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The US Navy is set to unleash an army of 'ghost drones' to scour the coasts for enemy submarines. They hope to end the growing threat of quiet, diesel powered enemy submarines enters American waters undetected. The robot boats will go to sea for us to three months at a time.

Microsoft has already said that Windows 10 will work on a PC, tablet or phone. Now it wants to put Windows on every other gadget you might want to connect to the Internet. On Monday, Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 IoT (short for the idiotically named "Internet of Things"). It's essentially a tool to let your connected thermostat to talk to your connected car, or for a bank's connected ATM to talk to its network hub. And if all those things run Windows, they'll play nicely (in theory) with your Windows PC or phone. That means you should be able to...

For some time, I've been collecting news stories about robots and jobs. By robots, I mean almost any automated process that substitutes machines for people. Here are some examples: ● The restaurant chain Chili's installed 45,000 computer tablets in its U.S. locations, says The Post. The tablets enable customers to pay their bills, play games and place some orders. ● One hotel is introducing a robot bellhop that delivers items to guests' rooms, reports the New York Times. The same story mentions automated golf caddies. Another Times story reports that the German firm Daimler has demonstrated a self-driving truck. ●...

As robots increasingly adopt human qualities, including those that allow them to replace actual human labor, economists are starting to worry.  As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, some “wonder if automation technology is near a tipping point, when machines finally master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable.”The fears of economists, politicians and workers themselves are way overdone.  They should embrace the rise of robots precisely because they love job creation.  As my upcoming book Popular Economics points out with regularity, abundant job creation is always and everywhere the happy result of technological advances that tautologically lead to job destruction.Robots...

A hotel staffed by ten multilingual robots is set to open later this year in Japan. When the Henn-na Hotel opens in July, it will be run by robots that can greet guests before carrying their luggage to their rooms. When guests leave, the robots will be able to clear their rooms, ready for the next human to come and stay. The robots are styled to look like a young Japanese woman. They can speak fluent Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and can respond to guest’s body language, eye contact and tone. …

WASHINGTON – Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16 percent, a report Tuesday said. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that investment in industrial robots will grow 10 percent a year in the world's 25-biggest export nations through 2025, up from 2 percent to 3 percent a year now. The investment will pay off in lower costs and increased efficiency.

NAGASAKI – A hotel with robot staff and face recognition instead of room keys will open this summer in Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki Prefecture, the operator of the theme park said Tuesday. The two-story Henn na Hotel is scheduled to open July 17. It will be promoted with the slogan “A Commitment for Evolution,” Huis Ten Bosch Co. said. The name reflects how the hotel will “change with cutting-edge technology,” a company official said. This is a play on words: “Henn” is also part of the Japanese word for change. Robots will provide porter service, room cleaning, front desk...

Foxconn, a supplier for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), has announced that it’s cutting its workforce. The exact number of employees that will be affected by the Foxconn layoffs hasn’t been announced. The company also hasn’t said when the layoffs will go into effect. The job cuts come as the company faces higher wages in China and less revenue growth, reports Reuters. The Foxconn layoffs are also likely affected by the company’s desire to replace workers with robots. The use of robotic arms in some parts of the company’s work will allow the company to replace workers that were performing simple tasks, Reuters...

Technology innovators and CEOs seem positively giddy nowadays about what the future will bring. New manufacturing technologies have generated feverish excitement about what some see as a Third Industrial Revolution. In the years ahead, technological improvements in robotics and automation will boost productivity and efficiency, implying significant economic gains for companies. But, unless the proper policies to nurture job growth are put in place, it remains uncertain whether demand for labor will continue to grow as technology marches forward. Recent technological advances have three biases: They tend to be capital-intensive (thus favoring those who already have financial resources); skill-intensive (thus...

The federal government is financing the creation of robots that can assist the elderly and make sure they are eating healthily.A nearly $800,000 project from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is pairing the University of Pennsylvania with a robot company to create the machines, which will be able to deliver glasses of water to senior citizens.The government said that the project is necessary due to a demographic crisis in America where soon there will not be enough young people to take care of their elders.“This Partnership For Innovation project develops and tests the use of service robots to monitor and...

The technologies of the past, by replacing human muscle, increased the value of human effort – and in the process drove rapid economic progress. Those of the future, by substituting for man’s senses and brain, will accelerate that process – but at the risk of creating millions of citizens who are simply unable to contribute economically, and with greater damage to an already declining middle class. Estimates of general rates of technological progress are always imprecise, but it is fair to say that, in the past, progress came more slowly. Henry Adams, the historian, measured technological progress by the power...

During the last few years, the semiconductor industry has been having a harder and harder time miniaturizing transistors with the latest problem being Intel’s delayed roll-out of its new 14 nm process. The best way to confirm this slowdown in progress of computing power is to try to run your current programs on a 6-year-old computer. You will likely have few problems since computers have not sped up greatly during the past 6 years. If you had tried this experiment a decade ago you would have found a 6-year-old computer to be close to useless as Intel and others were...

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...