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Obama to speak on the NSA surveillance scandal from the Justice Department around 11 a.m. EST today.C-SPAN's description:The President delivers remarks at the Department of Justice presenting the outcomes of the Administration's review of U.S. signals intelligence programs. He is expected to focus on steps that increase oversight and transparency while leaving the framework of the surveillance programs in place. In addition, according to officials, the President will turn to Congress for guidance regarding the future of NSA data collection. The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommended more than 40 suggested changes at the NSA in a...

A Silicon Valley startup is poised to replace the everyday security guard with high tech robots the company plans to introduce to the world on Thursday. The 300 pound R5 Autonomous Data Machine looks like a hybrid of R2-D2 and the robot from Lost in Space. More than just yelling ‘danger,’ manufacturer Knightscope hopes the machines will actually help predict crimes and even cut current rates in half. And its inventors say it was a recent school shooting that actually inspired them to create the R5....

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, creator of the BigDog, CHEETAH, and PETMAN robots, according the the New York Times. The purchase is Google’s latest investment in advanced robotics — a new priority for the search company and one that it has recently added to its list of “moonshot” initiatives. Boston Dynamics represents a new type of acquisition for Google. It is best known for projects that were carried out under military contracts, such as the tottering BigDog robot, a demonstration of which went viral in BigDog’s development was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part...

Momentum Machines robot enables a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. It does everything employees can do except better: * it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible. * their next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem. * Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in...

We worry about robots. Hardly a day goes by where we're not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans. Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he's not worried about them taking our jobs. He's worried about them exterminating the human race. I'll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how...

After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots? But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee’s announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili’s already made this move earlier this year. With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay...

The future doesn't always arrive with a gasp and a boom like Skynet inTerminator. No, sometimes it's more like Office Space. At least that's the idea I get watching this video of the Marines' testing the Legged Squad Support System. DARPA built the LS3 to act as an autonomous pack horse that "can carry 400 lbs of a squad’s load, follow squad members through rugged terrain and interact with troops in a natural way, similar to a trained animal and its handler." And yet, in the hands of real Marines, it sounds like they're testing a new network printer out,...

<p>What are human workers going to do when super-intelligent robots and computers are better than us at doing everything? That is one of the questions that a new study by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne of Oxford University sought to address, and what they concluded was that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be automated within the next 20 years. Considering the fact that the percentage of the U.S. population that is employed is already far lower than it was a decade ago, it is frightening to think that tens of millions more jobs could disappear due to technological advances over the next couple of decades. I have written extensively about how we are already losing millions of jobs to super cheap labor on the other side of the globe. What are middle class families going to do as technology also takes away huge numbers of our jobs at an ever increasing pace? We live during a period of history when knowledge is increasing an an exponential rate. In the past, when human workers were displaced by technology it also created new kinds of jobs that the world had never seen before. But what happens when the day arrives when computers and robots can do almost everything more cheaply and more efficiently than humans can?</p>

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)A new worker's revolution is rising in China and it doesn't involve humans. With soaring wages and an aging population, electronics factory managers say the day is approaching when robotic workers will replace people on the Chinese factory floor. A new wave of industrial robots is in development, ranging from high-end humanoid machines with vision, touch and even learning capabilities, to low-cost robots vying to undercut China's minimum wage....

Medieval doctors bled their patients with leeches. Far from improving their condition, it left them worse off. Raising the wages of fast-food workers to $15 an hour would produce similar results for those the proposal is intended to help. In America, minimum-wage workers are better paid than the average worker in Mexico. Why? It’s not because U.S. employers are more generous than their Mexican counterparts. Nor do Americans somehow deserve better pay. American minimum-wage earners make more because they produce more. Better education and greater capital investment make American workers more productive, raising their earnings. Competition forces businesses to pay...

Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people. A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades. The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services,...

They are an improbable group of superheroes. But some of Britain's greatest minds have got together to focus their powers on saving humanity from itself. Led by the Astronomer Royal and Cambridge don Martin Rees, famous thinkers such as physicist Stephen Hawking and former Government chief scientist Robert May have formed a society to draw up a doomsday list of risks that could wipe out mankind. From crippling cyber-attacks by terrorists using the internet to cause havoc, to the release of engineered diseases and killer computers, they warn the future is far from rosy.But the work being done by the...

Is the debate about giving citizenships to millions of illegal immigrants becoming irrelevant as technology begins to replace the need for today’s human labor required in planting and picking field crops?

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...