Nvidia Launches AI Computer To Give Autonomous Robots Better Brains (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: At Computex 2018, Nvidia unveiled two new products: Nvidia Isaac, a new developer platform, and the Jetson Xavier, an AI computer, both built to power autonomous robots. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Isaac and Jetson Xavier were designed to capture the next stage of AI innovation as it moves from software running in the cloud to robots that navigate the real world. The Isaac platform is a set of software tools that will make it simpler for companies to develop and train robots. It includes a collection of APIs to connect to 3D cameras and sensors; a library of AI accelerators to keep algorithms running smoothly and without lag; and a new simulation environment, Isaac Sim, for training and testing bots in a virtual space. Doing so is quicker and safer than IRL testing, but it can't match the complexity of the real world.

But the heart of the Isaac platform is Nvidia's new Jetson Xavier computer, an incredibly compact piece of hardware that's comprised of a number of processing components. These include a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, two NVDLA deep learning accelerators, and processors for static images and video. In total, Jetson Xavier contains more than 9 billion transistors and delivers over 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of compute. And it consumes just 30 watts of power, which is half of the electricity used by the average light bulb. The cost of one Jetson Xavier (along with access to the Isaac platform) is $1,299, and Huang claims the computer provides the same processing power as a $10,000 workstation "AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines," said Huang. "Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more."

Comments

Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I apologize in advance for creating the robots that will destroy us.

Re:Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

What about apologizing for being a raging, AIDS-infested homo?

Re:Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you bring it up--perhaps you should.

Re:Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent battle of wits. I salute you gentlemen.

And it coudn't happen they say.

[stroxor]

Day of judgement is here. Brace yourselves!

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

I swear to you all.. it's like everyone read TMIAHM, and actually believes that if you hook together enough hardware, it'll magically become a sentient self-aware synthetic mind like Mike in the book. Sorry, doesn't work that way, and until we solve the riddle of sentience, all these 'deep learning algorithms' will always fall short of whatever expectations you might have, no matter how much hardware you throw at it.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[mark-t]

Nature managed to do it, supposedly without understanding anything about what it was doing.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the thing:

Intelligence != Sentience

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the course of billions of years. AI might exist one day in the distant future, but it does not exist today.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

Nature managed to do it IN A FEW MILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION

Fixed that for you. Also these machines don't evolve, we build them. They don't reproduce, there's no natural selection, just us idiot arrogant humans, thinking we can do an end-run around all of it.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

So-called 'intelligence' without 'sentience' is worse than nothing.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[taustin]

"Deep learning algorithm" actually means "statistical analysis applied in a slightly fuzzy way." And not really much more.

Re: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

And what exactly do you think the organic brains are doing?

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Start off with light receptors sensitive to light and darkness wired directly into muscle activators. Critters like jellyfish are able to float around in the shade under rocks and vegetation in this way without the need for a brain.

Move up to having small neural networks (ganglion nerve centres) governing local behaviour of individual limbs and body segments. Improve each sense (smell, vision, vibration) through more advanced optics, molecular sensors and limb arrangement. Dragon flies have two sets of wings along with counterweights that allow for better stabilisation. Add social behaviours to handle living in large colonies and special interactions with other critters - symbiotic relationships such as Tarantula spiders and small frogs.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[mark-t]

Well, natural evolution was undirected... I don't think it's a far reach that an already existing intelligence directing some new inteliigence's course may be able to expedite that duration by many orders of magnitude.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[mark-t]

Machines evolve.... that they don't do so by entirely natural processes on their own is immaterial.

Just look at the past 50 years of computing... you can't tell me that machines don't evolve. The fact that we are the ones evolving them is immaterial.

My point is that I expect that an intelligence-directed course of evolution should be much faster than an undirected one... so I don't think there's any reason that we won't see AI happen some day, and it might not be even very long form now. Honestly, I'd say that I'd be surprised if we still don't have it by the end of this century except that I'll probably be dead by then unless I live to be about 140.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

We can't 'direct' something that we don't understand. We haven't got a clue how the phenomenon of 'consciousness' 'self awareness' or 'sentience' actually works in our own brains; the current approach in my opinion is fatally flawed and will not ever produce these phenomenon; it's like a million monkeys mashing keys on a million typewriters for a million years, expecting to get a duplication of Shakespeares' works. If and when we have the instrumentation to understand how our own brains produce these phenomena, then maybe we'll be able to build machines that can do that, too, but so far as I'm concerned not until then. It's wishful thinking at best otherwise, and delusional at worst, and falling for marketing hype the whole way.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[mark-t]

We can't 'direct' something that we don't understand

Well, it's only true to say that we don't understand it fully. That's not the same thing as saying we don't understand it at all. And it's certainly not the same thing as saying that we are necessarily far away from understanding it sufficiently to artificially replicate it.

I mean, starting from the time that man started building machines, we managed to create flying machines in a barely negligible *fraction* of the time that it took nature to pull it off, for instance.

Again, given that nature managed to create something intelligent within a a billion or so years without *ANY* intelligence applied to the process whatsoever, I'd suggest that's not a far stretch to suggest that we might be able to outpace it in that regard as well.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[ShanghaiBill]

an already existing intelligence directing some new inteliigence's course may be able to expedite that duration by many orders of magnitude.

Indeed. Moore's Law is driving increases in complexity at a rate about TEN MILLION TIMES faster than Darwinian evolution.

Evolution is undirected, converges on local minima, and does a lot of overfitting to narrow niches, and retrograde movement. There is little evidence that greater intelligence leads to more procreation, which is the only thing evolution cares about.

"Intelligent Design" can do way better. Unless you believe in some sort of "vital life essence", it is hard to argue that computers won't achieve sentience in the next century or so.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[jma05]

> all these 'deep learning algorithms' will always fall short of whatever expectations you might have

Actually, they have exceeded expectations so far,

None of the actual researchers who work on these worry about these going sentient at this level, only the Gates and Musk types.

Actual researchers simply see these as slightly deeper statistical learning systems and are just concerned about building models with better classification accuracy. That itself is tremendously powerful TODAY to keep working on them.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

What you just said makes no sense.

People get so caught up on words. Realize that the English language is sloppy, words have more than one meaning, and in specific contexts they can mean something different than what they mean in other contexts.

In computer science, "intelligence" loosely refers to an algorithm's ability to solve complex problems (and also handle errors). It can also refer to how well an algorithm mimics intelligent behavior. Sentience isn't an issue, and such algorithms are worth quite a lot (by any reasonable valuation of worth).

What you really don't seem to grasp is how the word "artificial" means "not real." As in, "artificial intelligence" means "not actually intelligent." When people shout "artificial intelligence doesn't exist," they seem to think that "artificial intelligence" means "actual real sentient intelligence done through software," which is exactly what it does not mean. It's artificial.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[angel'o'sphere]

Just look at the past 50 years of computing... you can't tell me that machines don't evolve.
No, they don't evolve. We get better skilled in making them.
And as long as not a human is building a sentient machine, machines never will be sentient.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Artificial Intelligence" is not the same thing as "consciousness, self-awareness, or sentience."

You are fixated on a definition that is wrong, and white-knuckling an enormous straw-man fallacy.

Yes, we don't have synthetic consciousness, and perhaps never will. But we already have artificial intelligence, and it is getting better every day.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[mark-t]

I said that they don't evolve on their own, but that's not the same thing as not evolving at all. Or do you think that the term is invalid outside of any context of reproductive evolution?

Re: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. This AI bullshit is getting pretty tired. If this is all modern day Silicon Valley has up its sleeve, Apple, being that they actually address the ordinary, daily needs of their users, is going to be the*only* profitable company before too long.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Would this be a good time to suggest that work be done to apply 3 Laws Safe to machines?

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[AHuxley]

Just doing fast sorting on costs of data is not good evolve people are expecting. Thats just more hardware and software funding providing faster results from larger existing data sets.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[AHuxley]

The only understanding needed is how to get more gov/mil funding for AI this decade.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[religionofpeas]

the current approach in my opinion is fatally flawed

And you have a better method ?

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[religionofpeas]

Humans can do magically a lot more than apes, and pretty much all that happened is that our brains got bigger.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Even you short-changed it.

Sentience: "able to perceive or feel things."

So, a few *billion* years would be correct unless you want to start from multi-cellular life. Then it's around 600m yr.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of leaving out that there were also *trillions* of experimenters in that there process aren't you? You have a rather large multiplier you're ignoring.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Intelligence: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

Unless you're counting programming as "acquiring", AI is still a misnomer.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

What you really don't seem to grasp is how the word "artificial" means "not real." As in, "artificial intelligence" means "not actually intelligent."

If you're going to be condescending, you should at least be correct. "Artificial intelligence" doesn't mean "not real intelligence", it means "man created intelligence".

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Undirected, with literally BILLIONS of years to work with. Human beings cannot even comprehend that number, that length of time. Sure, if we stick with the software we have and 'just throw hardware at it', allowing for increasing hardware performance, we may manage to pull it off.. in hundreds of thousands of years. Which is unimaginably but not immeasurably better than billions no matter how you slice it, but still not good enough for our lifetime.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[chthon]

Whales got the biggest brains...

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[AHuxley]

Every decade the US mil and gov get sold on AI.
Someone has to pay for a really fast GPU. The experts to then say it an AI project as to the funding
Remember the AI winter AC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Iamthecheese]

Not quite. It takes a known and finite amount of computronium to use CAD to emulate the electro-chemical processes in the human brain. When the structure of the human brain is known -- even if it's not understood -- a computer with that amount of power will be able to emulate human intelligence. That's the high end. There are much more efficient methods, but at that point a computer will definitively have the intelligence of a human.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[jimmydevice]

Trillions in a gram of mud.

Re: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Learning. Discovering higher order concepts.

Learning is a hard problem and _no one_ has a solid grasp of the process. How do you transfer knowledge over domain boundaries? Teaching you how to play chess can make you a better language learner, math can improve your artistic abilities. Heck, watching one single movie can change the way you view the world and retroactively alter the memory of everything you ever experienced.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[zifn4b]

Nature managed to do it, supposedly without understanding anything about what it was doing.

The complexity of the universe is far more complex than your brain. Unfortunately with the Dunning Kruger effect running afoul (we should teach that to the machines too) it's hard for you to comprehend.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[zifn4b]

Well, natural evolution was undirected... I don't think it's a far reach that an already existing intelligence directing some new inteliigence's course may be able to expedite that duration by many orders of magnitude.

Ugh, intelligent design again? Whether something is guided by a entity we can categorize at intelligent or un-directed is not really that important. The people who think that is important are worried about the superstitious consequences of death and the afterlife. All of the processes the led to the state of things today are indeed mathematical and based on a complex intertwined series of cause and effect. The complexity of that is very large, much larger than the human brain It still amazes me that you and I are made from the dust of the stars and yet here we are having this conversation pondering how that could be so.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

Also

Sentience != Free Will

Re: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

What I do is not to read the manuals, and just try random shit until something happens. Then I figure out why that shit happened and add it to my rule base. Then I try and solve the next problem. By a matter of elimination I figure out what I should have done in the first place had I read the manual and checked to see if there was a more recent version.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[angel'o'sphere]

Evolve implies it is evolving on its own. Well, at least in German, might be different in English (we use the same world).

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

Flight is easy by comparison. All you need to observe how flight works, really, is just your eyes. A camera would help. A movie camera would help even more. A wind tunnel helps with experiments, as would a number of other purely physical measuring devices. Do you see where I'm going with this? Flight is a purely physical thing that happens on a macroscopic scale. How a human brain works is on a microscopic scale. Furthermore you can't dismantle a brain and expect to get anything useful from it so far as how it functions when it's alive, it's too dynamic and complex for that, and we do not have sufficient instrumentation to sufficiently observe the incredibly complex system that is the human brain while it's in operation. Functional MRI is stone knives and bearskins compared to the task of mapping all the functions, in real time, of a human brain. Seriously, if we could do it, we'd have done it already, and the world of I, Robot would be a reality. Clearly it's not. Maybe someday, but that day is not today or anytime soon.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

Congratulations, you've got the message: Marketing hype drives all of it. There's already so much invested in something the likely mistakenly thought was going to be another simple development cycle, and like the bridge in Zork, they get 99.999% of the way to the other side, only to find that they can't seem to get to 100%.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

What I'm 'fixated' on, if I actually am (which I'm not) is that the whole approach to so-called 'AI' is completely wrong and a dead end. Furthermore for some of the tasks they want to use it for (SDC's I'm looking at YOU), which need to operate in a world purpose-built for humans, not machines, it NEEDS to UNDERSTAND US, not be the vague half-assed 'deep learning' crap they keep trotting out. It's not cutting it now and I do not believe it will cut it, EVER. Disagree with me all you want, argue with me all you want, insult me all you want, it will not change my opinion.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

You don't have to have all the answers to see that something just isn't going to work.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[JoeDuncan]

We haven't got a clue how the phenomenon of 'consciousness' 'self awareness' or 'sentience' actually works in our own brains;

Well, this is just utter bullshit. We have plenty of clues to how it works, and some pretty good ideas on how to recreate it and what properties it must have.

This is the kind of unmitigated nonsense that philosophers usually spill when they are completely ignorant of the current state of scientific understanding.

Lastly, you obviously don't know what "sentience" means: it is simply the ability to have sensations, and we understand that quite well.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[JoeDuncan]

Ding ding ding^

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[JoeDuncan]

... the whole approach to so-called 'AI' is completely wrong and a dead end.

LOL - only if you don't understand the difference between Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which you've made painfully clear that you are totally ignorant of.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Rick Schumann]

Oh fuck off. You don't work in any such field yourself, you're not an AI researcher, you're not a neuroscientist, so you don't know a goddamned thing yourself.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[JoeDuncan]

Oh fuck off.

Ad Hominem, so clearly you're an idiot

You don't work in any such field yourself,

I do

you're not an AI researcher,

I am

you're not a neuroscientist,

I earned an MSc at the Center for Neuroscience at Queen's University

... so you don't know a goddamned thing yourself.

Wow, you make so many unwarranted assumptions you'd be hard pressed to argue your way out of a wet paper bag. You don't know shit about me and everything you assumed you got wrong. All you've done here is prove how much of an idiot you are.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[yuriklastalov]

You say that as though some crap made up by a pulp sci-fi author in the 50s as plot points in his stories are some kind of normative guide to actual technology. For Christ's sake, "muh three laws of robotics" were violated routinely in order to demonstrate the fact that they wouldn't actually work and yet here we are, with a bunch of sci-fi addled technophiles jerking each other off about muh three laws and an ignorant sense of the immanence of sentient AI.

Whenever AI is finally achieved, it's certainly going to have been developed for military applications in which anything even resembling muh three laws would be a detriment to its purpose. Mindless morons dreaming of their favorite sci-fi fantasies coming true refuse to realize that the scenarios in their treasured stories do not reflect reality in any way, that these "amazing technological innovations" are going to be used to subjugate humanity with a totality the 20th century totalitarians could only dream of.

Technophiles and sci-fi quacks have their heads in the sand. The history of technological development is not one of expanded human liberation, unless you think being shackled inextricably to managerial capitalism is liberation. I'm so glad to have the corporate overlords orchestrating every facet of our existence. At least we've got our precious "self actualized" identities based on consumption of pop culture and social justice to carry us through being treated like the disposable cogs we've become.

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

As I already said, AI might exist one day in the distant future but it does not exist today. That doesn't necessarily mean it will take billions of years, but it could take thousands of years and humans, quite frankly, aren't going to last long enough to see that day arrive.

So did you have a point?

Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike"

[Anonymous Coward]

it is hard to argue that computers won't achieve sentience in the next century or so

LOL! Your naivety is adorable.

If humans don't die off, try a minimum of a thousand years before even the simplest true AI exists.

What can

[Anonymous Coward]

in the near future possibly go wrong. ??

Re:What can

[Anonymous Coward]

You’ll be a robot’s cuck?

bwahahaha yeah right

[coolmoe2]

Ill belive that once they get something that works in the real world outside of kicking as at video games.

In the real world computers can't even drive a car which even the dumbest among us can do.

Re:bwahahaha yeah right

[Bryansix]

Dumb people don't drive cars very well at all. In fact if we didn't have laws against it and extreme enforcement, the levels of drunk driving would be significantly higher.

Much better link

[rthille]

https://developer.nvidia.com/e...
TLDR: 10x better power efficiency than the TX2 and 20x the performance.

Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts

[Bryansix]

It's 2018 and most of by lightbulbs use between 8 and 15 watts each and contain only a single LED. Yes this computer is energy efficient but lets ditch the anachronisms.

Re:Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts

[Type44Q]

So the average diode doesn't use 60 watts. Noted.

Re:Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice work. Using pedantry for good :D

Re:Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice work. Using pedantry against the pedant.
Well played. :D

Re:Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts

[Anonymous Coward]

The original point wasn't exactly pedantry, a decent portable laptop often uses below 30W on average in use and that is powering the full device; the only reason for comparing to an element based bulb is to try and exaggerate the energy efficiency.

BRAINZ!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will autonomous robots soon have robozombies going for their brains?

Re:BRAINZ!!!!!!

[LifesABeach]

What a great idea for a game and movie plot!

I'm a fucking genius ... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject. I am a fucking genius because I can run ping on linux not as root
Crazy right, but here I am able to do the impossiable
All you fags can't which is why you should run my incredible APK hosts file engine version 77.839#^#W*+++ now for linux
If you don't or disagree with me you are a fucking ne'er-do-well and I will fucking fuck your fucking face up

Jetson Xavier

[Anonymous Coward]

*cut to a shot of Professor X uncontrollably tumbling along a treadmill*

"Jean! Stop this crazy thiiiiing!"

Nvidia is now âZCyberdyne systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Jensen Huang of Nvidia Corporation announcing today as part of an intensive company wide refocusing on AI Nvidia will now be "âZCyberdyne systems".

Jensen also announced a 7.5 billion dollar contract with US space command for an advanced missile defense systems.

A spokesman for Nvidia confirmed rebranding effort is expected to be completed by July 3rd.

Re:Nvidia is now âZCyberdyne systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Jensen Huang of Nvidia Corporation announcing today as part of an intensive company wide refocusing on AI Nvidia will now be "âZCyberdyne systems".

Jensen also announced a 7.5 billion dollar contract with US space command for an advanced missile defense systems.

A spokesman for Nvidia confirmed rebranding effort is expected to be completed by August 29th.

FTFY...
wait, maybe it was July 5th (or July 25th, or April 21st, ...) damn you time traveling paradox!!!

Let's repurpose this

[RhettLivingston]

It strikes me that any system for automating a robot that is relatively small and low power is likely to have great attributes for creating personal augmentation systems. The basic requirements of personal augmentation systems include analyzing the surroundings and increasing the person's situational awareness or responsiveness in some way. The only thing this is missing is the features required to deliver the feedback to the individual. Presumably, they aren't missing the outputs to help control devices augmenting personal actions.

Some augmented applications this could be great in include training in virtually any professional sport but especially outdoor ones, motorcycle helmets (especially in sports and off-road contexts), hunting (many hunters would shell out thousands for a full augmented reality system geared for hunting), snow skiing, guided aircraft repair activities, guided vehicle repairs in general, an EMT aide, controlling artificial limbs and exoskeletons, many military applications ranging from personal battlefield computers to personal warehouse and flight deck computers that could tie in with exoskeletons. All of these applications require realtime processing the live environment and presenting analyses and optimal plans based on that analysis and the goals of the tasks being performed to the user.

If we don't want to be replaced, we should stop trying to slow our replacement and instead speed the development of systems that help to make us less replaceable.

Re:Let's repurpose this

[Anonymous Coward]

Augmentation was last decade. We're into AI, neural nets and blockchains now. Try to keep up.

How About

[jmccue]

How about releasing the source under an Open/Free Source licence so all non Microsoft/Apple OSs can use your cards. That will help a lot more people than any AI will.

I got burned once (had to buy a new video board), will never buy anything with Nvidia until the above happens

Re:How About

[Anonymous Coward]

Jetsons run on Linux.

9 billion transistors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle Sparc M7 announced in 2014 and available in 2015 had 10 billion transistors.

Re:9 billion transistors?

[DivineKnight]

Shhh, is marketing. Always find impressive numbers that may or may not contribute to a positive view of your product, and cite them.

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down... etc etc

[timerider]

Am I the only one who sees "Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more." and translates that to "some day there will be billions of unemployed"?

Can someone PLEASE wake up those idiots and make them understand that ROBOTS do not buy PRODUCTS?

Re:When the Last Tree Is Cut Down... etc etc

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. Lets replace the electric street lights with gas lights so we can go back to employing lamp lighters. Imagine how many more jobs we'll have when we ban combines and employ millions to harvest cereal crops like we used to. Computers can go as well and we'll benefit from employing millions of typists, personal assistants, mail office staff, post office staff, and research assistants to lookup information in libraries...

The history of humanity has been finding ways to do more with less labour. The people who know that know that robots don't buy products, the idiots are the people who don't realise that the only reason their are so many products to buy and people can afford them is because of automation of labour.

Re:When the Last Tree Is Cut Down... etc etc

[Anonymous Coward]

All that matters as that robots will make things more efficient, thereby increasing profits. We don't know where the tipping point is where there's so little money being distributed to the peons that profits can no longer be gained through selling, but until that happens, the decision makers will keep their fingers firmly planted in their ears and utterly ignore any possible future consequences. All that matters is next quarter's profit. That's it. There is ZERO long-term plan.

Re:When the Last Tree Is Cut Down... etc etc

[JoeDuncan]

... ROBOTS do not buy PRODUCTS?

Huh, and I'm sure we were all going to pay them *salaries* until you pointed this out. You must be a genius or something.

Artificial

[Anonymous Coward]

Artificial intelligence is just that - artificial (not real) intelligence.

We've been doing it ever since we invented writing, possibly even before. Writing something on paper is AI - it's memory not stored in a brain but on some artificial material.

Sentience, now, is another thing altogether.

Can we cut the hype now?