Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Parrot Uses Alexa to Order Watermelon, Lightbulbs While Owner Is Out
December 15th, 2018Via: Newsweek: A peckish parrot has been caught ordering strawberries, a watermelon and even a water boiler through his foster owner’s electronic personal assistant. Rocco, an African Grey, requested the items through an Alexa device while his minder was out of the home. Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went […]
Affect Recognition: Face Scanning Combined with Insane Pseudoscience
December 14th, 2018You’ll love this one. Via: The Intercept: Facial recognition has quickly shifted from techno-novelty to fact of life for many, with millions around the world at least willing to put up with their faces scanned by software at the airport, their iPhones, or Facebook’s server farms. But researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute […]
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Doorbell Cameras
December 14th, 2018Via: ACLU: Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year. While the details are sketchy, the application describes a […]
Walmart Testing Robotic Fry Cook
December 11th, 2018Via: Yahoo Finance: Walmart (WMT) is in the early stages of testing a kitchen robot assistant named “Flippy” at its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters to see whether or not it’s the right fit for its in-store delis. Flippy is the world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant powered by artificial intelligence from Miso Robotics, a two-year-old startup. […]
DeepMind’s AlphaZero Obliterates Previous AI Chess Champion
December 6th, 2018Via: Telegraph: DeepMind’s artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero is now showing signs of human-like intuition and creativity, in what developers have hailed as ‘turning point’ in history. The computer system amazed the world last year when it mastered the game of chess from scratch within just four hours, despite not being programmed how to win. But […]
5G + AI
December 6th, 2018Via: EE Times: SAN FRANCISCO — Qualcomm launched a $100 million venture fund at an event here where the level of enthusiasm for machine learning ran high. China’s SenseTime alone talked about taking in $3 billion for its platform, and others gave examples of AI quadrupling productivity and saving lives. The combination of 5G and […]
Waymo One Robotaxi Service Available to “A Few Hundred Customers” in Arizona
December 5th, 2018Meatsack still onboard. Via: Los Angeles Times: Robot cars are now officially a real business. Waymo on Wednesday launched a commercial robot ride-hailing service in Arizona called Waymo One. Like Uber or Lyft, customers will summon a ride with a smartphone app. But in this case, the car will be driving itself. “This is a […]
Mastercard and Microsoft Have a Frightening Plan to Create Universal “Digital Identities”
December 4th, 2018Via: FastCompany: Sometimes a business inadvertently drops the pretense and just tells the world its real intentions. We saw this yesterday, when Amazon bragged about how it “allowed” an employee to lose 100 pounds by endlessly delivering boxes. Amazon saw this as a heartwarming tale about how great it is to work for the e-commerce […]
Robot Janitors Are Coming to Mop Floors at a Walmart Near You
December 3rd, 2018Via: MSN: Robots are coming to a Walmart Inc. near you, and not just as a gimmick. The world’s largest retailer is rolling out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots in some of its stores in the U.S. by the end of the January, it said in a joint statement with Brain Corp., which makes the machines. […]
Google Patents Reveal Plans to Monitor Our Moods, Our Movements, and Our Children’s Behavior at Home
November 25th, 2018I found myself thinking of a haiku about an imaginary situation in which my father (who died a while back) would be standing in a room, arguing with one of these “smart” speakers and eventually challenging it to a fight with his weapon of choice, a yard-long section of 2×4 lumber. Old man stands bugeyed […]
