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Ahshok Goel has been employing a robot as one of his teaching assistants. But the thing is, the students never realized that they were talking to a robot.

IBM’s Watson platform has done a number of remarkable things since its inception. Robots in retail stores are now powered by Watson, as are virtual assistants, and (of course) intelligent chatbots. If you aren’t farmilar with it, Watson gives robots and virtual platforms the ability to understand, learn, sense, and experience.

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Wow!!


The Pentagon is developing an emerging technology able to track, target and destroy approaching ICBMs and decoys simultaneously — by attaching a new Multi-Object Kill Vehicle, or MOKV, to a Ground Based Interceptor.

Development of the MOVK is intended to evolve from existing tests with the EKV, however industry and Pentagon developers do not want to rush the system in order to ensure it is well suited to destroy emerging threats anticipated five, ten or more years from now, Norm Montano, Raytheon EKV Program Director, told Scout Warrior in an interview last year.

While spoken many months ago, Montano’s comments bear even greater relevance now — as tensions with North Korea rise quickly and many analyze the regime’s fast-advancing ability to hit US targets with an ICBM.

Radioactive waste continues to pour from Exelon’s Illinois nuclear power plants more than a decade after the discovery of chronic leaks led to national outrage, a $1.2 million government settlement and a company vow to guard against future accidents, an investigation by a government watchdog group found.

Since 2007, there have been at least 35 reported leaks, spills or other accidental releases in Illinois of water contaminated with radioactive tritium, a byproduct of nuclear power production and a carcinogen at high levels, a Better Government Association review of federal and state records shows.

No fines were issued for the accidents, all of which were self-reported by the company.

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I dont know about his comment. But, this will probably become at least as big as the auto industry. If you had a robot that could cook, clean, take care of the yard, drive, run errands, had various entertainment features, etc… Then, every household in America will want one. It will just come down to getting the robots to the point where they can do all of that, and having the vision to do it, and initially selling it to the public.


“The Internet lets every person reach out and touch all the information in the world. But robotics lets you reach out and touch and manipulate all the stuff in the world — and so it is not just restricted to information, it is everything,” says Raibert, who spoke from the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the end of October.

Indeed, Raibert is building that reality. Boston Dynamics, which was bought by SoftBank from Alphabet in June, builds robots that look like humans and animals.

Let me start with two brief stories about social change. The first concerns changing laws and values about relationships. Only in 1967—in the aptly named case of Loving v. Virginia—did the United States Supreme Court recognize that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the United States Constitution. Nineteen years before, in 1948, the Supreme Court of California decided that such restrictions were unlawful. The California Supreme Court’s decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage also predated the federal decision, and reflected how, to channel William Gibson, th…

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