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AI comes of age; consumers prefer to talk to machines than humans: Pega survey

78% respondents said they were comfortable interacting with AI for business-related queries.


Artificial intelligence has come of age. Customers in the country seem to prefer to get responses from a machine than interacting with humans. The reason, according to a survey, answers given by an AI-system is backed with voluminous data that it crunches to deliver right responses.

A study commissioned by Pegasystems, a Nasdaq-listed digital transformation solutions company, has found that 60 per cent of people in the country are more likely to tell the truth to an AI system or chatbot as compared to a human, Suman Reddy, Managing Director of Pega India, told BusinessLine.

Kenyan inventors create bio-robotic arm controlled by brain signals

It was invented by David Gathu and Moses Kinyua and is powered by brain signals.

The signals are converted into an electric current by a “NeuroNode” biopotential headset receiver. This electrical current is then driven into the robot’s circuitry, which gives the arm its mobility.

The arm has several component materials including recycled wood and moves vertically and horizontally.

Juniorr Amenra.

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Tiny bio-inspired swarm robots for targeted medical interventions

Micro-sized robots could bring a new wave of innovation in the medical field by allowing doctors to access specific regions inside the human body without the need for highly invasive procedures. Among other things, these tiny robots could be used to carry drugs, genes or other substances to specific sites inside the body, opening up new possibilities for treating different medical conditions.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Helmholtz Institute Erlangen–Nürnberg for Renewable Energy have recently developed micro and nano-sized robots inspired by biological micro-swimmers (e.g., bacteria or spermatozoa). These , presented in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, are capable of upstream motility, which essentially means that they can autonomously move in the opposite direction to that in which a fluid (e.g., blood) flows. This makes them particularly promising for intervening inside the .

“We believe that the ideas discussed in our multidisciplinary study can transform many aspects of medicine by enabling tasks such as targeted and precise delivery of drugs or genes, as well as facilitating non-invasive surgeries,” Daniel Ahmed, lead author of the recent paper, told TechXplore.

Universal basic income doesn’t impact worker productivity

What do you think Eric Klien.


A universal basic income worth about one-fifth of workers’ median wages did not reduce the amount of effort employees put into their work, according to an experiment conducted by Spanish economists, a sign that the policy initiative could help mitigate inequalities and the impact of automation.

Providing workers with a universal basic income did not reduce the amount of effort they put into their work, according to an experiment conducted by Spanish economists, a sign that the policy initiative could help mitigate inequalities and debunking a common criticism of the proposal.

Examining a universal basic income worth about one-fifth of workers’ median wages, the researchers also found that the threat of being replaced by robots did not impact workers’ productivity, nor did a tax on firms when they replace a worker with a robot or automated process, though the latter successfully created a disincentive for managers.