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+16 +1
Why Not Utopia?
Some quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics...
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+15 +1
Google patented building robots with personalities
Whether or not we are headed toward a robot revolution, Google wants us to get comfortable with the next generation of robots. In a new patent awarded to the company today, Google outlines ways to download and customize the personality of a robot or computer.
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+13 +1
Bomb Squad Robot Delivers Pizza, Saves A Man's Life
Sometimes, a kind hand holding out a pizza is enough, even if that hand is attached to the mechanical arm of a bomb squad robot. On Monday, California Highway Patrol responded to a man standing with a knife on a San Jose highway overpass. After a five-hour standoff, the man left alive, thanks in no small part to the bomb squad robot.
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+16 +1
Science by robot: Outfitting the world’s “smartest” lake
Arriving at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's field research station on the shores of lovely Lake George, the offices appeared deserted. The station's staff didn't hide from us; they had all relocated to another building for a training session on a new piece of technology. They've been doing a lot of that lately. The scene in their meeting room was mostly pretty standard—tables, chairs, coffee, and snacks—but not many field stations have a shiny new nine-panel computer display on the wall.
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+4 +1
'Gods' edging out robots at Toyota facility
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.'s oldest plant, there's a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts...
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Mitsukoshi Gets Robot Receptionist
Robots will soon become a common phenomenon in the world and Japan has already started the trend. A robot receptionist started work on April 20, 2015 and never gets bored of welcoming customers to her upmarket shop. The new machine recruitment has been made at Japan’s oldest department store chain Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi and says, “My …
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+13 +1
Do Killer Robots Violate Human Rights?
When machines are anthropomorphized, we risk applying a human standard that should not apply to mere tools.
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Almost Human
Robot images
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+9 +1
Robots may be getting less clumsy, thanks to the science of illusion
Robots are clumsy. They fall over, bump into walls, and generally lack the spatial awareness of humans. Earlier this year, I took a ride in Mercedes-Benz’s concept self-driving car, and even that could only drive itself in a loop because engineers had preprogrammed it to do so – the car didn’t really know where it was going, just that it had to turn a certain number of degrees once certain sensors were activated.
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+18 +1
Incredible: Robot Stitches A Grape Back Together!
The da Vinci Surgical System is used to stitch a grape back together. The same technology that can be used to suture a tiny grape is designed to help perform delicate, minimally invasive surgery.
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+5 +1
Robot masters new skills through trial and error
Researchers have developed algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn, marking a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.
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+13 +1
Self-folding robot walks, swims, climbs, dissolves
A demo sparking interest at the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle was all about an origami robot that was worked on by researchers. More specifically, the team members are from the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT and the department of informatics, Technische Universitat in Germany. "An untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades" was the name of the paper...
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Amazon crowns winner of first warehouse robot challenge
The robots that joined Amazon's Picking Challenge aren't quite ready to replace human warehouse workers, but some of them seriously showed great promise. Team RBO from the Technical University of Berlin, in particular, demolished all the other 27 competitors by winning the contest with a 60-point lead over the second place team. If you recall, Amazon challenged companies and institutions a few months ago to build a machine that can...
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+14 +1
This idea that technology destroys jobs is garbage
There is a popular meme in tech and economics right now: the idea that technology — or robots specifically — will take our jobs and put us all out of work. This trend is typified by Wendell Wallach, a researcher at Yale, who recently said we're entering an era of structural high unemployment because tech is taking all our jobs...
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Meet The Four-Legged Freaks Competing In DARPA's Robotics Challenge
Robots are immune to pain, don’t have to breathe, and depending on how they’re designed, can go places humans can’t. They’re also, as my colleague Erik Sofge notes, about as good at walking as toddlers. Sofge is present to witness DARPA’s rescue robot competition, where vaguely-humanoid mechanical beasts will open doors, climb over obstacles, and otherwise attempt to be human-but-better.
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Astronomer Royal: If we find aliens, they will be machines
Prof Lord Rees told the Cheltenham Science Festival the first contact with aliens will be through robots
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Made to measure
HUMAN hands are extremely good at making clothes. While many manufacturing processes have been automated, stitching together garments remains a job for millions of...
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Robot fact-checkers will soon be able to verify the web (Wired UK)
The internet's noisy echo chamber of "facts", claims and assertions may soon be able to be verified -- by a squadron of robot fact-checkers. In a study published in Computational Fact Checking From Knowledge Networks, researchers from Indiana University revealed they have developed an algorithm designed to determine the accuracy of simple facts.
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Jellyfish "Gooeyness" Could Be a Model for Self-Healing Robots
A jellyfish’s strange shortcut to symmetry allows injured animals to reorganize their remaining limbs instead of having to regrow them
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Robotic cockroach can slither through your walls
The Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at University of California, Berkeley continues to creep us out with their cockroach-like robot. The researchers have a long history in improving upon their roach design, and they haven’t [...]
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