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Good morning, I'm Gilles Carbonnier, and today I'll be sharing some thoughts on the Swiss Responsible Business Initiative, and its likely impact if accepted by voters at a nationwide ballot at the end of this month.

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Gilles Carbonnier

14.11.2020


Anticipatory reads by GESDA


What is intelligence? Can it be reproduced – in what is called artificial intelligence (AI)? AI as we know it now – for example through a software able to defeat the best GO-game champion – remains most of the time limited to the field of actions it was designed for. And creating an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), capable amongst others of abstraction, common sense or rapid generalisation of concepts, still needs some way to go.

But what if the “body information”, the physical interactions an organism has with its environment, might help in inspiring better AIs? That is what a group of scientists with swiss participants from EMPA proposes, through a new concept called Physical Artificial Intelligence, which might redefine the field of robotics and the relationship between man and machine.

--Olivier Dessibourg

(EN)
Photo article

Robotics researcher Mirko Kovac wants to merge machines with the intelligence of life. (Photo: Robert Stürmer/EMPA)

Materialising artificial intelligence. What counts as intelligence, and how intelligence is implemented in different kinds of machines, robots and software varies across disciplines and over time

Nature Machine Intelligence (EN)

The plan to turn scrapped rockets into space stations. Spent rockets are dangerous space trash, but they could be the future of living and working in orbit

WIRED (EN)

Scientists are building cows to resist climate change. Using gene editing to make heat-tolerant cows could result in ‘super calves’.

Future Human (EN)

Rock mining with microbes may aid space explorers. Astronauts on the Moon or Mars could one day mine for important metals using bacteria.

BBC (EN)

Microbes’ mystery DNA helps defeat viruses. This finding has genome-editing potential.

Science (EN)

A space science boom or death by a thousand small satellites. A revolution in access to space, but with a double-edge.

Nature Astronomy (EN)

The batteries of the future are weightless and invisible. There’s a renaissance underway in structural battery research, which aims to build energy storage into the very devices and vehicles they power.

WIRED (EN)

Computer scientists achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of cryptography. A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true.

Quanta Magazine (EN)

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This selection is proposed by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator GESDA, working on anticipating cutting-edge science and technological advances to develop innovative and inclusive solutions for the benefit of the planet and its inhabitants.


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Have a good day!

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