Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Dawn of a Robot Revolution
June 6th, 2014Via: Financial Times: At the Automatica robot and automation fair in Munich this week the organisers devoted a whole section to so-called “service robots” for the first time. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for manufacturing, engineering and automation demonstrated a Care-O-Bot that sweeps office floors and empties waste paper bins. Pal Robotics showed Stockbot, which […]
Seattle Hikes Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
June 3rd, 2014Researchers Carl Freyand and Michael Osborne recently tried to figure out the likelihood that automation will replace humans in a wide variety of jobs: According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a […]
LAPD Adds Drones to Arsenal, Says They’ll Be Used Sparingly
May 31st, 2014*wink* Via: Los Angeles Times: The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired some eyes in the sky. On Friday, the department announced that it had acquired two “unmanned aerial vehicles” as gifts from the Seattle Police Department. The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a […]
Lifeguard Drones
May 23rd, 2014Via: Motherboard:
Cars Could Drive Themselves Sooner than Expected
May 19th, 2014Via: Reuters: Cars could be driving themselves down the world’s streets far sooner than expected, thanks to a change in a global treaty backed by European countries. A little-noticed amendment to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic agreed last month would let drivers take their hands off the wheel of self-driving cars. It was […]
‘Now The Military Is Going To Build Robots That Have Morals’
May 14th, 2014Via: DefenseOne: The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems.
Human Consciousness Probably Can’t Be Modeled On A Computer
May 13th, 2014Via: Medium: The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people […]
Robotic Arm Catches Objects On The Fly
May 13th, 2014Via: EPFL: A robot developed by EPFL researchers is capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five hundredths of a second.
Is Your Job at Risk from Robot Labor? Check This Handy Interactive Chart
May 13th, 2014Via: Quartz: In the second machine age, robots will perform tasks once thought to require uniquely human abilities, like driving our taxis and filleting our fish. But not all jobs will be equally affected by automation. The interactive plot above attempts to sort out the differences. We compared three variables related to the American workforce: […]
Innovative Prosthetic Arm From Segway Inventor Cleared by U.S.
May 10th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: A prosthetic arm made by a company founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen was approved for sale by U.S. regulators, who called it the first such device able to respond to multiple simultaneous commands from a wearer’s brain. Electrodes attached to the arm detect muscle contractions close to the prosthesis, and a computer […]
