NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.

"HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Inc., launched a new flying car on Sunday that it says can also drive on roads," reports CNBC (in a story shared by Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid ): The company says it plans for a rollout in 2024. The car is not commercially available right now. And HT Aero said the final design might change. HT Aero's vehicle will have a lightweight design and a rotor that folds away, the company said. That will allow the car to drive on roads and then fly once the rotors are expanded.

The vehicle will have a number of safety features including parachutes, the company said.
Elsewhere CNBC reports that Xpeng also launched a new charger for its electric cars. "The company says that with just five minutes of charging with the new charger, the car's battery will have a range of 200 kilometers [123 miles]." And Xpeng also makes an assisted-driving system, Bloomberg notes, and "will also partner with others to explore robo-taxi operations starting from the second half of next year."

And in addition, Bloomberg adds, the company also unveiled its prototype for a ridable robot horse, "equipped with bionic senses and multi-mode recognition technologies."

The Guardian reports: She has been described as "a vision of the future" who is every bit as good as other abstract artists today, but Ai-Da — the world's first ultra-realistic robot artist — hit a temporary snag before her latest exhibition when Egyptian security forces detained her at customs.

Ai-Da is due to open and present her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday, the first time contemporary art has been allowed next to the pyramid in thousands of years. But because of "security issues" that may include concerns that she is part of a wider espionage plot, both Ai-Da and her sculpture were held in Egyptian customs for 10 days before being released on Wednesday, sparking a diplomatic fracas... According to Aidan Meller, the human force behind Ai-Da, border guards detained Ai-Da at first because she had a modem, and then because she had cameras in her eyes (which she uses to draw and paint). "I can ditch the modems, but I can't really gouge her eyes out," he said.

She was finally cleared through customs on Wednesday evening, hours before the exhibition was due to start, with the British embassy in Cairo saying they were "glad" the case had been resolved...

Meller, an Oxford gallerist, said he always hoped his project would prompt debate about the rapid rise of AI technology. "She is an artist robot, let's be really clear about this. She is not a spy. People fear robots, I understand that. But the whole situation is ironic, because the goal of Ai-Da was to highlight and warn of the abuse of technological development, and she's being held because she is technology. Ai-Da would appreciate that irony, I think."

The case for robot umpires in baseball got some new interest this week — especially for Silicon Valley's baseball fans. As America settled in to watch the final inning of this year's National League Division Series, the Washington Post reports that (human) viewers saw a (human) umpire "call a third strike on a checked swing by San Francisco Giants infielder Wilmer Flores...ending the night, and season, of MLB's best team of 2021." (Though instead of swinging "Flores clearly appeared to hold up.")

But the backlash raises the question of whether a so-called robo-umpire — essentially, a set of highly placed and well-programmed cameras — could have automatically adjudicated the checked swing...

It's not a hypothetical question: MLB is in the middle of a three-year partnership with the independent Atlantic League for just such a robo-umpire, a system called Automatic Balls and Strikes (ABS), that this past season rendered a home-plate umpire moot for his most important job. MLB hasn't given a timetable for when the system could reach the big leagues, but it's clearly a trial balloon. ABS is overseen by TrackMan, a Denmark-based start-up that began by helping golfers with their swing and then expanded to baseball before broadening again to auto-officiating responsibilities. Under their ABS system, players are measured for a strike zone before the season, with their info then fed into the machine. Then, during the game, the company's sensor in the stands behind home plate uses Doppler technology to determine where the ball is thrown and where it should have been thrown based on the player's strike zone. The sensor then relays the call to, well, whoever wants to hear it. In the case of the Atlantic League, this is an actual umpire behind the plate who, in an ironic reversal, is a human who simply does what the machine tells him to do and announces the call.

The system is not being used for checked swings, but the technology is equally applicable; it makes little difference whether a ball is crossing the plate in one direction or a bat crosses it the other way...

But accuracy is only part of the equation. Presumably TrackMan could have made the right call — but what effect would such automation have on us socially? An argument can be made that it would increase consumer confidence and eliminate discord; an equal argument could be made the other way, that subjectivity is what makes the public realm, or at least baseball, a dynamic and interesting place.

The Flores checked swing, in other words, gets at the question that stretches across much of innovation: Just because we could, does that mean we should?
"Some fans have questioned whether judgment calls are part of the fun of baseball and a legalistic rendering is contrary to the spirit of the game," the article points out. And another issue: currently catchers will sometimes even move their glove with the caught ball so it looks like it passed through the strike zone when it didn't. (Or, as Deadspin puts it, "It's lying about where the pitch came in to fool the umpire into giving your team a strike when he shouldn't have." Though they call it "a beautiful art that defines the catcher position... and it will be rendered useless by the emergence of robot umpires.")

Deadspin tracked down the President of TrackMan Baseball, who said that after an entire season of use in the Atlantic league, "Our system was accurate to about a half-inch, and we do this at hundreds of baseball stadiums every single day." But Deadspin worries that if it's actually implemented in Major League Baseball stadium, then pitchers would be afraid to throw borderline pitches, and would be forced to throw more balls over the plate. While endless hits and home runs might sound exciting, it would only lengthen an already slow sport, and the high that comes from witnessing incredible offensive feats would slowly fade as they would become more commonplace.

Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting developments in robotics in recent years. They're small, nimble, and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled machines. So, of course, it was only a matter of time until someone put a gun on one. From a report: The image in the linked story shows a quadrupedal robot -- a Vision 60 unit built by US firm Ghost Robotics -- that's been equipped with a custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or "special purpose unmanned rifle") is designed to be fitted onto a variety of robotic platforms. It has a 30x optical zoom, thermal camera for targeting in the dark, and an effective range of 1,200 meters. What's not clear is whether or not Sword International or Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and robot. But if they're not, it seems they will be soon. As the marketing copy on Sword's website boasts: "The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now."

Italian winemakers have increasingly relied on migrant workers for the autumn harvest, but travel restrictions and soaring wage costs are pushing many to turn to machines. From a report: Last year's grape harvest was a harrowing scramble at Mirko Cappelli's Tuscan vineyard. With the Italian border closed because of the pandemic, the Eastern European workers he had come to rely on couldn't get into the country. The company he had contracted to supply grape pickers had no one to offer him. He ultimately found just enough workers to bring the grapes in on time. So, this year Mr. Cappelli made sure he wouldn't face the same problem: He spent â85,000, equivalent to $98,000, on a grape-harvesting machine. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing the wine industry toward automation.

Covid-related travel restrictions left severe shortages of agricultural workers last year, as Eastern Europeans and North Africans were unable to reach fields in Western Europe. Though the shortages have eased this year, the difficulty of finding workers has accelerated the shift, which was already under way across the agricultural sector. While harvests of some crops, like soybeans and corn, are already heavily automated, winemakers have been slower to make the switch. Vintners debate whether automated harvesting is more likely to damage grapes, which can affect the quality of the wine. The cost is a deterrent for many small farmers. Some European regions even ban machine harvesting.

For many vintners in Europe and the U.S., however, the difficulty of finding workers -- a problem they say had grown steadily for years but became acute during the pandemic -- has pushed them to take the robot plunge. It is a change that will outlast the pandemic and could shift longstanding migration patterns that bring tens of thousands of foreign workers to Italy, France and Spain for agricultural harvests each year. Ritano Baragli, president of Cantina Sociale colli Fiorentini Valvirgilio, a winemaker's group in Tuscany, said it has been getting harder to find pickers for several years, as locals increasingly shun the physically demanding, low-paid, short-term work while the demand for pickers has increased. But last year was the worst labor shortage of his half-century career in wine. Use of harvesting machines among the group's members increased 20% this year in response, he said.

em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project. The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them.

The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon's cutesy marketing suggests. "[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity," one of the files reads. "Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan." [...]

Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. "Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said. "The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there's no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens." "They're also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it'll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it's, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who'd actually rely on it for accessibility purposes," the source said.

Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. CNBC: I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can't do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot. Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a "Day 1 Edition" product, which means it won't be sold to everyone at first. [...] Astro is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels, including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye on your home as Astro patrols while you're away. It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize faces (if you want it to) so you can load up two sodas in the back storage compartment and tell Astro to go to someone in the living room.

Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon's other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon's Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time. You can talk to Astro much like you'd talk to an Echo or Alexa (you can change the name to Alexa if you want) to get sports scores or the weather. And you can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.

After failing its first attempt to re-create the Mayflower's voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, a crewless ocean vessel, powered by artificial intelligence, has returned to sea. From a report: Propelled by IBM's AI software, the autonomous ship set out in June for a month-long excursion through rough waters with no humans aboard. However, three days into what was supposed to be a monumental journey from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Mass., where pilgrim travelers settled in 1620, the robot ship suffered "a minor mechanical issue" according to ProMare, a nonprofit promoting marine research that is behind the project. Researchers pushed out a software update, signaling for the ship to reverse course. The boat abided by its orders and headed to shore. Yet according to Brett Phaneuf, co-director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship Project, the organizers quickly began planning another voyage. "We've had a setback, but one that will put us further ahead than if we did nothing," he said. Earlier this month, researchers sent the ship back out for a shorter trip: This time it'll focus on the waters around the United Kingdom, where crews can attend to it sooner if something unforeseen happens. "At some point, you have to go for it and take the risk or never improve," Phaneuf said.

For 14 years Israel had wanted to kill Iran's chief military nuclear scientist and the father of its weapons program, who they suspected of leading Iran's quest to build nuclear weapons.

Then last November "they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present" using a "souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun," according to the New York Times:

(Thanks to Slashdot readers schwit1 and PolygamousRanchKid for sharing this story.) Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. It was also methodically picking off the experts thought to be leading Iran's nuclear weapons program. Since 2007, its agents had assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists worked directly for Fakhrizadeh on what Israeli intelligence officials said was a covert program to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the substantial technical challenges of making one small enough to fit atop one of Iran's long-range missiles. Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in charge of missile development and 16 members of his team.

But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive... This time they were going to try something new.

Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles. Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material in the truck bed was a 7.62 mm sniper machine gun... The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position, calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly touched the trigger. He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away... Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment...

The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.The AI was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car's speed.
Ultimately 15 bullets were fired in less than 60 seconds. None of them hit Fakhrizadeh's wife, who was seated just inches away.

The whole remote-controlled apparatus "was smuggled into the country in small pieces over several months," reports the Jerusalem Post, "because, taken together, all of its components would have weighed around a full ton." One new detail in the report was that the explosives used to destroy evidence of the remote-gun partially failed, leaving enough of the gun intact for the Iranians to figure out what had happened...

While all Israeli intelligence and defense officials still praise the assassination for setting back Iran's nuclear weapons program dramatically, 10 months later and with the Islamic Republic an estimated one month away from producing sufficient enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, the legacy of the operation is less clear... On the other hand, others say that even if Iran decides to move its uranium enrichment up to 90%, that is weaponized level, they still have to put together the other components of a nuclear weapon capability. These include tasks concerned with detonation and missile delivery. Fakhizadeh would have shone in these tasks and his loss will still be felt and slow down the ayatollahs.

CNET's Roadshow reports that a safety-oriented version of Boston Dynamics' headless dog-shaped robot "Spot" will begin patrolling a Kia plant in South Korea, "to survey industrial areas remotely and help identify issues before they happen." For example, Spot's new thermal camera and 3D lidar (courtesy of Hyundai's technology chest) can identify personnel near machinery with high temperatures. In this case, our robotic canine friend may be able to pinpoint a fire hazard before a human does. The robot can be controlled remotely by human operators as well, and send potential alarms for hazards and notify plant management of a situation. Hyundai also plans to have the robot accompany night patrols to create a safer environment. With new gadgetry attached to Spot, including the latest artificial intelligence that helps it understand if doors are open or closed, the automaker believes the robot can play a big part in security...

All of Spot's new tasks are part of a pilot program so Hyundai can see if there's value in deploying additional Spot-based, robotic security dogs in other plants.
Hyundai's motor group has released a slick video showing the security robot in action.

It ends with the words "Robotics for Humanity."

"If you're wandering around Singapore anytime soon, take some time to wave hi to your friendly neighborhood snitch bot," writes Gizmodo: Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) will be deploying two robots named "Xavier" that the agency says use cameras with a 360-degree field of vision and analytics software to detect "undesirable social behaviors" in real time.

First reported by Business Insider, the robots are designed to detect activities such as public smoking, violation of pandemic restrictions (i.e., groups of more than five people), and illegally selling goods on the street. Other behaviors the agency said the robots can snitch on include the use of motorized vehicles or motorcycles on pedestrian walkways and "improperly parked bicycles." The Xavier robots roll around on a "patrol route pre-configured in advance by public officers," though they can deviate as necessary to avoid slamming into pedestrians or other obstacles. The plan is for the two robots to relay reports of such activity to a central police hub as well as confront violators directly with warning messages, with the first three weeks of deployment starting on Sept. 5 in Toa Payoh Central.
The three weeks are a "trial period," reports ZDNet. But they also note that the program includes "an interactive dashboard where public officers can receive real-time information from and be able to monitor and control multiple robots simultaneously."

One official said in a public statement that "The deployment of ground robots will help to augment our surveillance and enforcement resources."

ZDNet offers some context: Seeing robots being used in Singapore is not uncommon. Last year, Singapore deployed Boston Dynamics' four-legged droids, dubbed Spot, to its parks, garden, and nature reserves to remind people about social distancing. A fleet of Lightstrike robots was then rolled out at one of Singapore's general hospitals in a bid to thoroughly disinfect hospital rooms of pathogens. More recently in May, the Singapore government launched a one-year trial of using autonomous robots to facilitate on-demand food and grocery deliveries.

A robot called CIMON-2 (short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) has received a software update that will enable it to perform more complex tasks with a new human crewmate later this year. Space.com reports: The cute floating sphere with a cartoon-like face has been stored at the space station since the departure of the European Space Agency's (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2020. The robot will wake up again during the upcoming mission of German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will arrive at the orbital outpost with the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon mission in October. In the year and a half since the end of the last mission, engineers have worked on improving CIMON's connection to Earth so that it could provide a more seamless service to the astronauts, CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg at Airbus, which developed the intelligent robot together with the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the LMU University in Munich, told Space.com.

"The sphere is just the front end," Eisenberg said. "All the voice recognition and artificial intelligence happens on Earth at an IBM data centre in Frankfurt, Germany. The signal from CIMON has to travel through satellites and ground stations to the data centre and back. We focused on improving the robustness of this connection to prevent disruptions." CIMON relies on IBM's Watson speech recognition and synthesis software to converse with astronauts and respond to their commands. The first generation robot flew to the space station with Alexander Gerst in 2018. That robot later returned to Earth and is now touring German museums. The current robot, CIMON-2, is a second generation. Unlike its predecessor, it is more attuned to the astronauts' emotional states (thanks to the Watson Tone Analyzer). It also has a shorter reaction time.

Airbus and DLR have signed a contract with ESA for CIMON-2 to work with four humans on the orbital outpost in the upcoming years. During those four consecutive missions, engineers will first test CIMON's new software and then move on to allowing the sphere to participate in more complex experiments. During these new missions CIMON will, for the first time, guide and document complete scientific procedures, Airbus said in a statement. "Most of the activities that astronauts perform are covered by step by step procedures," Eisenberg said. "Normally, they have to use clip boards to follow these steps. But CIMON can free their hands by floating close by, listening to the commands and reading out the procedures, showing videos, pictures and clarifications on its screen." The robot can also look up additional information and document the experiments by taking videos and pictures. The scientists will gather feedback from the astronauts to see how helpful the sphere really was and identify improvements for CIMON's future incarnations.

"Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks," reports the Associated Press.

They're arguing that the pandemic "didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs." Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe...

Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise." Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods.

The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies.

Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. "Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified," they wrote in a January paper... Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.

Ideas from 4chan (including its paranormal section) have percolated into the "dead internet" theory, writes the Atlantic, with a seminal post on another forum by "IlluminatiPirate" now arguing that the internet is almost entirely overrun by artificial intelligence: Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat... Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is "empty and devoid of people," as well as "entirely sterile." Much of the "supposedly human-produced content" you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of "influencers" on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group's intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff... He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled "How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually."

"I think it's entirely obvious what I'm subtly suggesting here given this setup," the post continues. "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population." So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times...

The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory's validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be "hijacked" by bots so often. The theory's spread hasn't been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories... Anyway ... dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet's many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point... [Y]ou could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it's cliché — people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the "old" internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response.
That 2018 article in New York magazine had argued that (at that time) a majority of web traffic was probably coming from bots — including especially high bot traffic on YouTube — while even the engagement metrics for major sites like Facebook had been gamed or inflated.

But whether or not that's changed, the Atlantic shares a compelling argument from a forum poster arguing that their very presence in this discussion proves they must be a bot. "If I was real I'm pretty sure I'd be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I'll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: GM announced last Friday that it was recalling every Chevrolet Bolt it had ever made, including the new electric utility vehicle model that debuted this year. After a string of fires affected Bolt models, the company traced the problem to two simultaneously occurring defects in the cars' LG Chem-made batteries. The automaker initially discovered the problem in batteries from one of LG's Korean plants, and it recalled cars with those cells last November. But then more Bolts caught fire, and other LG plants were ensnared in the investigation, spurring two expansions of the recall. The problem, GM said, has been traced to a torn anode tab and a folded separator.

That's all GM has said so far. It hasn't said how widespread the defects are, nor has it said how, exactly, the fires started. But in what little information has been released, and in the timing of GM's recalls, there are clues. To decipher them, Ars spoke with Greg Less, technical director of the University of Michigan's Battery Lab. "What we're looking at is a perfect storm," Less said. The Bolt's battery packs are made up of pouch-type cells, which are essentially layers of cathodes, anodes, and separators that are flooded with liquid electrolyte and encased in a flexible polymer pouch. The torn anode tab, he said, would create a projection in what should be an otherwise flat battery. The projection brings the anode closer to the cathode. "And that would probably be OK if the separator was where it was supposed to be," he said.

But in problematic Bolt batteries, the separator wasn't where it was supposed to be. Separators are placed between the anode and cathode to prevent the two electrodes from touching. A torn tab wouldn't necessarily be an issue on its own because the separator would prevent any projection from bridging the anode-cathode gap. In cells with a folded separator, though, the gap would be missing from at least part of the battery. If the anode bridges the gap, Less said, "you have a short, and it's all downhill from there." "It wouldn't surprise me if both defects are caused by the same thing," he added. "I would imagine that the separator must be folded at the edge near where the anode tab is at. What I'm guessing is that at some point during the handling of the cell, before it's fully packaged, some part of the robot machine is catching. The tab is catching, the separator is catching -- something is catching very infrequently so that it hasn't been noticed, and it's causing this damage."

"Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?" asks a headline at the New York Times. (Alternate URL here for a text-only version.)

"A new trend that is coming into our animatronics is a level of intelligence," a senior Imagineering executive tells the Times, showing off Disney's sophisticated new three-foot animatronic of the Guardians of the Galaxy character Groot. "This guy represents our future. It's part of how we stay relevant."

The animatronic Groot walked across the room to introduce himself to the Times' reporter. When I remained silent, his demeanor changed. His shoulders slumped, and he seemed to look at me with puppy dog eyes. "Don't be sad," I blurted out. He grinned and broke into a little dance before balancing on one foot with outstretched arms.
It's just part of a larger initiative to upgrade the park's tech in a variety of different ways: There are animatronics at Disney World that have been doing the same herky-jerky thing on loop since Richard Nixon was president. In the meantime, the world's children have become technophiles, raised on apps (three million in the Google store), the Roblox online gaming universe and augmented reality Snapchat filters... In early June, Disney's animatronic technology took a sonic leap forward. The Disneyland Resort's newest ride, WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, features a "stuntronic" robot (outfitted in Spidey spandex) that performs elaborate aerial tricks, just like a stunt person. A catapult hurls the untethered machine 65 feet into the air, where it completes various feats (somersaults in one pass, an "epic flail" in another) while autonomously adjusting its trajectory to land in a hidden net... The Spider-Man robot — 95 pounds of microprocessors, 3-D printed plastic, gyroscopes, accelerometers, aluminum and other materials — took more than three years to develop. Disney declined to discuss the cost of the stuntronics endeavor, but the company easily invested millions of dollars...

One of Disney's senior roboticists, Scott LaValley, came from Boston Dynamics, where he contributed to an early version of Atlas, a running and jumping machine that inspires "how did they do that" amazement — followed by dystopian dread. Disney said it had no plans to replace human performers... Rather, Disney's newest robotics initiative is about extreme Marvel and "Star Wars" characters — huge ones like the Incredible Hulk, tiny ones like Baby Yoda and swinging ones like Spider-Man — that are challenging to bring to life in a realistic way, especially outdoors.... The development of Groot — code-named Project Kiwi — is the latest example. He is a prototype for a small-scale, free-roaming robotic actor that can take on the role of any similarly sized Disney character....

Cameras and sensors will give these robots the ability to make on-the-fly choices about what to do and say. Custom software allows animators and engineers to design behaviors (happy, sad, sneaky) and convey emotion.

At Tesla's AI Day event, Elon Musk revealed a humanoid robot called Tesla Bot that utilizes the same artificial intelligence that powers the company's autonomous vehicles. CNET reports: Musk revealed few details about the Slenderman-looking Tesla Bot outside of a few PowerPoint slides but reiterated some of his beliefs about human labor. "They can use all of the same tools that we use in the car," Musk noted, suggesting the robot could be told to "go to the store and get ... the following groceries." A prototype would likely be ready next year, Musk said. "It's intended to be friendly," Musk joked, "and navigate through a world built for humans."

In a statement to CRN, Intel said it was "winding down" RealSense and transferring the talent and computer vision tech to efforts that "better support" its core chip businesses. Engadget reports: Questions surfaced about the fate of RealSense after the team's leader, Sagi Ben Moshe, said he was leaving Intel two weeks ago. RealSense aimed to make computer vision more flexible and accessible. A company or researcher could buy cameras to aid everything from robot navigation through to facial recognition, and there was even a developer-focused phone. It was never a truly mainstream product, though, and ASI VP Kent Tibbils told CRN that there were few customers buying RealSense cameras in any significant quantities. It wasn't really a money-making division, even if the work helped Intel's other teams.

For Intel, there's likely a simpler answer: it wants to cut ballast. CEO Pat Gelsinger wants Intel to reclaim the chipmaking crown, and that means concentrating its resources on design and manufacturing capabilities. No matter how successful RealSense is, it's a potential distraction from Intel's latest strategy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Boston Dynamics taught its robots to dance last year, now one of them can complete a parkour course. The robot company, which is owned by Hyundai, has released two new videos today. The first shows off how well the Atlas robot can perform parkour, while the second video takes us behind the scenes and explains how Atlas works. It's actually the first time Atlas has managed to complete the complex obstacle course flawlessly, and Boston wants to celebrate that.

After the dancing video last year, we all expect Boston's robots to do amazing things now, and the parkour video doesn't disappoint. But what it doesn't show is all the hard work, missteps, and problems that need fixing in order to make these demonstrations possible. That's what the second video reveals, and it's the first time I've seen these robots breakdown and leak fluids.

There's a hardware team, a software team, technicians, and operations staff required to make this whole operation work. Each Atlas requires three onboard computers in order to process the sensor data and run the algorithms allowing this 5ft, 190lbs robot to move with 28-degrees of freedom without falling over (very often). And even though we're asking these robots to do the same actions as humans, it's a very different challenge.