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This holiday season, Amazon's little helper is an orange, 320-pound robot called Kiva. The robots -- more than 15,000 of them companywide -- are part of Amazon's high-tech effort to get orders to customers faster. By lifting shelves of Amazon products off the ground and speedily delivering them to employee stations, the robots dramatically reduce the time it takes for workers to find items and put them into boxes for shipment.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to call it “the parish paper,” a gentle barb at the pretensions of the self-described “paper of record,” but also, I think, a subtle pastoral hand extended to those who think they get all the advice they need when they look in the mirror.Yes, I’m talking about the New York Times, which just ran a discussion group on dropping the celibacy requirement for Catholic clergy. It was a “usual suspects” sort of panel, with the balance one would expect. Of 7 panelists 4 were in favor of married priests, one argued both for and...

Are businesses are moving too quickly to robots? Is any job safe? Patrick Thibodeau at Computer World discusses the idea things are moving "too fast" with a review of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Glass Cage, Automation and Us. Please consider Automation Could Take Your Skills -- and Your Job by Patrick Thibodeau. The Glass Cage examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and predictive analytics. It warns of the potential de-skilling of the workforce, including software developers, as larger shares...

Lowe’s LOW -0.45% Cos. is introducing robotic shopping assistants at an Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose, Calif., in late November. Lowe’s, which acquired Orchard Supply last year, says this is the first retail robot of its kind in the U.S. The OSHbot will greet customers, ask if they need help and guide them through the store to the product. Besides natural-language-processing technology, the 5-foot tall white robot houses two large rectangular screens—front and back—for video conferences with a store expert and to display in-store specials. The head features a 3-D scanner to help customers identify items. OSHbot speaks...

Volkswagen hopes to put more robots to work as it says goodbye to its retiring baby boomer employees, the company’s chief of human resources wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Monday. […] “In the German auto industry, labor costs are more than €40 per hour; eastern European labor costs €11; in China, it’s still than less than €10,” (Horst) Neumann wrote. “A current robotic replacement for assembly work currently costs around €5 an hour. Predictably, next-generation robotics will be even cheaper. We have to take make the most of this price advantage.” …

Remember the Terminator movies and the evil electronic overlords of Skynet – the computer system that became self-aware and launched the war against humans? We aren’t there…yet. But we are fast approaching the point where people simply aren’t necessary to conduct a significant amount of business and life. There won’t be a single day – a “Skynet Day” – we will point to when the low- and no-skilled workers became the Betamax of the workforce. It will happen gradually. But it will happen. And we’ll spend decades arguing over why. It didn’t start with the formation of unions. They were...

Next time you pour a nice cold glass of milk, you could have a robot to thank. That's because automated milking machines are showing up at more and more dairy farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. The technology is cutting down on labor costs, increasing yield and teaching farmers more about the health and productivity of their herds. Just ask Nate Tullar, of Orford, New Hampshire. Cows have been giving milk at his family’s farm, Tullando, since 1956. That’s when his grandparents started the dairy business, and they have often been open to innovation over the years. There are now...

Robot Couch Can Drive You to the Fridge and Back With a Raspberry Pi and USB gamepad controller letting you run riot on your sofa, this student project is couched in innovation. Sometimes, getting up off the couch to grab a drink is far too time consuming. What if you could drive the couch to the fridge instead? Well, your dreams of an automated couch have come true. Nine engineering students at the University of New South Wales in Australia have designed a robotic couch that can be controlled using a standard USB gamepad. Featuring a custom-built steel chassis with...

Want robots at McDonald's? Hike minimum wage: Zell Matthew J. Belvedere | @Matt_Belvedere Wednesday, 3 Sep 2014 Video Federal and state efforts to increase the minimum wage are misguided and pose serious risks to the economy and the job market, billionaire Sam Zell told CNBC on Wednesday. "The tinkering with the minimum wage is a very dangerous game," the chairman of Equity Group Investments said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "You start talking about a $13 or a $15 minimum wage, and you're going to have robots that are operating McDonald's."

Progress in robotics, from drones to medical applications, is starting to come at a fast clip. Do you want your robot to cook your food, or just deliver it?The days of drones filling the sky and robots roaming in our streets are not far removed from reality anymore, and scenes from movies like Star Wars, Minority Report and I, Robot will be common soon. Just consider some of the ways that robots have started to permeate our lives. Start with Amazon, which is taking to drones in a big way. The online shopping giant started a new phase in high-tech...

Killer robots programmed to open fire without human control are just a “small step” from the battlefield and military powers should agree to outlaw them, a top United Nations official has said. Angela Kane, the UN’s high representative for disarmament, said governments should be more open about programmes to develop the technology and she favoured a pre-emptive ban before it was too late. She said: “Any weapon of war is terrible, and if you can launch this without human intervention, I think it’s even worse. It compounds the problem and dehumanises it in a way. “It becomes a faceless war...

Humans have spent centuries advancing technology to the point where some jobs have been completely taken over by less expensive robots. In the future, technology will take over more and more sectors until there's nothing left. What will humans do then?

Hotel rooms for the introverts among us are an anti-social haven. Nothing beats a hot shower, followed by settling into a freshly made bed in a terrycloth robe to watch mediocre television with a glass of wine. No one bothers you and for an exquisite moment in time, you have nary a care in the world. Then the realization hits. You’ve forgotten your toothbrush at home! You’re going to have to call the snooty concierge. You’re going to have to smile and tip and say thank you. You’ll have to deal with people. The chain of hotels has introduced the...

Look out Rosie the Robot, Starwood Hotels' Aloft brand has a taskmaster of its own. His (or her?) name; A.L.O. pronounced "el-oh", the hotels' first Botlr (short of robotic butler.) Standing just under 3 feet tall, A.L.O. comes dressed in a vinyl-collared butler uniform and will soon be on call all day and night to fulfill requests from guests. Forget your toothpaste? Need more towels? How about a late-night chocolate bar? All guests of the hotel have to do is call the front desk, where staff will load up the Botlr with requested items, punch in the guest's room number...

Is the increasing automation of our economy a threat to American wages and jobs? Should the American worker fear the rise of the robots? No, not really. Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes warned that society faced “a new disease” of “technological unemployment” in which the “means of economizing the use of labor [were] outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Much more recently, Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute wrote about how “robot workers could tear America’s social fabric.” Strain worries that machines could eliminate the livelihoods of millions of less-skilled workers. These...

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers revived a debate I’d had with futurist Ray Kurzweil in 2012 about the jobless future. He echoed the words of Peter Diamandis, who says that we are moving from a history of scarcity to an era of abundance. Then he noted that the technologies that make such abundance possible are allowing production of far more output using far fewer people. On all this, Summers is right. Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live...

Newsmax Professor: Robots Are the Future of Elder Care Sunday, July 20, 2014 10:01 AM By: Sandy Fitzgerald Many older people need someone who is always there to help them with their everyday tasks, to listen to their stories, and to help them live independently — in other words, a robot caregiver, writes an associate professor of geriatrics in Sunday's New York Times. "That may sound like an oxymoron," writes the University of California's Louise Aronson in her opinion piece. "In an ideal world, it would be: Each of us would have at least one kind and fully capable human...

Has Skynet become self-aware? It seems the 'robots' that run the US equity markets (HFT/algo trading dominates what little volume there is left) have decided to cut out the middle man in the market as Associated Press reports this morning that it will employ the story-writing software by start-up Automated Insights to automate the production of U.S. corporate earnings stories. To be frank, given the copy/paste nature of most mainstream media 'analysis' of earnings, we thought this had already occurred but AP notes, "We are going to use our brains and time in more enterprising ways during earnings season." Does...

Want to build your very own robot? It turns out all you might need is a little heat. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed 3D-printed robots that can assemble themselves together after being exposed to heat. They demonstrated how these prototypes work in two new studies, to be presented at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Hong Kong next week. Using a type of polymer called polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, the research team led by Daniela Rus created two-dimensional sheets of the material and placed them between two rigid polyester films...

There are already more than 101 million working age Americans that are not employed and 20 percent of the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job. So what in the world are we going to do when robots start taking millions upon millions more of our jobs? Thanks to technology, the balance of power between employers and workers in this country is shifting dramatically in favor of the employers. These days, many employers are wondering why they are dealing with so many human worker "headaches" when they can just use technology to...