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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,250

An Investor Perspective: How To Prepare Society For An Automated Future

“I think we are on the verge of a massive disruption,” Ford told me recently. “We see stagnant wages, and we see an erosion in the quality of the jobs. A lot of solid middle-class jobs are disappearing, and that alone has been remarkably disruptive… This is a big deal and I think it’s going to get get vastly bigger, and I do think that this is a subject everyone should be a bit concerned about.”

To put it bluntly: Once cars and trucks become automated, what will taxi and truck drivers do for work? Same with factory workers, fast food employees, retail clerks, and millions of other low-skill jobs that could theoretically be phased out entirely with robotics. This isn’t some sci-fi future; one report compiled recently by the McKinsey Global Institute says that advances in AI, automation and robotics will displace between 39 and 73 million jobs by 2030.

Even Alphabet is having trouble reinventing smart cities

An ambitious smart-city project spearheaded by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has run into local resistance, causing delays.

The backstory: Waterfront Toronto, a development agency founded by the Canadian government, partnered with the Google sister company in October 2017 to create a futuristic neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs plans to fill the 12-acre plot with driverless shuttle buses, garbage-toting robots, and other gadgets to show how emerging technologies can improve city life.

The problem: Sidewalk Labs’ connection to Google and vague descriptions of its business model alarmed privacy advocates and urban planners from the start. Local pushback has increased since, causing a key supporter to resign from the project and delaying the release of its final development plan to spring 2019.

Futurists in Ethiopia are betting on artificial intelligence to drive development

“We should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies—that is already done,” Assefa argues.

That makes sense to academics like Singh — though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. “But any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.”

A 2017 report (pdf) by the World Wide Web Foundation suggested that Ethiopian “intelligence services are using machine intelligence techniques to break encryption and find patterns in social media posts that can be used to identify dissidents.” And while mobile phone and internet penetration in Ethiopia is comparatively poor—a situation made worst amid widespread anti-government protests, which prompted an internet crackdown in February — the report added that government surveillance and oppression could increase as the use of smartphones expands.

LG to open next AI research lab in Canada

LG will build its next artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in Toronto, it announced Wednesday.

The South Korean electronics company said the Canadian lab is an extension of its newly expanded Silicon Valley AI Lab in Santa Clara, California. It also has AI labs in South Korea, India and Russia.

“Early implementations of AI in connected devices today are setting the stage for tomorrow’s smart cities, smart homes, smart businesses and smart devices, all with capabilities that no one has even dreamed of yet.” said LG President and Chief Technology Officer Il-pyung Park.

Chinese Scientists Want to Capture a Small Asteroid and Land it on Earth

Space agencies have successfully studied asteroid and comets up close on several occasions, but capturing one for mining is also in the works. A group of Chinese scientists is looking to go a step further. Their ambitious plan involves not just capturing an asteroid, but bringing it down to the surface of Earth for study and mining.

This does sound pretty crazy on the face of it, but researchers from the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences say it’s feasible. Researcher Li Mingtao and his team presented the idea at a conference to explore ideas for future technology in Shenzhen. Li says that the mission could focus on asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit, which could make them a potential hazard in the future. The Chinese plan could turn a hazard into a new source of rare materials.

The asteroids targeted by this project would be on the small side — probably just a few hundred tons. The first step is to send a fleet of small robotic probes to intercept the space rock. Then, they would deploy a “bag” of some sort that covers the asteroid, allowing the robots to slowly alter its course and steer it back to Earth.