Free Republic

By now, you’ve definitely heard about the Burrit0bot — pretty much the most awesome 3D printer in the world. It lets you make burritos … with your iPhone. (If you hadn’t heard about this till now, go ahead and collect your brain pieces from the floor.) Burrit0bot is, very sadly, still a prototype designed by an NYU grad student named Marko Manriquez for his thesis project. Meaning that it hasn’t been made yet. So — to appease your disappointment — we decided to round up all of the grub that already can be made by robots. To follow, your futuristic...

SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds. The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand. The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined...

If Seattle fast workers demanding a big raise in the minimum wage get their way, they'll soon be replaced by robots says KIRO Radio's John Curley, who points to growing automation as a warning to those who want $15 an hour or more to flip burgers. A group of local fast food workers recently staged a one-day walkout and are calling on the Seattle City Council to increase the minimum wage from $9.19 per hour - the highest in the country - to $15 an hour. "We're asking for $15 because in order to support one person in a one...

He's handy with a shot glass and customers travel from far and wide to admire him at work. The only strange thing about Carl the bartender is that he's not quite human.

A Gallup Poll on US Payroll Employment for Age Group 18 to 29 shows Fewer Young Adults Holding Full-Time Jobs in 2013. Fewer Americans aged 18 to 29 worked full time for an employer in June 2013 (43.6%) than did so in June 2012 (47.0%), according to Gallup's Payroll to Population employment rate. The P2P rate for young adults is also down from 45.8% in June 2011 and 46.3% in June 2010. Younger Americans Less Likely to Have Full-Time Work Now, Regardless of Education Older Americans More Likely to Hold Full-Time Jobs Now Than a Year Ago The lack of...

Parts of the nation's commentariat have been seized, in recent months, with a nasty bout of technophobia. Technophobia is a psychological condition, but infectious. Hardly a week goes by without a new outbreak documented in another blog post or business column. To judge from the symptomatic hand-wringing the epidemic is spreading, we are on the verge of mass unemployment as work becomes increasingly automated. Technophobia is an affliction we have yet to cure even after decades of evidence-based ameliorative efforts. We might not have expected much resistance to the disease in earlier times, before evidence accumulated that the fears it...

Killer robots that can attack targets without any human input “should not have the power of life and death over human beings,” a new draft U.N. report says. The report for the U.N. Human Rights Commission posted online this week deals with legal and philosophical issues involved in giving robots lethal powers over humans, echoing countless science-fiction novels and films. The debate dates to author Isaac Asimov’s first rule for robots in the 1942 story “Runaround:” ”A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Report author Christof Heyns, a...

Campaigners call for ban on "killer robots" LONDON (Reuters) - Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against "killer robots" urged on Tuesday. The weapons, which could be ready for use within the next 20 years, would breach a moral and ethical boundary that should never be crossed, said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, of the "Campaign To Stop Killer Robots". "If war is reduced to weapons attacking without human beings in control, it is going to be civilians who are going to bear...

Robotic automation has long been the domain of manufacturing, but of late, service robots have made an often entertaining and sometimes gimmicky leap to restaurants in China, Taiwan, Japan, and increasingly the US. Please accept the following video ode to Singularity Hub’s favorite restaurant robots of the past few years. Noodle bot: Knife-brandishing chopper of noodles, you terrify and inspire us in equal parts. You slice noodles with grim efficiency, and for that we are grateful. (VIDEO AT LINK) Sushi bot: Although the high art of sushi-making may best be suited for human hands, we hold your pace of 3,600...

If you meet Baxter, the latest humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics – you should get comfortable with him, because you'll likely be seeing more of him soon. Rethink Robotics released Baxter last fall and received an overwhelming response from the manufacturing industry, selling out of their production capacity through April. He's cheap to buy ($22,000), easy to train, and can safely work side-by-side with humans. He's just what factories need to make their assembly lines more efficient – and yes, to replace costly human workers. But manufacturing is only the beginning.

The CIA's secret experiments to turn cats into spies Want to know what's going to happen to animals in the next century? Then you must read science journalist Emily Anthes' new book Frankenstein's Cat, about how the animals of tomorrow will be transformed by high tech implants and genetic engineering. We've got an amazing excerpt from the book -- about how the CIA tried to create cyborg cat spies. "Robo Revolution," an excerpt from Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, by Emily Anthes In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat....

Simple chemical reaction powers robot to make lofty leaps. Kaboom! Controlled explosions in the legs of this silicone 'soft robot' make it leap higher than 30 times its own height. Researchers led by George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have engineered a three-legged silicone device that is powered by combustion — previously used only in hard systems such as diesel engines. The soft robot has in each of its legs a channel with a soft valve at the end. Methane and oxygen gases are fed into this channel in a ratio of one part methane to...

Typing on computers that have replaced typewriters, which previously replaced ink-pen and paper, some reporters write about the concern that increased productivity is leading to irreversible job losses for workers. "Some experts now believe that computers and robots will take over much of the work performed by humans, raising critical concerns about the future of jobs," wrote business and economics columnist Rick Haglund in MLive. Haglund’s piece came after a recent Associated Press article, “Recession, tech killing middle-class jobs” that also questioned advances in technology. "For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our...

"Compressorhead" rehearsing for an upcoming gig at The Big Day Out Festival - Drummer has four arms

NAVY DOLPHINS’ WORK WILL BE OUTSOURCED Robots to pick up animals’ tasks, like some detection of mines Like the factory worker and travel agent before them, some Navy dolphins trained to hunt down mines are scheduled to be replaced by computers in five years. However, the Navy’s marine mammals aren’t going away. Military-trained dolphins and sea lions will continue to be used for port security and retrieving objects from the sea floor — jobs they are still better at than machines. The Navy’s $28 million marine mammal program, headquartered in San Diego, uses 80 bottlenose dolphins and 40 California sea...

Homeland Security to deploy underwater drones that mimic tuna fish With even gossip magazines being (falsely) accused of wanting to deploy aerial drones, it seems like the only place you might be able to escape robotic scrutiny would be somewhere far off at sea. Turns out: not true. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has funded a new underwater robot that can find you even in your underwater lair. The BIOSwimmer was developed by Boston Engineering Corporation's Advanced Systems Group (ASG) as an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) modeled after the shape and swimming mechanics of a tuna fish. According to...

Foxconn has been planning to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers and it looks like that change, albeit gradual, is about to start. The company is allegedly paying $25,000 per robot – about three times a worker’s average salary – and they will replace humans in assembly tasks. The plans have been in place for a while – I spoke to Foxconn reps about this a year ago – and it makes perfect sense. Humans are messy, they want more money, and having a half-a-million of them in one factory is a recipe for unrest. But what happens...

A number of robots in development for the military are being given increasing amounts of autonomy. The question is now how they will be used. But, despite widespread press about armed drones hunting down terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the increasing use of ground robots to fight roadside bombs, the truth is that most military robots are still pretty dumb. In fact, almost all unmanned systems involve humans in almost every aspect of their operations—it’s just that instead of sitting in a cockpit or behind the wheel of a vehicle, humans are operating the systems from a...

At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way. At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human. One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages...

Computerworld - MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that they say will enable robots to learn and adapt to humans so they can soon work side-by-side on factory floors. Traditionally, robots working in factories are large, imposing and sectioned off in metal cages as they move heavy loads and perform menial, repetitive tasks. However, Julie Shah, the Boeing Career Development Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, said robots can be more than they've been in a manufacturing setting. It's time for robots to begin working more closely with humans, making workers jobs' safer and easier. Shah, in a...