An Air Force press release notes that the first opportunity for SpaceX to compete to provide launch services will probably be in June, for the GPS III satellite launch. “This is a very important milestone for the Air Force and the Department of Defense," said the Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, who added: SpaceX’s emergence as a viable commercial launch provider gives the opportunity to compete for launch services for the first time in almost a decade. Ultimately, leveraging of the commercial space market drives down cost to the American taxpayer and improves our military’s resiliency. SpaceX will now be able to compete against the former monopoly holder, United Launch Alliance (ULA), a coalition between US aerospace-defence behemoths Lockheed and Boeing.

Google will build a fleet of robots capable of destroying mankind

“I think that this technology will ultimately be one of the greatest forces for good in mankind’s history simply because it makes people smarter,” Schmidt said during a keynote address with author Walter Isaacson and Megan Smith, U.S. chief technology officer. “I’m certainly not worried in the next 10 to 20 years about that. We’re still in the baby step of understanding things,” Schmidt said. “We’ve made tremendous progress in respect to [artificial intelligence].”

RT @elonmusk: Excellent and funny intro article about Artificial Superintelligence! Highly recommend reading

Elon Musk and AAAI President Thomas Dietterich comment on Elon's decision to fund artificial intelligence safety research

"Hopefully this grant program will help shift our focus from building things just because we can, toward building things because they are good for us in the long term", says FLI co-founder Meia Chita-Tegmark.

So who’s going to protect us from the real-life rise of the machines? Step forward a little-known body called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). CSER is based at the University of Cambridge, and is a multidisciplinary group of individuals – mainly scientists – whose mission, as defined on their website, is “the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction”.CSER was set up with funding from Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, which arguably makes him the real-life John Connor, making a lone stand against the real-life Skynets.

Artificial intelligence: Friendly or frightening?

RT @elonmusk: Reread Asimov's Foundation

THE FUTURE OF AI IS A COIN FLIP: IMMORTALITY OR HUMAN EXTINCTION?