As a multi-billion dollar economy, the AI and Robotics industry are seeing technological advancements on a daily basis. Autonomous cars and assistance robots are two of the categories that are often topics for discussion. Many people are scared of change, but it is important to innovate, test and try new things if we want to move forward. New designs and innovations can change our future for the better.

It is, however, important to research potential downsides to new innovations. For instance, bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technological singularity are two challenges that need to be addressed. Bias in AI occurs when a computer system reflects the implicit values of the people that are involved in the coding, collecting or selecting of the algorithm used to be implemented in the AI based device. Technological Singularity is the phenomenon that artificial superintelligence (ASI) will become smarter than human beings.

Recent innovations

Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank invested 100 billion U.S. dollarsto develop a chip that can produce artificial intelligence (AI) based robots to reach an IQ of 10,000. ‘This will all take place within 30 years’, SoftBanks CEO Masayoshi Son predicts.

Development teams at IBM Watson are making continuous progress in improving on the supercomputer that outsmarts almost everybody. A special version of IBM Watson was designed to prevent cyber attacks. In 2017 IBM Watson Genomics announced it would be integrated into Biotech company Illumina’s TruSight Tumor 170 tool, making it easy for accurate drug-recommendations to be set for cancer patients. Pepper the Robot has been updated with IBM Watson computing power, making it smarter than ever.

Dubai is soon to be offering autonomous droned helicopter taxi’s, called Volocopters. These autonomous helicopters, that are invented and manufactured by a 50-person aviation startup from Germany, will be operated from the ground. Car manufacturer Daimler and Chip producer Intel are among the project’s biggest investors. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas the team was showcasing their Volocopter in the U.S. for the first time.

An ultrafast transportation network called ‘the hyperloop one’ is in full development, making it easy for people to have access from one city to the next in an ultra-short time. According to the website’s calculator, a Hyperloop trip from Amsterdam (Holland) to Paris (France) will take around 30 minutes, which is extremely fast. The same trip by car will set you back around 5 hours.

Another robotics implementation in forward-thinking city Dubai is the real-world Robocop, that will guard the world’s largest shopping mall together with its police-officer colleagues. Besides robocops, Dubai also plans to install ‘smart dogs’ which are robot-like dogs that will serve as surveillance officers.

The projects referred to above are just a few of the countless proprietary technologies we encounter on a daily basis. Innovations like these are increasing at a rapid pace and they fall into the category of innovations that is also referred to as part of the fourth industrial revolution.

Frontier technology

As the next phase in the evolution of modern technology, frontier technologies like AI and Robotics are experiencing various groundbreaking technological advancements. AI complements the robotics industry by implementing features into robots that can be viewed as brain enhancements. While robotics is focused on empowering the body of the robot, AI is focused on enhancing the brain, thus making the robot smarter and interesting to implement with specific tasks. These two technologies complement each other in a way that they both prosper of it.

Blockchain technology adds value to the AI and Robotics industry because of its decentralized nature. Centralized businesses that intervein as a third-party are dispensable in decentralized platforms. A third-party is a dependent party as they have a monetary motive in providing a service or selling a product. With blockchain technology services can be arranged by executing blockchain based smart contracts. This will provide a safe and secure base to sign a contract or activate a service without depending on a third-party to intervein. Other advantages of using blockchain or distributed ledger technology are its transparency and privacy features.

If companies can take the best of both worlds (AI and Robotics on one hand and Blockchain technology on the other) they can create a truly decentralized AI and Robotics ecosystem that is safe, secure and cheap to use.

Kambria

Kambria is one of the projects that aim to disrupt the AI and Robotics industry by building an open innovation platform. The platform will be similar to Linux and Android with the addition of several software and hardware features. Kambria is creating a blockchain based ecosystem that allows developers to develop faster, cheaper and easier. Blockchain will enable an open, transparent, trustless and fully decentralized system.

Kambria proposes to create a way to incentivize collaboration between company’s, manufacturers, investors, developers, and platform users. These collaborations will effectively accelerate the evolution of robotics and AI technologies and it will allow entrepreneurs to pursue their vision.

Kambria introduces its own ERC-20 Kambria Token (KAT). KAT will be used as a tool to facilitate all platform interactions. From gaining access to the platform to setting up a crowdfunding campaign.

The project is working together with prominent university’s like Stanford University, Central Michigan University, and Nanyang Technological University. Kambria is also building robotics labs.

On the 26th of September, Kambria celebrated its soft launch with a special event held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Somewhere in the second quarter of 2019 they are projected to launch their fully developed platform including the entire K-DNA Code Base.

OhmniLabs The foundation of Kambria was built by OhmniLabs. While Kambria International (KI) and OhmniLabs are two separate companies, the latter initiated the Kambria project as a solution to a problem they encountered when launching their telepresence robot. A telepresence robot is a robot that places you at a remote location instantly. You can view the location through the ‘eyes’ of the robot and you can connect to other people that are present at the remote location. The ‘Ohmni’ is available online for $1,495. My personal opinion on the project One of my personal interests is Futurism. I enjoy researching technological innovations that in essence have the ability to be implemented and make a huge difference in our day-to-day lives. A few months ago, I came across the Kambria project and it instantly caught my eye. I like the fact that they aim to provide affordable telepresence robots and that they like to share the knowledge they attained onto an open source platform with other developers. They have put in years of research and development into building Ohmni and with Kambria they want to share their findings with others in order to grow the robotics industry and make sure smaller players can also participate in this innovative industry. If executed the right way I foresee a great future ahead for Kambria. While it usually astonishes me to see what developers are building, sometimes it also scares me. It frightens me to think that working on the development of AI and Robotics can also mean that we come closer to reaching technological singularity. At this point, it is still unclear as to whether super-intelligent robots will have all good intentions or that they may be able to be corrupted.