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The future of sex robots is closer than ever, and more and more people are open to having a romantic, sexual relationship with them. Take Roxxxy, billed as the world’s first sex robot, not to be confused with sex dolls that can’t move or communicate. For just under $10,000, users can customize her or her male counterpart, Rocky, by selecting a hair style and color, eye color, skin tone, fingernail and toenail style, and even the shape and color of its pubic hair (if any). These robots converse, respond to touch, and perform movements such as hip thrusts.

Just when you thought it was advanced computer systems and the military that were out to get us, it turns out that sex robots - the very machines designed to give us pleasure - could be about to kill us too. Sex robots have been with us for quite a few years now and they have already attracted their fair share of warnings and controversy. However, a warning from Dr Nick Patterson, a cybersecurity lecturer at Deakin University, Australia has to be the starkest yet.  He believes that in the future sex robots could be easier for hackers to access and control than a laptop...

Why China’s ammunition factories are being turned over to robots ‘Smart machines’ could treble bomb and shell production capacity in less than a decade PUBLISHED : Monday, 01 January, 2018, 8:21pm UPDATED : Monday, 01 January, 2018, 11:28pm Robots could treble China’s bomb and shell production capacity in less than a decade according to a senior scientist involved in a programme that is using artificial intelligence to boost the productivity of ammunition factories. Xu Zhigang, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shenyang Institute of Automation and a lead scientist with China’s “high-level weapon system intelligent manufacturing programme”, told...

In San Francisco, autonomous crime-fighting robots that are used to patrol parking lots, sports arenas, and tech company campuses are now being deployed to keep away homeless people. The San Francisco Business Times reported last week that the San Francisco SPCA, an animal advocacy and pet adoption group, put a security robot to work outside its facilities in the gentrifying Mission neighborhood. The robot's presence is meant to deter homeless people from setting up camps along the sidewalks. Last week, the City of San Francisco ordered the SF SPCA to keep its robot off the streets or be fined...

Hillary Clinton spoke about the dangers of artificial intelligence in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday. The failed presidential candidate was on Hewitt's show to promote her book, but the conversation steered towards recent advances in technology. Something that concerns Clinton is the potential for our society to become inundated with artificial intelligence - computers that mimic the human brain to complete tasks for us - such as home office assistants or even robot drones. Clinton says that AI can be a good thing, but she's worried that our society is rushing into a brave new world without...

Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land. This isn’t some post-apocalyptic vision of the future à la The Terminator. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation—from seed to harvest—may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one’s fingernails dirty. In fact, it’s science fiction already being engineered into reality. Today, robots empowered with artificial intelligence can zap weeds with preternatural...

Agriculture is big business in Indiana. The US Census Bureau places the Hoosier State firmly in the top ten farming states with 11.2 billion dollars in annual sales. Farmers, faced with a labor shortage and declining profit, are quickly adopting robotic technology to ensure their family businesses stay afloat. These farms, like Superior Dairy in Garrett, are not your father’s farms. Not Your Father’s Farm Step onto the lot of Superior Dairy in Garrett, and the smell hits you right away. It’s not foul, not like a hog farm. Instead, it’s earthy, with notes of hay, mud and hints of...

Yanis Varoufakis resigned as finance minister of Greece after only six months on the job, following what he described as his own “complete failure” to negotiate a resolution of his country’s debts. A little over two years later, he has restored sufficient confidence in his views to predict the end of capitalism. Varoufakis told an audience at University College London a few days ago that large technology corporations and artificial intelligence will cause capitalism to undermine itself, with technology eliminating more jobs than it creates. As an example, he cited Google, the search engine giant that after less than 20...

LONDON: A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates. Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression. Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot. “I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust...

Robots may be coming for some jobs, but they will likely create new roles as well. Here are some spots humans are needed to fill and how to get them. It has become common to joke about how robots are going to take our jobs, and rightfully so: Oxford University researchers estimate that 47% of all current US employment is at high risk to become automated over the next decade or so. But there is positive news: Of the 1.8 million jobs AI will get rid of, the emerging field will create 2.3 million by 2020, according to a recent...

A new partnership between Rolls-Royce and Google will see ships become smarter and self-learning thanks to advanced machine learning algorithms. It will also bring the company’s vision of a fully autonomous ship setting sail by 2020 a step closer to reality. Rolls Royce announced this month that it will use Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine across a range of applications, designed to both make today’s ships safer and more efficient, and to launch the ships of tomorrow. Initially the machine learning engine will be used to further train existing AI algorithms designed to power the image recognition systems of vessels....

The Gartner Hype Cycle shows a remarkably consistent pattern. A new technology is first ignored, then begins to show promise and expectations get inflated beyond any realistic assessment of value. That leads to disillusionment and the technology is almost forgotten until, some years later, it begins to make a true competitive impact.What makes the Hype Cycle so pervasive is that it is, essentially, a pattern based on our obsession with patterns and stories, which is so universal that there is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to it. Our love of patterns is so great, in fact, that once we...

After strong stock-market performance in the year to date, several big U.S. tech firms have begun to receive some negative attention from the public, as well as from regulators and politicians. Alphabet (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) have gotten the most scrutiny, with European regulators leveling accusations of unfair search advantages against GOOG, and U.S. lawmakers drawing FB into the controversy surrounding alleged Russian efforts to influence the outcome of last year’s election. Amazon (AMZN) has not been above the fray. The company’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods Market led to a few muted pieces of press coverage that mentioned “antitrust,”...

Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 10/06/2017 -- The global agriculture robots market features a widely diverse competitive landscape characterized by region-wise dominance of prominent players, notes Transparency Market Research (TMR). For instance, the agriculture robots market in North America was dominated Harvest Automation, Inc., Clearpath Robotics, and PrecisionHawk, Inc., in 2015, while in the same year, Naio Technologies and SenseFly SA led the Europe market. In addition, Shibuya Seiki was one of the leading players in the Asia Pacific market for agriculture robots in 2015. Furthermore, driven by abundant lucrative avenues, the market is witnessing a constant influx of emerging...

Perrone Robotics, a developer of autonomous car software, will invest $3.8 million to expand its research and development operation in Albemarle County to add to its test track and facilities. Virginia successfully competed against California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for the project, which will create 127 new jobs over the next three years. “Entrepreneurial companies like Perrone Robotics are putting Virginia on the map for cutting-edge industry and the jobs that come with it,” said Governor McAuliffe, speaking at the event. “This expansion is a testament to Virginia’s stellar technology workforce and competitive business climate, particularly for high-tech companies in sectors...

LONDON, Sept. 29 (Xinhua) -- In what has been described Friday as a world first, a farm field in Britain has been planted and harvested completely by autonomous vehicles and drones without any farmhands in sight. The hands-free crop farming was delivered in joint project by Harper Adams University in Shropshire and Yorkshire-based Precision Decisions, in an initiative partly-funded by the government agency, Innovate UK. The renowned agricultural university and Precision Decisions announced Friday the successful completion of "Hands Free Hectare", a project to plant, tend and harvest a crop using only autonomous vehicles and drones. A spokesman for Innovate...

TORONTO -- Former U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday that closing borders won't create future jobs because what's changing industries like manufacturing are automation and artificial intelligence. Obama told a Toronto luncheon on Friday that the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy happened over the course of 150 years, but that the technological revolution is happening in 20 years. He said it's hard for governments to catch up to the pace of disruption. Obama said over the next 25 years, advanced economies will have to confront the fact that there is not going to be enough high-paying full-time...

A sex doll was so heavily molested by eager men it broke before anyone could actually use it. Or use it privately, anyway. We're not entirely sure what happened to 'Samantha'. But its owner complained that the £3,000 robot was left "heavily soiled" after being exhibited at a tech fair. Developer Sergi Santos, from Barcelona, Spain, says visitors to the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz treated the 'intelligent' sex doll "like barbarians", and added that two fingers were broken in the melee. "The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms," Sergi said. "Two fingers were broken. She was...

Jack Ma knows artificial intelligence will change the world. The Alibaba founder and chairman doesn't think we should be scared. But he does think we should be prepared for major disruptions to the job market. "In the last 200 years, manufacturing (has brought) jobs. But today -- because of the artificial intelligence, because of the robots -- manufacturing is no longer the main engine of creating jobs," Ma said Wednesday in a speech at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York City. Moving forward, Ma said he believes the service industry will be the largest engine of job creation....

These days, it’s tough to avoid newspaper headlines warning that artificial intelligence is coming for your job. The problem is that, often, the only thing these oversimplifications get right is that there is, in fact, an important connection between automation and work.What’s surprising is how many examples there are of AI acting as the catalyst for new hiring, higher wages, and happier employees. But of course, AI success stories aren’t as exciting as the “job-stealing robots” narrative. The reality is that the impact of AI on the workforce is complex, nuanced, and still very much in transition.Worker-Friendly OutcomesHere’s an...