An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: The company's new initiative -- a collaborative effort between its Uber Eats and Uber Elevate divisions -- began with tests in San Diego using fast food meals from McDonald's, but could expand to include a local fine-dining restaurant called Juniper and Ivy, the company said. Uber intends to roll out commercial food delivery using drones in the same city this summer, with a fee structure that mimics Uber Eats current pricing, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, which first reported the company's plan...

"We've been working closely with the FAA to ensure that we're meeting requirements and prioritizing safety," Uber Elevate's Luke Fischer, the company's head of flight operations, said in a statement. "From there, our goal is to expand Uber Eats drone delivery so we can provide more options to more people at the tap of a button. We believe that Uber is uniquely positioned to take on this challenge as we're able to leverage the Uber Eats network of restaurant partners and delivery partners as well as the aviation experience and technology of Uber Elevate."

How will Uber's drone delivery service work? After a restaurant loads a meal into a drone and the robot takes to the air, the company's technology will notify a nearby Uber Eats driver at a designated drop-off location, the company said. The driver will pick up and hand deliver the meal to the customer the same way the service currently operates. But in the future, Uber said, the company would like to land drones atop parked vehicles near delivery locations "through QR code correspondence." Once that happens, the last-mile leg of delivery would be completed by the Uber Eats driver who would hand-deliver the order.

AmiMoJo shared this post from one of the ACLU's senior technology policy analysts about what happens when security cameras get AI upgrades: [I]magine that all that video were being watched -- that millions of security guards were monitoring them all 24/7. Imagine this army is made up of guards who don't need to be paid, who never get bored, who never sleep, who never miss a detail, and who have total recall for everything they've seen. Such an army of watchers could scrutinize every person they see for signs of "suspicious" behavior. With unlimited time and attention, they could also record details about all of the people they see -- their clothing, their expressions and emotions, their body language, the people they are with and how they relate to them, and their every activity and motion...

The guards won't be human, of course -- they'll be AI agents.

Today we're publishing a report on a $3.2 billion industry building a technology known as "video analytics," which is starting to augment surveillance cameras around the world and has the potential to turn them into just that kind of nightmarish army of unblinking watchers.... Many or most of these technologies will be somewhere between unreliable and utterly bogus. Based on experience, however, that often won't stop them from being deployed -- and from hurting innocent people...

We are still in the early days of a revolution in computer vision, and we don't know how AI will progress, but we need to keep in mind that progress in artificial intelligence may end up being extremely rapid. We could, in the not-so-distant future, end up living under armies of computerized watchers with intelligence at or near human levels. These AI watchers, if unchecked, are likely to proliferate in American life until they number in the billions, representing an extension of corporate and bureaucratic power into the tendrils of our lives, watching over each of us and constantly shaping our behavior... Policymakers must contend with this technology's enormous power. They should prohibit its use for mass surveillance, narrow its deployments, and create rules to minimize abuse.
They argue that the threat is just starting to emerge. "It is as if a great surveillance machine has been growing up around us, but largely dumb and inert -- and is now, in a meaningful sense, 'waking up.'"

Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there's no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year. "We're just doing some final tweaks to the design," said the CEO. "We've been testing them relentlessly."

Rather than selling the robot as a single-use tool, it's positioning it as a "mobility platform" that can be customized by users to complete a range of tasks. A Spot robot mounted with 3D cameras can map environments like construction sites, identifying hazards and work progress. When equipped with a robot arm, it has even greater flexibility, able to open doors and manipulate objects. At Re:MARS, a Spot with a robot arm used it to pick up items, including a cuddly toy that was then offered to a flesh-and-blood police dog. The dog was unimpressed with the robot, but happy, at least, to receive the toy. Raibert says it's this "athletic intelligence" that Boston Dynamics will be selling through its robots. Think of it like Amazon's AWS business, but instead of offering computing power on tap, its robotic mobility. How much will Spot cost? Raibert only said that the commercial version will be "much less expensive than prototypes [and] we think they'll be less expensive than other peoples' quadrupeds."

He did, however, reveal that the company had already found some paying customers, including construction companies in Japan who are testing Spot as a way to oversee the progress of work on sites.

Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit that can slide across a room via a touchpad to divide a room into two living spaces, a bed, desk, and a couch for people to pull out when needed. It will launch first in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The Verge reports: Rognan is built on Ori's robotic platform, and works with Ikea's Platsa line of storage furniture. It's also compatible with Ikea's Tradfri line of cabinet and wardrobe smart lighting. Ikea says the Rognan can save an extra eight square meters (about 86 square feet) of living space. That might not sound like much, but if you live in a tiny home, it could make all the difference. The Verge notes that Ori's line of automated furniture started as a concept from MIT's CityHome concept project in 2014. It launched for real estate developers and Airbnbs for $10,000 as Ori Systems.

"A robotic boat and submersible have won the XPRIZE to find the best new technologies to map the seafloor," writes the BBC -- taking home the grand prize of $4 million.

dryriver shares their report: The surface and underwater combo demonstrated their capabilities in a timed test in the Mediterranean, surveying depths down to 4km. [2.48 miles -- slightly deeper than the ocean's average depth of 2.3 miles.] Put together by the international GEBCO-NF Alumni team, the autonomous duo are likely now to play a role in meeting the "Seabed 2030" challenge. This aims to have Earth's ocean floor fully mapped to a high standard. Currently, only 20% of the world's sub-surface topography has been resolved to an acceptable level of accuracy...

The group triumphed by packaging an existing, state-of-the-art solution with a novel twist. So, while its HUGIN autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is an established industry tool for echo-sounding the depths, its uncrewed surface vessel (USV) that deployed and recovered the sub was developed specially for the competition... On arrival, the chosen technologies had just 24 hours to make an extensive, high-resolution (5m or better) bathymetric (depth) map; and take multiple pictures of the seabed. The GEBCO-NF Alumni team covered 278 sq km in its allotted time, returning more than 10 images of identifiable geological features.

merbs writes: If the robots are simply "coming," if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this techno-elemental phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. Not the executives swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI customer service bots, or the managers who see an opportunity to improve profit margins by adopting automated kiosks that edge out cashiers, or the shipping conglomerate bosses who decide to replace dockworkers with a fleet of automated trucks. These individuals may feel as if they have no choice, with shareholders and boards and bosses of their own to answer to, and an economic system that incentivizes the making of these decisions -- and sometimes the technology will perform obviously superior work to the human -- but they are exactly that: decisions, made by people, to call in or build the job-threatening robots.

Pretending otherwise, that robots in every use case are inevitable, is the very worst form of technological determinism, and leads to a dearth in critical thinking about when and how automation *is* best implemented. Because even the most ardent robot lovers will agree, there are plenty of cases of badly deployed automation; systems that make our lives worse and more inefficient, and that kill jobs en route to worse outcomes. And such automated regression is often implemented under the logic of 'robots are coming,' so better hop aboard. We will be able to make better decisions about embracing effective automation if we understand that, in practice, 'the robots are coming for our jobs' usually means something more like 'a CEO wants to cut his operating budget by 15 percent and was just pitched on enterprise software that promises to do the work currently done by thirty employees in accounts payable.'

An anonymous reader writes: iRobot today launched two new robots: the Roomba s9+ robot vacuum cleaner and the Braava jet m6 robot mop. The Roomba s9+ robot vacuum with Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal starts at $1,299. The Roomba s9 without the Clean Base starts at $999. The Braava jet m6 robot mop starts at $499. All the robots are available for purchase today in the U.S. and Canada. They will start shipping in select European countries on July 12, 2019. The two robots can use iRobot's Imprint Link Technology to "talk to each other" -- vacuuming and then mopping automatically. The technology also works with the Roomba i7+, which launched in September. iRobot is thus introducing two robots that can clean together "as a team." Owners of the robots can initiate a "Linked clean" in the iRobot Home app.

NASA will etch your name onto a silicon chip that will be carried to Mars by a rover in 2020:

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: The rover's primary mission is to get us closer to answering that fundamental question: did Mars ever host alien life? The robot is equipped with tools and instruments that will help scientists figure out if the planet may have hosted life in the past. On top of that, the rover will also be drilling and collecting samples of Martian dirt. It'll then leave those samples on the ground, where they could potentially be picked up someday by another spacecraft and brought back to Earth. And while the Mars 2020 rover is doing all of this, your name could be along for the ride.

If you send in your name sometime before September 30th, NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will etch it onto a silicon chip with an electron beam, and then the rover will carry it on its journey. The names are going to be pretty teeny, though -- about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. That's small enough so that more than a million names can be included on a single chip as big as a dime -- but big enough for any Martian microbes to read (only kidding... Martians can't read).

Microsoft, best known for developing Windows, has a thirst for something new: whiskey. The tech giant is co-developing the world's first computer-generated blend using artificial intelligence. From a report: For centuries whiskey has been cultivated by craftsmen drawing on knowledge and experience passed through generations. Single-malts have long been considered superior to blends, which are made by combining a number of single malts. One of the world's most expensive single-malts, a Macallan 1946, sold at an auction for a $460,000, while a Chivas Regal Royal Salute blend, which was created in 2002 to celebrate the golden jubilee of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, has sold for $10,000 a bottle. But now Microsoft has teamed up with Swedish distillery Mackmyra and Finnish consultancy Fourkind to use what's being dubbed as the world's first "bionic blender" to create the perfect tipple. Machine learning analyzes existing recipes, sales data and customer preferences to generate a dataset of more than 70 million recipes that a robot predicts will be popular. While Microsoft's leap from software to spirits might raise eyebrows in the Highlands of Scotland, the American software giant says its digital distiller will not replace the expertise and knowledge of human experts.

Northeastern University requires all of its computer science majors to take improv -- a class in theatre and improvisation, taught by professors in the drama department. The Wall Street Journal says it "forces students to come out of their shells and exercise creative play" before they can get their diplomas. (Although when the class was made mandatory in 2016, "We saw a lot of hysterics and crying," says Carla E. Brodley, dean of the computer science department.)

So what happens to the computer science majors at Northeastern? The course requires public speaking, lecturing on such nontechnical topics as family recipes. Students also learn to speak gibberish -- 'butuga dubuka manala phuthusa,' for instance... One class had students stare into a classmate's eyes for 60 seconds. If someone laughed, you had to try again...

The class is a way to 'robot-proof' computer-science majors, helping them sharpen uniquely human skills, said Joseph E. Aoun, the university president. Empathy, creativity and teamwork help students exercise their competitive advantage over machines in the era of artificial intelligence, according to Mr. Aoun, who wrote a book about it... Other professionals agree that improv can teach the teamwork and communication required of working with others. Many software applications now are built in small teams, a collaboration of engineers, writers and designers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It all started over lunch at a Dubai restaurant on March 19, 2017. It was the first time 45-year-old Li, met Costa, the 49-year-old Italian who's often known by peers in the industry as "Captain Magic." During their meal, Costa described a robot hedge fund his company London-based Tyndaris Investments would soon offer to manage money entirely using AI, or artificial intelligence. Developed by Austria-based AI company 42.cx, the supercomputer named K1 would comb through online sources like real-time news and social media to gauge investor sentiment and make predictions on US stock futures. It would then send instructions to a broker to execute trades, adjusting its strategy over time based on what it had learned.

The idea of a fully automated money manager inspired Li instantly. He met Costa for dinner three days later, saying in an email beforehand that the AI fund "is exactly my kind of thing." Over the following months, Costa shared simulations with Li showing K1 making double-digit returns, although the two now dispute the thoroughness of the back-testing. Li eventually let K1 manage $2.5bn -- $250m of his own cash and the rest leverage from Citigroup. The plan was to double that over time. But Li's affection for K1 waned almost as soon as the computer started trading in late 2017. By February 2018, it was regularly losing money, including over $20m in a single day -- Feb. 14 -- due to a stop-loss order Li's lawyers argue wouldn't have been triggered if K1 was as sophisticated as Costa led him to believe.

Salon tech editor Keith A. Spencer just published a new article describing what happens when "venture capital-backed entrepreneurs jackhammer their way into a new industry, 'tech'-ify it in some way, undermine the competition and declare their new way superior once the old is bankrupted." - Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....

- Building devices to quantize as much fitness data as possible wasn't an example of capitalism fulfilling consumer desire -- no one, save a few data scientists, ever said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise regime into spreadsheets" -- but the tech industry has been very effective at making us desire just that....

- The thing is, baristas and cashiers aren't things that we are all dying to get rid of... Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs. The tech industry's vision of the future is of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity; and more surveillance and more monetization of our buying habits. No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us.
The article is adapted from Spencer's recent book, A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy.

The article's title? "Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined."

Amazon dismissed the idea of running a fully automated warehouse in the near future, citing the superior cognitive ability of humans and limitations of current technology. From a report: Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. There is a misperception that Amazon will run fully automated warehouses soon, Anderson said during a tour of Amazon's Baltimore warehouse for reporters on Tuesday. The technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.

Anki, the San Francisco startup behind AI-imbued robotics toys like Overdrive, Cozmo, and Vector, today shuttered its doors after raising close to $200 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors. From a report: According to Recode , it'll lay off its entire workforce of just over 200 employees, each of whom will receive a week of severance. A failed round of financing was reportedly to blame. CEO Boris Softman told employees last week that a deal failed to materialize "at the last minute," as did acquisition interest from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast. Anki claimed to have sold 6.5 million devices total, and 1.5 million robots last August alone. (Cozmo was the top-selling toy on Amazon in 2017 with a community of more than 15,000 developers.) And in fall 2018, the company revealed that revenue was close to $100 million in 2017, a figure it expected to beat the subsequent year.

From a report: A small part of us always knew the Laundroid was too good to be true. The black obelisk, developed by Japanese company Seven Dreamers, was supposed to be a washing machine, dryer, ironing and laundry-folding robot rolled into one. It was the perfect appliance, in short, for chore-dodging so-and-sos who hate dealing with grimy clothes. But that dream has come to a predictable end. This week, Seven Dreamers filed for bankruptcy in Japan, all but ensuring its halo product will never reach store shelves. According to Teikoku Databank, a private credit research agency, the company owes 2.25 billion yen ($20.1 million USD) to 200 creditors.

Fast Company shares an essay from an anthropologist who researches human agency, algorithms, AI, and automation in the context of social systems: With the advent of computational tools for quantitative measurement and metrics, and the development of machine learning based on the big data developed by those metrics, organizations, Amazon among them, started to transition through a period of what I refer to as "extreme data analysis," whereby anything and anyone that can be measured, is. This is a problem. Using counting, metrics, and implementation of outcomes from extreme data analysis to inform policies for humans is a threat to our well-being, and results in the stories we are hearing about in the warehouse, and in other areas of our lives, where humans are too often forfeiting their agency to algorithms and machines. Unfortunately, after decades of building this quantitative scaffolding, a company such as Amazon has pretty much baked it into their infrastructure and their culture....

As the world continues to automate things, processes, and services, humans are put in positions where we must constantly adapt, since at the moment, automation cannot, and does not, cooperate with us outside of its pre-programmed repertoire. Thus, in many instances we must do the yielding of our agency and our choices, to the algorithms or robots, to reach the cooperative outcomes we require.... If every process is eventually automated and restricts human agency, while simultaneously requiring our servitude to function, we will be pinned to the wall with no choices, nothing left to give, and no alternatives for coping with it.
One example provided was the Amazon worker who complained the warehouse temperatures were always kept too hot -- to accommodate the needs of Amazon's robots. But the article argues we also forfeit agency "Every time we use a computer, or any computationally based device...

"We do this by sitting or standing to use a keyboard, by typing, clicking, scrolling, checking boxes, pulling down menus, and filling in data in a way that the machine can understand."

Russia state news channel Rossiya 24 has introduced a robot presenter for some of its bulletins. The BBC reports that the robot, named Alex, "has already caused a stir, with some viewers complaining about his appearance and accusing him of peddling political propaganda." From the report: The robot was developed by Promobot in the city of Perm. His silicon head is modeled on the face of the company's co-founder Alexei Yuzhakov. At the moment, the robot anchor can only move his facial features and neck. However, the final robot will have fully mobile limbs as well. Production of the robot began in 2017 and should be fully complete later this year, according to Promobot. It said Alex had cost more than one million roubles ($15,600) to develop and that it had received orders for 12 more humanoids.

Rossiya 24 said its newest presenter was of Russian origin with "software and almost all of its components produced inside the country." Alex has delivered a number of bulletins for the channel, presenting news items about agriculture, a nuclear technology forum and micro-finance. Most observers think on-air Alex is a temporary stunt to inject some fun and promote innovative Russian technology in TV news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: SpaceX successfully landed the center core of its Falcon Heavy rocket on a drone ship last week, but the vehicle accidentally fell into the ocean while in transit to the Florida coast. The company blamed the loss on choppy seas. "Over the weekend, due to rough sea conditions, SpaceX's recovery team was unable to secure the center core booster for its return trip to Port Canaveral," SpaceX said in a statement to The Verge. "As conditions worsened with eight to ten foot swells, the booster began to shift and ultimately was unable to remain upright. While we had hoped to bring the booster back intact, the safety of our team always takes precedence. We do not expect future missions to be impacted."

SpaceX does have ways to secure the rockets it lands in the ocean, including a robot known as the "octagrabber" that latches on to the base of the boosters. But because the center core connects to two side boosters, it has a different design than a normal Falcon 9 booster. So the octagrabber cannot hold on to it in the same way. The center core is a modified Falcon 9 booster -- one of three that make up the Falcon Heavy rocket -- which flew last week during the second flight of the Falcon Heavy. "Following takeoff, all three cores of the rocket successfully landed back on Earth: the two outer cores touched down on dual concrete landing pads at the Cape while the center core touched down on the company's drone ship named Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic," reports The Verge.

In a startling demonstration, the machine drew on experimentation, data, and observation of humans to learn how simple implements could help it achieve a task. From a report: Learning to use tools played a crucial role in the evolution of human intelligence. It may yet prove vital to the emergence of smarter, more capable robots, too. New research shows that robots can figure out at least the rudiments of tool use, through a combination of experimenting and observing people. Chelsea Finn, a researcher at Google Brain, and Sergey Levine, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, developed the robotic system together with several of Levine's students. The setup consists of an off-the-shelf robot arm that can be controlled by a person or a computer. It also includes a camera that sees the environment within reach of the arm -- and, most important, a computer running a very large neural network that lets the robot learn.

The robot worked out how to make use of simple implements, including a dustpan and broom and a duster, to move other objects around. The work hints at how robots might someday learn to perform sophisticated manipulations, and solve abstract problems, for themselves. "It's exciting because it means the robot can figure out what to do with a tool in situations it hasn't seen before," Finn says. "We really want to study that sort of generality, rather than a robot learning to use one tool."

Citing "significant" new corporate investments in AI technology, futurist Gary Grossman argues that AI "may be the fastest paradigm shift in the history of technology -- and warns there's a counter-argument to the theory that AI will create as many jobs as its displaces. "The other view is that this time is different, that we are not just automating labor but also cognition and many fewer people will be needed by industry." KPMG claims more than half of business executives plan to implement some form of AI within the next 12 months... The disruption is already beginning, with fully 75% of the organizations KPMG surveyed expecting intelligent automation to significantly impact 10 to 50% of their employees in the next two years. A Citigroup executive told Bloomberg that better AI could reduce headcount at the bank by 30%. In the face of all this change, many companies publicly state that AI will eliminate some dull and repetitive jobs and make it possible for people to do higher-order work. However, as a prominent venture capitalist relayed to me recently on this topic: "most displaced call center workers don't become Java programmers." It is not only low-skilled jobs that are at risk. Gartner analysts recently reported that AI will eliminate 80% of project management tasks....

A New York Times article noted that while many company executives pay public lip service to "human-centered AI" and the need to provide a safety net for those who lose their jobs, they privately talk about racing to automate their workforces "to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers." The article also cites a Deloitte survey from 2017 that found 53% of companies had already started to use machines to perform tasks previously done by humans. The figure is expected to climb to 72% by next year.... The net of this dynamic is that workers are not a major factor in the economic calculus of the business drive to adopt AI, despite so many public statements to the contrary.

So perhaps it's not a surprise when the Edelman 2019 AI survey shows a widely held view that AI will lead to short-term job losses with the potential for societal disruption and that AI will benefit the rich and hurt the poor.
He also shares a sobering quote from historian, philosopher, and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari on why Silicon Valley supports Universal Basic Incomes.

"The message is: 'We don't need you. But we are nice, so we'll take care of you.'"