Free Republic

BREAKING - Top US Source says "deal is done" re #NAFTA. Joint statement from @USTradeRep & Canada's Freeland expected soon. I'm told #NAFTA deal was reached around 9:30pm tonight. Canada giving a larger % of its dairy market to US products in exchange for cultural protection & some form of dispute resolution process (formerly Ch 19).

American Verizon workers say mass layoffs are coming as soon as next week in exclusive statements to Breitbart News. Essentially, the deal for the 44,000 workers forces them to resign and take the severance or stay on at the corporation until they are eventually laid off and not eligible to receive the hefty severance package. As Breitbart News reported, Verizon has announced that it will outsource its IT department to Infosys, one of the biggest multi-billion dollar outsourcing firms in the U.S. that has been accused of undercutting American workers and discriminating against black and white Americans in favor of...

80 Acres Farms, a Cincinnati-based firm focused on the indoor vertical farming industry, is building the first fully-automated indoor farm in the U.S. in Hamilton, Ohio. The initial phase, expected to be completed later this year, will feature state-of-the-art grow centers to produce specialty greens that include microgreens, culinary herbs, leafy greens and kale. According to company officials, the company plans three additional phases at the Hamilton site. When completed, the project will comprise over 150,000 square feet of fully-automated indoor farming, also known as controlled environmental agriculture. The full-phase expansion will allow 80 Acres Farms to provide more product...

A start-up uses visual tracking and behavioral data to operate a new San Francisco market, which lets shoppers walk out unimpeded. And sometimes mischarged. One recent afternoon, the city’s newest grocery market was trying to figure out whether I would buy, steal or leave behind a bag of white Cheddar popcorn — and so was I. On its side: 27 cameras along the ceiling and a wealth of behavioral data. On my side: crippling indecision. Last week, San Francisco got its first completely automated cashierless store, Standard Market. Shoppers who have downloaded the store’s app can go into the 1,900-square-foot...

... the pilots cited cases where, they argued, the action of pilots had saved an airplane and its passengers when the computers could not have. In at least two of those cases they had a point. In January 2009 Captain “Sully” Sullenberger saved the lives of 150 passengers by making an emergency landing on the Hudson River. And in November, 2010 what would have been one of the world’s worst air disasters was averted when Captain Richard de Crespigny of the Australian airline Qantas managed to get a giant Airbus A380 that had been badly crippled by an exploding engine...

7-Eleven is launching first fully-automated stores 7-Eleven Express in South Korea. Currently under trial, four vending machine-style convenience stores are being operated: two at the headquarters of 7-Eleven in downtown Seoul, one at Lotte E&M in Incheon, and one at the headquarters of Lotte Rent-a-Car in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province. The store is designed as a 10-metre long express train, and consists of five vending machines with 200 products, which are divided into five categories for which there is high consumer demand: drinks, snacks, prepared meals, processed food and non-food products. Consumers can make a purchase by inputting the product number...

There could be a future where robots will do most of your grocery shopping for you. And for some Walmart shoppers, that future is getting even closer. Walmart (WMT), the world’s largest seller of groceries, will begin piloting a robotics system for its fast-growing online grocery pickup (OGP) service in one of its stores. The retailer has teamed up with Massachusetts-based Alert Innovation to deploy its Alphabot, a first-of-its-kind technology, in its supercenter store in Salem, New Hampshire just off of Interstate 93. “This is about the evolution of retail,” Alert Innovation CEO John Lert told Yahoo Finance. “So, we...

As McDonald's seeks to modernize its business, the company is placing a big bet on mobile and other tech platforms. McDonald's has been systematically adding self-service ordering kiosks and table service to stores as it works to "build a better McDonald's." "What we're finding is when people dwell more, they select more," CEO Steve Easterbrook told CNBC on "Squawk on the Street" on Monday. "There's a little bit of an average check boost."

John covered this story last night, but the death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle in Arizona should have ramifications for the entire idea of autonomous vehicles. (Something I’ve been concerned about for a couple of years now.) After covering the initial reports from the accident, John concluded with the following observations and questions. There will be an investigation of this accident as well, but my first thought is to wonder why the human ‘backup driver’ didn’t stop the car and prevent this. Reliable self-driving cars and trucks may still be a couple years away but it’s...

A recent article in The Guardian dons the foreboding title "Robots will destroy our jobs — and we're not ready for it." The article claims, "For every job created by robotic automation, several more will be eliminated entirely. ... This disruption will have a devastating impact on our workforce." According to an article in MIT Technology Review, business researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. If technology is destroying jobs...

Amazon Go allows customers to grab items and just walk out without stopping to pay. =============================================== Amazon’s store of the future has been five years in the making. But the unveiling is just about here. Amazon Go, the company’s first brick-and-mortar convenience store, will open to the public on Monday on the ground floor of Amazon’s new headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Seattle. Though the unveiling will take place about a year later than the company originally planned, it will still be met with great intrigue because of the store’s unique technology that Amazon believes can make checkout lines a...

Cleaning the floors at Walmart isn’t exactly an enviable job — and now it’s one humans no longer have to do. As originally reported by LinkedIn, the retail giant is currently applying some high-tech to a generally low-paying task. Walmart now has self-driving machines of its own, but you won’t see any of them on highways. Rather, these bristle-wielding devices designed by Brain Corp. are autonomously rolling themselves around Walmart stores, cleaning up after customers and employees. The autonomous floor cleaner is currently being tested in five stores in the vicinity of company headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. With its sensors,...

When the robots came to online retailer Boxed, dread came, too: The familiar fear that the machines would take over, leaving a trail of unemployed humans in their wake. "I had a lot of people asking me, 'What is going to happen to us?'" says Veronica Mena, a trainer for the e-commerce startup, recalling the anxiety that rippled through her co-workers after company executives announced plans to open an automated warehouse in nearby Union, N. J. Yet their fears didn't come to pass. When the new warehouse opened this spring, workers found that their jobs were less physically demanding than...

Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-teslas-truck-mean-for-truckers/

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...

While many human workers fear that they will ultimately be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), it's more likely that our current workforce will shift into new types of roles for people, according to a new report from professional services company Cognizant. "In the future, work will change but won't go away," the report stated. "Work will continue to be core to our identities, our nature, our dreams and our realities. But it won't necessarily be the work we know or do now." Work has always changed as technology advances, the report noted, with positions such as switchboard operators, lamplighters, and...

Waymo Trucks will someday drive themselves out of warehouses and cruise down freeways without the aid of humans or even a driver’s cab — about that there seems little disagreement. The question is how soon that day gets here. And while the answers vary — technologists, not surprisingly, are more bullish than truckers — billions of dollars and a growing parade of companies, from tiny start-ups to the biggest trucking operations, are betting it will be here sooner than most people think. This year, companies and investors are on pace to put just over $1 billion into self-driving and other...

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...

President Donald Trump might not have made it to the White House if the number of robots in the labor market wasn't as high, according to researchers. A study by three Oxford University academics found that workers exposed to automation were more likely to vote for Trump than for than his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. "Automation has always been an engine of prosperity," Professor Carl Frey said in a statement Monday. "But it can take a long time for the benefits to show, and workers who are not able to find better paid jobs are more likely to be hostile...