San Francisco SPCA uses a robot to chase away homeless people, because...
The San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals bought a "security robot" to harass homeless people at its Mission District offices, a move that the city has banned and threatened...
View ArticleKimberly Clark says the Trump tax-cuts let it fire 5,500 US workers and pay...
Kimberly Clark, makers of Kleenex and Huggies, says it will lay off 10-12% of its US workforce and divert the savings to shareholder dividends and capital investment (presumably robots to replace the...
View ArticleStephen Hawking's final words to the internet: robots aren't the problem,...
The last message Stephen Hawking posted to a public internet forum was an answer to a question in a Reddit AMA, querying how humanity will weather an age of technological unemployment. Professor...
View ArticleChinese law professor: AI will end capitalism
Feng Xiang is a prominent Chinese legal scholar with an appointment at Tsinghua University; in a new Washington Post editorial adapted from his recent speech at the Berggruen Institute’s China Center...
View ArticlePapers sought for We Robot: Miami's eighth annual conference on robots and...
Michael Froomkin writes, "We Robot, now heading into its 8th year, is lots of fun -- and it's also the leading North American conference on robotics law and policy. The 2019 edition will be held at...
View ArticleHow trade unions are addressing automation
The first wave of computerized automation caught trade unions flat-footed; already reeling from the Reagan-era attacks on labor, union leadership failed completely to come up with a coherent response...
View ArticleCompetitive book-sorting event pits New York library workers against...
Big library systems struggling with the task of sorting interbranch requests for distribution on the library's delivery vehicles can buy a $2 million Lyngsoe Systems Compact Cross Belt Sorter, whose...
View ArticleScience fiction writers on the future of work: Laurie Penny, Ken Liu, Charlie...
Wired Magazine has just published a package of eight sf writers visions of "The Future of Work," including some of our favorite authors like Laurie Penny (previously), Charlie Jane Anders...
View ArticleStop saying "robots are coming for your job"; start saying "Your boss wants...
Tech reporter and sf writer Brian Merchant (previously) calls our attention to the peculiar construction of the problem statement in articles about automation and obsolescence, in which "robots are...
View ArticleVast majority of truck-driving jobs are not under threat from automation
The looming threat of mass-unemployment driven by automation has been grossly overstated: while it's true that "truck driver" is one of the most common jobs in America, the vast majority of truck...
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Inventing a better future of work: the Working Futures science fiction...
[Worried about automation and high-tech unemployment, or gig economy labor apocalypses? Techdirt's Mike Masnick and the Copia Institute have pulled together an outstanding anthology of speculative...
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Text this number with the name of a musical artist, and an AI responds with...
Musician and Programmer Sam Agnew decided to spend his quarantine time automating new music creation by popular artist, with the help of OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 language modelling...
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Japanese town enlists terrifying robot wolves to protect them from bears
From Reuters: The town of Takikawa, on the northern island of Hokkaido, purchased and installed two Monster Wolf robots after bears were found roaming neighbourhoods in September. City officials said...
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Sarah "O'" Connor tells the Financial Times why she was wrong about robots.
Sarah Connor was the mother of future human resistance leader John Connor, and the target of the first time-traveling assassination by Terminator robots. Sarah O'Connor is a columnist and associate...
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Watch a wombat-sized research robot burrow into marsupial holes
Scott Carver is a wildlife ecologist at the University of Tasmania who is perhaps best known for his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research into the physical phenomenon of wombat poop. With that mystery out...
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The MLB is testing out Robot Umpires to optimize baseball.
Major League Baseball has been developing an Automated Ball-Strike System that trains computers to determine whether or not a pitch arrives over home plate within the designated ideal strike zone. The...
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The World's first robot hotel
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Explore Japan (@tankensurujapan) Automation is reaching new heights daily. The dual fields of robotics and artificial intelligence have rendered science...
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Bipedal robot drummer already better at it than most humans
Back in August, the Chinese cybernetics company Xiamoi announced plans to build a bipedal humanoid drummer. Initially, it seemed like a strange choice — of all the things you could do with an android,...
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Krispy Kreme to deploy robots in factory stores within 18 months
Krispy Kreme CEO Mike Tattersfield announced in a Yahoo Finance Live interview that automation is being tested with an expected $2 million annual savings resulting from robots taking over portions of...
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CNET "quietly publishing" AI-generated news articles
From Futurism: CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of "automation technology" — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on a new wave of financial explainer articles,...
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Rabbi gives a sermon written by AI
Via Jerusalem Post: New York Senior Rabbi Josh Franklin, of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, surprised his congregation earlier this week by delivering a sermon written entirely by Artificial...
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What happens when you use music reviews as prompts for AI generated music?
Over at Pitchfork, writer Jayson Greene offers a pretty fascinating look at both the appeal, and the shortcomings, of using text-to-music LLMs such as Google's new MusicLM. In a lot of ways, Greene...
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