Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
China Is Creating a Database of Its Citizens’ Voices to Boost its Surveillance Capability
October 23rd, 2017In other news, Google Home Capable of Voice Printing Multiple Users. Via: Time: The Chinese government has collected tens of thousands of “voice pattern” samples from targeted citizens and is inputting them into a national voice biometric database, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Monday. The idea is that an automated system, thought […]
LAPD Becomes Nation’s Largest Police Department to Test Drones
October 18th, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times: After months of often-heated debate, a civilian oversight panel Tuesday signed off on a yearlong test of drones by the Los Angeles Police Department, which will become the largest police department in the nation to deploy the controversial technology. The Police Commission’s 3-1 vote prompted jeers, cursing and a small protest […]
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC: “What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single […]
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the […]
Google’s Home Mini Needed a Software Patch to Stop Some of Them from Recording Everything
October 11th, 2017Mmm hmm. Via: The Verge: Categorize this under “one of the worst possible PR nightmares for a Google smart speaker.” According to Artem Russakovskii at Android Police, the Google Home Mini he was reviewing was randomly and near-constantly recording sounds in his home and transmitting them to Google. The company acknowledged the problem and is […]
GM to Buy Sensor-Tech Firm Strobe to Speed Up Self-Driving Car Push
October 10th, 2017Via: Reuters: No. 1 U.S. automaker General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday it would buy Strobe Inc, which uses LIDAR technology to help self-driving cars identify objects at a distance, to speed up development of autonomous vehicles and slash sensor costs. LIDAR is one of the major sensor technologies used in autonomous, or self-driving […]
Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest
October 8th, 2017Via: LiveScience: It’s harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons […]
Our Minds Can Be Hijacked: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia
October 6th, 2017Via: Guardian: There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein […]
Japan Trials Driverless Cars with Rural Elderly
September 12th, 2017Via: Reuters: As the annual rice harvest begins this month in the Japanese town of Nishikata, the combines that usually putter along the sleepy roads lining its rice fields are giving way to a vehicle residents have never before seen, a driverless shuttle bus. Japan is starting to experiment with self-driving buses in rural communities […]
Cruise Automation/GM: “How We Built the First Real Self-Driving Car (Really)”
September 12th, 2017Via: Medium: The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car, but it’s the first that meets the redundancy and safety requirements we believe are necessary to operate without a driver. There’s no other car like this in existence. In a few weeks, these cars will be a part of the fleet […]
