Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Amazon Designing Some Sort of Home Robot
April 23rd, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Now Amazon.com Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail […]
Palantir Using War on Terror Tools to Track American Citizens
April 19th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting […]
Do You Trust This Computer?
April 7th, 2018Via: doyoutrustthiscomputer.org: Do You Trust This Computer? from Busy Child on Vimeo.
The Assassination Complex
April 4th, 2018Via: The Intercept: The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on […]
Zipline’s Bigger, Faster Drones Will Deliver Blood in the United States This Year
April 4th, 2018Via: IEEE Spectrum: The delivery drone startup has been operating in Rwanda since October of 2016, using small autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to paradrop critical blood products to rural medical clinics. The system is able to get blood from a centralized distribution center to where it’s needed in minutes, independent of time of day, traffic, or […]
Retailers Race Against Amazon to Automate Stores
April 2nd, 2018Via: New York Times: A global race to automate stores is underway among several of the world’s top retailers and small tech start-ups, which are motivated to shave labor costs and minimize shoppers’ frustrations, like waiting for cashiers. They are also trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the physical retail world as it does online […]
Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Woman Crossing Street
March 19th, 2018Update: Police Release Video The LIDAR system should have easily been able to detect that a pedestrian was in the road. Additionally, despite the difficult lighting situation, an alert human driver probably wouldn’t have hit the woman. A professional driver, trained in defensive driving techniques, almost certainly wouldn’t have hit the woman. The ride-along driver […]
By 2019 Every New Ford Will Have 4G LTE Connectivity for Over-The-Air Updates
March 18th, 2018Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are […]
Flying Taxis to be Trialled in New Zealand
March 13th, 2018They have their doomsteads here, so… Via: Radio New Zealand: A network of self-piloted, flying taxis will be trialled in New Zealand, in a partnership with the government. Airways, New Zealand’s air navigation service provider confirmed the trial and said it will develop a nationwide unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traffic management system which will integrate […]
Palantir Wins $876 Million U.S. Army Contract
March 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army. Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, […]
