What it means to be human in a world that’s increasingly filled with robots?
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Category: robotics/AI
Today’s leading buzzwords seem to describe very separate concepts, but it turns out that they have some amazing commonalities.
- By Stephen Wolfram on April 1, 2018
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Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone. High-tech systems like the one used by Amazon Go completely automate the checkout process. China, which has its own ambitious e-commerce companies, is emerging as an especially fertile place for these retail experiments.
But the opening of Amazon Go in January was alarming for many retailers, who saw a sudden willingness by Amazon to wield its technology power in new ways. Hundreds of cameras near the ceiling and sensors in the shelves help automatically tally the cookies, chips and soda that shoppers remove and put into their bags. Shoppers’ accounts are charged as they walk out the doors.
Amazon is now looking to expand Go to new areas. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on its expansion plans, but the company has a job posting for a senior real estate manager who will be responsible for “site selection and acquisition” and field tours of “potential locations” for new Go stores.
“Unanimously, there was an element of embarrassment because here is an online retailer showing us how to do brick and mortar, and frankly doing it amazingly well,” said Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, a company that makes inventory management robots that Walmart and others are testing.
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A swarm of robotic bees, nimble enough to fly across the surface of Mars and explore the Red Planet’s nooks and crannies, is being funded by NASA.
The cyber-insects, dubbed Marsbees, are the size of bumblebees but have giant wings to generate sufficient lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than Earth’s.
Developed by US and Japanese scientists, the bees would be fitted with sensors and wireless communication devices so they could map terrain, take samples, or even look for signs of life, such as methane emissions.
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O n the outskirts of Beijing, a policeman peers over his glasses at a driver stopped at a motorway checkpoint. As he looks at the man’s face, a tiny camera in one of the lenses of his glasses records his features and checks them with a national database.
The artificial intelligence-powered glasses are what Chinese citizens refer to as “black tech”, because they spot delinquents on the country’s “blacklist”. Other examples include robots for crowd control, drones that hover over the country’s borders, and intelligent systems to track behaviour online. Some reports claim the government has installed scanners that can forcibly read information from smartphones.
In the last two weeks, Facebook has been mired in a privacy storm in the UK and US over potential misuse of personal data. But such an event might baffle many in China, where the country’s surveillance culture eclipses anything Facebook has done.
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DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) in swarms of 250 robots or more to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough swarm capabilities.
To continue the rapid pace and further advance the technology development of OFFSET, DARPA is soliciting proposals for the second “swarm sprint.” Each of the five core “sprints” focuses on one of the key thrust areas: Swarm Tactics, Swarm Autonomy, Human-Swarm Team, Virtual Environment, and Physical Testbed. This second group of “Swarm Sprinters” will have the opportunity to work with one or both of the OFFSET Swarm Systems Integrator teams to develop and assess tactics as well as algorithms to enhance autonomy.
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