Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Robots to Work in 50 Wal-Marts
October 30th, 2017Via: Arkansas Online: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. customers in a few Arkansas stores will soon cross paths with robots roaming the aisles. The Bentonville company said it will begin using autonomous devices in about 50 stores next month that are programmed to scan store shelves and identify things like out-of-stock items or products incorrectly priced or […]
Nothing to Hide
October 29th, 2017Via: Vimeo: NOTHING TO HIDE (Oct. 2016) is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument.
Alphabet’s Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit
October 27th, 2017Via: Bloomberg: The self-driving cars Google designed are going to the snow — and the seat of the car industry. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, the vehicle arm of Google’s parent, announced on Thursday that it will start testing its autonomous Chrysler minivans on roads in the greater Detroit area. Michigan will be the sixth state where […]
China Is Creating a Database of Its Citizens’ Voices to Boost its Surveillance Capability
October 23rd, 2017In other news, Google Home Capable of Voice Printing Multiple Users. Via: Time: The Chinese government has collected tens of thousands of “voice pattern” samples from targeted citizens and is inputting them into a national voice biometric database, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Monday. The idea is that an automated system, thought […]
LAPD Becomes Nation’s Largest Police Department to Test Drones
October 18th, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times: After months of often-heated debate, a civilian oversight panel Tuesday signed off on a yearlong test of drones by the Los Angeles Police Department, which will become the largest police department in the nation to deploy the controversial technology. The Police Commission’s 3-1 vote prompted jeers, cursing and a small protest […]
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC: “What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single […]
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the […]
Google’s Home Mini Needed a Software Patch to Stop Some of Them from Recording Everything
October 11th, 2017Mmm hmm. Via: The Verge: Categorize this under “one of the worst possible PR nightmares for a Google smart speaker.” According to Artem Russakovskii at Android Police, the Google Home Mini he was reviewing was randomly and near-constantly recording sounds in his home and transmitting them to Google. The company acknowledged the problem and is […]
GM to Buy Sensor-Tech Firm Strobe to Speed Up Self-Driving Car Push
October 10th, 2017Via: Reuters: No. 1 U.S. automaker General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday it would buy Strobe Inc, which uses LIDAR technology to help self-driving cars identify objects at a distance, to speed up development of autonomous vehicles and slash sensor costs. LIDAR is one of the major sensor technologies used in autonomous, or self-driving […]
Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest
October 8th, 2017Via: LiveScience: It’s harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons […]
