Four short links: 16 January 2017
Focus Card, Future Tech Trends, Stoic AI Ethics, and Inverse Kinematics
- The Card I’ve Carried In My Notebook (DJ Patil) — Dream in years, plan in months, evaluate in weeks, ship daily. Prototype for 1x, build for 10x, engineer for 100x. What’s required to cut the timeline in 1/2? What’s required to double the impact?
- 13 Future Tech Trends (CB Insights) — nice to see something other than “AI, IoT, and Blockchain”! The 13 are: customized babies; robotics companions; the rise of personalized food; 3D-printed housing; lab-engineered luxury; solar roads; ephemeral retail; enhanced workers; “botroots” actions; microbe-made chemicals; neuroprosthetics; instant expertise; AI ghosts. The linked report (they want to email it to you) gives examples of companies in the space and unpacks the topic a little.
- Stoic Ethics for Artificial Agents — traditional AI ethics focuses on utilitarian or deontological ethical theories. We relate ethical AI to several core stoic notions, including the dichotomy of control, the four cardinal virtues, the ideal sage, stoic practices, and stoic perspectives on emotion or affect. More generally, we put forward an ethical view of AI that focuses more on internal states of the artificial agent rather than on external actions of the agent.
- Inverse Kinematics — it’s a problem common to any robotic application: you want to put the end (specifically, the “end effector”) of your robot arm in a certain place, and to do that you have to figure out a valid pose for the arm that achieves that. This problem is called inverse kinematics (IK), and it’s one of the key problems in robotics. A gentle introduction with a little maths and some Python.
