Daily Archives: April 2, 2017

Under Armour upgrades its 3D-printed shoe with ArchiTech Futurist – Digital Trends

Posted: April 2, 2017 at 7:28 am

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3D-printed shoes are getting better with each model and the ArchiTech Futurist is part of a technological movement.

Year after year, 3D-printing technology is getting better. There are more products that can be printed andthe machines have been refined to the point that many printed objects dont look printed. Shoes are the latest endeavor across the biggest names in athletics and Under Armour released its latest model.

The ArchiTech Futurist is an updated version of the companys ArchiTech running shoe it released in 2016. This time, the technology is back in a high-top variant.With a 3D-printed midsole made from a lattice network, this shoe offers plenty of stability and cushion.

More:Awesome Tech You Cant Buy Yet: 3D printed violins, biometric wallets, and more

Those intertwined loops are what provide the shoe with its cushioning and support. Overtop that is a flat outsole that features different density foams for a smoother feel. What sets this shoe apart from last years model is how it fits. The Futurist uses a compression lace system with a neoprene shroud and a zipper. Just like a compression sleeve, it conforms to each users foot. This provides lockdown and support witha tailored and seamless fit.

Additionally, the shoe takes advantage of Under Armours SpeedForm. This upper maintains the seamless look and locks the heel into the shoe. Whether the user is lifting, training, or running, the shoe will maintain a seamless fit with the heel. This is a shoedesigned for superior fit and comfort with a modern silhouette.

Due to the complexity of the tendrils, each shoe takes a full day of printing. Just like the ArchiTech before it, the Futurist launched with a very limited release at a retail price of $300. While the shoe is currently sold out, those who are interested are encouraged to sign up for email notifications about availability.

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Elon Musk’s revolt against futurist-led A.I. Apocalypse – TRUNEWS

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March 27, 2017

On Sunday Vanity Fair published a detailed summary of SpaceX CEO Elon Musks reservations against Artificial Intelligence

(VERO BEACH, FLA) In the 7,900 word manifesto titled Elon Musks Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse Vanity Fairs Maureen Dowd interviewed the leading figures of Silicon Valley, including Demis Hassabis, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman, to decipher why fellow futurist Elon Musk is no fan of his colleagues goal of ubiquitously connected robotic artificial intelligence.

The full manuscript is available here, these are notable nuggets from the piece:

The way to escape human obsolescence, in the end, may be by having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence. Were already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow. For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think were roughly four or five years away.

At the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, TRUNEWS host Rick Wiles was told by keynote speakers that the integration of computers into human beings is a goal being pursed by the same architects behind the implementation of an Artificially Intelligent (AI) ubiquitously connectedGlobal Brain.

On the March 16th and 17th editions of TRUNEWS, host Rick Wiles described what he was told about the development of a Global Brain and how the Christians today must learn to evangelize in this coming technocracy.

TRUNEWS copy, TRUNEWS analysis

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Can Futurists Predict the Year of the Singularity? – Singularity Hub

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The end of the world as we know it is near. And thats a good thing, according to many of the futurists who are predicting the imminent arrival of whats been called the technological singularity.

The technological singularity is the idea that technological progress, particularly in artificial intelligence, will reach a tipping point to where machines are exponentially smarter than humans. It has been a hot topic of late.

Well-known futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil (co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University) reiterated his bold prediction at Austins South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this month that machines will match human intelligence by 2029 (and has said previously the Singularity itself will occur by 2045). Thats two years before SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Sons prediction of 2047, made at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year.

Author of the seminal book on the topic, The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil said during the SXSW festival that whats actually happening is [machines] are powering all of us. Theyre making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

That merger of man and machinesometimes referred to as transhumanismis the same concept that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks about when discussing development of a neural lace. For Musk, however, an interface between the human brain and computers is vital to keep our species from becoming obsolete when the singularity hits.

Musk is also the driving force behind Open AI, a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is beneficial to humanity. AGI is another term for human-level intelligence. What most people refer to as AI today is weak or narrow artificial intelligencea machine capable of thinking within a very narrow range of concepts or tasks.

Futurist Ben Goertzel, who among his many roles is chief scientist at financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics company Hanson Robotics (and advisor to Singularity University), believes AGI is possible well within Kurzweils timeframe. The singularity is harder to predict, he says on his personal website, estimating the date anywhere between 2020 and 2100.

Note that we might achieve human-level AGI, radical health-span extension and other cool stuff well before a singularityespecially if we choose to throttle AGI development rate for a while in order to increase the odds of a beneficial singularity, he writes.

Meanwhile, billionaire Son of SoftBank, a multinational telecommunications and Internet firm based in Japan, predicts superintelligent robots will surpass humans in both number and brain power by 2047.

He is putting a lot of money toward making it happen. The investment arm of SoftBank, for instance, recently bankrolled $100 million in a startup called CloudMinds for cloud-connected robots, transplanting the brain from the machine to the cloud. Son is also creating the worlds biggest tech venture capitalist fund to the tune of $100 billion.

I truly believe its coming, thats why Im in a hurryto aggregate the cash, to invest, he was quoted as saying at the MWC.

Kurzweil, Son, Goertzel and others are just the latest generation of futurists who have observed that humanity is accelerating toward a new paradigm of existence, largely due to technological innovation.

There were some hints that philosophers as early as the 19th century, during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, recognized that the human race was a species fast-tracked for a different sort of reality. It wasnt until the 1950s, however, when the modern-day understanding of the singularity first took form.

Mathematician John von Neumann had noted that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

In the 1960s, following his work with Alan Turing to decrypt Nazi communications, British mathematician I.J. Goode invoked the singularity without naming it as such.

He wrote, Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Science fiction writer and retired mathematics and computer science professor Vernor Vinge is usually credited with coining the term technological singularity. His 1993 essay, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Erapredicted the moment of technological transcendence would come within 30 years.

Vinge explains in his essay why he thinks the term singularityin cosmology, the event where space-time collapses and a black hole formsis apt: It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.

But is predicting the singularity even possible?

A paper by Stuart Armstrong et al suggests such predictions are a best guess at most. A database compiled by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a nonprofit dedicated to social issues related to AGI, found 257 AI predictions from the period 1950-2012 in the scientific literature. Of these, 95 contained predictions giving timelines for AI development.

The AI predictions in the database seem little better than random guesses, the authors write. For example, the researchers found that there is no evidence that expert predictions differ from those of non-experts. They also observed a strong pattern that showed most AI prognostications fell within a certain sweet spot15 to 25 years from the moment of prediction.

Others have cast doubt that the singularity is achievable in the time frames put forth by Kurzweil and Son.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and Institute of Artificial Intelligence, among other ventures, has written that such a technological leap forward is still far in the future.

[I]f the singularity is to arrive by 2045, it will take unforeseeable and fundamentally unpredictable breakthroughs, and not because the Law of Accelerating Returns made it the inevitable result of a specific exponential rate of progress, he writes, referring to the concept that past rates of progress can predict future rates as well.

Futurist Nikola Danaylov, who manages the Singularity Weblog, says he believes a better question to ask is whether achieving the singularity is a good thing or a bad thing.

Is that going to help us grow extinct like the dinosaurs or is it going to help us spread through the universe like Carl Sagan dreamed of? he tells Singularity Hub. Right now, its very unclear to me personally.

Danaylov argues that the singularity orthodoxy of today largely ignores the societal upheavals already under way. The idea that technology will save us will not lift people out of poverty or extend human life if technological breakthroughs only benefit those with money, he says.

Im not convinced [the singularity is] going to happen in the way we think its going to happen, he says. Im sure were missing the major implications, the major considerations.

We have tremendous potential to make it a good thing, he adds.

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Can Futurists Predict the Year of the Singularity? - Singularity Hub

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