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These days, it’s tough to avoid newspaper headlines warning that artificial intelligence is coming for your job. The problem is that, often, the only thing these oversimplifications get right is that there is, in fact, an important connection between automation and work.What’s surprising is how many examples there are of AI acting as the catalyst for new hiring, higher wages, and happier employees. But of course, AI success stories aren’t as exciting as the “job-stealing robots” narrative. The reality is that the impact of AI on the workforce is complex, nuanced, and still very much in transition.Worker-Friendly OutcomesHere’s an...

<p>Self-driving car makers have been testing experimental models on a laborious state-by-state basis while everyone waits for Congress to enact national legislation. But last month, a House of Representatives panel unanimously approved a measure that would exempt tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles from current restrictions and sent it to the floor for a vote -- which just got scheduled for next week.</p>

Antonio Garcia Martinez fears revolution and armed conflict will erupt in America in the coming decades A former Facebook executive has quit his job and now lives as a recluse in the wilderness – because he is convinced that machines will take over the world. Antonio Garcia Martinez worked as a project manager for the social media giant in Silicon Valley but became terrified by the relentless march of technology. He reckons that machines will have taken half of humanity’s jobs within 30 years, sparking revolt and armed conflict. So he quit his job, fled his home and now lives...

Google has insisted that its robots are now superior to humans at identifying and blocking extremist videos, saying that they flag three in four offensive videos from YouTube before they are reported by users. [Google] more than doubled the number of illegal videos deleted from its platform last month after it adopted artificial intelligence moderators to help police content. "With over 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute, finding and taking action on violent extremist content poses a significant challenge. But over the past month, our initial use of machine learning has more than doubled both the number...

It was one small step for security technology, but one giant leap in the wrong direction for robotkind. A security robot in Washington, D.C. — lovingly named Steve — plunged down four steps into a fountain Monday. Photos show the sad, waterlogged robot cop partially submerged in defeat. It’s unclear if any foul play was involved or if Steve simply rolled down a dark path on his own.

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

The race to create A.I. and robotic technology that will change the way we work and live is dominating countless industries. But the chaos and disruption these ground-breaking fields are set to have on numerous areas of the economy, the job market, the banking system and the transportation industry have also incited fear. Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has previously warned that society could see decades of "pain" thanks to new technologies. While Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg if we want to stay relevant. But forgetting...

President Donald Trump reportedly spends his nights alone in the White House, watching TV news and yelling at the screen. He wakes up early each morning to watch more television and tweet his anger to the world … or Mika Brzezinski … or CNN. He takes time out of meetings with foreign leaders to brag about his Electoral College win.

A great pizza dough flipper probably can’t turn out one perfectly shaped pizza dough every nine seconds, but one California company’s robotic pizza dough press can make a great pie at that whiplash-inducing rate. Silicon Valley start-up Zume Pizza has nearly fully automated the process of making fresh, made-to-order pizza – and it’s streamlined the delivery process, too. If you live in Mountain View, California, and you order a pizza, it could be at your door as quickly as four minutes later. While other pizzas – especially the bake-at-home kind you buy at the grocery store – are also made...

Consider this before you assume you can have a long or lucrative career in the retail industry: Up to half of all current jobs in the retail sector are likely to vanish because of e-commerce, automation of jobs and the closing of brick-and-mortar stores. Millions of retail jobs — as we now know them — are going the way of gas station attendants. Just as ATMs replaced many bank tellers, automated check-out stations are supplanting retail clerks. And have you watched in-store “shoppers” who do Amazon price checks while they’re standing in the aisles? Have you noticed how many of...

SUIDOBASHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES! MegaBots, Inc. challenges you to a duel! You have a giant robot, we have a giant robot - we have a duty to the science fiction lovers of this world to fight them to the death. Prepare yourselves, and name the battlefield

It is often said that in the future, jobs that were once done by humans could eventually be taken over by robots who are admittedly more efficient due to their lack of the need to rest, take breaks, and sleep. While there are some jobs that are obvious in terms of robots being better at it, there are some that are less obvious, such as the job of a programmer. However a Danish startup by the name of Ulzard Technologies IVS could change that, thanks to their development of AI dubbed pix2code that can help to program applications based on...

Building Self-Assembling Robots With Origami, PowerPoint, and an LED Projector A new photopolymer technique creates self-folding origami structures from PowerPoint slides, which might be used as tiny, medical bots inside the body. By Glenn McDonald May 5, 2017 3:03 PM EDT Share on Facebook Tweet this article Email Origami, the art of paper folding, has been around for a long time. Historians are pretty sure that origami as we know it today — think paper cranes and frogs — has its origins in 17th-century Japan. But it's likely that the roots of the practice date back to 1st-century China.  ...

he ECM, as it is known for short, was able to produce factually coherent answers whilst also imbuing its conversation with emotions such as happiness, sadness or disgust. ... The paper found that 61% of humans who tested the machine favoured the emotional versions to the neutral chatbot. Similar results have been found in so-called “Wizard of Oz” studies in which a human typing responses masquerades as advanced AI. “It is not a question whether they are desirable – they clearly are – but in which applications they make sense and where they don’t,” said Schuller. Minlie Huang, a computer...

The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump's treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen." There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce....

POLICE have charged a man who drunkenly attacked a robotic patrol droid in a car park in the United States, after the device called them for help. The incident occurred in the car park of technology maker Knightscope’s headquarters in Mountain View, California on April 19, authorities said. Jason Sylvain, 41, was intoxicated when he came across the K5 droid, which was conducting patrols around the building as part of product testing.Despite the robot weighing in at a whopping 135 kilograms, he managed to tip it over. It detected the danger and automatically alerted authorities to an intruder on the...

A nightmare-inducing robot tarantula has been built using a 3D printer. The all-terrain machine, which weighs less than 5 kilograms (11lbs), can climb tricky surfaces like rocks and stairs with ease. It runs using 18 different motors that help it move smoothly over uneven surfaces. The motors give the robot exceptional flexibility and even appear to make it dance in a video of the strange machine.

The future of U.S. homebuilding depends on more people like Cyndicy Yarborough, a 26-year-old former Wal-Mart clerk with no background in construction. At Blueprint Robotics in Baltimore, she works in a factory that builds houses like cars, on an assembly line, using robots that fire thousands of nails into studs each day and never miss. Yarborough operates a machine that lifts floors and walls and packs them onto a flatbed truck, the final step before delivery to a development site where they’ll be pieced together. “I like being a part of something new, on the cutting edge,” said Yarborough, a...

Tucked away in Apex, a robotics company is about to nearly double its headcount. Robert Little, CEO of ATI Industrial Automation, says the company breaks ground next week on an expansion that will create 275 new jobs and grow its Apex footprint to 185,000 square feet. The company currently has 300 employees. Little says it has reached the limits of its Apex facility, and that the new robotics lab will be bigger with state of the art features. With the new facility, ATI intends to focus on new and better robots with force-control. Little describes it as equipping robots with...

Humanoid robot F.E.D.O.R., set to fly into space in 2021, is now capable of shooting using both of his arms, according to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.“The robot of the F.E.D.O.R. platform showed skills of firing using both . Currently the work on fine motor skills and decision algorithms is underway,” Rogozin wrote on his Twitter.​According to Rogozin, training to shoot is a way of teaching the robot to instantaneously prioritize targets and make decisions.“We are not creating a terminator but artificial intelligence which will have a great practical importance in various fields,” he added.