Businesses

Will Tech Leave Detroit In the Dust? (wsj.com) 102

As automotive companies shift their focus to software and services in the pursuit of self-driving cars, the impact to large manufacturing cities like Detroit could be drastic. The Wall Street Journal explores this "transformation without precedent" and poses the question: will tech leave Detroit in the dust? From the report: Auto makers point out that they have one advantage that newcomers to the industry don't: vehicles. "Ultimately, you can have the best services platform there is, but if you don't have the vehicles to operate on it, that won't do you much good," said Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst with Navigant research. "That's where the manufacturers have an ace in the hole." Many analysts believe businesses like Uber and Alphabet's self-driving tech subsidiary Waymo won't have the appetite to get into the low-margin, capital-intensive business of car manufacturing. Some auto executives say they can hold on to their roles as hardware providers while also tapping into the growth of more-profitable services. Mr. Stackmann said VW can earn millions more customers than it currently has by offering transportation as a service through a network of connected cars. "They talk about scalability, but where is the added value from Uber?" he said. "We have a technical foundation and will build connectivity into our vehicles to connect them and our customers to our ecosystem. In the long term, the question will be: Why do you need Uber?"

Auto industry executives have long seen tech-industry threats coming. The valuation of Elon Musk's Tesla has soared in recent years, pulling even with GM's, as it has shown it can create a fiercely loyal customer base for electric cars. Google began working on autonomous-vehicle technology in 2009 and its self-driving car unit Waymo is today considered a leader in the technology. While demand for new cars and trucks remains robust and selling them will remain a core part of the industry's business in the years to come, many executives believe the long-term profit growth is limited as new forms of transportation proliferate and more car owners ditch their vehicles for shared ones, hurting sales. Car companies are trying to diversify into new business models that, much like Uber, sell transportation as a service. Revenue is generated by usage as opposed to a one-time vehicle sale, and because the service isn't as capital-intensive as building and selling cars, executives believe it can ultimately command higher margins..."
The report goes on to mention the investments automobile companies are making to restructure their businesses. GM, Ford, and Toyota, for example, "are investing in new tech startups, purchasing artificial-intelligence and robotics firms, and hiring thousands of workers in tech hubs in California and Tel Aviv, Israel," reports the WSJ. "Several car companies have acquired or invested in makers of lidar, laser-based sensors that help driverless cars navigate. The auto makers are tapping the tech world for software-engineering talent, a skill traditionally in short supply in the car business."

"Over the last year, GM has taken journalists and investors through a factory in suburban Detroit, where workers plan to build self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric cars that have no steering wheels or brake pedals," reports the WSJ. "The message: It has the manufacturing might to crank out thousands of robot cars, while tech rivals like Alphabet's Waymo unit must equip their autonomous systems onto vehicles they purchase from traditional car companies."
Programming

Researchers Secretly Deployed A Bot That Submitted Bug-Fixing Pull Requests (medium.com) 87

An anonymous reader quotes Martin Monperrus, a professor of software at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology: Repairnator is a bot. It constantly monitors software bugs discovered during continuous integration of open-source software and tries to fix them automatically. If it succeeds to synthesize a valid patch, Repairnator proposes the patch to the human developers, disguised under a fake human identity. To date, Repairnator has been able to produce 5 patches that were accepted by the human developers and permanently merged in the code base...

It analyzes bugs and produces patches, in the same way as human developers involved in software maintenance activities. This idea of a program repair bot is disruptive, because today humans are responsible for fixing bugs. In others words, we are talking about a bot meant to (partially) replace human developers for tedious tasks.... [F]or a patch to be human-competitive 1) the bot has to synthesize the patch faster than the human developer 2) the patch has to be judged good-enough by the human developer and permanently merged in the code base.... We believe that Repairnator prefigures a certain future of software development, where bots and humans will smoothly collaborate and even cooperate on software artifacts.

Their fake identity was a software engineer named Luc Esape, with a profile picture that "looks like a junior developer, eager to make open-source contributions... humans tend to have a priori biases against machines, and are more tolerant to errors if the contribution comes from a human peer. In the context of program repair, this means that developers may put the bar higher on the quality of the patch, if they know that the patch comes from a bot."

The researchers proudly published the approving comments on their merged patches -- although a conundrum arose when repairnator submitted a patch for Eclipse Ditto, only to be told that "We can only accept pull-requests which come from users who signed the Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement."

"We were puzzled because a bot cannot physically or morally sign a license agreement and is probably not entitled to do so. Who owns the intellectual property and responsibility of a bot contribution: the robot operator, the bot implementer or the repair algorithm designer?"
AI

Sentimental Humans Launch A Movement to Save (Human) Driving (freep.com) 286

Car enthusiast McKeel Hagerty -- also the CEO America's largest insurer of classic cars -- recently told a Detroit newspaper about his "Save Driving" campaign to preserve human driving for future generations. Hagerty said he wants people-driven cars to share the roads, not surrender them, with robot cars. "Driving and the car culture are meaningful for a lot of people," Hagerty said, who still owns the first car he bought 37 years ago for $500. It's a 1967 Porsche 911S, which he restored with his dad. "We feel the car culture needs a champion." Hagerty said he will need 6 million members to have the clout to preserve human driving in the future, but he is not alone in the quest to drum up that support. The Human Driving Association was launched in January and it already has 4,000 members. Both movements have a growing following as many consumers distrust the evolving self-driving car technology, studies show...

[S]ome people fear losing the freedom of personal car ownership and want to have control of their own mobility. They distrust autonomous technology and they worry about the loss of privacy... In Cox Automotive's Evolution of Mobility study released earlier this year, nearly half of the 1,250 consumers surveyed said they would "never" buy a fully autonomous car and indicated they did not believe roads would be safer if all vehicles were self-driving. The study showed 68 percent said they would feel "uncomfortable" riding in car driven fully by a computer. And 84 percent said people should have the option to drive themselves even in an autonomous vehicle. The study showed people's perception of self-driving cars' safety is dwindling. When asked whether the roads would be safer if all vehicles were fully autonomous, 45 percent said yes, compared with 63 percent who answered yes in 2016's study....

Proponents for self-driving cars say the cars would offer mobility to those who cannot drive such as disabled people or elderly people. They say the electric self-driving cars would be better for the environment. Finally, roads would be safer with computers driving, they say. In 2017, the United States had about 40,000 traffic deaths, about 90 percent of which were due to human error, Cox's study said.

Alex Roy, founder of the The Human Driving Association, is proposing a third option called "augmented driving" -- allowing people the option to drive, but helping them do it better.

"It's a system that would not allow a human to drive into a wall. If I turned the steering wheel toward a wall, the car turns the wheel back the right way," said Roy.
Privacy

Smart Home Makers Hoard Your Data, But Won't Say If the Police Come For It (techcrunch.com) 45

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Thermostats know the temperature of your house, and smart cameras and sensors know when someone's walking around your home. Smart assistants know what you're asking for, and smart doorbells know who's coming and going. And thanks to the cloud, that data is available to you from anywhere -- you can check in on your pets from your phone or make sure your robot vacuum cleaned the house. Because the data is stored or accessible by the smart home tech makers, law enforcement and government agencies have increasingly sought out data from the companies to solve crimes. And device makers won't say if your smart home gadgets have been used to spy on you. We asked some of the most well-known smart home makers on the market if they plan on releasing a transparency report, or disclose the number of demands they receive for data from their smart home devices. For the most part, we received fairly dismal responses. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson for the company said last year that it would not reveal the figures for its Echo smart speakers. Facebook said that its transparency report section will include "any requests related to Portal," its new hardware screen with a camera and a microphone. A spokesperson for the company did not comment on if the company will break out the hardware figures separately. Google also declined to comment, but did point TechCruch to Nest's transparency report. Apple, the last of the big tech giants, said that there's no need to disclose its smart home figures because there would be nothing to report, adding that user requests made to HomePod are given a random identifier that cannot be tied to a person.

TechCrunch also asked a number of smaller smart home players, like August, iRobot, Arlo, Ring, Honeywell, Canary, Samsung, and Ecobee.
Robotics

Automation is Democratizing Experimental Science (axios.com) 52

New advances are taking automation to the highest end of human endeavors, offering scientists a shot at some of the most intractable problems that have confounded them -- and along the way tipping a global balance to give upstarts like China a more level playing field in the lab. From a report: A combination of artificial intelligence and nimble robots are allowing scientists to do more, and be faster, than they ever could with mere human hands and brains. "We're in the middle of a paradigm shift, a time when the choice of experiments and the execution of experiments are not really things that people do," says Bob Murphy, the head of the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments. He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once -- and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now. Starting next year, Murphy's department will offer students a master's degree in automated science, the university announced last week.

Robotics

The UK Invited a Robot To 'Give Evidence' In Parliament For Attention (theverge.com) 18

"The UK Parliament caused a bit of a stir this week with the news that it would play host to its first non-human witness," reports The Verge. "A press release from one of Parliament's select committees (groups of MPs who investigate an issue and report back to their peers) said it had invited Pepper the robot to 'answer questions' on the impact of AI on the labor market." From the report: "Pepper is part of an international research project developing the world's first culturally aware robots aimed at assisting with care for older people," said the release from the Education Committee. "The Committee will hear about her work [and] what role increased automation and robotics might play in the workplace and classroom of the future." It is, of course, a stunt.

As a number of AI and robotics researchers pointed out on Twitter, Pepper the robot is incapable of giving such evidence. It can certainly deliver a speech the same way Alexa can read out the news, but it can't formulate ideas itself. As one researcher told MIT Technology Review, "Modern robots are not intelligent and so can't testify in any meaningful way." Parliament knows this. In an email to The Verge, a media officer for the Education Committee confirmed that Pepper would be providing preprogrammed answers written by robotics researchers from Middlesex University, who are also testifying on the same panel. "It will be clear on the day that Pepper's responses are not spontaneous," said the spokesperson. "Having Pepper appear before the Committee and the chance to question the witnesses will provide an opportunity for members to explore both the potential and limitations of such technology and the capabilities of robots."
MP Robert Halfon, the committee's chair, told education news site TES that inviting Pepper was "not about someone bringing an electronic toy robot and doing a demonstration" but showing the "potential of robotics and artificial intelligence." He added: "If we've got the march of the robots, we perhaps need the march of the robots to our select committee to give evidence."
Robotics

Boston Dynamics' Robot Went From a Drunk Baby To a Nimble Ninja in a Matter of Years (qz.com) 115

In a new video from robotics company Boston Dynamics, which Alphabet sold to SoftBank last year, a robot is shown hopping over a log and then up a series of blocks, an activity called parkour. From a report: In previous videos, the robot did a backflip -- now it's leaping over obstacles and climbing up large, uneven stairs with fleet-footed ease. But Atlas wasn't always so graceful. In some of the first videos where Boston Dynamics' robots could walk upright, way back in 2015, Atlas lumbered through the woods, looking like it was narrowly avoiding falling with each step, rather than moving with any kind of purpose.
Robotics

Automated Warehouse In Tokyo Managed To Replace 90 Percent of Its Staff With Robots (qz.com) 73

Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said."

The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).

AI

New App Lets You 'Sue Anyone By Pressing a Button' (vice.com) 105

Jason Koebler writes: Do Not Pay, a free service that launched in the iOS App store today, uses artificial intelligence to help people win up to $25,000 in small claims court. It's the latest project from 21-year-old Stanford senior Joshua Browder, whose service previously allowed people to fight parking tickets or sue Equifax; now, the app has streamlined the process. It's the "first ever service to sue anyone (in all 3,000 counties in 50 states) by pressing a button."
Google

Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL Announced With Bigger Screens and Best Cameras Yet (theverge.com) 74

Google on Tuesday unveiled the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, its latest flagship Android smartphones. "For life on the go, we designed the world's best camera and put it in the world's most helpful phone," said Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh. From a report: The Pixel 3 starts at $799 for 64GB, with the 3 XL costing $899. Add $100 to either for the 128GB storage option. Core specs for both include a Snapdragon 845, 4GB RAM (there's no option for more), Bluetooth 5.0, and front-facing stereo speakers. Also inside is a new Titan M security chip, which Google says provides "on-device protection for login credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system." Preorders for both phones begin today, and buyers will get six months of free YouTube Music service.

The Pixel 3 and 3 XL both feature larger screens than last year's models thanks to slimmed down bezels -- and the controversial notch in the case of the bigger phone. The 3 XL has a 6.3-inch display (up from six inches on the 2 XL), while the regular 3 has a 5.5-inch screen (up from five inches). Overall, though, the actual phones are very similar in size and handling to their direct predecessors. Google has stuck with a single rear 12.2-megapixel camera on both phones, continuing to resist the dual-camera industry trend. But it's a different story up front. Both the Pixel 3 and 3 XL have two front-facing cameras; one of them offers a wider field of view for getting more people or a greater sense of your surroundings into a selfie. [...] A new Top Shot option will select the best image from a burst series of shots. Like Samsung's Galaxy Note 9, it will weed out pictures that are blurry or snaps where someone blinked. Super Res Zoom uses multiple frames and AI to deliver a sharper final photo even without optical zoom.
There's another interesting feature on the new Pixel handsets: To help you avoid calls from scammers, Google is adding Call Screen to the Pixel, a new option that appears when you receive a phone call. Whenever someone calls you, you can tap a "Screen call" button, and a robot voice will pick up. "The person you're calling is using a screening service, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name, and why you're calling," the Google bot will say. As the caller responds, the digital assistant will transcribe the caller's message for you. If you need more information, you can use one of the feature's canned responses, which include, "Tell me more," and "Who is this?" There is an accept and reject call button that's on-screen, so you can hang up or take the call at any time.
Robotics

Robot Pioneer Rethink Shuts Down (bostonglobe.com) 30

Rethink Robotics led the way in building robots that could work safely alongside humans. But when it came to selling those robots, Boston-based Rethink came up second best. On Wednesday, without warning, Rethink shut its doors, after a deal to acquire the company fell through. From a report: "We thought that we had a deal that we were going to be able to close," said Rethink chief executive Scott Eckert. But the buyer backed out. Eckert declined to identify the company that had broken off the acquisition. Eckert said Rethink ran low on cash as sales of the company's Baxter and Sawyer robots fell short of expectations. "We got out a little early with a very, very innovative product, and unfortunately did not get the commercial success that we expected to get," he said. Rethink was a pioneer in developing collaborative robots, or "cobots," which are designed to work side-by-side with humans. Their software makes them easy to program, even by workers with no training in robotics, and they come with sensors and software to prevent them from accidentally harming nearby humans.
Businesses

New Autonomous Farm Wants To Produce Food Without Human Workers (technologyreview.com) 92

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Iron Ox isn't like most robotics companies. Instead of trying to flog you its technology, it wants to sell you food. As the firm's cofounder Brandon Alexander puts it: "We are a farm and will always be a farm." But it's no ordinary farm. For starters, the company's 15 human employees share their work space with robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy greens. Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility -- which is attached to the startup's offices -- will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That's the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company's grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply. Iron Ox uses software, dubbed "The Brain," to watch over the farm and monitor nitrogen levels, temperature, and robot location. Alexander hopes to automative every process of the farm, but human workers are currently needed to help with seeding and processing the crops. He cites the shortage of agricultural workers and the distances that fresh product currently has to be shipped for reasons why we need automated farming.

"The problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system," says Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Florida. "You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small growers can't do that." Currently, Iron Ox is sending the food it produces to a local food bank and to the company salad bar.
The Internet

Internet Archive Says It Has Restored 9 Million Broken Wikipedia Links By Directing Them To Archived Versions in Wayback Machine (archive.org) 40

Mark Graham, the Director of Wayback Machine at Internet Archive, announces: As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine.

For more than 5 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week. And for the past 3 years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a '404', or 'Page Not Found'). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with. Restoring links ensures Wikipedia remains accurate and verifiable and thus meets one of Wikipedia's three core content policies: 'Verifiability.'

Facebook

Facebook is Equipping K-8 Classrooms With Robot Sets To Boost Tech Diversity 63

Long time reader theodp writes: Facebook last week announced the launch of CodeFWD, "a free online education program created in partnership with [robotic toy maker] Sphero to increase the amount of underrepresented and female students interested in studying computer science." Sphero and CodeFWD are offering a free Sphero BOLT Power Pack (a classroom set of 15 robots valued at $2,499) for a select number of accepted applicants through the program. So, what do you need to begin CodeFWD by Facebook? "No experience necessary. No experience preferred ," explains the website. However, that's not to say CodeFWD is for all. "CodeFWD is intended for educators who are credentialed K-12 teachers or 501(c)(3) non-profit staff members in the United States," the website makes clear, adding that "given the limited supply of robots, we will evaluate the information you've provided and prioritize those applications that help us achieve the goal of expanding access to computer programming opportunities." And Facebook, being Facebook, adds that it wants some data out of the deal: "Please note that Facebook will have access to aggregate, anonymous usage data from Sphero, but will not have access to user-identifiable data collected by Sphero."
Robotics

What Will Happen When Killer Robots Get Hijacked? (marketwatch.com) 157

"Imagine an artificial-intelligence-driven military drone capable of autonomously patrolling the perimeter of a country or region and deciding who lives and who dies, without a human operator. Now do the same with tanks, helicopters and biped/quadruped robots." A United Nations conference recently decided not to ban these weapons systems outright, but to revisit the topic in November.

So a MarketWatch columnist looked at how these weapons systems could go bad -- and argues the risks are greater than simply fooling the AI into malfunctioning. What about hijacking...? In warfare, AI units can function autonomously, but in the end they need a way to communicate with one another and to transfer data to a command center. This makes them vulnerable to hacking and hijacking. What would happen if one of these drones or robots was hijacked by an opposite faction and started firing on civilians? A hacker would laugh. Why? Because he wouldn't hijack just one. He would design a self-propagating virus that would spread throughout the AI network and infect all units in the vicinity, as well as those communicating with them. In a split second, an entire squad of lethal autonomous weapons systems would be under enemy control... Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.

However, the U.S. government remains oblivious. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has already announced a $2 billion development campaign for the next wave of technologically advanced AI (dubbed "AI Next"). One of the goals is to have the machines "acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them." I may be overreaching here, but the UN meeting on one end and this announcement on the other, make me think that the U.S. government isn't just pro-robotic -- it may already have a lethal autonomous weapons ace up its sleeve.

The article ends with a question: What do you think about killer robots replacing human combatants?

And what would happen if killer robots got hijacked?
Robotics

Robot Lawnmowers Are Killing Hedgehogs (wired.com) 215

An anonymous reader shares a report: While Americans still wrangle their overgrown lawns by pushing or riding a lawnmower, many Europeans have handed off that responsibility to robots. These beefy, Roomba-like mowers loop their way around a yard, keeping grass trim and neat. To many of their users, the bots are endearing. Their owners give them names or cover them in decals of ladybugs or bumblebees. But the sentimentality only goes so far, because these blades-on-wheels have also been slicing up something other than grass: hedgehogs.

Erika Heller, a long-time hedgehog advocate with a Swiss nonprofit called Igelstation Winterthur, estimates that nearly half the hedgehogs brought to the group during the last couple years were injured by robot lawnmowers. These injuries include limb amputation, cut bellies, or even scalping. And that's not including the ones that have been killed outright. "The ones that have died we don't see, because they don't get brought here." In the United States, despite a wealth of children's toys and clothing featuring hedgehogs, the only live animals you're likely to see are in the zoo or, more controversially, kept as pets. But in Europe, wild hedgehogs are beloved. They're popular in European folklore; there's even a famous British poem about a hedgehog killed by a lawn mower.

Space

Japan's Two Hopping Rovers Successfully Land On Asteroid Ryugu (space.com) 76

sharkbiter shares a report from Space.com: The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu -- and they've even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely.

In order to complete the deployment, the main spacecraft of the Hayabusa2 mission lowered itself carefully down toward the surface until it was just 180 feet (55 meters) up. After the rovers were on their way, the spacecraft raised itself back up to its typical altitude of about 12.5 miles above the asteroid's surface (20 kilometers). The agency still has two more deployments yet to accomplish before it can rest easy: Hayabusa2 is scheduled to deploy a larger rover called MASCOT in October and another tiny hopper next year. And of course, the main spacecraft has a host of other tasks to accomplish during its stay at Ryugu -- most notably, to collect a sample of the primitive world to bring home to Earth for laboratory analysis.
JAXA tweeted on Saturday: "We are sorry we have kept you waiting! MINERVA-II1 consists of two rovers, 1a & 1b. Both rovers are confirmed to have landed on the surface of Ryugu. They are in good condition and have transmitted photos & data. We also confirmed they are moving on the surface."
Programming

Coding Error Sends 2019 Subaru Ascents To the Car Crusher (ieee.org) 183

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [A] software remedy can't solve Subaru's issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru's recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents' B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents' bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed." Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.
Robotics

In a World of Robots, Carmakers Persist in Hiring More Humans (bloomberg.com) 44

It looks like car-industry employees who are concerned about robots taking their jobs don't need to worry -- for now, at least. Of the 13 publicly traded automakers with at least 100,000 workers at the end of their most-recent fiscal year, 11 had more staff compared with year-end 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Combined, they had 3.1 million employees, or 11 percent more than four years earlier, the data show. From the report: Carmakers in China and other emerging markets, where growth is strongest, favor human labor because it requires less upfront investment, said Steve Man, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong. In developed markets, tasks that can be handled by robots were automated years ago and automakers are now boosting hiring in research and development as the industry evolves. "There's been a lot of growth in emerging markets, especially China, so that's one reason automakers are adding staff," Man said. "More staff is being added on the R&D side, with the push for autonomous, electric, connected vehicles." A trio of Chinese automakers, SAIC Motor, Dongfeng Motor Group and BYD -- in which Warren Buffett is a major investor -- increased staff by at least 24 percent. Volkswagen accounted for more than one in five jobs among the group of 13, and increased its employee count by 12 percent in the period. Things, however, look differently at General Motors, which shrank its payroll 18 percent to 180,000, and Nissan Motor, which contracted by 2.8 percent to 139,000 workers, the report added.
Robotics

Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025 (cnbc.com) 145

In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans, according to the World Economic Forum's latest AI job forecast. From a report: Machines will overtake humans in terms of performing more tasks at the workplace by 2025 -- but there could still be 58 million net new jobs created in the next five years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a report on Monday. Developments in automation technologies and artificial intelligence could see 75 million jobs displaced, according to the WEF report "The Future of Jobs 2018." However, another 133 million new roles may emerge as companies shake up their division of labor between humans and machines, translating to 58 million net new jobs being created by 2022, it said. At the same time, there would be "significant shifts" in the quality, location and format of new roles, according to the WEF report, which suggested that full-time, permanent employment may potentially fall. Some companies could choose to use temporary workers, freelancers and specialist contractors, while others may automate many of the tasks. New skill sets for employees will be needed as labor between machines and humans continue to evolve, the report pointed out.

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