Killer Robots

Mykola Holyutyak/Shutterstock

Autonomous targeting systems originated with innovations in anti-aircraft weaponry during World War II. Zef Art/Shutterstock

The President of Microsoft, Brad Smith,  believes that a new digital Geneva Convention is essential to protect the world from the threat of killer robots. Smith told the Daily Telegraph, that the use of “lethal autonomous weapon systems” poses a host of new ethical questions which need to be considered by governments as a matter of urgency. He claimed the rapidly advancing technology, including flying, swimming and walking drones, can be equipped with lethal weapons systems such as missiles, bombs or guns.

Weapon systems with a significant degree of autonomy in the critical functions of selecting and attacking targets are being developed in the US, China, Israel, South Korea, Russia and the UK.

Additionally, technology is a growing focus for many militaries because replacing troops with machines can make the decision to go to war easier. Lethal autonomous weapons are military robots able to make lethal decisions free from human oversight. They are designed to select and attack targets without intervention or the control of a human operator. These weapons are capable of operation in the air, on land, in water, under water or in space.

The development of autonomous weapon systems has received heavy criticism in a open letter to the UN. It was signed by over 100 artificial intelligence robot experts.

Robot named Sophia Funded by Epstein

 

More Here

 

DARPA Sends Robots To The Caves

 

 

The Sub-T Challenge “seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios.”

The ultimate goal of the tunnel challenge is for teams to remotely map, identify and report the greatest number of artifacts along the mines’ passages. Teams had to provide the exact coordinates of the items.

 

For four days, the eleven teams took turns making runs through the two on-site mines. Each team got two full attempts, from start to finish, and the clock runs out after one hour.

Teams can run their robot fleet into and out of the cave up to four times—which is good because things could break.

Teams are told what they’re looking for in advance

Eventually, teams learned how well their robots could withstand the tactical challenges that DARPA put inside the mines.

During those extremely hot August days, eleven teams vied for the $200,000 prize (and the included robotic street cred), which include a red backpack, mannequins, fire extinguishers and drills. There were about 10-30 artifacts in total and the locations of each changed in between each team’s turns.

The teams—mostly composed of researchers, roboticists, mechanical engineers, and even some industry experts—took turns setting up their creations at the mouths of the caves, preparing to find the most artifacts. Most were calibrating drones or ground robots before the clock started running. Everyone paid special attention to their communications strategy, which turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of the Sub-T Challenge.

Amazon Executive Says Robotics Won’t Replace Warehouse Workers In next Decade

 

Robotics director,Scott Anderson, of Amazon robotics fulfillment, told a group of reporters during a visit to Amazon’s Baltimore warehouse on Tuesday that the company is 10 years away from replacing certain human jobs.

He was referring specifically to the picking process, which would require robots to select a single product from a bin without picking up or damaging other items.

 The technology is very limited and extremely far from the fully automated workstation thats needed.

According to a recent report by TechCrunch, Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots in operation. According to Amazon, none of these robots are currently used in warehouses that handle fresh food because of the need for human intelligence.

The FedEx SameDay Delivery Bot

The FedEx SameDay Bot is designed to travel on sidewalks and along roadsides carrying small packages to homes and businesses. Developed in collaboration with Segway and iBot inventor Dean Kamen and his company Deka, the zero-emission, battery-powered robot is equipped with Lidar technology and “multiple” cameras that allow it to sense its surroundings and avoid obstacles. FedEx currently offers a SameDay City courier service in 1,900 cities using branded vehicles and uniformed employees.

https://vimeo.com/320057631

 

Robots Delivery via Robots @ A College

George Mason University  is easily one of the first large-scale college programs to use robots to deliver food on campus. The service was the brainchild of two companies, food service operator Sodexo and delivery robot company Starship Technologies.

Today, members of the Mason community can pull up an app on their iPhones and Android phones to order food and drinks for delivery anywhere on the campus. Delivery costs $1.99 and runs from 8:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night. Currently, food options are limited to some items on the menus of three participants: Blaze Pizza, Starbucks, Second Stop and Dunkin’ Donuts. More on-campus restaurants are expected to join the list in coming weeks.

Robots & Artificial Intelligence Allows Doctors More Time With Patients

Robots, artificial intelligence and smart speakers will unburden doctors to give them more time with patients, according to an NHS report on the pending technological “revolution” in healthcare.

Rapid advances will also be spurred on by developments in the ability to sequence individuals’ genomes, of their genetic data, according to the review published on Monday.

The report led by US academic Eric Topol called for fresh education of staff, with 90% of all NHS jobs predicted to require digital skills within 20 years.

But those who fear robots may edge out human practitioners may be reassured by the review suggesting technology will in fact “enhance” professionals, giving them greater time for patients.

Smart speakers, such as Siri and Alexa, were envisioned as having a “major impact” on care.

Intelligent Stores Coming Your Way

 

The upcoming year plans to bring exciting technological breakthroughs. The “physical realm” of commerce will continue to dissolve, in 2019 and we’ll enter the age of “Experience-Driven, Unified Commerce”. A new type of retail paradigm where connectivity is ubiquitous, will exists without borders, and payment credentials are stored in the cloud. Consumers will interact with a host of “gateway” devices including smartphones, tablets, voice assistants, smartwatches, appliances, clothing, fashion accessories, automobiles, and more…anytime and everywhere. In order to keep up with the increasing demand for quick resolution and 24/7 accessibility, customer service will become increasingly automated, with AI-enabled live chat and virtual assistants becoming dominant communication channels.

The physical store of the future will be a significantly more digitized version of what exists today, with multiple smart devices working together on a single IoT platform to deliver hyper-personalized, adaptive and context specific experiences. AI will soon be applied across the entire retail product and service cycle, in areas such as product design and manufacturing, demand forecasting, supply chain management, price and assortment optimization, merchandising, promotions, customer experience. personalization, and post-sale customer service.

With AI and deep learning, retailers can use prediction analysis to determine which products might not sell under certain conditions – including market, economic, competitor and weather related factors – and create a combination of targeted discounts, dynamic, pricing, free shipping, enhanced services, product combinations etc., to clear out the inventory that is most likely not to sell after a certain period.

 

 

Travelmate Robotics

AI Robots Soon Will Determine If Your Marriage Failing

Imperial College Business School and dating website eharmony has investigated how AI will change dating in the next few years.

It found in-home listening devices such as Alexa and Google Home could predict with 75% accuracy the likelihood of a couple’s relationship ending.

By 2021 the popular AI assistants could analyze the acoustics of conversations between couples.When an argument breaks out, robots could even intervene with suggestions of a resolution.

The Future of Dating Report also believes DNA analysis could be routinely used to match people with their perfect partner.The report also explored how technology will better aid success in online dating. Most dating services use AI and machine learning to filter possible matches by analysing self-reported feelings and can capture behavioral data captured by wearable tech.

Nowadays, algorithms can predict compatibility, enhance dating experiences and help manufacture chemistry

AI & Your Job

 

Farms Run By Robots!

A company called Iron Ox created a fully autonomous farm in San Carlos, California. The hydroponic, indoor farm relies on two robots to plant, care for and harvest all its produce. One of the robots is 1,000 pounds and about the size of a car. It picks up the trays of plants and transports them around the greenhouse. A second machine, a robotic arm, is responsible for all the fine manipulation tasks, like seeding and transplanting.”

Making Preparations For Robots

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.Engineers at the conference say, a source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable.
The trick to making them more palatable, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily.
In ageing societies, “robots will coexist with humans sooner or later”, said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese psychologist who specializes in relations between humans and robots. Welcoming robots into households or workplaces involves developing “multipurpose machines that are capable of interacting” with humans without being dangerous, said Philippe Soueres, head of the robotics department at  a laboratory belonging to France’s CNRS scientific institute.

The Big Robotic Takeover

More Jobs that may be in jeopardy.

Lawyers–

A.I. can help perform tasks ranging from legal discovery (the pre-trial process in which lawyers decide which documents are relevant to a case) to creating contracts. They can even argue parking fines and handle divorce proceedings.

Data entry clerks

Journalists

 

Financial Analysts

A.I. is taking over. Computers can spot patterns and make trades faster than even the most eagle-eyed of human analysts. Machine learning tools are all the rage, while some estimates suggest that around 30 percent of banking sector jobs will be lost to A.I. within the next decade.

Telemarketers and customer service assistants

Smart chatbots can perform a lot of these tools easily.

Medics

Algorithms can make diagnoses about disease and computers are being used to make recommendations about the best cancer treatment. A.I. pharmacists, and wearable devices that can help treat physical disorders, or even robots carrying out surgery, there’s no doubt that cutting edge technology will have a big impact on a range of medical professions.

Construction workers or other manual labor jobs

humans still have an advantage over robots when it comes to dexterity. For example, Amazon’s warehouses use robots developed by Kiva Systems to move around racks of shelves and bring them to stationary human workers who then pick the required items off the shelf. Bricklaying robots can lay bricks, but require humans to do the grouting. This balance will shift as robots get more dexterous, but for now many humans will find themselves working alongside robots rather than being flat-out replaced by them.

Musicians and other artists

Artificial intelligence systems which can generate stock music, or create images based on a written description. These tools will only become more advanced. And due to the ability to scale this tech, they’ll be able to carry out far more work than an individual human creative.

 

 

Robots & Medical Doctor Training

A robot, called HAL, has been made to look like a five-year-old male patient and offers unprecedented training options.

HAL not only looks like a boy, he behaves like one. He can track a finger with his eyes, answer questions, cry for his mother and experience anaphylactic shock. He can even breathe faster and/or urinate when scared. And he has also been built in a way that allows doctors and nurses in-training to perform a myriad of tests such as taking blood pressure, checking his pulse and monitoring breathing. Trainees can also use real medical equipment such as an EKG machine or a heart or blood pressure monitor—or tools such as a scalpel or breathing tubes—to perform realistic medical procedures.

Gaumard has a long history of producing medical training equipment. HAL is just one of several robots the company offers—others include a robot mother who gives birth and a baby who can experience a wide variety of newborn complications. With HAL, medical students are offered a new level of interaction with a robot patient before being exposed to real ones. Representatives with Gaumard told the press that they actually backed off making the robot look too human—leaving off freckles, for example, or real hair. They feared such a robot that could also bleed to death or experience cardiac arrest might be too emotionally traumatic for students just being introduced to emergency pediatric situations.

HAL can also be shocked with a real defibrillator or have his throat cut to allow for insertion of a tracheal tube. Trainees can also draw blood and insert urinary catheters or insert a chest tube to allow drainage of what looks like real blood. The makers of the robot have put in special parts at certain body sites to allow for replacement, such as patches of skin that are damaged by a scalpel or needle. And as students perform treatment, the robot can react, crying, for example, or saying “ouch” when pricked with a needle. He might also move, not only showing emotions, but mimicking the difficulty often found when treating a person in pain.

Trainers can also speak into a microphone and have their voice come out of the robot sounding like a five-year-old boy—and they can cause medical emergency conditions too, such as arrhythmia, or cardiac arrest, forcing students to react quickly.

 

 

 

Robot That Can Blast Away Germs

Solaris Disinfection has had U.S. sales for its Lytbot robot that blasts away hospital germs using ultraviolet light says its Solaris Lytbot is the ideal weapon in the war against hospital-acquired infections such as C. difficile. The Lytbot cycles through a programmed pattern and fires pulsed UV light until it completes a 360-degree sweep of the room. The robot’s beams have a devastating effect on germ cells and bacteria spores through called “cellular disruption”.

On the other hand, Dr Kevin Katz of the North York General Hospital says most hospitals rely on products like bleach or activated hydrogen peroxide for infected surfaces.”I don’t think the evidence is there to use this technology to replace environmental cleaners in healthcare environments,” says Katz, who adds a recent Ontario health technology review of UV technology did not support the purchase of products like the Lytbot at this time.

What’s more, Katz is concerned cash-strapped hospitals would be tempted to use the robotic technology instead of old-fashioned human cleaners with mops and pails.

Adam Steinhoff, chief operating officer and co-founder of Solaris Disinfection, says he has had some success selling the Lytbot to U.S. hospitals, but Canadian health-care institutions have so far been hesitant and Lytbot isn’t meant to be a replacement for daily cleaning, but a supplemental method of disinfecting a room after traditional hand cleaning is done.

The Virtual Home & Robots

Computer scientists have been working on teaching machines to do a wider range of tasks around the house. In a new paper spearheaded by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Toronto, researchers demonstrate “VirtualHome,” a system that can simulate detailed household tasks and then have artificial “agents” execute them, opening up the possibility of one day teaching robots to do such tasks.Using Virtual Home, the MIT computer scientists have trained AI to do about 1,000 different tasks that one might expect a household robot assistant to be able to do. Robots trained in this way may oneday be a great help for the elderly or people who have trouble getting around, and perhaps even to the average person. But until they become useful, at least they’re entertaining to watch.

 

WWhile the rest of the world is worried that automation will make their jobs obsolete, Japan is scrambling to make sophisticated robots that can help it do exactly this as its workforce ages. This is especially the case in construction, where a significant number of workers are set to retire soon and there are not enough people to replace them. Unfortunately, even with robots, the challenges are still steep.

Among the biggest problems with using machines to replace humans in building entire skyscrapers is the sheer absence of versatility. Humans can easily scale beams and walls, but robots are still unable to do so. As Bloomberg also points out, it takes about 500,000 workers to erect even just one 30-story building.

Robots can replace workers by the dozens or even hundreds, depending on the task. Telemarketing can see an artificial intelligence take over for an entire floor or even building of workers, if necessary. This just isn’t the same with construction.

Among the companies that are trying to build enough robots to at least soften the blow of the retirement of many construction workers in Japan is the Shimizu Corp. and it’s trying to do so by building machines that can weld or install ceiling panels. Robots aren’t exactly a strange sight in construction these days, either, so this isn’t surprising.

Unfortunately, there are limitations to what these robots can do. Mobility is a particularly huge problem that still doesn’t have a viable solution.

 

Brooklyn’s New Lab Tech Hub

New Lab’s main corridor in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The 84,000-square-foot collaborative currently has 600 people working in the space. (Rich Gilligan)

Located in New York is a former shipbuilding space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, named New Lab, which is an 84,000-square-foot collaborative tech hub dedicated to entrepreneurs working on scalable technologies and products. New Lab supports companies in nine disciplines: robotics, AI, urban tech, the built environment, energy, connected devices, additive tech, life sciences, and nanotechnology. Members benefit from access to a dizzying array of fabrication labs, including 3-D printing, woodworking, casting, CNC milling, and electronics, along with access to free software, including Autodesk and SolidWorks.

The flagship tech hub opened in 2016 and was founded to provide a supportive center for those companies working at the forefront of technology and human experience and to ensure that they have a reason to stay in the city. David Belt, New Lab’s co-founder and CEO, is careful to stress that the lab is not an incubator—that is, it is not dedicated to helping companies at the beginning of their research or product-development cycles, but rather those that have concrete products and built technologies and are ready to take the next step.

Through a formalized arm of the company called New Lab Ventures—a $50 million venture fund—the lab itself invests in some of its member companies and currently has investments in 14 of them; the lab also connects members to the world’s leading venture funds. And a joint program called the Urban Tech Hub, in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), allows New Lab to support companies that strive to make a more livable, resilient city through their technologies and products. Additionally, the lab has other private-public partnerships in the works and a global partner network with Barcelona, Spain, and Copenhagen, Denmark, that offers other opportunities to members. New Lab currently has 103 member companies, with 600 individuals working at the space. Competition for entry is steep—just 15 percent of applicants are accepted.

Notable alumni include:

CARMERA

The founders see potential for their technology to be crucial for urban developers, autonomous vehicles, public transportation, and infrastructure. It allows for real-time, constantly updated 3-D mapping of cities.

Voltaic Systems

The portable solar power company creates lightweight solar panels and solar-powered solutions for people, products, and structures alike.

StrongArm Technologies

This company develops ergonomic solutions for injury prevention and peak performance for the industrial workforce, including the construction industry.

Terreform ONE

An architecture and urban think tank that advances ecological design in derelict municipal areas. Terreform is New Lab’s only nonprofit and its only architect-centric member.

AI technologies like speech analytics, deep-learning platforms and natural language generation have exploded onto the scene in the past 12 months. Soon firms will be able to automate and scale in a more efficient way because software will ultimately be able to learn and adapt rather than require programming.

Automation will transform the workforce as technology advances result in humans increasingly working side by side with software robots These robots don’t herald a gloomy future for jobs. As we showed in our report. Working Side By Side With Robots, automation will replace some jobs and create others, with a net loss of 9.8 million US jobs by 2027 — while transforming at least 25 percent of the remaining jobs.

SONY To Launch Robotic Dog

The robotic dog will feature a bevy of sensors including a camera embedded in the nose, and will go on sale in Japan on Jan. 11 for 198,000 yen ($1,750), excluding tax, plus at least 90,000 yen for a three-year data plan,

Robotic Lawyers On The Rise

The list of occupations that will be decimated by artificial intelligence and automation is becoming larger and larger with drivers, translators and shop assistants under threat from the rise of the robots,.Now you can add lawyers to the list.

A contest that took place last month pitched over 100 lawyers from many of London’s ritziest firms against an artificial intelligence program called Case Cruncher Alpha.

Both the humans and the AI were given the basic facts of hundreds of PPI (payment protection insurance) and asked to predict whether the Financial Ombudsman would allow a claim.

In all, they submitted 775 predictions and the computer won hands down, with Case Cruncher getting an accuracy rate of 86.6%, compared with 66.3% for the lawyers.

Case Cruncher is not the product of a tech giant but the brainchild of four Cambridge law students. They started out with a simple chatbot that answered legal questions – a bit of a gimmick but it caught on.

Two judges oversaw the competition, Cambridge law lecturer Felix Steffek and Ian Dodd from a company called Prediction, which runs one of the world’s biggest databases of legal cases. He says the youthful Case Cruncher team chose the subject for the contest well.

Ian Dodd thinks AI may replace some of the grunt work done by junior lawyers and paralegals but no machine can talk to a client or argue in front of a High Court judge. He puts it simply: “The knowledge jobs will go, the wisdom jobs will stay.”

New Technology For Booking Travel

Instead of entering a hotel search and receiving a page with hundreds of options, new data-driven travel agents—using humans, AI or both—are tailoring options based on a traveler’s personal preferences. These new agents use chatbots or messaging to communicate with travel bookers. Elaine Glusac, writing at The New York Times, offers these examples of data-driven travel planners.

Pana caters to frequent travelers. For a monthly fee, Pana is available 24 hours. It uses member profiles and past trips to funnel travel requests to human agents.

Mezi uses chatbots to handle travel booking. If a complicated issue arises then humans get involved; afterward they train the bots to handle it in the future. The more you book with Mezi, the more it learns about your preferences.

Savanti Travel helps frequent travelers cut costs while gaining status with travel companies. It doesn’t operate on commission to avoid the urge to find more expensive bookings.

Hello Hipmunk is a travel-planning messaging system. It runs through Facebook Messenger, Skype or Slack, and lets you topic hop as if you were talking to a human. It can offer tips such as on the cheapest times to travel.

Flightfox specializes in complicated itineraries. The service books flights only; for a fee, agents find the best prices and send you links so you can do the booking yourself. It also uses points systems to find the best deals.

Robotic Buddhist Priests Being Used For Funerals In Japan

Buddhist priest for a funeral cost about $2,200 in Japan. So a plastic molding company Nissei Eco Co. decided to  create a robotic Buddhist priest. Nissei has modified an existing robot in the form of SoftBank’s Pepper robot. The Buddhist Pepper robot is going to be around $450 per funeral.

Whats Next?

Biomedicine: They’re Analyzing Your DNA

23andMe

23andMe first debuted direct-to-consumer tests meant to predict disease in 2013, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quickly clamped down on that and told the company to stop marketing the tests, saying they could be inaccurate and confusing to consumers.

However, the company was vindicated earlier this year when the FDA revised that decision, declaring 23andMe could sell tests that estimate customers’ risk of certain disease, as long as they don’t purport to diagnose any disease.

Illumina

Early this year, Illumina, the manufacturer of most of the world’s DNA sequencers, unveiled its newest, most efficient machine, NovaSeq, which can sequence as many as 48 entire human genomes in two and a half days, according to the company. Illumina claims the ultra-fast machine will usher in the $100 genome and will open the door for researchers to cheaply sequence DNA in search of rare genetic variants that cause disease.

Sophia Genetics

Sophia Genetics is taking a big-data approach to DNA. The Swiss company is using AI algorithms to continuously learn from thousands of patients’ genomic data. Partnering hospitals take patient samples and run them through a DNA sequencer. The Sophia system sifts through that genetic information to identify mutations in a patient’s genome. The technology is said to quickly and more accurately diagnose conditions like cancer, metabolic disorders, and heart disease.

LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robot Can Eliminated Hospital Germs

Environmental services staffer Hilda Guzman of Old Bridge prepares the Xenex LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robot for disinfection of a patient room at Saint Peter’s University Hospital n New Brunswick.(Photo: ~Courtesy of John O’Boyle)

 

Hospitals around the world are constantly for new and innovative ways to battle deadly pathogens and kill multidrug resistant organisms that can cause hospital-acquired infections (HAI).

Saint Peter’s University Hospital has implemented a LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robot that emits waves of ultraviolet (UV) light to destroy hard-to-kill bugs in hard-to-clean places.

Their goal is to prevent infection & provide a clean, safe environment for their patients,  families and employees. The latest technology provides an added level of protection in combating HAI’s caused by pathogens such as Clostridium difficile and Staphylococcus aureus.

The Xenex robot is a new technology that uses pulsed xenon, a high-intensity UV light that penetrates the cell walls of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, mold, fungus and spores. Their DNA is fused, rendering them unable to reproduce or mutate, effectively killing them on surfaces without contact or chemicals.

The system is effective against even the most dangerous pathogens, including Clostridium difficile (C. diff), norovirus, influenza, Ebola and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA. Over 400 hospitals, Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense facilities in the U.S., Canada, Africa, Japan and Europe are using Xenex robots, which are also in use in skilled nursing facilities, ambulatory surgery centers, and long-term acute-care facilities.

Walmart’s Patent To Track Shoppers Emotions

Walmart, is seeking ways to identify whether a customer is unhappy or dissatisfied, and then sending staff in to deal with them before they are able to register a complaint. Walmart is using video cameras at store checkout lines that monitor customers’ facial expressions and movements to try and identify varying levels of dissatisfaction, according to a patent filing. According to their patent filing,Walmart will not only use the data to address immediate staffing needs. It will also use the technology to analyze trends in shoppers’ purchase behavior over time.

If the system detects an unhappy customer, it will ping employees in other parts of the store and order them to report to a checkout register, in the hopes of alleviating shoppers’ distress. Walmart is hoping that the technology will enable stores to respond more efficiently to customer service issues before shoppers have a chance to complain.

 

 

Robotics Team From Burundi Missing

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TEAM BURUNDI

The D.C. Police Department identified the missing teens on Twitter as: Audrey Mwamikazi, 17; Aristide Irambona, 18; Kevin Sabumukiza, 17; Don Ingabire, 16; Nice Munezero, 17; and Richard Irakoze, 18.

The robotics competition, is designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science, and have attracted teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations. 

Competition organizers say they learned Tuesday night that the team’s mentor could not find the students. FIRST Global President Joe Sestak made the initial call to police, according to a statement issued Thursday. Two of the teens were seen crossing into Canada, D.C. police say. The members of the robotics team from the eastern African country of Burundi, who are 16, 17 and 18, disappeared Tuesday after they took part in the FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition. 

The Metropolitan Police Department has received reports that Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, and Don Ingabire, 16, were seen crossing into Canada, spokeswoman Aquita Brown said Thursday morning.

Police say they have no indication of foul play in their disappearance. No additional details were released immediately. The team’s mentor said they disappeared after the competition. He said he did not know where they went. The mentor told police the teens have one-year visas to stay in the U.S. 

Police Department Upstate New York Has Drones

Western New York police department has purchased a drone for $9,994.99.

It will be flying the skies of West Seneca to help officers solve crimes and keep the community safe. The grant was secured by State Senator Patrick Gallivan.

West Seneca Police have been training for eight months on how to use this new technology, which officers say will assist in many different police missions including search and rescues, creek levels during flooding and crime scene analysis.

The drone is equipped to drop items to those in need, such as a during a hostage situation. They can put a cell phone in it for delivery to someone in need, during a hostage situation which will help our hostage negotiators maintain communication with them.The drone can travel up to 400 feet high, with a speed up to 50 miles per hour, with a rotating camera that captures video from all angles.

The drone also can give the investigators an indicator of where a fire started,” according to Lt. McNamara. “Accident investigation, that can be used to show the weather conditions at the time of an accident.”

The department is ready to start flying, but is waiting for final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to use the drone at night.

Voice Imitation & Fake Videos ?

 

Just imagine a world where anyone could create a photo-realistic and make who ever they want to say whatever they want. Add to that the ability to write a script and have a machine recite it back with the perfectly indistinguishable intonation of the person featured. Well it’s here!

A Montreal-based AI startup has recently revealed a new voice imitation technology that could signal the end of trusting your ears, meaning pretty soon there could be a cloud of doubt over literally every “recording” you see and hear.

Three PhD students at the University of Montreal developed Lyrebird, a deep learning algorithm that reportedly needs only a 60-second sample of a person’s voice to be able to generate a synthesized copy. While the company touts applications such as speech synthesis for people with disabilities, it’s clear this technology is opening a Pandora’s box of future complications.

Lyrebird has a dedicated “Ethics” page on its website, openly discussing the potentially dangerous consequences of the technology. The company intends to release the technology publicly and make it available to anyone, with the idea being that demonstrating so visibly how voices can be artificially faked. We will all learn to become skeptical of audio recordings we hear in the future. Everyone will learn to become skeptical of audio recordings we hear in the future.

Adobe revealed aproject in late 2016 called VoCo.

 

 

 

Will Robots Take Your Job?

Designed and developed by Dimitar Raykov and Mubashar Iqbal, uses data from the 2013 report, “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?” as well as data from the Bureau of Labor. The researchers for that study estimated 47 percent of total US employment is at risk of automation.

You can search for your own gig (reporters and correspondents are at an 11 percent risk of automation, or hit the randomized button to see an example from their database (metal and plastic pattern makers are at 90 percent risk). Alongside the risk percentage are projected growth rates in the next seven years, the amount of people sharing that job title as of 2016, and median annual wage.

Sorry To say data reveals positions such as Bank Tellers, Postal Clerks, Office Clerks, Cashiers,Retail sales person are about 96% doomed. Librarians 65% Train Operators 86% Dispatchers except Police Fire 3ll

Click Here To Find If Robots Will Take Your Job

Map Tells Which Cities Likely To Lose Jobs To Robots

As the map shows, almost all large metropolitan areas can lose over 55% of their current jobs due to automation. The ones that fare better than others include high-tech centers like Silicon Valley and Boston.

Lower income jobs face higher automation risk, the effect on employment will be much more drastic than the effect on wages. MSAs with a high share of low paying jobs will have larger job and wage losses. The researchers emphasize that probability of automation does not equal future unemployment rates: “Technical feasibility does not imply that automation necessarily makes economic sense. And historically, automation went hand in hand with new job creation both in skilled and less skilled labor,” explains Dr. Chen. “However, the speed and the high share of automation in less skilled jobs raises many questions about whether the economy will be able to make up for the expected job losses. They expect that automation will create winners and losers among cities and regions of the U.S.,

Metropolitan Statistical Area	Share of Jobs Automatable
1 Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV	65.2%
2 El Paso, TX	63.9%
3 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	62.6%
4 Greensboro-High Point, NC	62.5%
5 North Port-Sarasota- Bradenton, FL	62.4%
6 Bakersfield, CA	62.4%
7 Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL	61.8%
8 Fresno, CA	61.5%
9 Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin, SC	61.3%
10 Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN	61.3%

They Say Tm Cook’s 1 Billion Investment Will Bring Robot Jobs Not Factory Jobs

Apple just promised $1 billion boost to US manufacturing  Wednesday, 3 May 2017 | 6:57 PM ET | 01:07

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that his company will start a $1 billion fund to promote advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Apple hasn’t released much in the way of details about its plans for the investment, saying only that the first beneficiary will be announced later this month. Advanced manufacturing is a large umbrella term that includes everything from 3-D printing aerospace components to installing robots on assembly lines.

The fund comes as President Donald Trump has made bringing back manufacturing jobs a big part of his agenda. As advanced manufacturing jobs are in high demand in the U.S., the sector was already high on Apple’s list of priorities, and Cook hopes the investment will spur even more job creation.

Whats Trending

Yelp Tests Robots Delivering Food

Robots will hit the streets with food delivery orders from Marble, a San Francisco startup that is partnering with Yelp to navigate crowded city streets and deliver your order before it gets cold.

Marble’s robots are about waist-height, a bit larger than the dog-sized models of its competitor Starship. They’re also brimming with technology borrowed from self-driving cars. Each Marble delivery bot—there are a few of them cruising the streets of San Francisco’s Mission and Potrero Hill neighborhoods—includes lidar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors to monitor their surroundings. The company says it plans to map the majority of San Francisco’s sidewalks over the coming year. Visitors and San Francisco residents can order delivery from Yelp’s Eat24 app for a chance to be served by a Marble bot. If you’re selected, you’ll be offered the opportunity to accept the service, and the restaurant will then pack your order into one of the robots’ cargo bays. Once it arrives, you’ll enter an access code to unlock your breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Last month, Starship also began delivering pizza from Domino’s locations in Germany and the Netherlands. If those trials are successful, Domino’s could expand the service to more of its 2,000+ stores worldwide.

 

Ford Motors Looking @ 3D For Its Motor Parts

3D printing giant Stratasys’ Infinite Build 3D printer,  is housed at Ford Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Michigan. This humongus machine is expected to provide Ford with a more efficient, as well as affordable way to create tooling, prototype parts and components for their products. These will initially be produced for low volume vehicles.

Ford is the first automaker to make use of this technology in their manufacturing process,  producing lighter and cheaper components for its vehicles. The automaker believes that reduction in weight of the vehicle will help it achieve greater fuel efficiency.

The Stratasys Infinite Build, the automaker adds, is seen as a breakthrough for vehicle manufacturing, capable of printing parts of practically any shape, size as well as length. This 3D printing machine is a beast and provides for rapid prototyping of components and parts for building its upcoming vehicles. This also gives the automaker control over their designs, which can be modified and instantly printed to meet their needs.

The process is similar to the usual 3D printing procedure, but everything here is automated. Once the supply or raw material for the printer runs out, the robotic arm itself replaces it with a new full one. This makes the printer capable of operating unattended for days, but do see that you have provided enough supplies.

Office Workers @ Stockholm Sweden’s Epicenter Choose To Be Microchipped

Many of the workers at the Epicenter in Stockholm Sweden have chosen to be voluntarily chipped with RFID implants in their hands. Epicenter members can unlock doors, access printers, and pay at vending machines without having to fumble for cash or a card. Most of the nearly 1,000 members still use traditional means, but a healthy handful has opted to volunteer.

Epicenter is part of a movement to construct office space of the future. Members are encouraged to participate in over 100 annual events, from workshops on biohacking to concerts. Long distance calls can be taken through telepresence robots that roam around the corridors. A “robotic” vending machine makes fresh fruit smoothies on demand. There’s even a “biohacker breakfast” that consists of bulletproof coffee and a pair of boiled eggs.

Their goal is to make the workplace a place for play as well as productivity and experimentation and to push forward as early adopters of untested technology.

Epicenter is founded by a group of guys who used to run big tech conferences, and one of their visions for epicenter is that it will be like a big tech conference on a daily basis. Every A Chip & Beer, a meet-up is held monthly, where members can come get implants and sip libations. (Alcohol thins blood, so it’s best to start with the implant.)

France gives employees the right to disconnect as soon as they step out of the office, there’s something suspect about Epicenter members quite literally taking their work home with them, even though these chips can be used far beyond the office – as membership IDs for gym chains and supercenters, and to pay for goods at small shops all around Sweden .

Biometric monitoring of employees continues to be a growing trend, the widespread use of these new technologies remains rare due to privacy and legal concerns. Privacy issues prevent many companies from instituting biometric IDs simply because — like anything else — they pose a hacking risk, too. 

They say the benefits range from accounting for employees in emergency situations to protecting employees and employers from unfounded complaints.

The Cons no more Privacy, Those with something to hide well BEWARE! Big Brother Is Coming Soon

Mark Zuckerberg’s Robot Jarvis

Over the last year, though, Zuckerberg has spent between 100 and 150 hours on his home project. Zuckerberg’s project consist of coding with the creation of Jarvis. Morgan Freeman is the voice of Jarvis. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan use a custom iPhone app or a Facebook Messenger bot to turn lights on and off, play music based on personal tastes, open the front gate for friends, make toast, and even wake up their one-year-old daughter Max with Mandarin lessons.

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The White house Report On Artificial Intelligence & America’s Employees

The White House released a new report this week entitled Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy, as part of an admirable but very flawed initiative to understand the impact of the new technology on American employees.

The White House said, “Accelerating AI capabilities will enable automation of some tasks that have long required human labor”. The report says some low wage jobs will become obsolete. Research consistently finds that the jobs that are threatened by automation are highly concentrated among lower-paid, lower-skilled, and less-educated workers. This means that automation will continue to put downward pressure on demand for this group, putting downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on inequality.  Robots are taking orders and making food; customers are growing accustomed to the lack of human interaction.

These transformations will open up new opportunities for individuals, the economy, and society, on the other hand, has the potential to disrupt the current livelihoods of millions of Americans. Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality over the long-run depends not only on the technology itself but also on the institutions and policies that are in place. 

The advent of computers and the Internet raised the relative productivity of higher skilled workers. Routine-intensive occupations that focused on predictable, easily-programmable tasks—such as switchboard operators, filing clerks, travel agents, and assembly line workers— were particularly vulnerable to replacement by new technologies. Some occupations were virtually eliminated and demand for others reduced. Research suggests that technological innovation over this period increased the productivity of those engaged in abstract thinking, creative tasks, and problem-solving and was therefore at least partially responsible for the substantial growth in jobs employing such traits. Shifting demand towards more skilled labor raised the relative pay of this group, contributing to rising inequality. AI is not a single technology, but rather a collection of technologies that are applied to specific tasks, the effects of AI will be felt unevenly through the economy. Some tasks will be more easily automated than others, and some jobs will be affected more than others—both negatively and positively. Some jobs may be automated away, while for others, AI-driven automation will make many workers more productive and increase demand for certain skills. Finally, new jobs are likely to be directly created in areas such as the development and supervision of AI as well as indirectly created in a range of areas throughout the economy as higher incomes lead to expanded demand. Recent research suggests that the effects of AI on the labor market in the near term will continue the trend that computerization and communication innovations have driven in recent decades. Researchers’ estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade or two range from 9 to 47 percent.

The report suggests three broad strategies for addressing the impacts of AI-driven automation across the whole U.S. economy:

1. Invest in and develop AI for its many benefits;
2. Educate and train Americans for jobs of the future; and
3. Aid workers in the transition and empower workers to ensure broadly shared growth.

 

 

More Workplace Trends: Perks & Gig Economy Will slow Down

According to Glassdoor research sixty seven percent of U.S. employees said they were not likely to apply for a job at a company where men and women were paid unequally for the same work.

Boston Consulting Group says that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots, and a study from Oxford University reveals that 35% of existing U.K. jobs are at risk of automation in the next 20 years.

Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby have researched and wrote a book on this subject called Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers In the Age of Smart Machines. Their bottom line is this: machines are less likely to displace entire jobs, but will more likely replace specific tasks and in the process will augment many jobs.

Jobs Will Be Impacted by Intelligent Technologies

.  Presently journalist can tap into algorithms from two firms called Narrative Science and Automated Insights, that use machine learning to write an article in a matter of seconds. The journalist then can focus on writing a more strategic view of the article. In other words, leverage the technology to do what it does best and re-frame the article to a more analytical level.

Wealth advisors are already seeing the power of Analytix Insights, a company that creates investment analytic narratives on more than 40,00 public companies.The job of a wealth advisor is already automated, the critical part of advising clients, establishing trust, and providing personalized expertise is the opportunity for wealth advisors to enhance their skill sets.

The proliferation of automated teller machines has actually led to slightly more bank tellers, due to both bank deregulation and job augmentation as bank tellers now reduce their time on cash handling responsibilities and can be trained to provide relationship based services to bank customers.

Don’t Feel Like Standing?

The Robotic Lawyer

 

The UK-based DoNotPay chatbot has extended its services into New York in March 2016, and successfully challenged 160,000 of 250,000 parking fines over a 21-month period. The free online program asks people a series of questions to work out whether an appeal is viable, and then guides the user through the appeals process. The DoNotPay program is also able to navigate compensation for delayed flights.

The Future of Travel 2024

 

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Robots & The Travel Industry

A robot named Kanae, who hails from Japan, can be programmed to speak any language (including sign language). She has two sisters: Chihira Aico, who assists shoppers at the Tokyo shopping center, and Chihira Junko, who offers help at an info desk at Tokyo’s Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall. Bots in tourism signal an industry shift—Hilton Hotels, for example, announced on March 9 it was teaming up with IBM for a concierge robot named Naofor a concierge robot named Nao, while the SkyMax Skytender started mixing martinis on airplanes back in 2012.

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Dallas Police & Use Of Robotics

 photo courtesy of Alexandre Dulaunoy

Dallas Police used a bomb disposal robot to kill a suspect after last night’s deadly shooting during a protest. In a press conference, Dallas police chief David Brown said that the robot was deployed after negotiations with the suspect failed. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” said Brown. “Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.”

Drones Packing Insecticides

A company called Drone Volt has introduced the Drone Spray Hornet to locate and destroy the nests of Asian hornets that are becoming pests in parts of Europe.

The Asian Hornet is believed to have arrived in France in a shipment of pottery over a decade ago and has since spread itself over much of the country and other European regions. The predatory wasp preys on a variety of insects, including bees and other native pollinators. The species is also known to defend its nests by attacking perceived threats in swarms. Drone Volt collaborated with a beekeeper to develop a drone equipped with a tilting spray system and a Go Pro Hero 4 Black Edition HD camera to safely track down and eliminate the hornet nests.

Japanese Robot Writes Novel & Almost Wins Prize

 A Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize, it seems that no occupation is safe. The robot-written novel didn’t win the competition’s final prize, this time.

The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or “Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi” in Japanese. Although the narrative did’nt win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, however, it did come close.The novel was written by a very human team that led the AI program’s development. Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI “write” the novel autonomously. One of the team’s two submissions to the competition made it past the first round of screening, despite a blind reading policy that prevents judges from knowing whether an AI was involved in the writing process.

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Bots Assisting In Hotels

American hotel multinational Hilton has teamed up with tech giant IBM to trial a robotic concierge powered by IBM’s AI software Watson.

The bots name is Connie after the chain’s founder, Conrad Hilton, and it is currently assisting residents at Hilton McLean hotel, in Virginia.Connie helps guests navigate around the hotel and find restaurants or tourist attractions in the area—but it is not able to check them in just yet.

Connie’s physical support is Nao, a French-made 58cm-tall android that has become the go-to platform for educational and customer care tasks, thanks to its relative affordability (about £6,000 or $9,000). But the concierge’s brain is based on IBM’s flagship AI program Watson—the Jeopardy!-winning system engineered to understand people’s questions and answer them in the best way possible.

In this case, Watson’s main role is natural language processing, which enables the bot to welcome guests, grasp their spoken queries, and answer accordingly. The information on local attractions and interesting sites is actually channelled from the database of travel platform WayBlazer, also an IBM’s partner. Connie is also designed to improve itself through interactions with human customers, learning from frequent queries how to fine-tune its recommendations.

Japan, the Hen-na Hotel has in fact whittled down its biological staff to only ten people, and is in general fully manned by robots, speaking both Japanese and English. The English-speaking concierge is, bafflingly, a velociraptor sporting a blue bowtie.

The Robotic Cook

 

TNL’s OneCook is a cooking robot that drops food from separate containers into a pot-like device and heats and stirs it. It follows the recipes on the accompanying app to get the timing right and has RFID technology so the onions get added before the garlic, for example. Creator Hanlin Hong says some meals can be ready in about five minutes. You can order meals, each under $10, from the app, or you can add your own ingredients and recipes to the dispensers and app.

Sereneti Cooki houses the trays for all the ingredients, and these trays flip over into the bowl at the recipe’s designated times. A robotic arm with a spatula-like utensil stirs the ingredients as an induction heater cooks the food.

Marines Ditches Googles Robo Dogs

The LS3 robot dogs created by Google-owned Boston Dynamics were created so they could be very useful dogs of war.However, these robo-dogs have one small problem: Like quite a few real dogs, they make too much noise and hence, “A loud robot that’s going to give away their position.”

The Robo Dogs were ditched before they had a chance to become regular members of battle squads.The whole project cost around $42 million and was a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Boston Dynamics did make a smaller, quieter robo-animal, nicknamed Spot. The problem, however, is that Spot couldn’t carry much — around 40 lbs, or one-tenth of what the bigger versions could tote. Spot lacked the autonomous capabilities of the larger robo-animals, relying entirely on a human controller.