Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

Bottom of the barrel white collar jobs will all probably be automated by 2025.

When Google introduced Google Duplex, its AI assistant designed to speak like a human, the company showed off how the average person could use the tech to save time making reservations and whatnot. What wasn’t touched on was the possibility that Duplex may have a use on the other side of the line, taking over for call center employees and telemarketers.

A report from The Information suggests Google may be making a play to find other applications for its human-sounding assistant and has already started experimenting with ways to use Duplex to do with away roles currently filled by humans—a move that could have ramifications for millions of people.

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German automaker Daimler is the 1st foreign company licensed to test its autonomous vehicles in Beijing.

July 6 (UPI) — German automaker Daimler is the first foreign company licensed to test its autonomous vehicles in Beijing, the company announced on Friday.

With the certification, the maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles can begin road tests of self-driving cars in Beijing, “a metropolis with unique and complex urban traffic situations,” a company statement said.

Daimler has similar licenses in Germany and the United States and has had a research facility in China since 2005.

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A team of Japanese researchers from Waseda University, Osaka University, and Shizuoka University designed and successfully developed a high-power, silicon-nanowire thermoelectric generator which, at a thermal difference of only 5 degrees C, could drive various IoT devices autonomously in the near future.

Objects in our daily lives, such as speakers, refrigerators, and even cars, are becoming “smarter” day by day as they connect to the internet and exchange data, creating the Internet of Things (IoT), a network among the objects themselves. Toward an IoT-based society, a miniaturized is anticipated to charge these objects, especially for those that are portable and wearable.

Due to advantages such as its relatively low thermal conductance but high electric conductance, have emerged as a promising thermoelectric material. Silicon-based thermoelectric generators conventionally employed long, nanowires of about 10–100 nanometers, which were suspended on a cavity to cutoff the bypass of the heat current and secure the temperature difference across the silicon nanowires. However, the cavity structure weakened the mechanical strength of the devices and increased the fabrication cost.

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While facial recognition performs well in controlled environments (like photos taken at borders), they struggle to identify faces in the wild. According to data released under the UK’s Freedom of Information laws, the Metropolitan’s AFR system has a 98 percent false positive rate — meaning that 98 percent of the “matches” it makes are of innocent people.

The head of London’s Metropolitan Police force has defended the organization’s ongoing trials of automated facial recognition systems, despite legal challenges and criticisms that the technology is “almost entirely inaccurate.”

According to a report from The Register, UK Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick said on Wednesday that she did not expect the technology to lead to “lots of arrests,” but argued that the public “expect[s]” law enforcement to test such cutting-edge systems.

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Researchers at UC Berkeley have figured out a way to train robots by imitating humans, by showing them and not telling them what to do. This is a stride in being able to easily communicate with machines to hopefully usher in an age of robotic butlers and home assistants to serve humans’ needs.

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As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome – or at least evade – our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy.”

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The Cognitive Limits of Lifelong Learning (Project Syndicate):

“As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks once performed by humans, workers worldwide fear for their futures. But what will really prevent humans from competing effectively in the labor market is not the robots themselves, but rather our own minds, with all their psychological biases and cognitive limitations …

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Disney’s animatronics are coming a long way from drunken pirates waving flagons of ale or hippos that wiggle their ears. In the (relatively) near future, robotic versions of Iron Man or Buzz Lightyear could be performing autonomous acrobatics overhead in Disney theme parks, thanks to the newly-unveiled Stuntronics robot.

Animatronic characters have populated Disney parks for more than half a century, albeit often just looping a specific movement over and over. In recent years Disney Research has tried to make the robots more agile and interactive, developing versions that can grab objects more naturally, and even juggle and play catch with visitors.

Back in May the company unveiled a prototype called Stickman. Basically a mechanical stick with two degrees of freedom, the robot could be flicked into the air like a trapeze artist, where it used a suite of sensors to tuck and roll in midair, perform a couple of backflips, and unfurl for landing.

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Seen this video going around. I think this is more of a fancy dummy than a robot, cause if they had video of it walking around i’m sure they would of posted it. The Atlas robot will be able to do stuff like this in a couple of years. Disney probably wants to build some circus attraction where it would be cheaper and safer to have the robots doing the stunts than the people.

In Unrelated news robot news. Supposedly Honda has killed off the Asimo robot, figured that was coming when they didnt even attempt to send it out to the robot competitions, which gives some idea how bad it really must of been behind the scenes; its claim to fame though will be proving that robots that walked like people were possible.

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