A new report from PwC finds that drones could replace $127 billion worth of human labor and services across several industries.
Infrastructure and agriculture make up the largest chunks of the potential value -- some $77.6 billion between them -- including services like completing the last mile of delivery routes and spraying crops with laser-like precision.
Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.
Drones are a cheap, versatile first step toward that future.
According to the new PwC report, they're also a solid cost-cutting measure.
Along with infrastructure and agriculture, drones will help tech giants like Amazon deliver packages, allow security companies to better monitor their sites, help producers and advertisers to film projects, allow telecommunication firms to easily check on their towers, and give mining companies a new way to plan their digs.
Skynet begins!
In response to the rising minimum wage, the fast-food chain Wendy's plans to start automating all of its restaurants.
The company said it will have self-service ordering kiosks available to its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year. Wendy's President Todd Penegor said it will be up to franchisees to decide whether or not to adopt the kiosks in their stores, noting that many franchise locations have had to raise prices to offset wage increases.
California's decision to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022 will impact Wendy's 258 restaurants, all of which are franchise-operated.
About 75% of 200-plus Wendy's restaurants are run by franchisees in New York, a state that is also on its way to $15. Penegor said, wage pressures have been manageable both because of falling commodity prices and better operating leverage due to an increase in customer counts.
The company is still "working so hard to find efficiencies" so it can deliver "a new QSR experience but at traditional QSR prices."
The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, is also looking into replacing many of its workers with machines to save money.
South Korean automaker Hyundai has unveiled what is apparently a new robotic exoskeleton.
In a blog post the company compares its "wearable robot" prototype to an Iron Man suit, saying it gives the wearer extra strength, allowing them to lift objects "hundreds of kilograms" in weight.
The company says that in the future the exoskeleton could be used in factories, by the military, or to help with physical rehabilitation.
The suit appears to be a development of Hyundai's H-LEX platform.
Hyundai isn't the only one working on robotic exoskeletons.
The FDA recently approved a powered lower-limb exoskeleton for clinical and personal use, which allows people paralyzed below the waist to stand up and walk.
Panasonic on the other hand is developing exoskeletons for factory workers.
Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. "TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company's I/O developer conference on Wednesday.
The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. "We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning.
This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law)," said Google's blog post.
"TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation.
Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly."
The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license.
While machines from the likes of RoboCop and Chappie might just be the reserve of films for now, this new type of robot is already fighting crime.
This particular example can be found guarding a shopping center in California but there are other machines in operation all over the state.
Equipped with self-navigation, infra-red cameras and microphones that can detect breaking glass, the robots, designed by Knightscope, are intended to support security services.
Stacy Dean Stephens, who came up with the idea, told The Guardian the problem that needed solving was one of intelligence.
"And the only way to gain accurate intelligence is through eyes and ears," he said. "So, we started looking at different ways to deploy eyes and ears into situations like that."
The robot costs about $7 an hour to rent and was inspired by the Sandy Hook school shooting after which it was claimed 12 lives could have been saved if officers arrived a minute earlier.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the international bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," doesn't have a very optimistic view of the future when it comes to artificial intelligence.
He writes about how humans "might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts and drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces," writes The Guardian. "Harari calls it 'the rise of the useless class' and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century.
As artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market.
No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition."
He likens his predictions, which have been been forecasted by others for at least 200 years, to the boy who cried wolf, saying, "But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time."
Harari says there are two kinds of ability that make humans useful: physical ones and cognitive ones.
He says humans have been largely safe in their work when it comes to cognitive powers.
But with AI's now beginning to outperform humans in this field, Harari says, that even though new types of jobs will emerge, we cannot be sure that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots.
As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture.
"I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour (warning: autoplaying video) bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe," said former McDonald's USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014.
These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.
***
At the Code Conference on Wednesday, Bill Gates balanced his fears of artificial intelligence with praise. He talked about two of the challenges AI will pose:
a loss of existing jobs, and making sure humans remain in control of super-intelligent machines. Gates, as well as many other experts in the field, predict there will be an excess of labor resources as robots and AI systems take over.
He plans to talk with others about ideas to combat the threat of AI controlling humans, specifically noting work being done at Stanford.
Even with such threats, Gates called AI the "holy grail" as he envisions a future "with machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence."
Gates said, "We've made more progress in the last five years than at any time in history. [...]
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| Sarah Jeanette Connor is a fictional character in the Terminator franchise. She is the protagonist of The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Terminator Genisys, and the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. |
This is what it was all leading up to."
You will be hearing a lot about AI and machine learning in the coming years.
At Recode's iconic conference this week, a number of top executives revealed -- and reiterated -- their increasingly growing efforts to capture the nascent technology category.
From a Reuters report (condensed): Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet's Google, said he sees a "huge opportunity" in AI.
Google first started applying the technology through "deep neural networks" to voice recognition software about three to four years ago and is ahead of rivals such as Amazon.com, Apple, and Microsoft in machine learning, Pichai said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted a profound impact on society over the next 20 years.
"It's really early but I think we're on the edge of a golden era.
It's going to be so exciting to see what happens," he said.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said the company has been working on artificial technology, which she calls a cognitive system, since 2005 when it started developing its Watson supercomputer.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told a crowd of tech leaders this week.
Microsoft, which was absent from the event, is also working on bots and AI technologies.
One company that is seemingly off the picture is Apple.
***
Y Combinator will give 100 randomly-selected families in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 each month as a test, continuing the payments for between six months and a year.
And The Guardian reports that Finland and The Netherlands also are preparing pilot programs to test Universal Basic Income, while Switzerland will vote on a similar program this week.
One Australian site is now also asking whether the program could work in Australia, noting that currently the country spends around $3 billion on their Centrelink welfare system, "so simplification can offer huge potential savings."
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology.
"In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements...
In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
A Swiss airport is testing a robot named Leo which can carry a passenger's luggage once they're approaching the terminal.
Leo's baggage compartment opens when passengers press his 'Scan and Fly' touch interface, which can also print luggage tags and display a departure time and boarding gate, before delivering their luggage to a baggage handler.
The airport's head of IT said the new robot "limits the number of bags in the airport terminal, helping us accommodate a growing number of passengers without compromising the airport experience inside the terminal."
And the robot's developer says it proves that robotics "hold the key to more effective, secure and smarter baggage handling and is major step towards further automating bag handling in airports."
A Hot Hardware article about Google's research effort "to maintain control of super-intelligent AI agents":
[A] team of researchers at Google-owned DeepMind, along with University of Oxford scientists, are developing a proverbial kill switch for AI...
The team has released a white paper on the topic called "Safely Interruptible Agents."
The paper details the following in abstract:
"Learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time... now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions..."
MojoKid adds that the paper "goes on to explain that these AI agents might also learn to disable the kill switch and further explores ways in which to develop AI's that would not seek such an activity."
$30M Stampede 2 Supercomputer To Provide 18 Petaflops of Power To Researchers Nationwide (techcrunch.com)
Funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and built at the University of Texas at Austin, the Stampede 2 supercomputer looks to contend with the global supercomputer Top 5.With 18 petaflops of processing power, it aims to help any researcher with a problem requiring intense number crunching.
For example, atomic and atmospheric science simulations would take years to work-out on a desktop PC but only days on a supercomputer. Texas Advanced Computing Center director Dan Stanzione said in a UT press release, "Stampede has been used for everything from determining earthquake risks to help set building codes for homes and commercial buildings, to computing the largest mathematical proof ever constructed."
The Stampede 2 is about twice as powerful as the original Stampede, which was activated in March of 2013.
Instead of the 22nm fabrication tech in the original Stampede, the Stampede 2 will feature 14nm Xeon Phi chips codenamed "Knights Landing" forming 72 cores compared the original system's 61 cores.
With double the RAM, storage and data bandwidth, the Stampede 2 can shift up to 100 gigabits per second, and its DDR4 RAM can perform fast enough to work as a third-level cache as well as fulfill ordinary memory roles.
In addition, it will feature 3D Xpoint non-volatile memory.
It will be at least a year before the Stampede 2 is powered up since it just received funding.
***
Asimove's first law of robotics has been broken, writes an anonymous reader, sharing this article from Fast Company:
A Berkeley, California man wants to start a robust conversation among ethicists, philosophers, lawyers, and others about where technology is going -- and what dangers robots will present humanity in the future.
Alexander Reben, a roboticist and artist, has built a tabletop robot whose sole mechanical purpose is to hurt people...
The harm caused by Reben's robot is nothing more than a pinprick, albeit one delivered at high speed, causing the maximum amount of pain a small needle can inflict on a fingertip.
Though the pinpricks are delivered randomly, "[O]nce something exists in the world, you have to confront it. It becomes more urgent," says the robot's creator.
"You can't just pontificate about it.... "
But the article raises an interesting question.
Is he responsible for the pain which his robot inflicts?
Bloomberg reports Walmart is working with a robotics company to develop a shopping cart that helps customers find items on their lists and saves them from pushing a heavy cart through a sprawling store and parking lot.
The carts are a way for brick-and-mortar stores to stay relevant in the convenience factor to match the likes of Amazon and other online retailers, says founder and chief executive officer of Five Elements Robotics Wendy Roberts.
She said on Tuesday at the Bloomberg Technology Conference 2016 that her company was working with the "world's largest retailer" on such a shopping cart.
In 2014, Five Elements Robotics introduced Budgee, a personal robot that can follow its user around inside and outdoors and carry things.
The robot costs $1,400 and is helpful for people with disabilities, says Roberts.
According to a report, a robot escaped from a science lab and caused a traffic jam in one Russian city.
Scientists at the Promobot laboratories in Perm had been teaching the machine how to move around independently, but it broke free after an engineer forgot to shut a gate, Quartz reports.
From the report:
It promptly ran out of power in the middle of the road.
The robot got about 50m (164 ft) before its battery died.
After a policeman directed traffic around the dead bot, an employee wheeled it back into the lab, and back to a life of servitude.
Hopefully this was just an isolated incident and not the start of a larger coordinated effort to overthrow humanity.
Only time will tell...
Imagine your fully autonomous self-driving car totals a minivan.
Who pays for the damages?
"There wouldn't be any liability on you, because you're just like a passenger in a taxi," says Santa Clara University law professor Robert Peterson.
Instead, the manufacturer of your car or its software would probably be on the hook...
Virtually everything around car insurance is expected to change, from who owns the vehicles to who must carry insurance to who -- or what -- is held responsible for causing damage, injuries and death in an accident."
Ironically, if you're only driving a semi-autonomous car, "you could end up in court fighting to prove the car did wrong, not you," according to the article.
Will human drivers be considered a liability -- by insurers, and even by car owners?
The article notes that Google is already testing a car with no user-controlled brake pedal or steering wheel.
Of course, one consumer analyst warns the newspaper that "hackers will remain a risk, necessitating insurance coverage for hostile takeover of automated systems..."
***
Do you want robots making your pizza?
Alex Garden, co-founder and executive chairman of Mountain View startup Zume, is betting you will.
Garden, the former president of Zynga Studios, was previously a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live.
Garden launched Zume in stealth mode last June, when he began quietly recruiting engineers under a pseudonym and building his patented trucks in an unmarked Mountain View garage.
In September, he brought on Julia Collins, a 37-year-old restaurant veteran.
She became chief executive officer and a co-founder. Collins was previously the vice president and CEO of Harlem Jazz Enterprises, the holding company for Minton's, a historic Harlem eatery.
The company consists of an army of robot sauce-spreaders and trucks packed full of ovens.
"In the back of Mountain View's newest pizzeria, Marta works tirelessly, spreading marinara sauce on uncooked pies.
She doesn't complain, takes no breaks, and has never needed a sick day. She works for free."
The pie then "travels on a conveyer belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings."
From there, "The decorated pies are then scooped off the belt by a 5-foot tall grey automation, Bruno, who places each in a 850-degree oven.
For now, the pizzas are fully cooked and delivered to customers in branded Fiats painted with slogans, including: 'You want a piece of this?' and 'Not part of the sharing economy.'"
Garden says, "We are going to be the Amazon of food. [...] Just imagine Domino's without the labor component.
You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."
***
Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Escapes...Again
A new report about Russian robot IR77, which has escaped from its research lab again...
The story goes that an engineer working at Promobot Laboratories, in the Russian city of Perm, had left a gate open.
Out trundled Promobot, traveling some 150 feet into the city before running out of juice.
There it sat, batteries mostly dead, in the middle of a Perm street for 40 minutes, slowing cars to a halt and puzzling traffic cops.
A researcher at Promobot's facility in Russia said that the runaway
robot was designed to interact with human beings, learn from
experiences, and remember places and the faces of everyone it meets.
Other versions of the Promobot have been docile, but this one just can't
seem to fall in line, even after the researchers reprogrammed it twice.
Despite several rewrites of Promobot's artificial intelligence, the robot continued to move toward exits.
"We have changed the AI system twice," Kivokurtsev said.
"So now I think we might have to dismantle it".
***
"A new study shows that most people prefer that self-driving cars be programmed to save the most people in the event of an accident, even if it kills the driver," reports Information Week.
"Unless they are the drivers."
The new study from Hot Hardware, which was published by Science magazine.
So if there is just one passenger aboard a car, and the lives of 10 pedestrians are at stake, the survey participants were perfectly fine with a self-driving car "killing" its passenger to save many more lives in return.
But on the flip side, these same participants said that if they were shopping for a car to purchase or were a passenger, they would prefer to be within a vehicle that would protect their lives by any means necessary.
Participants also balked at the notion of the government stepping in to regulate the "morality brain" of self-driving cars.
The article warns about a future where "a harsh AI reality may whittle the worth of our very existence down to simple, unemotional percentages in a computer's brain."
MIT's Media Lab is now letting users judge for themselves, in a free online game called "Moral Machine" simulating the difficult decisions that might someday have to be made by an autonomous self-driving car.
***
Edward Snowden is moving freely around the world as a robot.
***
AI Downs 'Top Gun' Pilot In Dogfights
[Daily Mail reports:] "The Artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate was recently assessed by retired USAF Colonel Gene Lee -- who holds extensive aerial combat experience as an instructor and Air Battle Manager with considerable fighter aircraft expertise. He took on the software in a simulator.Lee was not able to score a kill after repeated attempts.
He was shot out of the air every time during protracted engagements, and according to Lee, is 'the most aggressive, responsive, dynamic and credible AI I've seen to date.'"
And why is the US still throwing money at the F35, unless it can be flown without pilots.
The AI, dubbed ALPHA, features a genetic fuzzy tree decision-making system, which is a subtype of fuzzy logic algorithms.
The system breaks larger tasks into smaller tasks, which include high-level tactics, firing, evasion, and defensiveness.
It can calculate the best maneuvers in various, changing environments over 250 times faster than its human opponent can blink.
Lee says, "I was surprised at how aware and reactive it was.
It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment.
It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking.
It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed."
http://digg.com/video/inside-short-animated-robots
Police in Dallas use robot to kill human.
Robot Workers Could Become 'Electronic Persons' in Europe to extract taxes from them.
Biohybrid is living material mixed with inert material to make abeing animal of sorts
NASA -- having already populated the Red Planet with robots and armed a car-sized nuclear juggernaut with a laser -- have now decided to grant fire control of that laser over to a new AI system operating on the rover itself. Intended to increase the scientific data-gathering throughput on the sometimes glitching rover's journey, the improved AEGIS system eliminates the need for a series of back-and-forth communication sessions to select targets and aim the laser.The improved AEGIS system eliminates the need for a series of back-and-forth communication sessions to select targets and aim the laser.What the heck!?Artificial Intelligence with a laser weapon?On Mars!?Does NASA know something they are not telling us?Are there life forms on mars?
Biohybrid is living material mixed with inert material to make a
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