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Men and women Uber drivers prefer different locations and hours. REMY GABALDA/AFP/Getty Images Economists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago conducted an unprecedented study recently on the pay equality between men and women in the “gig economy,” where workers get to pick their own hours and get paid by project, instead of a fixed salary. The study sampled workers from one of the largest gig platforms of today—Uber. After tracking 1.8 million drivers (for Uber X and Uber Pool) nationally from January 2015 to March 2017, researchers found that male drivers, on average, make seven percent more than...

Uber Chief Brand Officer Bozoma Saint John has called on white men to ‘make noise’ about diversity in the workplace. CNN reports that Uber chief brand officer Bozoma Saint John has called on white men to encourage diversity in the workplace during a panel at the South by Southwest film festival. “I want white men to look around in their office and say, ‘Oh look, there’s a lot of white men here. Let’s change this,'” said Saint John. She claims that it’s not the responsibility of minorities to encourage diversity: “Why do I — as the black woman — have...

Uber should release its camera footage of its fatal crash to the public Two days ago, a self driving Uber car crashed into and killed a woman in Arizona. The car had a backup human driver behind the wheel who had the ability to take control at any time. The woman who got killed was walking in the street but was not in a crosswalk.In my opinion, the government should get a warrant from a judge to require Uber to release its camera footage of the collision to the public. As long as we don’t get to see the footage, we...

The woman died of her injuries at a hospital and her name was not made public. In a statement Monday, Uber said: “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We’re fully cooperating with @TempePolice and local authorities as they investigate this incident.” Dara Khosrowshahi. the company’s CEO, tweeted this statement: Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened ... Uber has been testing the self-driving vehicles in Tempe and Phoenix for months. Late last month, California announced new rules that will allow driverless...

SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road. The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m. The woman was not publicly identified. Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving...

Uber is temporarily halting self-driving car tests in all locations after a deadly accident. Programs in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Toronto will be paused after a woman was hit and killed overnight by an Uber self-driving car when walking across the street in Tempe, Arizona. It is likely the first pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car.

Look, it is Terminator's GG...Grandad - kind of like the naked baby pictures of humans. Yes, it was 2015 but they ain't getting all that much better yet.

Like so many of my fellow freepers, I have real intellectual problems with Google and the way it operates, but I've tended to stick with them because their news search function was extremely helpful. But they've changed things and their news search is much less helpful now.

The AI was trained in English but apparently had grown fed up with the various nuances and inconsistencies. Rather than continue down that path, it developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. What spooked the researchers is that the phrases used by the AI seemed like gibberish and were unintelligible to them, but made perfect sense to AI agents. This allowed the AI agents to communicate with one another without the researchers knowing what information was being shared. ... AI technologies use a "reward" system in which they expect of a course of action to have...

Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4​ ​feet vertically. ​It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. ​​​Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles​ found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

Apple’s new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are far and away the most powerful smartphones the world has seen thus far. In terms of both raw benchmark test scores on paper and real-world performance, Apple’s latest mobile devices outshine every other phone on the market. In fact, they’re even more powerful than Apple’s latest iPad Pro tablets, which is no small feat.As powerful as they already are though, Apple is constantly working on next-generation products, looking to make them better and faster than their predecessors. Now, it looks like benchmark tests from Apple’s next-gen processor have leaked, revealing...

Google’s new OS is expected to bring some of the desktop-like capabilities of Chrome into Android to form a super OS that will be able to compete directly with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Veteran fans of thriller author Michael Crichton may recall that his career kicked into high gear with the 1969 release of a novel entitled “The Andromeda Strain.” The book described the impact of a deadly microbe strain delivered to earth from space via a military satellite.Tomorrow in San Francisco, Google is expected to announce the release of a new strain of operating system code-named “Andromeda.”...

A robot escaped from a testing area in Perm, a city not far from the Urals, and made it on to a busy junction, baffling passersby, but also disturbing traffic. “The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot.” The co-founder of the robot’s maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency. “Our engineer drove onto the testing ground and forgot to close the gates. So the robot escaped and went on his little adventure.” Kivokurtsev explained.

It may have fared badly in the recent robo-olympics, causing hilarity with a series on unexpected falls, but Google has revealed its humanoid robot has been set free in the woods to learn how to run through terrain. The Atlas robot created by Google-owned firm Boston Dynamics is a formidable figure at 6ft 2in tall and weighing in at 330lb. In the video, it is shown struggling to stay upright - but managing to traverse a forest path without falling.

A global robotic arms race "is virtually inevitable" unless a ban is imposed on autonomous weapons, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and 1,000 academics, researchers and public figures have warned. In an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, the Future of Life Institute signatories caution that "starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control". Although the letter, first reported by the Guardian, notes that "we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many...

One of the big complaints I’ve had with cars and trucks (including ours) since the 90s is the increasing reliance on onboard computers which control nearly every aspect of the vehicle’s performance. I’m sure there must be a number of benefits to it, but it makes home repair of your car (which I used to quite enjoy) impossible in many cases unless you own a computer test station costing as much as the vehicle. Also, your car can break down because of a computer failure when there’s nothing actually wrong with the mechanical performance of the engine or drive...

SpaceX just failed at its third attempt..

The United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA,Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate...

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” —Stephen Hawking, Dec. 2 Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested? Is the development of AI like “summoning the demon,” as tech pioneer Elon Musk told an audience at MIT in October? Will smart machines supersede or even annihilate humankind? As a cognitive scientist and founder of a new startup that focuses on “machine learning,” I think about these questions nearly every day. But let’s not panic. “Superintelligent” machines won’t be arriving soon. Computers today are good at narrow tasks...

ATLAS Robot built by Boston Dyanmics- which Google recently bought Dubbed Ian, the Atlas robot is 6ft 2in tall and weighs in at 330lb The Atlas robot created by Google-owned firm Boston Dynamics is a formidable figure at 6ft 2in tall and weighing in at 330lb. The robot boasts 28 hydraulically actuated joints and stereo vision, and is one of the most advanced robots ever created.