An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Automation is coming, but not for everyone. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate just 25% of occupations in the US -- in production, food service, and transportation -- are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation. "Automation is not the end of work," said Mark Muro, policy director for the Brookings Institution's program on urban economies and co-author of a study published Jan. 24. Most occupations will see specific tasks assumed by machines, but much of their labor will likely be enhanced, rather than fully replaced, through automation, the study found. That's because automation rarely replaces entire jobs, but instead handles specific tasks in occupations that often require hundreds of them.

To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).

In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold 'Em. Now, Libratus' technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind -- in service of the US military.

From a report: Libratus -- Latin for balanced -- was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decision making based on game theory. Early last year, the professor who led the project, Tuomas Sandholm, founded a startup called Strategy Robot to adapt his lab's game-playing technology for government use, such as in war games and simulations used to explore military strategy and planning. Late in August, public records show, the company received a two-year contract of up to $10 million with the US Army. It is described as "in support of" a Pentagon agency called the Defense Innovation Unit, created in 2015 to woo Silicon Valley and speed US military adoption of new technology.

[...] Sandholm declines to discuss specifics of Strategy Robot's projects, which include at least one other government contract. He says it can tackle simulations that involve making decisions in a simulated physical space, such as where to place military units. The Defense Innovation Unit declined to comment on the project, and the Army did not respond to requests for comment. Libratus' poker technique suggests Strategy Robot might deliver military personnel some surprising recommendations. Pro players who took on the bot found that it flipped unnervingly between tame and hyperaggressive tactics, all the while relentlessly notching up wins as it calculated paths to victory.

pacopico writes: Every year, DJI hosts a robotics competition called Robomasters. It draws in hundreds of engineering students from around the world for two weeks of all out robotics mayhem. The students build and then control robotic vehicles that blast away at each other with rubber bullets, while drones strafe from overhead. Bloomberg Businessweek did a short documentary on the competition and everything that goes with it, including a reality TV show, an anime series, and final battle attended by thousands of people at a stadium in Shenzhen. The Chinese teams usually do the best, and the winners get some money and sometimes a job offer at DJI -- all part of the country's quest to dominate the robotics industry in the years to come.

Pick up a glass of water, lift a fork: you automatically figure out the best way to grasp each object. Now researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a robot that makes similar calculation, choosing on the fly whether to grab an object with pincers or lift it with a suction cup. From a report: Berkeley's two-armed robot, seen in this video clip [GIF file], first considers the contents of a bin and calculates each arm's probability of picking up an object. Its suction cup is good at grabbing smooth, flat objects like boxes, but bad at porous surfaces like on a stuffed animal. The pincers, on the other hand, are best with small, odd-shaped items. The system learned its pick-up prowess not from actual practice, but from millions of simulated grasps on more than 1,600 3D objects. In every simulation, small details were randomized, which taught the robot to deal with real-world uncertainty. The bot can pick up objects 95% of the time, at about 300 successful pickups per hour, its creators write in a paper published this week in Science Robotics. Warehouse robots that can move around merchandise are highly sought after. Amazon is reportedly working on its own "picker" robots, as are several robotics companies.

Amazon's annual invitation-only event on machine learning, automation, robotics and space -- known as Mars -- has become a high-tech highlight for insiders, featuring billionaire founder and CEO Jeff Bezos riding a giant robot or walking a robot dog. From a report: Now a wider circle of tech leaders can get in on a spin-off experience called re:MARS, which is due to make its debut June 4-7 at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The event will shine a spotlight on the leading lights and cutting-edge advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Amazon said today in a blog posting.

"We're at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction -- and we've only scratched the surface of what's possible," Bezos said. "AI is an enabling technology that can improve products and services across all industries. We're excited to create re:MARS, bringing together leaders and builders from diverse areas to share learnings and spark new ideas for future innovation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The world's first hotel "staffed by robots" has culled half of its steely eyed employees, because they're rubbish and annoy the guests. "Our hotel's advanced technologies, introduced with the aim of maximizing efficiency, also add to the fun and comfort of your stay," the Henn na Hotel boasted on its website. It's where multilingual female robots staff the reception desk. Guests are checked in using face recognition. Robot concierges carry your luggage. Robots cleaned and mixed drinks. A voice activated robot doll is on hand at night while you sleep.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the room doll interpreted snoring as a request it couldn't understand, waking guests continually through the night to rephrase. "The two robot luggage carriers are out of use because they can reach only about two dozen of the more than 100 rooms in the hotel. They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings," the paper reported. "They were really slow and noisy, and would get stuck trying to go past each other," lamented one guest. The concierge and the room doll have now been removed.

According to local reports, the world's first remote surgery equipment using 5G networks was successfully tested in China. "The test involved a doctor in the southeastern province of Fujian removing the liver of a laboratory test animal at a remote location," reports Ubergizmo. "The doctor performed the surgery by controlling robotic surgical arms over a 5G connection." From the report: The lag time was said to be only 0.1 seconds between the control device of the doctor and the robot in the surgical room. The researchers said that this high speed can reduce the risk of potentially deadly medical mistakes. They hope that 5G enabled remote surgery will soon become reliable enough that it can be used safely on humans as well. This could end up saving countless lives as skilled surgeons will be able to operate on patients in remote locations in a safe manner. The South China Morning Post published a video that shows the doctor performing the surgery.

Last Saturday a firm which rents promotional robots claimed that one of their robots broke free from a line of robots, only to be hit by a self-driving Tesla.

Though video of the incident has now been viewed over 1.2 million times, Wired followed up on the company's claim that "Nevada police" were investigating the incident. Or weren't. Aden Ocampo Gomez, a public information officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, said he couldn't find any record of such an incident. And anyway, he says, "We don't report to that kind of incident on private property."
Wired also challenged Promobot's claim that their robot was hit by "a self-driving Tesla car": Teslas don't have a "full self-driving" mode. Autopilot, the automaker's semiautonomous system, is made for highways, not the sort of private road shown in a video of the alleged crash published by the robotics company. Promobot seems to start falling over just a moment before the car gets to it. And that video appears to show a rope snaking away from the incident -- the sort that could be used, say, to pull down a robot that hadn't been hit by a car at all.
When Wired contacted the company for a comment, they didn't respond.

The company's press release also claims that after the collision "most likely there is no way to restore" their robot -- and yet the Daily Dot reports Promobot "does not intend to pursue reparations".

merbs writes: Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon -- but it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that's not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management -- in fact, it's very often not. Sometimes it's a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern.

In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.

General Motors was once the world's most profitable company -- for two decades -- and by 1970 its revenue was $22.8 billion (or $152 billion in today's dollars). But five weeks ago GM announced that it was finally ending small-car production and closing its Lordstown Assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio.

So what went wrong? Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible." In an article shared by Slashdot reader reporter, Quartz argues that seen in that light, the company's response to a 1972 strike "marked the beginning of the company's long but uneven descent, which would be characterized by a repeated impulse to bet on fancy, futuristic but unproven technologies while undervaluing its workers."

But the strike also raised larger issues for "a massive special task force" issuing a federal report on the quality of working life in 1972, titled Work in America... [T]echnology had failed in its promise to free humans from drudgery and wring profit from their talents, the authors said. On the contrary, the new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore prevented workers from honing their skills. That stymied career mobility and left people mired in the same torpor of boredom for decades. Despite this, America continued to offer its young people increasingly rigorous education -- even as work life left little opportunity to apply it.... The larger hopes and ambitions of Work in America -- the vision that saw satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy -- exists now as little but a curio in the footnotes of academic journals....

Meanwhile, GM continued to lavish spending on big capital investments, confident that the secret to competitiveness lay in replacing humans with technology. But as in Lordstown, the spending bore little fruit. As automotive analyst Maryann Keller recounted in her 1989 book Rude Awakening, one GM executive observed that, between 1980 and 1985, the company shelled out an eye-popping $45 billion in capital investment. Despite that spending, its global market share rose by but a single percentage point, to 22%. "For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," said the executive -- which would have instantly bumped GM's market share to 40%.
At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs," Quartz argues. "Workers had no big-picture goal of building cars together to motivate them."

The 7,000-word article concludes by noting that Youngstown residents still hope that their car factory will re-open. But it's also possible that instead Lordstown Assembly "will remain standing, but empty, a vast roadside reminder of a corporate elite's doomed quest to cheapen labor by stripping the human need for skill, learning, independence, and purpose out of production, by reimagining people as machines."

MojoKid writes: College students used to have to fend for themselves at the campus convenient store but soon may have the snacks coming to them courtesy of a new delivery service. The PepsiCo Hello Goodness Snackbot, an autonomous delivery robot, will now run snacks around select college campuses to satiate whatever case of the munchies it can. Students, staff, and faculty at the University of Pacific in Stockton, California can now order snacks between 9AM and 5PM through the Snackbot app, which is currently only available on iOS. The robot will deliver goods at 50 designated Snackbot areas across campuses. The delivery bot can go more than 20 miles on a single charge and includes a camera, headlights, and all-wheel drive to help it navigate through tough terrain if need be. The Snackbots are part of the company's goal of expanding the reach of their healthier product lines to 50,000 points of presence by the end of 2019.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to trick Google's reCaptcha system by using Google's own speech-to-text service. "[The researchers] claim that their CAPTCHA-fooling method, unCaptcha, can fool Google's reCaptcha, one of the most popular CAPTCHA systems currently used by hundreds of thousands of websites, with a 90 percent success rate," reports Motherboard. From the report: The researchers originally developed UnCaptcha in 2017, which uses Google's own free speech-to-text service to trick the system into thinking a robot is a human. It's an oroborus of bots: According to their paper, UnCaptcha downloads the audio captcha, segments the audio into individual digit audio clips, uploads the segments to multiple other speech-to-text services (including Google's), then converts these services' responses to digits. After a little homophone guesswork, it then decides which speech-to-text output is closest to accurate, and uploads the answer to the CAPTCHA field. This old method returned an 85% success rate.

After the release of that version of unCaptcha, Google fixed some of the loopholes that made it work, including better browser automation detection and switching to spoken phrases, rather than digits. The researchers claim that their new method, updated in June, gets around these improvements and is even more accurate than before, at 90 percent. "We have been in contact with the ReCaptcha team for over six months and they are fully aware of this attack," the researchers write. "The team has allowed us to release the code, despite its current success."

Some Amazon stores have no cashiers, and Waymo is testing self-driving taxis. Are robots taking our jobs? It depends on what you do and where you do it, according to a new report by the World Bank released this week. From a report: "Advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss," said the report, titled "The Changing Nature of Work." That may seem like good news in a broad sense, but not to the people whose jobs are disappearing. Technological advances and automation are making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.

schwit1 shares a report: Mining corporation Rio Tinto says that an autonomous rail system called AutoHaul that it's been developing in the remote Pilbara region of Australia for several years is now entirely operational -- an accomplishment the company says makes the system the "world's largest robot." "It's been a challenging journey to automate a rail network of this size and scale in a remote location like the Pilbara," Rio Tinto's managing director Ivan Vella told the Sydney Morning Herald, "but early results indicate significant potential to improve productivity, providing increased system flexibility and reducing bottlenecks." The ore-hauling train is just one part of an ambitious automation project involving robotics and driverless vehicles that Rio Tinto wants to use to automate its mining operations. The company conducted its first test of the train without a human on board last year, and it now claims that the system has completed more than a million kilometers (620,000 miles) of autonomous travel.

"In Japan, a robot may create a new way to mourn," reports one Colorado news team: This robot is supposed to sound like a loved one. Now imagine the same robot having a 3D-printed mask of their face. You will be able to stay with that robot for 49 days which is the period of mourning after the funeral in Japan. That is the concept of Digital Shaman project, which uses a humanoid.

Users will have an interview with the artist while they're alive. Their physical characteristics and messages will be recorded then. After the user dies, the bereaved ones will be able to install the program into the robot. It mimics the deceased one's personality, speech, and gestures. The robot can imitate hand and head movements the person was making during the interview.... As unreal as it may seem, the artist is planning to sell digital shaman to the public in the future.

People may wonder if the creator is planning to allow the deceased to live forever through the program. She's not. "I think it will seriously hinder those left behind to move on." We live in a digital world. And now a robot has brought together "IT technology" and "Death".
It's part of a larger research project on Japanese funeral rites, and one of a series of works on "digital shamanism" that "attempt to blend Japanese folk beliefs with technology."

An artist's statement calls it "a new mode of mourning in keeping with the technical advances of today."

For most of us, using up the Christmas leftovers means endless rounds of turkey sandwiches and lashings of Brussel sprout curry in the days leading up to New Year. So, to help inject some creativity into this year's leftover eat-up, BBC turned to artificial intelligence for some culinary assistance. From a report: A number of research teams around the world have been developing AI systems that are capable of learning from existing recipes and then coming up with some of their own. We asked researchers behind two innovative algorithms to see what their AI's take would be on Christmas food. One, developed by computer scientists at Stanford University, can turn whatever food is left in your fridge into a unique recipe based on those ingredients. The other, created by AI researchers at the University of Illinois, puts a cultural twist on a meal by creating dishes from one country in the style of another cuisine.

The first algorithm, called Forage, uses a type of AI known as deep neural networks, which attempts to replicate the way the human brain works. Networks like these are able to handle problems involving complex data and are increasingly being used to tackle tasks as diverse as controlling self-driving cars and recognising the early signs of cancer in health scans. [...] The second algorithm we used was developed by Lav Varshney and his team at the University of Illinois. It was trained on nearly 40,000 recipes from 20 different countries using a system that can apply semantic reasoning to replace certain ingredients with those it considers to be equivalent from a different cuisine.

An anonymous reader quotes CBS News: Parents are realizing that it's not just Santa who's keeping tabs on their kids. Many popular high-tech gadgets that may end up being given as holiday presents can actually track, monitor and record children. Because of that, there are some gifts Felicity and Alden Eute won't have under their Christmas tree. Their mother, Emily, has banned all tech gifts this season. "My husband and I both agree kids don't really need to be on technology or on social media," Emily said. "None of these extra gadgets that just expose you to things kids shouldn't be exposed to at their age."

While federal law requires a parent's permission to track and collect data on children under 13, a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed this week alleges widespread violations through apps that "send persistent identifiers to third parties without giving direct notice to parents." That means things like location data, phone numbers and contact information could be exposed, according to Serge Engleman of the International Computer Science Institute. The institute's surveillance system, under the direction of Engleman, collected evidence that is now before the Federal Trade Commission.... It's not only apps where there are potential violations. "Any kind of interconnected robot-type toys...interactive games that you may play online are collecting data," said Scott Pink, a privacy and cybersecurity specialist.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares this article from the Verge: An autonomous food delivery robot burst into flames on a Berkeley, California walkway, as first reported by The Daily Californian. Kiwi, the startup that makes and manages the one hundred-strong fleet of robots, issued a statement to say that the fire was quickly extinguished by a passerby before the city's fire department arrived and doused the machine in foam.... It said that it believed the fire was caused by human error, when a faulty battery was manually inserted into the robot, eventually causing thermal runaway -- the same issue that resulted in the recall of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phones. Kiwi says that a new piece of software will "rigorously monitor the state of each battery" to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Kiwi said the incident resulted in "some smoke and minor flames." But video captured of the event shows the robot engulfed in the kind of fiercely burning fireball typically associated with battery fires.
Though no one was hurt, Kiwi's fleet of 100 delivery robots was still deactivated while the company investigated the fiery wreck.

merbs writes: Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too.

There's a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others.

In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels' and casinos' widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city's most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got.

Waymo's testing dozens of self-driving mini-vans near Phoenix. Now the Arizona Republic asks why the vehicles are getting so much hate, citing "a slashed tire, a pointed gun, bullies on the road..."

"Police have responded to dozens of calls regarding people threatening and harassing Waymo vans." That was clear August 19, when police were called because a 37-year-old man who police described as "heavily intoxicated" was standing in front of a Waymo and not allowing the van to proceed. "He stated he was sick and tired of the Waymo vehicles driving in his neighborhood, and apparently thought the best idea to resolve this was to stand in front of one of these vehicles," Officer Richard Rimbach wrote in a report.

Phil Simon, an information systems lecturer at Arizona State University and author of several books on technology, said angst from residents is probably less about how the Waymo vans drive and more about people frustrated with what Waymo represents. "This stuff is happening fast and a lot of people are concerned that technology is going to run them out of a job," Simon said. Simon said it is hard for middle-class people to celebrate technological breakthroughs like self-driving cars if they have seen their own wages stagnate or even decline in recent years. "There are always winners and losers, and these are probably people who are afraid and this is a way for them to fight back in some small, futile way," Simon said. "Something tells me these are not college professors or vice presidents who are doing well."
Police used video footage from Waymo to identify the license plate of a Jeep that kept driving head-on toward Waymo's test car -- six different times, one in which the driver then slammed on the brakes, jumped out of their car, and demanded that Waymo get out of their neighborhood. Another local resident told the newspaper that "Everybody hates Waymo drivers. They are dangerous." On four separate occasions, people have thrown rocks.

A 69-year-old man was even arrested for pointing a revolver at the test driver in a passing Waymo car. He later told police he was trying to scare Waymo's driver, and "stated that he despises and hates those cars." He was charged with aggravated assault and disorderly conduct. The man's wife told reporters he'd been diagnosed with dementia, but the Arizona Republic calls it "one of at least 21 interactions documented by local police during the past two years where people have harassed the autonomous vehicles and their human test drivers," adding "There may be many undocumented instances where people threatened Waymo drivers..."

"The self-driving vans use radar, lidar and cameras to navigate, so they capture footage of all interactions that usually is clear enough to identify people and read license plates," the paper adds. (Waymo later cites its "ongoing work" with communities "including Arizona law enforcement and first responders.") When one local news crew followed Waymo vehicles for 170 miles to critique their driving, a Waymo driver eventually pulled into a police station "because the driver was concerned we might've been harassing them. After they learned we were with the media, they let us go on our way."