A new investment fund by a Vancouver-based venture capital group and an alliance of robotics professionals in the Netherlands plan to invest 100 million ( 113.6 million) into robo-startups around the world, according to a joint statement this past week. The RoboValley Fund, named after the RoboValley Innovation Hub located near the Hague leading the charge, will likely focus on seed and early stage funding. RoboValley touts 170 members from a variety of AI and robotics-related disciplines and is based out of the Delft University of Technology. The investment strategy will be managed and led by Chrysalix Venture Capital. According to Markets and Markets, the industrial robotics market is predicted to reach a value of nearly 80 billion by 2022.

Move over, humans; the emulations are coming and our world is going to get really weird. The book tries to discern how the world will change when it becomes possible to upload human minds into computational substrates. Hanson argues that three supporting technologies are required to achieve this: fast, cheap computers; fast, cheap brain scanners; and detailed and effective models of brain cells. Once all three become available later this century, it will be possible to scan a human brain and emulate it on computer hardware. At that point we'll enter the Age of Emulation--or the Age of Em, for short.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species. From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a ...

The beloved trio of Top Gear presenters is long gone, but another pillar of the BBC's most popular show endures: spectacular stunts in exotic locales, with cars that drill dimples into your cheeks. That explains why even in the, let's just say mixed reviews of the new crew's first episode, no one complained about the American's star turn. In a 10-minute segment, new host Matt LeBlanc took the dirt-spitting Ariel Nomad for a run through the Moroccan desert, dodging "villains" riding motorcycles, flying drones, and doing whatever it is you do with a paramotor. The 47,000 Nomad is the off-road sibling to the bonkers Atom, so it obviously struck the Top Gear guys as something "we can have a lot of fun with," says series producer Alex Renton. He's been with the show for 11 years and got the top job for this, its 23rd season. Putting LeBlanc behind the wheel brought a dose of comedy to an already silly car and the 30-person "traveling circus" that descended on Northern Africa for three days in February.

The Henn Na hotel, or "Weird Hotel", has opened. The news is in all of around the world. It is the first establishment where robots attend to guests. It costs 66 euros to stay the night surrounded by androids who, although cannot make the bed, do not ask for a wage and can work without a break seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Henn Na is a good example of robot fever in Japan.

With artificial intelligence crossing milestones in its capability to learn rapidly from its environment and beat humans at tasks and games from Jeopardy to the ancient Chinese game Go, Alphabet's Google is taking proactive steps to ensure that the technology it is creating does not one day turn against humans. Google's AI research lab in London, DeepMind, teamed up with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute to explore ways to prevent an AI agent from going rogue. In their joint-study, "Safely Interruptible Agents," the DeepMind-Future of Humanity team proposed a framework to allow humans to repeatedly and safely interrupt an AI agent's reinforcement learning. But, more importantly, this can be done while simultaneously blocking an AI agent's ability to learn how to prevent a human operator from turning off its machine-learning capabilities or reinforcement learning. It's not a stretch to think AI agents can learn how to outthink humans. Earlier this year, Google's AI agent AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol in Go, the ancient Chinese game of strategy.

For a generation that has been exposed to the Terminator movies, visions of a robot uprising come to mind whenever news about advancements in artificial intelligence surface. Great minds such as Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have previously expressed their concern on the possibility of a robot apocalypse. It would seem that Google, one of the companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, is now sharing some of these concerns, as its DeepMind unit has published a study that seeks to implement safety measures on the technology. The paper, published as a collaboration between DeepMind and the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, discusses a "big red button" that will allow humans to turn off artificial intelligence in a robot and take control of it in case the robot is misbehaving or malfunctioning. And just so it is clear, the Future of Humanity Institute is named as such as it wants humanity to have a future, with Nick Bostrom, its founding director, being one of the more vocal opponents of artificial intelligence. The researchers of the paper, DeepMind's Laurent Orseau and the Future of Humanity Institute's Stuart Armstrong, explain that artificial intelligence agents are not likely to be at their best behavior at all times.

At the Dusseldorf airport, robotic valet parking is now reality. You step out of your car. You press a button on a touch screen. And then a machine lifts your car off the ground, moving all three tons of it into a kind of aerial parking bay. Built by a German company called Serva Transport, the system saves you time. It saves garage space, thanks to those carefully arranged parking spots.

Switzerland is voting on whether to introduce a guaranteed basic income for every citizen, becoming the first country to hold such a vote. The proposal calls for adults to be paid an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ( 1,755; 2,555) a month, whether they work or not. Supporters of the idea say 21st Century work is increasingly automated, with fewer jobs available for workers. But polls suggest that only about one quarter of Swiss voters back the idea. Under the terms of the basic income, workers who already earn more than SFr2,500 Swiss francs would not get any additional money.

We present a framework to derive risk bounds for vector-valued learning with a broad class of feature maps and loss functions. Multi-task learning and one-vs-all multi-category learning are treated as examples. We discuss in detail vector-valued functions with one hidden layer, and demonstrate that the conditions under which shared representations are beneficial for multi- task learning are equally applicable to multi-category learning.