The concept of artificial intelligence, or AI, has existed for centuries, even if the phrase itself wasn't coined until 1956. The idea that humans could create something capable of thought processes similar to, or even superior to, their own, existed with the ancient Greeks and has extended through the millennia. The concept ramped up significantly in the 1950s, though computer memory and construction limitations prevented significant breakthroughs from occurring. Science fiction novels and films began foreseeing an ominous future, and recently, AI applications have started infiltrating our world. More recent years have seen some interest spikes: Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, and IBM's Watson destroyed its human competition in Jeopardy! in 2011.

This is part of our Road Trip 2017 summer series "The Smartest Stuff," about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you -- and the world around you -- smarter. A Las Vegas driver asks me this after I tell him I'm headed to Defcon at Caesars Palace. All week, a cloud of paranoia looms over Las Vegas, as hackers from around the world swarm Sin City for Black Hat and Defcon, two back-to-back cybersecurity conferences taking place in the last week of July. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the UPS store posts a sign telling guests it won't accept printing requests from USB thumb drives. You can't be too careful with all those hackers in town.

The digital arms race between the United States and Russia appears to be accelerating, fueled in part by new comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, speaking to a group of Russian students Friday, called artificial intelligence "not only Russia's future" but "the future of the whole of mankind." "The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world," he said. "There are colossal opportunities and threats that are difficult to predict now." Top U.S. intelligence officials have been warning of a "perpetual contest" between the United States and Russia, with much of it playing out in the digital domain.

Despite what you might see in movies, today's robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to "pick it up," it would be completely lost. Picking it up means being able to see and identify objects, understand commands, recognize that the "it" in question is the tool you put down, go back in time to remember the moment when you put down the tool, and distinguish the tool you put down from other ones of similar shapes and sizes. Recently researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have gotten closer to making this type of request easier: In a new paper, they present an Alexa-like system that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that whoever reaches a breakthrough in developing artificial intelligence will come to dominate the world.... 58 Published By - U.S. News - News - 2017.09.01. Related Posts Opinion: Russia's Vladimir Putin the teacher gets an'F' Deutsche Welle (Yesterday) - Six months before Russia's presidential election, Vladimir Putin wants to show that he's just like everyone else. This time his strategy wound up as a failed attempt to reach out... Teacher arrested for indecent behavior with students Ex-Teacher Sentenced to 12 Years in Case Involving Student Putin Warns North Korea Situation Is on the Verge of a'Large-Scale Conflict' The world may run out of food in a decade New York Post (Yesterday) - The world could be facing a food shortage in just 10 years, according to an agricultural data technology company. Gro Intelligence founder and chief executive Sara Menker says previous calculations... Food revolution in aisle seven: Amazon will be a game ...

A firing this week by a Washington think tank has exposed the deep and often hidden influence of tech companies that are driving key governmental decisions affecting people both on and off the Internet. On Wednesday, the New America Foundation -- a think tank funded by Google as well as one of its cofounders, Eric Schmidt -- ousted members of its Open Markets program, its anti-monopoly research arm, that had openly criticized the Web giant's growing power. Google and New America have said this specific decision was not motivated by the group's remarks. But critics say the episode highlights the tech industry's enormous power to set the terms of public debate in the nation's capital. The funding of think tanks is just one way Silicon Valley is quietly expanding its influence in Washington.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming. It could contribute to a more secure and rational world or it may unravel our trust in technology. AI holds a strong promise of changing our world and extending compute functions to a more dominant role of directly manipulating physical world activities. This is a momentous step where we relinquish some level of control for the safety of ourselves, family, and prosperity. With the capabilities of AI, machines can be given vastly more responsibility.

Forty years ago this coming Tuesday, a car-sized piece of equipment launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Thirty five years later, it became the first and only man-made object to enter interstellar space. Along the way, the Voyager probes (there were two) made headlines for flybys of Jupiter, Saturn and Titan. Fran Bagenal was a student when the Voyager probes launched, and wrote her doctoral thesis on data the probes collected around Jupiter. The professor of astrophysical and planetary science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and former chair of NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group, has also worked on the Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno missions. Nautilus caught up with Bagenal to discuss the legacy of Voyager and the future of manned and unmanned exploration of space.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I don't know much about this powered partial exoskeleton called KOMA, except that the company behind it (ATOUN, from Japan) says that it's designed to help you carry very heavy objects in a way that won't interfere with your natural movements. Jiří Zemánek and Martin Gurtner from the Czech Technical University in Prague won first place in the IEEE CSS video contest (awarded at the IEEE CCTA 2017 conference) for their video demonstrating numerical optimal control on a "flying ball in a hoop" system: The IEEE CCTA Conference, incidentally, was held on the Kohala Coast in Hawaii, where as far as I know we have not had a major robotics conference recently.

Cybersecurity firm Cylance offers products and services that help prevent cyber threats and malware. The firm helps hundreds of enterprise clients around the world, including Fortune 100 organizations and government institutions. Cylance Chief Product Officer Rahul Kashyap talked to International Business Times about how artificial intelligence is boosting cybersecurity and about products his company offers. How has artificial intelligence improved cybersecurity? Artificial intelligence is currently improving enterprise cybersecurity in two primary ways. First, it addresses the need for security teams to rapidly scale their response to meet the dramatic rise in the volume and varieties of malware being fired at their networks on a daily basis.