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The contest is a battle of robots on an obstacle course meant to simulate conditions similar to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. Team Kaist's DRC-Hubo humanoid robot defeated 22 others to win the top $2m prize from the US Department of Defense's Darpa research unit. The robots had an hour to complete a series of tasks, such as a driving a car and walking up steps. The challenge involved a series of tasks for the robots to complete, somewhat autonomously, with intermittent connectivity with their operators to simulate real disaster conditions. The challenge was the first where robots performed...

The elephants in the room lumber about, undisturbed by politicians or people of vision. The hard issues of the economy are well known. Politicians, bureaucracies, CEOs and trade union leaders have dealt the the issues of productivity, unemployment, competition from east and west, the collapse of industries through the decades of the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Yet these are harder now. Intelligent systems, robotic manufacturing, driverless vehicles, online services, all carve deep into established trades. In the post-war decades, every time a new technology came along, the feared bonfire of jobs didn’t happen — or only briefly and...

I have seen many grim predictions regarding robots taking away human jobs, but one of the most dire predictions comes from a study commissioned by ING-Diba. The study claims that 59 percent of Germany's work force could be replaced by machines and software in the coming decades. The Local asks Robots About to Take Away 18 Million Jobs? The results of the [ING-Diba] study paint an almost doomsday-esque scenario for Germany. Almost two thirds of its workforce will be unemployed. Of the 30.9 million people currently in full or part-time employment in Germany, 18 million will be made redundant...

Report: Robots replacing human workers at faster pace Robots aren't just for corporate Goliaths -- now even the little guy on Main Street is adopting them. The goal: to boost sales and productivity. But at what cost? Take Sam Kraus, a Hungarian immigrant who founded what became Skyline Windows in 1921. In the early days, the tinsmith traveled around with a small cart to do his roofing and waterproofing work by hand. Fast-forward to today, and the fourth-generation business based in New York City's South Bronx has left the pushcart era far behind. Skyline, which has evolved into a custom...

Taking a page out of Volvo’s playbook, Honda has set a handful of lofty goals for the next 35 years – including eliminating the possibility of its cars crashing. Speaking to Car and Driver last week at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress, Honda Americas R&D president Frank Paluch dished detains on a new set of core goals the Japanese automaker hopes to achieve by 2040, but they won’t be happening all at once. The first step in Honda’s goal will come in 2020, where Paluch says Honda vehicles will be connected one another and to infrastructure, lending to...

China faces rising labor costs and a shortage of workers. But a government project called “replacing humans with robots” is trying to change the face of the work force in Guangdong Province.

OXNARD, Calif.—A 14-arm, automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands. Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby. Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit...

The Great Robot Freakout of 2015 has begun, and it looks a lot like the robot freakouts that came before it. In a new survey by CNBC, Americans were asked how concerned they were, if at all, that their jobs could be replaced by technology in the next five years. The level of automation angst was astonishing: About 1 in 8 workers indicated was worried about being displaced. Among those earning less than $30,000, it was a whopping 1 in 4. No doubt these workers have seen travel agents, bank tellers, typists, mid-skilled manufacturing workers and other occupations of yore...

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...