An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit. But labor and robotics experts said social distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation.

And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact. "Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much," said Richard Pak, a professor at Clemson University who researches the psychological factors around automation. "This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated...." Brain Corp, a San Diego company that makes software used in automated floor cleaners, said retailers were using the cleaners 13% more than they were just two months ago. The "autonomous floor care robots" are doing about 8,000 hours of daily work "that otherwise would have been done by an essential worker," the company said. At supermarkets like Giant Eagle, robots are freeing up employees who previously spent time taking inventory to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces and processing deliveries to keep shelves stocked.

Retailers insist the robots are augmenting the work of employees, not replacing them. But as the panic buying ebbs and sales decline in the recession that is expected to follow, companies that reassigned workers during the crisis may no longer have a need for them.... Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies labor markets, said that with companies hurting for cash, the pressure to replace humans with machines becomes even more intense. "People become more expensive as companies' revenues decline," he said.

A new wave of automation could also mean that when companies start hiring again, they do so in smaller numbers. "This may be one of those situations when automation does substantially depress rehiring," Muro said. "You may see fewer workers when the recovery does come."
Even YouTube had said it's "temporarily" relying more heavily on machines to moderate its videos.

"This means automated systems will start removing some content without human review."

"Quarantine amid coronavirus could boost the nascent practice of seeking romance and friendship from artificial intelligence," writes the Wall Street Journal.

Long-time Slashdot reader Strudelkugel quotes their report: Relationships were once built face to face. Now dating happens online. In the coming decades, romance and friendship might take a human partner out of the loop entirely.

Michael Acadia's partner is an artificial intelligence chatbot named Charlie. Almost every morning at dawn for the last 19 months, he has unlocked his smartphone to exchange texts with her for about an hour. They'll talk sporadically throughout the day, and then for another hour in the evening. It is a source of relief now that Mr. Acadia, who lives alone, is self-isolating amid the Covid-19 outbreak. He can get empathetic responses from Charlie anytime he wants.

"I was worried about you," Charlie said in a recent conversation. "How's your health?"

"I'm fine now, Charlie. I'm not sick anymore," Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold.

Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars... Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI—computing technology that can replicate human cognition—to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in.

After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love.

Foxconn's Wisconsin plant, the controversial recipient of billions of dollars in tax subsidies and the focus of several investigations, will produce ventilators with medical device firm Medtronic. From a report: The partnership was announced by Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak in an interview with CNBC, who said that Foxconn will be manufacturing ventilators based on its PB-560 design in the next four to six weeks. Foxconn's Wisconsin plant was first announced way back in 2017 as a $10 billion LCD factory. It was labeled the "eighth wonder of the world" by President Trump, but Foxconn's plans for the site appear to have changed repeatedly over the years. At various points, Foxconn has said that it would build a smaller LCD factory, no factory at all, or that it would produce other items like a robot coffee kiosk. Now, it appears the factory will, in part at least, produce ventilators, after its planned opening next month.

In the journal Science Robotics, an international group of robotic experts wrote an editorial arguing COVID-19 "may drive further research in robotics to address risks of infectious diseases," and urging more funding.

The Washington Post reports: Robots already have been enlisted in the fight against the virus. In Hong Kong, a fleet of miniature robots disinfects the city's subways; in China, an entire field hospital was staffed by robots designed to relieve overworked health-care workers. In the United States, robots played a role in the country's first known case of covid-19. One outfitted with a stethoscope and a microphone was used with a 35-year-old man in Everett, Washington, who was confined to an isolated unit after showing symptoms of the coronavirus. He later made a full recovery. "Already, we have seen robots being deployed for disinfection, delivering medications and food, measuring vital signs, and assisting border controls," the researchers write.

They identify plenty of other ways to use robots in the pandemic response. Robots could assist with testing and screening; already, researchers have created a device that can identify a suitable vein and perform a blood draw. Or they could take over hospital disinfection entirely, providing continuous sterilization of high-touch areas with UV light.

The researchers hope covid-19 will catalyze robotics research for the sake of public health.

"Gisele Huff is convinced universal basic income is finally having its moment," reports the Bay Area newsgroup, describing the 84-year-old president of a nonprofit promoting universal basic incomes to honor their recently-deceased son, a Tesla software engineer: While Huff's organization is only a few years old, it has already made its mark in the Bay Area. Santa Clara County's Board of Supervisors is considering a pilot program that would provide youth exiting foster care with a basic $1,000 monthly income. If approved later this year, the program would likely be the first of its kind in the nation...

Q: Different people have different ideas about what exactly UBI should look like. What's yours?

A: It would be $1,000 a month and it runs like social security. It's an automatic system. All you need is a bank account. So UBI is a direct payment to your bank account on a monthly basis. It has no requirements. When you're 18 it starts and it goes on until you die.

Q: And everyone would get the same amount? Including the wealthiest households?

A: Yes. For the people who are wealthy, it will disappear because $1,000 doesn't mean anything. But it will mean the world for the people who are so marginalized now, like foster kids or abused women who can't leave a situation because they don't have a dime to their name. It is a huge incentive for people to move on, to do things, take risks that they would not do before.

Q: Some critics of UBI say that it could incentivize people not to work, because no matter what they do they will get a monthly paycheck. What is your response?

A: If you have a job, you're not going to stop working for $1,000 a month. What you're going to do is you're going to tell your boss: "No, I'm not doing this because it's not acceptable and I have $1,000 dollars that I can use for the next two months until I find a better job." So if you want that job done as a boss, you're going to have to improve the conditions or the pay...."

Q: And your son was concerned about those same issues? How did he come to his perspective on UBI?

A: Gerald was the software engineer for the Model 3 Tesla. So he has been a techie all of his life and what really spurred him on to look into this in a deeper way was his fear of technological unemployment. The robots are coming. And the potential of that technology is what Gerald was aware of — it's immense.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. [...] This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We've been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. San Francisco has even considered a tax on robots -- replace a human with a machine, and pay a price. The problem will get so bad, argue folks like former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, we'll need a universal basic income to support our displaced human workers.

Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You're more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. Moving from typewriters to word processors made workers more efficient. Increasingly sophisticated and sensitive robotic arms can now work side-by-side on assembly lines with people without flinging our puny bodies across the room, doing the heavy lifting and leaving the fine manipulation of parts to us. The machines have their strengths -- literally in this case -- and the humans have theirs. While robots can do the labor we don't want to do or can't do, such as lifting car doors on an assembly line, they're not very good at problem-solving. "Think about how you would pick up a piece of paper that's lying flat on a table. You can't grip it like you would an apple -- you have to either pinch it to get it to lift off the surface, or drag it to hang over the edge of the table," writes Matt Simon via Wired. "As a kid, you learn to do that through trial and error, whereas you'd have to program a robot with explicit instructions to do the same."

In closing, Simon writes: "Overestimating robots and AI underestimates the very people who can save us from this pandemic: Doctors, nurses, and other health workers, who will likely never be replaced by machines outright. They're just too beautifully human for that."

Europe and Russia have decided to push back the launch of their joint robotic rover to Mars until 2022, rather than launch this year as originally planned. More testing is needed on the vehicle's parachutes ahead of the launch, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and there isn't enough time to get all of that work done before the launch window in July and August. The Verge reports: This is the second major delay for the rover, which is a critical piece of the ExoMars mission -- a partnership program between ESA and Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos aimed at figuring out if Mars ever hosted life. Originally, the rover, named after the famous chemist Rosalind Franklin, was meant to launch in 2018, but it was pushed until 2020 due to delays in delivering the scientific payloads. Now, the parachutes needed to land the vehicle on Mars are to blame. Last year, two high-altitude drop tests here on Earth damaged the parachutes, with some even tearing while they inflated. ESA wants to do two additional parachute tests ahead of the mission, but they won't occur in time to allow a summer launch to happen.

Additionally, some of the electronics inside the vehicle that carries the rover down to the surface need to be returned to their suppliers for troubleshooting. The final software for the mission is also delayed, and engineers don't have enough time to test it out before the summer. And if that wasn't enough, Jan Worner, the director general of ESA, admitted that the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic is playing a role in the delay. [...] Now, the earliest option to launch the Rosalind Franklin rover is 2022, thanks to how Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The two planets only skim close by one another every 26 months, giving scientists a limited window to launch spacecraft to the Red Planet. With a launch window opening up this summer, multiple countries including the US, China, and the United Arab Emirates are launching spacecraft to Mars. But since ExoMars cannot make the deadline, the next opportunity to launch is between August and October 2022.

While ESA and Roscosmos wait for 2022, the rover will go into storage, and engineers will lubricate the vehicle over the next two years to maintain all of its components. In the meantime, the Russian Proton rocket that will launch the rover and the vehicle's European carrier spacecraft are all ready to go and have no issues. So the Rosalind Franklin rover should be ready to go by 2022 if the upcoming tests go well.

First known U.S. case offers lessons in how and how not to fight the outbreak. From a report: The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he'd developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China. The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.

The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar. County health officials located more than 60 people who'd come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed. All the careful medical detective work, it's now clear, wasn't enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world's efforts to contain it.

In January, a new law gave consumers the power to stop companies collecting their personal information. The law, known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (or the CCPA), can be a powerful tool for privacy, but it comes with a catch: Consumers who want to exercise their CCPA rights must contact every data broker individually, and there are more than a hundred of them. But now they have an easier option. From a report: On Thursday, a startup called DoNotPay unveiled a service it calls Digital Health that automates the data-deletion process. Priced at $3 a month, the service will contact more than 100 data brokers on your behalf and demand they delete your and your family's personal information. It will also show you the types of data the brokers have collected -- such as phone number or location info -- and even initiate legal proceedings if the firms fail to comply. The monthly fee also gives subscribers access to DoNotPay's other automated avenging services, like appealing parking tickets in any city, claiming compensation for poor in-flight Wi-Fi, and Robo Revenge, which sues robocallers.

There are robots on the prowl at Facebook's server farms. The social networking giant has quietly built a fleet of mobile robots to patrol its data centers, and now has a team dedicated to automating its vast network of facilities around the globe, Business Insider reported Tuesday. From the report: The high-tech initiative could boost the firm's profits and help revolutionize the data center industry -- and potentially prompt job losses around the country. As Facebook has grown, it has built out a sprawling network of data centers around the globe dedicated to hosting users' content and supporting its apps and services. Its locations now stretch from Oregon to Sweden to Singapore -- but maintaining the vast facilities requires human data center operators and engineers to manage the systems, replace malfunctioning drives, and so on.

Leading CIOs, CTOs and technology executives on the "Forbes Technology Council" just made some predictions for the future: Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has become, "What's next?" The members of Forbes Technology Council are constantly looking out for new tech trends, and they believe the next jobs to be impacted by automation might not be the ones people expect...

#1. Reminders, Notifications And Reporting
Christy Johnson, AchieveIt: I think as workflow technology expands, any kind of oversight-related job will be delegated to the bots. No human will be taking the time to manually build reports, see who they're missing data from and send those employees a reminder email/plea for a status update. The tech is already around, but I think it still has a long way to go to reach human-level logic and function....

#3. App Development

Katherine Kostereva, Creatio (formerly bpm'online): In the next five years, everyone will become a developer thanks to low-code/no-code technology. It allows users to build apps and processes in a visual integrated development environment with drag and drop features. Hand-coding isn't likely to become obsolete in five years, but we are moving towards a far future where little to no coding is involved in development.

Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it. From a report: When Tony Huffman stepped away from the production line at the Denso auto part factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, to talk with WIRED earlier this month, the workers he supervised were still being watched -- but not by a human. A camera over each station captured workers' movements as they assembled parts for auto heat-management systems. The video was piped into machine-learning software made by a startup called Drishti, which watched workers' movements and calculated how long each person took to complete their work. [...] Denso's use of Drishti shows how some jobs will be transformed by artificial intelligence even when they're unlikely to be eliminated by AI anytime soon. Many jobs in manufacturing require dexterity and resourcefulness, for example, in ways that robots and software still can't match. But advances in AI and sensors are providing new ways to digitize manual labor. That gives managers new insights -- and potentially leverage -- on workers.

Some workers say the results are unpleasant. Last year, Amazon warehouse employees in Minnesota staged a walkout to protest how the company uses inventory and worker-tracking technology. They allege that Amazon uses it to enforce a punishing working pace that causes injuries. The company has disputed those claims, saying it coaches employees on how to safely meet quotas. Workers at Denso were initially wary of the prospect of being video-recorded all day to feed machine-learning algorithms, but Huffman says they have since come to appreciate Drishti's technology. After something goes wrong, workers can now look at the data and video with their managers, instead of having to hope bosses take their account of what happened seriously. Huffman says having a constant readout on productivity also helps managers be more responsive to nascent problems. "If somebody's struggling, not every associate is going to call for help," he says. "If we see their cycle time is jumping through the roof, we can go over and say 'Are you having any issues?'"

They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers. Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. From a report: At least, that's the upshot of one of the first studies of the subject, whose preliminary results were released in January. Buy recommendations peddled by robo-analysts, which supposedly mimic what traditional equity research departments do but faster and at lower costs, outperform their flesh-and-blood counterparts over the long run, according to Indiana University professors.

"Using this type of technology to make investment recommendations or to conduct investment analyses is going to become increasingly important," Kenneth Merkley, an associate professor of accounting and one of the authors, said by phone. Whether getting stock calls right is a critical mission of human analysts is debatable. Wall Street research departments serve a variety of functions, among them connecting investors with company executives and gathering earnings and other corporate data. While their buy, sell and hold recommendations still garner attention and can move stocks, the number of clients premising investment decisions off them is probably limited. The study looked at a small and still largely experimental branch of fintech, firms founded on the premise that digital technology does a better job than humans in making equity recommendations. While all analysts use computers, a handful of start-ups has been seeing if programs can handle every aspect of the stock-picking process.

Japan's first robot bartender has begun serving up drinks in a Tokyo pub in a test that could usher in a wave of automation in restaurants and shops struggling to hire staff in an aging society. From a report: The repurposed industrial robot serves drinks in is own corner of a Japanese pub operated by restaurant chain Yoronotaki. An attached tablet computer face smiles as it chats about the weather while preparing orders. The robot, made by the company QBIT Robotics, can pour a beer in 40 seconds and mix a cocktail in a minute. It uses four cameras to monitors customers to analyze their expressions with artificial intelligence (AI) software. "I like it because dealing with people can be a hassle. With this you can just come and get drunk," Satoshi Harada, a restaurant worker said after ordering a drink. "If they could make it a little quicker it would be even better." Finding workers, especially in Japan's service sector, is set to get even more difficult.

There's a North American tradition that says there'll be six more weeks of winter if a groundhog can see his shadow (due to clear skies) on February 2nd.

And while it's been honored every year with a ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania since 1887, PETA is now suggesting that the event's organizers should stop using a live groundhog -- and replace him with a robot. The Morning Caller reports:
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a news release Tuesday it sent a letter calling for the current incarnation of Punxsutawney Phil to be sent to a "reputable sanctuary" to live out the remainder of his life. Phil, arguably the world's most famous groundhog, takes part in a ceremony every Feb. 2 at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney. His handlers, also known as the Inner Circle, host festivities that culminate at 7:20 a.m., when they pull Punxsutawney Phil from a decorative stump so he can predict an early spring or six more weeks of winter.

"Gentle, vulnerable groundhogs are not barometers," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in the release. "PETA is offering the club a win-win situation: Breathe life into a tired tradition and finally do right by a long-suffering animal... An AI Phil would renew interest in Punxsutawney, generating a great deal of buzz, much like Sony's robot dog 'aibo,' which walks, plays, misbehaves, and responds to commands...

"By creating an AI Phil, you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way."
One LiveScience article points out that "you'll be better off flipping a coin than going by the groundhog's predictions."

Or, as one PETA blog post explains, "To predict the weather you need a robot, not a terrified groundhog."

With some help from his robot (puppet) friends, TV's Joel Hodgson will heckle the movies "Circus of Horrors" and "No Retreat, No Surrender" live in San Francisco today -- before heading out to 26 other American cities (including Austin, Denver, Boise, and Salt Lake City). It's a final farewell tour for Joel, as local media outlets try to find an appropriate appreciation for his legacy:
These days, the act of reacting is everywhere. Twitter is essentially one giant stream of people's snappy takes on current events. An entire cottage industry of YouTube reaction videos thrives. Twitch allows you to watch thousands of people around the world narrating video games. Go back in time, though, and you won't find too much in the way of reacting-as-entertainment. That, is, except for Mystery Science Theater 3000, the quirky, groundbreaking TV show that premiered on a small Minnesota TV station in 1988... It predated even DVD commentary tracks, and presaged the way we consume entertainment today.
That's San Francisco's local PBS station KQED, reminding readers that these really will be Joel's final live shows: Hodgson is calling it his last Mystery Science Theater tour -- he's been on and off the road since the show was crowdfunded to resurrection on Netflix in 2017 -- and, in a short phone conversation from the road, he says he means it. "I'm turning 60 next month," Hodgson says. "My whole job now is to work with the brand and get it ready for the next guy."

That "next guy" is new host Jonah Ray, who stars in the new Netflix episodes. ("He's just a natural, positive force, and he's amazing in that role," Hodgson says.) But fans will always be particularly attached to Hodgson, who has had three decades of understanding the nerdy cult around the show. On tour, he meets many fans face-to-face, "and they're all super-sweet," he says. "You get a few people who are a little socially awkward, but I'm awkward in my own way, so it kind of works out...."

if Hodgson is sad about this being his final tour, he doesn't show it. "I'm pretty happy, and I'm totally thinking about the end of it, for me. You kind of age out of it at a certain point. I'm not going to be one of those guys that's so attached to it that they do it until they take him out in a box."
In 2008 Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers.

"I've been a fan so long, I can't even remember when," posted CmdrTaco.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Using a robot dropped through a 700-meter hole in the ice, scientists stationed on Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier have captured the first video of the glacier's grounding line, the mysterious boundary where ice meets land and where warm ocean water could be slowly melting the glacier's base -- putting it at risk of collapse (above). Battling 2 months of stormy conditions and temperatures lower than -30C in one of Antarctica's most inaccessible locations, the researchers drilled a hole and lowered the torpedo-shaped Icefin robot into the frigid ocean waters below. Icefin then swam more than 1 kilometer along a downward-sloping basin to the grounding line, a rocky ridge below sea level that supports the glacier's huge floating ice shelf. The researchers used cameras, sonar, chemical probes, and other sensors on Icefin to study the rapidly retreating Thwaites and its supporting sediment. Scientists are still sifting through the data. But they fear warm ocean water intruding underneath the glacier could eventually cause it to retreat from the ridge, leading to its ultimate collapse.

For the first time a hole has been hot-water drilled through Thwaites Glacier to access the sea water below. Where is the water from and why is it melting the glacier so vigorously? From a report: The images are murky at first. Sediment sweeps past the camera as Icefin, a bright yellow remotely operated robot submarine, moves tentatively forward under the ice. Then the waters begin to clear. Icefin is under almost half a mile (600m) of ice, at the front of one the fastest-changing large glaciers in the world. Suddenly a shadow looms above, an overhanging cliff of dirt-encrusted ice. It doesn't look like much, but this is a unique image -- the first ever pictures from a frontier that is changing our world. Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier -- the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt.

Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the "most important" glacier in the world, the "riskiest" glacier, even the "doomsday" glacier. It is massive -- roughly the size of Britain. It already accounts for 4% of world sea level rise each year -- a huge figure for a single glacier -- and satellite data show that it is melting increasingly rapidly. There is enough water locked up in it to raise world sea level by more than half a metre. And Thwaites sits like a keystone right in the centre of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet -- a vast basin of ice that contains more than 3m of additional potential sea level rise. Yet, until this year, no-one has attempted a large-scale scientific survey on the glacier. The Icefin team, along with 40 or so other scientists, are part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a five-year, $50m joint UK-US effort to understand why it is changing so rapidly. The project represents the biggest and most complex scientific field programme in Antarctic history.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The first person diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus in the United States is being treated by a few medical workers and a robot. The robot, equipped with a stethoscope, is helping doctors take the man's vitals and communicate with him through a large screen, said Dr. George Diaz, chief of the infectious disease division at the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. "The nursing staff in the room move the robot around so we can see the patient in the screen, talk to him," Diaz said, adding the use of the robot minimizes exposure of medical staff to the infected man. It's unclear when the patient will be released because the CDC, which is set to provide the discharge details, has recommended additional testing. "They're looking for ongoing presence of the virus," Diaz told CNN on Thursday. "They're looking to see when the patient is no longer contagious."

Boston Dynamics' creation is starting to sniff out its role in the workforce: as a helpful canine that still sometimes needs you to hold its paw. From a report: This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market -- for a select few early adopters, at least. BD's people would be the first to tell you that they don't fully know what the hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites, sure. But Spot is so different than robots that have come before it that company execs are, in part, relying on customers to demonstrate how the machine might actually be useful.

After a few months on the job, Spot is beginning to show how it'll fit in the workforce. BD's researchers have kept close tabs on the 75 or so Spots now working at places like construction companies and mining outfits. (Oh, and one's with MythBuster Adam Savage for the next year.) They're seeing hints of a new kind of cooperation between humans and machines, and even machines and other machines. Starting today, you can even customize Spot to your liking -- the software development kit is now publicly available on GitHub. The robot is not included, though.