The Shadow Robot Company, that manufactures robotic hands for grasping and manipulation for real world challenges from fruit picking to bomb disposal, is supplying its Shadow Dexterous Hands to OpenAI, a non-profit company focusing on the path to safe artificial intelligence. The research is claimed to have created eight newly released environments, four of which using the Shadow Hand robot to solve realistic manipulation tasks. The Shadow Hand is tactile enough to rotate a block and a solid egg and flexible enough to move a pen between its fingers. Each task has a'goal', such as achieving the desired orientation of a block in the Shadow hand block manipulation task. Along with releasing these new robotics environments, OpenAI is releasing code for Hindsight Experience Replay, a reinforcement learning algorithm that can teach and improve robotic technology to learn from failure.

Advances in superconducting materials and more efficient passive photovoltaic or other renewable energy sources coupled with real world locomotion will limit the ability to control AI in its myriad potential deployments. Self-driving cars are a self-contained, albeit enormously complex task, but represent just a sliver of the overall movement negotiation handled by a human under self-power or controlling another vehicle. The negotiation of movement into learned models is a function of morphology. Much as Darwin's theory of natural selection applies, this is a basic outgrowth of a competitive human environment where an AI would be designed to be the "best" at what is supposed to do. This doesn't mean explicit kill logic will be present.