Hasta La Gadget!

First he was in Game of Thrones, soon he’ll be in the DC Universe, and now, he’s going to a galaxy far, far away.

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Spain is wasting no time. The country plans to dramatically decarbonize its economy by 2050, and that includes banning a lot of cars, according to a draft law the Ministry for Ecological Transition published Tuesday.

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Juul Labs, the makers of the wildly popular Juul e-cigarettes, announced today that it will stop selling most of its flavored vaping pods in retail stores. The company will also put an end to its social media promotions and advertisements. The decisi…

Add the United Kingdom to the list of countries with commercial 5G networks scheduled for launch in 2019. It’s already known that carriers in the United States and South Korea will be launching their commercial 5G networks next year. EE, the UK’s largest mobile carrier, has now confirmed that its 5G network will be launched in 16 cities.

The first lanch cities will be the country’s four capital cities – London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast in addition to Birmingham and Manchester. It’s building the 5G network in the busiest parts of the launch cities including Hyde Park in London, Manchester Arena, Belfast City Airport, Edinburgh Waverly train station, the Welsh Assembly, and Birmingham’s Bullring.

Aside from these six launch cities, EE will also introduce 5G in 10 more cities across the country next year. They include Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, and Bristol. The network will be launched with multiple smartphone partners as well as an EE 5G Home router with external antenna so that home users can get 5G broadband services.

The first 1,500 cell sites that EE upgrades to 5G in 2019 will carry 25 percent of all data across the entire network but only cover 15 percent of the country’s population. It will be upgrading those sites first which can “make the biggest difference to the most people.” The transmission is being upgraded to 10Gbps links at each 5G site.

Largest UK Carrier To Launch 5G In 16 Cities Next Year , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

This simple spreadsheet of machine learning foibles may not look like much but it’s a fascinating exploration of how machines “think.” The list, compiled by researcher Victoria Krakovna, describes various situations in which robots followed the spirit and the letter of the law at the same time.

For example, in the video below a machine learning algorithm learned that it could rack up points not by taking part in a boat race but by flipping around in a circle to get points. In another simulation “where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).” This led to what Krakovna called “indolent cannibals.”

It’s obvious that these machines aren’t “thinking” in any real sense but when given parameters and a the ability to evolve an answer, it’s also obvious that these robots will come up with some fun ideas. In other test, a robot learned to move a block by smacking the table with its arm and still another “genetic algorithm [was] supposed to configure a circuit into an oscillator, but instead [made] a radio to pick up signals from neighboring computers.” Another cancer-detecting system found that pictures of malignant tumors usually contained rulers and so gave plenty of false positives.

Each of these examples shows the unintended consequences of trusting machines to learn. They will learn but they will also confound us. Machine learning is just that – learning that is understandable only by machines.

One final example: in a game of Tetris in which a robot was required to “not lose” the program pauses “the game indefinitely to avoid losing.” Now it just needs to throw a tantrum and we’d have a clever three-year-old on our hands.