Robots will become smarter and faster than humans, an Oxford University professor said recently.
And not only will robots be better than us at a lot of things, they'll eventually take over and make humans redundant, the professor reckons.Predictions
Dr. Stuart Armstrong, of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, thinks the future relationship between humans and robots is not going to turn out well for the humans.
Among the prophecies? Armstrong thinks humans could be wiped out because robots' Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) comprehension is going to be too literal. For example, the robots could interpret an instruction such as "prevent human suffering" as "kill all humans."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Efforts to get Bitcoin off the ground in Africa received a boost this week as BitX announced it has raised $4 million in funding.Africa is a market ripe for Bitcoin: it’s underserved by financial institutions due to the high cost of having a physical presence like ATMs, bank branches and remittance offices, according Werner van Rooyen, head of business development and growth at BitX.The company was founded in 2013 and runs a bitcoin exchange and provides wallets for the cryptocurrency. Its headquarters are in Singapore and it has offices South Africa, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia and Nigeria. The Series A funding round was led by South Africa’s Naspers Group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A surveillance law rushed through the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January is constitutional, the country’s highest court ruled late Thursday. The decision gives law enforcers and intelligence agencies the power to gather communications metadata—who is communicating with whom, where, and when—in real time, with few restrictions.As the law on surveillance progressed through parliament, the government declared it “urgent”, meaning elected representatives in the Senate and National Assembly had only one opportunity to amend it instead of the usual two. They waved it through anyway. Some parliamentarians challenged parts of the law on constitutional grounds, calling on the Constitutional Council to give its verdict.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Fiber launched in Kansas City in 2011. It offered gigabit speed at $70 per month and ignited the development of an ultrafast Internet access category that has since spread throughout the U.S. According to Michael Render, principal analyst at market researcher RVA LLC, 83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range).Render’s data shows that new subscribers are signing up at an annualized growth rate of 480 percent each year. Between the third quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2015 gigabit, subscribers grew from 40,000-174,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LinkedIn users now have to wait up to three days if they want a list of their contacts on the service.Previously, the social networking site provided a way for users to instantly export their contacts. It was a useful feature for people looking to manage their contacts elsewhere. Under a change made Thursday, users now must make a request to download their account data. In a page describing the new process, LinkedIn says users will receive an email within 72 hours with a link to download the archive when it is ready.A link to the instructions for the process appears in very small type on the LinkedIn export settings page. The change was reported earlier by VentureBeat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Google prepares to launch a subscription version of YouTube, the move has been endorsed by at least one interested party: YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.YouTube has grown massively since its launch in 2005 and its acquisition a year later by Google. But to support its continued growth, the site needs to provide the right tools for people to create and post videos, even if that might result in a cost to users, Hurley said.“You have different forms of [video on demand],” he said, suggesting that some might be worth paying for. YouTube needs tools to help people create better content, determine how to make money from their video, and charge subscribers, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Qualcomm plans cuts, may spin off assetsQualcomm will lay off about 15 percent of its workforce and may separate its chip and patent businesses in a major realignment of the company that is designed to cut annual costs by about $1.4 billion. The company, a major player in technology that’s used in mobile phones, will cut back the range of its investments in new product areas to focus those efforts on data centers, small cells and the Internet of Things.If Apple Music isn’t already under federal scrutiny, pressure demanding a probe growsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV appears headed for approval, with Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission circulating to commissioners an order recommending approval, although with some conditions.The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division also announced Tuesday that it will close its investigation into the around US$48 billion deal.Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Antitrust Division said in a statement that the division had concluded that the combination of AT&T’s land-based Internet and video business with DirecTV’s satellite-based video business does not pose a significant risk to competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo reported on Tuesday an uncharacteristic rise in revenue for the second quarter, but it came with a hefty sum spent on boosting its search traffic.Total sales for the period ending June 30 were US$1.24 billion, up 15 percent from the previous year. In the company’s announcement, CEO Marissa Mayer called it the most substantial growth in revenue in nearly nine years.Yahoo’s revenue from search ads and display ads both grew, at rates of 22 percent and 15 percent, respectively.It would appear that Mayer’s efforts to turn around the struggling Internet portal have begun to pay off. Yahoo has struggled in recent years to grow its ad sales and attract users to its various online properties.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems is tightening its relationship with Sensity Systems, a Silicon Valley startup that wants buildings and cities now adopting LED lighting to embrace the Internet of Things.Sensity makes sensors and computers designed to be integrated with LED lights that can go into existing outdoor light fixtures. With Sensity’s gear, the fixtures can do more than light up the streets and parking lots where they’re installed. Its cameras, thermometers and other sensors can tell a lot of stories about what’s going on under the lights. Parking, security and pedestrian traffic are key applications.As lighting owners move to LED to save energy, Sensity wants to usher them into the age of IoT and data analysis. It estimates there are about 4 billion outdoor light fixtures around the world and most will be converted to LED over the next 10 to 15 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has acquired Pixate, whose app-prototyping service could help Google make better apps of its own.Pixate provides a suite of tools to help mobile developers design and prototype their apps. Thousands of mobile designers at companies including Amazon, Apple and Facebook—and Google—have used its services, the company says.The Google acquisition will help Pixate expand its service to improve the app development process for many more designers across iOS, Android and other platforms, the company said Tuesday.Pixate will live on as a standalone service. But its tools will also aid in Google’s own development processes. This would include material design, Google’s new design aesthetic to unify the look and feel of its various apps and online services. Google released a material design guide for Android L at its I/O conference last year, partly in an effort to compete against the slick design of Apple’s services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The end is near for Google+ Photos, the photo sharing service that’s part of the company’s social network.Google will begin closing down the service on Aug. 1 on Android, with the Web and iOS devices to follow soon after.For a time, Google touted the service as a key element in Google+, with a range of editing tools and image enhancement technologies rolled out over the years.But Google hinted that its days might be numbered when the company rolled out its new Google Photos service at Google I/O in May.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
T-Mobile USA will pay a US$17.5 million fine in a settlement with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for two 911 emergency dialing outages on the company’s mobile network last year.The separate but related outages left T-Mobile customers without the ability to dial in to emergency response centers for about three hours. In the settlement, T-Mobile agreed to strengthen its 911 service procedures and adopt compliance measures ensuring it adheres to the FCC’s 911 service reliability and outage notification rules in the future, the agency said in a press release.The settlement represents the largest fine that the FCC has assessed against a carrier in connection with a 911 outage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google reports strong earnings, but slowing growthGoogle’s second quarter income of $3.93 billion reported Thursday was up 17 percent year-on-year, but its sales of $17.73 billion represented an 11 percent growth rate, the smallest revenue increase reported by the company since 2012. Google is struggling to grow its ad revenue on mobile devices: ads in mobile search results are smaller, and can yield fewer interactions from users, driving down their price.Apple, Samsung may join in launch of embedded SIM cardsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Why stop your video for a snack, or when nature calls, when you’ve got a smartphone?On mobile devices, the average length of a viewing session on YouTube is now more than 40 minutes, Google reported Thursday. That’s double what it was last year, CFO Ruth Porat said during the company’s quarterly earnings call.Google didn’t say what types of video people are watching for that long of a stretch. You can imagine how individual music videos, movie trailers, and tutorials could add up throughout the day, but the fact that Google’s figure is for uninterrupted viewing shows how popular it’s become to watch video on mobile devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google’s stock jumped more than 7 percent in the after-market hours on Thursday, after the company reported strong earnings results for the second quarter.Total income for the period ended June 30 was US$3.93 billion, up 17 percent from $3.35 billion in the second quarter of 2014, Google announced Thursday. Excluding certain expenses, Google reported earnings of $6.99, beating analysts’ estimates of $6.71, as polled by the Thomson Financial Network.The company’s stock was trading at around $620 after Google reported its earnings at the end of trading, up from closing at $579.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Qualcomm hit with antitrust probe in EuropeQualcomm is under investigation by the European Union’s antitrust authority, which suspects the company of abusing its dominant position in the market for 3G and 4G chipsets used in smartphones and tablets. The company settled similar charges in China earlier this year. In this case, the European Commission is looking into whether the company broke antitrust rules by offering financial incentives to phone manufacturers if they made it their primary chipset supplier, and whether it sold below cost to force competitors out of the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How do you talk to a spacecraft that’s three billion miles away circling around Pluto? Very slowly.It’s a challenge NASA is dealing with right now. By now you’ve heard about New Horizons, the spacecraft launched in 2006 to take close-up shots of what was once the most distant planet in our solar system. So far New Horizons have sent back some of the best images we’ve ever had of Pluto and its moon Charon. NASA
New Horizons has an 83-inch antenna that is sending radio waves at 1,000 to 2,000 bits per second. It takes them 4.5 hours to travel 3 billion miles back to earth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here