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Consider this before you assume you can have a long or lucrative career in the retail industry: Up to half of all current jobs in the retail sector are likely to vanish because of e-commerce, automation of jobs and the closing of brick-and-mortar stores. Millions of retail jobs — as we now know them — are going the way of gas station attendants. Just as ATMs replaced many bank tellers, automated check-out stations are supplanting retail clerks. And have you watched in-store “shoppers” who do Amazon price checks while they’re standing in the aisles? Have you noticed how many of...

SUIDOBASHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES! MegaBots, Inc. challenges you to a duel! You have a giant robot, we have a giant robot - we have a duty to the science fiction lovers of this world to fight them to the death. Prepare yourselves, and name the battlefield

It is often said that in the future, jobs that were once done by humans could eventually be taken over by robots who are admittedly more efficient due to their lack of the need to rest, take breaks, and sleep. While there are some jobs that are obvious in terms of robots being better at it, there are some that are less obvious, such as the job of a programmer. However a Danish startup by the name of Ulzard Technologies IVS could change that, thanks to their development of AI dubbed pix2code that can help to program applications based on...

Building Self-Assembling Robots With Origami, PowerPoint, and an LED Projector A new photopolymer technique creates self-folding origami structures from PowerPoint slides, which might be used as tiny, medical bots inside the body. By Glenn McDonald May 5, 2017 3:03 PM EDT Share on Facebook Tweet this article Email Origami, the art of paper folding, has been around for a long time. Historians are pretty sure that origami as we know it today — think paper cranes and frogs — has its origins in 17th-century Japan. But it's likely that the roots of the practice date back to 1st-century China.  ...

he ECM, as it is known for short, was able to produce factually coherent answers whilst also imbuing its conversation with emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust. ... The paper found that 61% of humans who tested the machine favoured the emotional versions to the neutral chatbot. Similar results have been found in so-called “Wizard of Oz” studies in which a human typing responses masquerades as advanced AI. “It is not a question whether they are desirable – they clearly are – but in which applications they make sense and where they don’t,” said Schuller. Minlie Huang, a computer...

The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump's treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen." There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce....

POLICE have charged a man who drunkenly attacked a robotic patrol droid in a car park in the United States, after the device called them for help. The incident occurred in the car park of technology maker Knightscope’s headquarters in Mountain View, California on April 19, authorities said. Jason Sylvain, 41, was intoxicated when he came across the K5 droid, which was conducting patrols around the building as part of product testing.Despite the robot weighing in at a whopping 135 kilograms, he managed to tip it over. It detected the danger and automatically alerted authorities to an intruder on the...

A nightmare-inducing robot tarantula has been built using a 3D printer. The all-terrain machine, which weighs less than 5 kilograms (11lbs), can climb tricky surfaces like rocks and stairs with ease. It runs using 18 different motors that help it move smoothly over uneven surfaces. The motors give the robot exceptional flexibility and even appear to make it dance in a video of the strange machine.

The future of U.S. homebuilding depends on more people like Cyndicy Yarborough, a 26-year-old former Wal-Mart clerk with no background in construction. At Blueprint Robotics in Baltimore, she works in a factory that builds houses like cars, on an assembly line, using robots that fire thousands of nails into studs each day and never miss. Yarborough operates a machine that lifts floors and walls and packs them onto a flatbed truck, the final step before delivery to a development site where they’ll be pieced together. “I like being a part of something new, on the cutting edge,” said Yarborough, a...

Tucked away in Apex, a robotics company is about to nearly double its headcount. Robert Little, CEO of ATI Industrial Automation, says the company breaks ground next week on an expansion that will create 275 new jobs and grow its Apex footprint to 185,000 square feet. The company currently has 300 employees. Little says it has reached the limits of its Apex facility, and that the new robotics lab will be bigger with state of the art features. With the new facility, ATI intends to focus on new and better robots with force-control. Little describes it as equipping robots with...

Humanoid robot F.E.D.O.R., set to fly into space in 2021, is now capable of shooting using both of his arms, according to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.“The robot of the F.E.D.O.R. platform showed skills of firing using both . Currently the work on fine motor skills and decision algorithms is underway,” Rogozin wrote on his Twitter.​According to Rogozin, training to shoot is a way of teaching the robot to instantaneously prioritize targets and make decisions.“We are not creating a terminator but artificial intelligence which will have a great practical importance in various fields,” he added.

BlackRock's move this week to replace dozens of fund managers and analysts with robotic stock-selection tools reflects a powerful and somewhat puzzling feature of today's market: No one does stock picking anymore, it's too crowded. Yogi Berra's paradoxical quip about an unfashionably congested restaurant applies to the traditional Wall Street pursuit of selecting the best stocks. And even the world's largest asset manager, with $5 trillion under its control, is not insulated from the pressure. Wall Street firms caught in the middle of these movements have been generating pointed research on these trends for institutional clients, as both the "sell...

The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. China and India, the two largest countries in the world, have populations totalling around one billion. In four years, by 2022, India is predicted to have the largest population in the world, surpassing China. This means we need new ways to grow food that are smarter and helps regulate our use of land, water and energy in order to feed the planet and avoid a global food crisis. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute believe the answer lies in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. In a new...

A recent report by the Los Angeles Times indicates that up to 38% of American jobs are at risk of being occupied by robots by the early 2030s. This alarming prediction is based on the advancement rates of artificial intelligence and technology. Food service, hospitality, truck driving, and other low wage jobs are at risk of being automated. Many Americans who work in these fields should be alarmed, thus working towards jobs or careers that require particular skill sets. The study confirms the increasing gap between the rich and poor members of society. Americans with careers or jobs that require...

“The U.S. military is very likely to pursue forms of automation that reduce ‘back-office’ costs over time, as well as remove soldiers from non-combat deployments where they might face risk from adversaries on fluid battlefields, such as in transportation.” Driver-less vehicles poised to take taxi, train and truck driver jobs in the civilian sector also could nab many combat-support slots in the Army. “Robots will continue to replace the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs, and this will affect typically more uneducated and unskilled workers,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Institute for Contextual Robotics at UC San Diego. “You need...

Within the next 10 years, there's a good chance that 50% of the jobs today will be gone.And no one in Washington is talking about what to do to deal with this likelihood.The cause of this coming massive economic upheaval is artificial intelligence -- a catch-all term that encompasses everything from driverless cars to sex robots. Its impact is already being felt on the factory floor, where smart machines are making American manufacturers more competitive, more efficient, and more profitable, but without the mass number of workers that used to be the backbone of the American economy.Donald Trump says...

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology. In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has doubled down on his support of a universal basic income as a possible solution for unemployment caused by the rise of machines equipped with artificial intelligence taking over the workforce. A universal basic income would give a standard amount of money to every citizen to cover basic expenses like food and living costs each month. At the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, Musk told a crowd that universal basic income is “going to be necessary” in the future. Musk first joined the growing list of tech executives supporting the payment system in November...

After a factory in Dongguan, China, replaced most of its workers with robots, it witnessed a spectacular rise in productivity. While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots. It’s been long discussed that robots and computers will start taking our jobs “in the near future” — well that near future is upon us and we’re not really prepared to deal with it. Of course, some jobs are more at risk than others, are few are as threatened as factory jobs. Advertisement According...

AS EXPECTED, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee voted in favour of extending rights to robots, granting them what the committee called "electronic personhood", by 17 votes to two, with two abstentions. The robot 'bill of rights' is intended to cover such issues as liability, such as when automated or robotic systems are involved in accidents or go postal, as well as ethical issues, such as should it be legal to beat your robot? Socialist worker Mady Delvaux, a Luxembourgois politician and vice-chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs, said that the EU "urgently need(s) to create a robust European...