Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Mastercard and Microsoft Have a Frightening Plan to Create Universal “Digital Identities”
December 4th, 2018Via: FastCompany: Sometimes a business inadvertently drops the pretense and just tells the world its real intentions. We saw this yesterday, when Amazon bragged about how it “allowed” an employee to lose 100 pounds by endlessly delivering boxes. Amazon saw this as a heartwarming tale about how great it is to work for the e-commerce […]
Robot Janitors Are Coming to Mop Floors at a Walmart Near You
December 3rd, 2018Via: MSN: Robots are coming to a Walmart Inc. near you, and not just as a gimmick. The world’s largest retailer is rolling out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots in some of its stores in the U.S. by the end of the January, it said in a joint statement with Brain Corp., which makes the machines. […]
Google Patents Reveal Plans to Monitor Our Moods, Our Movements, and Our Children’s Behavior at Home
November 25th, 2018I found myself thinking of a haiku about an imaginary situation in which my father (who died a while back) would be standing in a room, arguing with one of these “smart” speakers and eventually challenging it to a fight with his weapon of choice, a yard-long section of 2×4 lumber. Old man stands bugeyed […]
Humanoid Robot Prototype Capable of Heavy Labor
November 16th, 2018Via: PhysOrg: Researchers have developed a humanoid robot prototype, HRP-5P, intended to autonomously perform heavy labor or work in hazardous environments. As a 182 cm, 101 kg humanoid robot, HRP-5P was built on HRP series technologies by incorporating new hardware technologies. Within the series, it has unsurpassed physical capabilities. Its robot intelligence comprises environmental measurement […]
Robots Are Coming for Europe’s Jobs
November 12th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Robots are coming for people’s jobs in Europe, and the countries in the ex-communist east are particularly vulnerable. With the use of industrial robots rising globally, the average worker in Slovakia — the world’s top car producer per capita — faces a 62 percent median probability that his or her job will be […]
Japan Moving to Allow Foreign Blue-Collar Workers
November 1st, 2018I guess the nappy changing robots weren’t going to come fast enough. Via: Reuters: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet approved draft legislation on Friday to open the door to more overseas blue-collar workers in sectors grappling with labor shortages, a controversial policy shift in immigration-shy Japan. … Immigration has long been taboo as many Japanese […]
VW and Ford in Talks on Self-Driving and Electric Vehicles
October 31st, 2018Via: Reuters: Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co are in “exploratory talks” to jointly develop self-driving and electric vehicles in a far-reaching strategic alliance meant to save the companies billions of dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter.
More Robots to Hit the Aisles at Schnucks Grocery Stores in St. Louis Area
October 30th, 2018Via: St. Louis Post Dispatch: In at least 15 Schnuck Markets stores, the future is now. Aisle-scanning retail inventory robots, known as Tally, will soon be wheeling around in a growing number of locations as the St. Louis area’s leading grocer expands its partnership with San Francisco firm Simbe Robotics. The robot, which moves around […]
Waymo Autonomous Cars Coming to California
October 30th, 2018Via: Wired: The driverless cars cometh. Waymo just became the first company allowed to test fully self-driving cars—the kind with no carbon-based beings behind the wheel—in the state of California. The outfit that started life as Google’s self-driving car project has been running driver-free cars in Arizona for almost a year, where the state testing […]
Rise of the Machines: Automation Reshapes Job Market
October 27th, 2018Via: Daily Republic: Looking at a map of California on a projector screen, Johannes Moenius, an economics professor at the University of Redlands, hovered his mouse over the Inland Empire, which glowed with a splotch of red pixels. The colored dots signified how susceptible an area would be to job losses caused by automation. And […]
