Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Tesla Autonomy Day Presentation
April 22nd, 2019This is a fairly technical presentation for analysts. Personally, I doubt that Tesla is going to have a widely available robotaxi service anytime soon, but, at a minimum, this makes for interesting listening with regard to their efforts to devise the custom hardware and software necessary for autonomous driving. I queued the video to the […]
Mush, Spot, Mush!
April 16th, 2019The sound… Via: Boston Dynamics: It only takes 10 Spotpower (SP) to haul a truck across the Boston Dynamics parking lot (~1 degree uphill, truck in neutral). These Spot robots are coming off the production line now and will be available for a range of applications soon.
We’re All Being Judged By a Secret ‘Trustworthiness’ Score
April 15th, 2019Via: Slashdot: Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we’re buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal. More than 16,000 signals are analyzed by a service called Sift, which generates a “Sift score” ranging […]
Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police
April 13th, 2019Via: New York Times: The warrants, which draw on an enormous Google database employees call Sensorvault, turn the business of tracking cellphone users’ locations into a digital dragnet for law enforcement. In an era of ubiquitous data gathering by tech companies, it is just the latest example of how personal information — where you go, […]
Amazon Workers Listening to the Inane Ramblings of Alexa Users to Train AI
April 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a […]
Walmart Is Rolling Out the Robots
April 10th, 2019Via: Wall Street Journal: Walmart Inc. is expanding its use of robots in stores to help monitor inventory, clean floors and unload trucks, part of the retail giant’s efforts to control labor costs as it spends more to raise wages and offer new services like online grocery delivery.
Prison Labor: Inmates in Finland Are Training AI
March 29th, 2019Via: The Verge: “Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other […]
Boston Dynamics: Handle Robot
March 29th, 2019Via: Boston Dynamics: Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing. When Handle places a boxes onto a […]
How Android Phones Keep Tabs On Our Every Move
March 29th, 2019I wouldn’t encourage the use of Apple’s mobile devices as an alternative, but Android is essentially malware. Via: El País: As a consumer, you buy a new Android cellphone. It could be any brand, but it is likely to be an Android as they account for more than 80% of today’s cellphone market. You open […]
U.S. Government Will Be Scanning Faces at 20 Top Airports
March 13th, 2019Via: BuzzFeed: For Hasbrouck, the big takeaway is that the broad surveillance of people in airports amounts to a kind of “individualized control of citizenry” — not unlike what’s already happening with the social credit scoring system in China. “There are already people who aren’t allowed on, say, a high-speed train because their social credit […]
