Free Republic

LONDON: A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates. Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression. Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot. “I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust...

Robots may be coming for some jobs, but they will likely create new roles as well. Here are some spots humans are needed to fill and how to get them. It has become common to joke about how robots are going to take our jobs, and rightfully so: Oxford University researchers estimate that 47% of all current US employment is at high risk to become automated over the next decade or so. But there is positive news: Of the 1.8 million jobs AI will get rid of, the emerging field will create 2.3 million by 2020, according to a recent...

A new partnership between Rolls-Royce and Google will see ships become smarter and self-learning thanks to advanced machine learning algorithms. It will also bring the company’s vision of a fully autonomous ship setting sail by 2020 a step closer to reality. Rolls Royce announced this month that it will use Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine across a range of applications, designed to both make today’s ships safer and more efficient, and to launch the ships of tomorrow. Initially the machine learning engine will be used to further train existing AI algorithms designed to power the image recognition systems of vessels....

The Gartner Hype Cycle shows a remarkably consistent pattern. A new technology is first ignored, then begins to show promise and expectations get inflated beyond any realistic assessment of value. That leads to disillusionment and the technology is almost forgotten until, some years later, it begins to make a true competitive impact.What makes the Hype Cycle so pervasive is that it is, essentially, a pattern based on our obsession with patterns and stories, which is so universal that there is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to it. Our love of patterns is so great, in fact, that once we...

After strong stock-market performance in the year to date, several big U.S. tech firms have begun to receive some negative attention from the public, as well as from regulators and politicians. Alphabet (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) have gotten the most scrutiny, with European regulators leveling accusations of unfair search advantages against GOOG, and U.S. lawmakers drawing FB into the controversy surrounding alleged Russian efforts to influence the outcome of last year’s election. Amazon (AMZN) has not been above the fray. The company’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods Market led to a few muted pieces of press coverage that mentioned “antitrust,”...

Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 10/06/2017 -- The global agriculture robots market features a widely diverse competitive landscape characterized by region-wise dominance of prominent players, notes Transparency Market Research (TMR). For instance, the agriculture robots market in North America was dominated Harvest Automation, Inc., Clearpath Robotics, and PrecisionHawk, Inc., in 2015, while in the same year, Naio Technologies and SenseFly SA led the Europe market. In addition, Shibuya Seiki was one of the leading players in the Asia Pacific market for agriculture robots in 2015. Furthermore, driven by abundant lucrative avenues, the market is witnessing a constant influx of emerging...

Perrone Robotics, a developer of autonomous car software, will invest $3.8 million to expand its research and development operation in Albemarle County to add to its test track and facilities. Virginia successfully competed against California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for the project, which will create 127 new jobs over the next three years. “Entrepreneurial companies like Perrone Robotics are putting Virginia on the map for cutting-edge industry and the jobs that come with it,” said Governor McAuliffe, speaking at the event. “This expansion is a testament to Virginia’s stellar technology workforce and competitive business climate, particularly for high-tech companies in sectors...

LONDON, Sept. 29 (Xinhua) -- In what has been described Friday as a world first, a farm field in Britain has been planted and harvested completely by autonomous vehicles and drones without any farmhands in sight. The hands-free crop farming was delivered in joint project by Harper Adams University in Shropshire and Yorkshire-based Precision Decisions, in an initiative partly-funded by the government agency, Innovate UK. The renowned agricultural university and Precision Decisions announced Friday the successful completion of "Hands Free Hectare", a project to plant, tend and harvest a crop using only autonomous vehicles and drones. A spokesman for Innovate...

TORONTO -- Former U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday that closing borders won't create future jobs because what's changing industries like manufacturing are automation and artificial intelligence. Obama told a Toronto luncheon on Friday that the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy happened over the course of 150 years, but that the technological revolution is happening in 20 years. He said it's hard for governments to catch up to the pace of disruption. Obama said over the next 25 years, advanced economies will have to confront the fact that there is not going to be enough high-paying full-time...

A sex doll was so heavily molested by eager men it broke before anyone could actually use it. Or use it privately, anyway. We're not entirely sure what happened to 'Samantha'. But its owner complained that the £3,000 robot was left "heavily soiled" after being exhibited at a tech fair. Developer Sergi Santos, from Barcelona, Spain, says visitors to the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz treated the 'intelligent' sex doll "like barbarians", and added that two fingers were broken in the melee. "The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms," Sergi said. "Two fingers were broken. She was...

Jack Ma knows artificial intelligence will change the world. The Alibaba founder and chairman doesn't think we should be scared. But he does think we should be prepared for major disruptions to the job market. "In the last 200 years, manufacturing (has brought) jobs. But today -- because of the artificial intelligence, because of the robots -- manufacturing is no longer the main engine of creating jobs," Ma said Wednesday in a speech at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York City. Moving forward, Ma said he believes the service industry will be the largest engine of job creation....

These days, it’s tough to avoid newspaper headlines warning that artificial intelligence is coming for your job. The problem is that, often, the only thing these oversimplifications get right is that there is, in fact, an important connection between automation and work.What’s surprising is how many examples there are of AI acting as the catalyst for new hiring, higher wages, and happier employees. But of course, AI success stories aren’t as exciting as the “job-stealing robots” narrative. The reality is that the impact of AI on the workforce is complex, nuanced, and still very much in transition.Worker-Friendly OutcomesHere’s an...

<p>Self-driving car makers have been testing experimental models on a laborious state-by-state basis while everyone waits for Congress to enact national legislation. But last month, a House of Representatives panel unanimously approved a measure that would exempt tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles from current restrictions and sent it to the floor for a vote -- which just got scheduled for next week.</p>

Antonio Garcia Martinez fears revolution and armed conflict will erupt in America in the coming decades A former Facebook executive has quit his job and now lives as a recluse in the wilderness – because he is convinced that machines will take over the world. Antonio Garcia Martinez worked as a project manager for the social media giant in Silicon Valley but became terrified by the relentless march of technology. He reckons that machines will have taken half of humanity’s jobs within 30 years, sparking revolt and armed conflict. So he quit his job, fled his home and now lives...

Google has insisted that its robots are now superior to humans at identifying and blocking extremist videos, saying that they flag three in four offensive videos from YouTube before they are reported by users. [Google] more than doubled the number of illegal videos deleted from its platform last month after it adopted artificial intelligence moderators to help police content. "With over 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute, finding and taking action on violent extremist content poses a significant challenge. But over the past month, our initial use of machine learning has more than doubled both the number...

It was one small step for security technology, but one giant leap in the wrong direction for robotkind. A security robot in Washington, D.C. — lovingly named Steve — plunged down four steps into a fountain Monday. Photos show the sad, waterlogged robot cop partially submerged in defeat. It’s unclear if any foul play was involved or if Steve simply rolled down a dark path on his own.

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

The race to create A.I. and robotic technology that will change the way we work and live is dominating countless industries. But the chaos and disruption these ground-breaking fields are set to have on numerous areas of the economy, the job market, the banking system and the transportation industry have also incited fear. Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has previously warned that society could see decades of "pain" thanks to new technologies. While Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg if we want to stay relevant. But forgetting...

President Donald Trump reportedly spends his nights alone in the White House, watching TV news and yelling at the screen. He wakes up early each morning to watch more television and tweet his anger to the world … or Mika Brzezinski … or CNN. He takes time out of meetings with foreign leaders to brag about his Electoral College win.

A great pizza dough flipper probably can’t turn out one perfectly shaped pizza dough every nine seconds, but one California company’s robotic pizza dough press can make a great pie at that whiplash-inducing rate. Silicon Valley start-up Zume Pizza has nearly fully automated the process of making fresh, made-to-order pizza – and it’s streamlined the delivery process, too. If you live in Mountain View, California, and you order a pizza, it could be at your door as quickly as four minutes later. While other pizzas – especially the bake-at-home kind you buy at the grocery store – are also made...