'Norman,' When Artificial Intelligence Goes Psycho

No, it's not a new horror film. It's Norman: also known as the first psychopathic artificial intelligence, just unveiled by US researchers.

The goal is to explain in layman's terms how algorithms are made, and to make people aware of AI's potential dangers.

Norman "represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms," according to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan, part of an MIT team, added: "there is a central idea in machine learning: the data you use to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behaviour."

"So when we talk about AI algorithms being biased on unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it," they said via email.

Hence the idea of creating Norman, which was named after the psychopathic killer Norman Bates in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film "Psycho."

There May Be a Better Answer Than Electric Cars

Erich Sixt, chairman and chief executive officer of the Pullach, Germany-based global car rental company that bears his family's name, recently described electric cars as a "costly political error" given their still inferior range, long charging times and the huge investment necessary to expand the charging infrastructure. It may have been a self-serving statement (renters don't like them), but he may also well be right: If a paper published on Thursday correctly estimates the cost of extracting carbon dioxide from the air, regulators could do better to concentrate on that technology rather than on forcing vehicle electrification.

Carbon Engineering is a company co-founded by Harvard physicist David Keith and funded, among others, by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Since 2015, the firm has been running a CO2 extraction plant in Canada, testing out a technology that was until recently rejected as too costly. Keith and his collaborators, who wrote the paper, have used an independent cost assessment to calculate that using the process they developed allows the capture of a metric ton of carbon dioxide at the cost of $94 (roughly Rs. 6,400) to $232 (roughly Rs. 15,800), depending on variable costs such as the price of natural gas. (Since energy is used in the process, about 0.9 tons of CO2 is actually removed from the atmosphere with each ton captured).

That is far lower than previous estimates for the technology, ranging from $550 (roughly Rs. 37,400) to $1,300 (roughly Rs. 88,400) per ton. The paper's authors explain that the reduction comes from simply using industrial equipment already available on the market without much customization, a strategy they put in place at the Canadian plant.

Germany's Rules Says Self-Driving Cars Can't Base Decision on Age

Protecting people rather than property or animals will be the priority under pioneering new German legal guidelines for the operation of driverless cars, the transport ministry said on Wednesday.

Germany is home to some of the world's largest car companies, including Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW, all of which are investing heavily in self-driving technology.

German regulators have been working on rules for how such vehicles should be programmed to deal with a dilemma, such as choosing between hitting a cyclist or accelerating beyond legal speeds to avoid an accident.

Under new ethical guidelines - drawn up by a government-appointed committee comprising experts in ethics, law and technology - the software that controls such cars must be programmed to avoid injury or death of people at all cost.

Popular Robots Are Dangerously Easy to Hack, Researchers Say

Some of the most popular industrial and consumer robots are dangerously easy to hack and could be turned into bugging devices or weapons, IOActive said.

The Seattle-based cyber-security firm found major security flaws in industrial models sold by Universal Robots, a division of US technology company Teradyne. It also cited issues with consumer robots Pepper and NAO, which are manufactured by Japan's Softbank Group, and the Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 made by China-based UBTech Robotics.

These vulnerabilities could allow the robots to be turned into surveillance devices, surreptitiously spying on their owners, or let them to be hijacked and used to physically harm people or damage property, the researchers wrote in a report released Tuesday.

Universal Robots's devices are designed to work directly alongside humans without being confined to a cage for safety, as with many other industrial models. But IOActive was able to remotely hack the software that controls the robot and disable key safety features. This could result in them being programmed to injure the humans around them.

Elon Musk Offers Sneak Peek of SpaceX Spacesuit on Instagram

Astronauts travelling aboard Elon Musk's Dragon Capsule will wear form-fitting white-and-black spacesuits that bear little resemblance to their NASA forebears, the SpaceX founder revealed Wednesday, a pivotal development in his quest to launch crewed missions to and from the International Space Station and beyond.

Although he offered few details in his sneak-peek Instagram post - "More in the days to follow," a brief message promises - the tech billionaire, who is also chief executive of automaker Tesla, indicated that his spacesuit is functional and tested to withstand pressure loss while travelling through space. And in a nod to the design, he noted how "incredibly hard" it was to marry aesthetics and survivability.

AI Robots Hunt New Drugs for ALS, the Crippling Nerve Disease

Artificial intelligence robots are turbo-charging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, or motor neurone disease.

The condition, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure.

There are only two drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally and there is no cure for the disease, famously suffered by cosmologist Stephen Hawking.