Andrew Tarantola writes via Engadget: It's been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It's been three years since the company first demonstrated its "sewing machine-like" implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs -- and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third "show and tell" event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, "we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human."

Neuralink has seen tumultuous times in the previous April 2021 status update: The company's co-founder, Max Hodak, quietly quit just after that event, though he said was still a "huge cheerleader" for Neuralink's success. That show of confidence was subsequently shattered this past August after Musk reportedly approached Neuralink's main rival, Synchron, as an investment opportunity. Earlier in February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died during prototype testing of its BCI implants at the University of California, Davis Primate Center but rejected accusations by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine of animal cruelty. Musk responded indirectly to those charges on Wednesday. "Before we would even think of putting a device in an animal, we do everything possible we with rigorous benchtop testing, We're not cavalier about putting these devices into animals," he said. "We're extremely careful and we always want the device, whenever we do the implant -- whether into a sheep, pig or monkey -- to be confirmatory, not exploratory."

Neuralink is still working towards gaining FDA approval for its implant, though the company was awarded the agency's Breakthrough Device Designation in July 2020. This program allows patients and caregivers more "timely access" to promising treatments and medical devices by fast tracking their development and regulatory testing. As of September, 2022 the FDA has granted that designation to 728 medical devices. The FDA has also updated its best practices guidance regarding clinical and nonclinical BCI testing in 2021. "The field of implanted BCI devices is progressing rapidly from fundamental neuroscience discoveries to translational applications and market access," the agency asserted in its May guidance. "Implanted BCI devices have the potential to bring benefit to people with severe disabilities by increasing their ability to interact with their environment, and consequently, providing new independence in daily life."

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 Tuesday night to approve a controversial policy that would allow police to deploy robots capable of using lethal force in extraordinary circumstances, according to multiple reports. From a report: The Washington Post reports the vote came after a heated debate on a policy that would allow officers to use ground-based robots to kill "when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and officers cannot subdue the threat after using alternative force options or de-escalation tactics." The Post says the measure still requires a second vote next week and the mayor's approval.

"There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm," Supervisor Aaron Peskin said at the board meeting, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. But Supervisors Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton voted against the policy, the Chronicle reported. "There is serious potential for misuse and abuse of this military-grade technology, and zero showing of necessity," Preston said at the meeting. Ultimately, the board adopted an amendment requiring one of two high-ranking San Francisco Police Department leaders to authorize any use of a robot for lethal force, according to the Chronicle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The San Francisco Police Department is currently petitioning the city's Board of Supervisors for permission to deploy robots to kill suspects that law enforcement deems a sufficient threat that the "risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD." The draft policy, which was written by the SFPD itself, also seeks to exclude "hundreds of assault rifles from its inventory of military-style weapons and for not include personnel costs in the price of its weapons," according to a report from Mission Local.

As Mission Local notes, this proposal has already seen significant opposition from both within and without the Board. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, initially pushed back against the use of force requirements, inserting "Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person," into the policy language. The SFPD removed that wording in a subsequent draft, which I as a lifelong San Francisco resident did not know was something that they could just do. The three-member Rules Committee, which Peskin chairs, then unanimously approved that draft and advanced it to the full Board of Supervisors for a vote on November 29th. Peskin excused his decision by claiming that "there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option."

The police force currently maintains a dozen fully-functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspections and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD showed in 2016, they make excellent bomb delivery platforms as well. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with blank shotgun shells used to forcibly disrupt an explosive device's internal workings, though there is nothing stopping police from using live rounds if they needed, as Oakland police recently acknowledged to that city's civilian oversight board.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division." Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa. The report says that while Alexa's Echo line is among the "best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost." One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable. Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino's pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: "By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use." The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the "financial contribution" of those users "often fell short of expectations."

In a public note to employees, Jassy said the company still has "conviction in pursuing" Alexa, but that's after making huge cuts to the Alexa team. One employee told Business Insider that currently, "There's no clear directive for devices" in the future, and that since the hardware isn't profitable, there's no clear incentive to keep iterating on popular products. That lack of direction led to the internally controversial $1,000 Astro robot, which is basically an Amazon Alexa on wheels. Business Insider's tracking now puts Alexa in third place in the US voice-assistant wars, with the Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple's Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon on Thursday showed off a new robot that could one day assist warehouse workers with some of the more tedious aspects of the job. The company unveiled "Sparrow," a robotic arm that can pluck millions of items of varying shapes and sizes, on stage at the Delivering the Future conference near Boston, where it showcased new robotics, transportation and last-mile delivery technologies. Amazon says Sparrow uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to move products before they're packaged. A video of Sparrow shows the robotic arm picking up a board game, a bottle of vitamins and a set of sheets -- all the kinds of items that might flow through one of the company's warehouses -- and deftly placing them in crates.

Suction cups attached to the surface of the robot allow it to firmly grasp items. Previous iterations of robotic arms have been able to pick up boxes, which are generally uniform in their shape but might vary in size. But Sparrow is capable of handling items with varying curvature and size, said Jason Messinger, principal technical product manager of robotic manipulation at Amazon Robotics, in a demonstration. "This is not just picking the same things up and moving it with high precision, which we've seen in previous robots," Messinger said. The robotic arm can identify around 65% of Amazon's product inventory, the company said.

While the introduction of robots to the warehouse often raises questions about whether human jobs will be replaced, Amazon says Sparrow will "take on repetitive tasks," freeing employees up to focus on other things. The company also said the technology can improve safety in the workplace, although that prospect has been debated. An investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found the company's warehouses with robots have higher injury rates than facilities without automation. Further reading: Amazon Unveils Smaller Delivery Drone That Can Fly in Rain

Google has announced an ambitious new project to develop a single AI language model that supports the world's "1,000 most spoken languages." The Verge reports: As a first step towards this goal, the company is unveiling an AI model trained on over 400 languages, which it describes as "the largest language coverage seen in a speech model today." [...] Google's "1,000 Languages Initiative" is not focusing on any particular functionality, but instead on creating a single system with huge breadth of knowledge across the world's languages.

Speaking to The Verge, Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google AI, said the company believes that creating a model of this size will make it easier to bring various AI functionalities to languages that are poorly represented in online spaces and AI training datasets (also known as "low-resource languages"). "By having a single model that is exposed to and trained on many different languages, we get much better performance on our low resource languages," says Ghahramani. "The way we get to 1,000 languages is not by building 1,000 different models. Languages are like organisms, they've evolved from one another and they have certain similarities. And we can find some pretty spectacular advances in what we call zero-shot learning when we incorporate data from a new language into our 1,000 language model and get the ability to translate [what it's learned] from a high-resource language to a low-resource language."

Access to data is a problem when training across so many languages, though, and Google says that in order to support work on the 1,000-language model it will be funding the collection of data for low-resource languages, including audio recordings and written texts. The company says it has no direct plans on where to apply the functionality of this model -- only that it expects it will have a range of uses across Google's products, from Google Translate to YouTube captions and more. "One of the really interesting things about large language models and language research in general is that they can do lots and lots of different tasks," says Ghahramani. "The same language model can turn commands for a robot into code; it can solve maths problems; it can do translation. The really interesting things about language models is they're becoming repositories of a lot of knowledge, and by probing them in different ways you can get to different bits of useful functionality."

According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has "switched off Westworld" after its recent fourth season. From the report: It's an unexpected fate for a series that was once considered one of HBO's biggest tentpoles -- an acclaimed mystery-box drama that racked up 54 Emmy award nominations (including a supporting actress win for Thandiwe Newton). Last month, co-creator Jonathan Nolan said in an interview that he hoped HBO would give the series a fifth season to wrap up the show's ambitious story, which has chronicled a robot uprising that changed the fate of humanity. "We always planned for a fifth and final season," Nolan said. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them." Co-creator Lisa Joy likewise said the series has always been working toward a specific ending: "Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet."

Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four. Westworld's critic average on Rotten Tomatoes likewise declined from the mid-80s for its first two seasons to the mid-70s for the latter two. Fans increasingly griped that the show became confusing and tangled in its mythology and lacked characters to root for. Looming over all of this is the fact Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has pledged aggressive cost cutting mandate, though network insiders maintain that saving money was not a factor in the show's cancelation. HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It's been a thrill to join them on this journey."

"Today, tools like drones, digital recorders, and artificial intelligence are helping us listen to the sounds of nature in unprecedented ways," writes Vox, citing Karen Bakker, author of the new book Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.

But how far will this lead? Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and miniaturization has allowed scientists to stick microphones onto animals as small as honeybees. "Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities," Bakker writes.

All those devices create a ton of data, which would be impossible to go through manually. So researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (which studies sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (which studies the sounds made by entire ecosystems) are turning to artificial intelligence to sift through the piles of recordings, finding patterns that might help us understand what animals are saying to each other. There are now databases of whale songs and honeybee dances, among others, that Bakker writes could one day turn into "a zoological version of Google Translate."
In an interview with Vox, the author points out that already "We can use artificial intelligence-enabled robots to speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication. Researchers are doing this in a very rudimentary way with honeybees and dolphins and to some extent with elephants.

"Now, this raises a very serious ethical question..." I'll give you one example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. That robot is able to use the honeybees' waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it's able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we'll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way we've never done so before. This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there's a long history of the military use of animals, so that's one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells.

The Lego Group announced this week that it will discontinue its Mindstorms-branded products at the end of 2022. From a report: In an official statement, the company said it will redirect its internal Mindstorms team into "different areas of the business" and that its Mindstorms Robot Inventor App digital platforms will remain live until the end of 2024. Lego Mindstorms debuted on September 1, 1998, as a breakthrough educational tool -- originally developed at MIT -- that allowed kids and adults alike to craft robotic systems using standard Lego parts and a computerized control brick.

The set gained a key part of its appeal by allowing owners to program the control brick easily on a personal computer using a drag-and-drop visual programming language, making sophisticated robots possible with a relatively simple set of parts. Over the years, hobbyists and researchers took the Mindstorms series in unexpected new directions while Lego itself iterated the product line with increasingly sophisticated offerings.

Israel has deployed a new kind of robotic weapon over a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, reports Euronews. "The twin gun turrets can fire tear gas, stun grenades, and sponge-tipped bullets."

"Operated by trained soldiers, they track their targets using AI."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A Euronews video features footage of Sharone Aloni, Research and Development VP of Sharp Shooter, demonstrating one of the company's devices with an automatic Fire Control System. "Inside here, you have the computer running all the artificial intelligence, computer vision algorithms, which makes this what we call a true fire control system," Aloni says. "It's not only just relying on static information. It actually considers the human, the soldier, which is not stable. He's under pressure. He's tired. Sometimes he didn't get enough training. And also, the target is usually dynamic, and it's moving all the time."

The company's web site promises the systems "significantly increase weapon accuracy." And according to Euronews, Israel's army "says the tech protects soldiers, who can fire more accurately at a distance." But Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's director for Israel and Palestine, counters that when he hears claims of a reduction in risks, "that's often a one-sided kind of risk. It might minimize the risk for the occupying force or the army deploying it, but often it invariably increases the risk to affected communities." Sophisticated weapons systems "will lack elements of human control and agency that are often the difference between life and death." Euronews adds that "Palestinians and human rights experts say the weapons are dehumanizing, dangerous and unaccountable."

Sharp Shooter has a response to that, according to Eurnoews: the robotic guns are not fully automated, so a soldier must always pull the trigger, with the system only firing "after algorithms assess factors like wind speed, distance and velocity." And Michal Mor, Sharp Shooter's CEO and founder, also describes its utility in fighting a terrorist. "Usually the terrorist will be inside a civilian environment with many people that we do not want to hurt.

"We're enabling the soldier to look through his fire control system, to make sure that the target that he wants to hit is the legitimate target. Once he locks on the target, the system will make sure that the round will be released when he presses the trigger, only on the legitimate target, and none of the bystanders can be hit by the weapon."
The Israeli army stressed to Euronews that their deployment isn't using live rounds, and can only fire tear gas, stun grenades, and sponge-tipped bullets.

A resident of the refugee camp tells Euronews that the gun "is very fast, even faster than the soldiers."

"It might be a while before you can buy a 'Roomba for laundry'," jokes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac, pointing out that "while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types."

But NPR reports laundry-folding robots are getting closer: As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles That's not to say that it's completely impossible. University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel spent years teaching a robot how to fold a towel, eventually cutting that process down from 20 minutes to a whopping minute and a half.

And Silicon Valley-based company FoldiMate raised hopes and eyebrows when it showed off a prototype of its eponymous laundry-folding robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2019. It said the machine could fold some 25 pieces of laundry — except for small items like socks and large items like sheets — in under five minutes, with an estimated price tag of $980. It's unclear what happened to that company — its website is down and it hasn't tweeted since April 2020. Its sole competitor, a Japanese company with an AI-powered prototype, filed for bankruptcy.

In sum, most robots have not generally been equipped for the task. But an international group of researchers say their new method could change that — or at least speed up the process. Researchers are calling the new method, SpeedFolding. It's a "reliable and efficient bimanual system" — meaning it involves two hands — that's able to smooth and fold a crumpled garment in record speed (for robots, that is). SpeedFolding can fold 30 to 40 strewn-about garments per hour, compared to previous models that averaged three to six garments in that same time span, according to researchers. They say their robot can fold items in under two minutes, with a success rate of 93%.

"Real-world experiments show that the system is able to generalize to unseen garments of different color, shape, and stiffness," they add.
According to the article, the team will be presenting their paper at a robotics conference in Kyoto this month, and they've also posted a one-minute video on YouTube. (Their solution involves both an overhead camera and a novel neural network called BiManual Manipulation Network that "studied 4,300 human and machine-assisted actions in order to learn how to smooth and fold garments from a random configuration."

"While researchers describe SpeedFolding as a significant improvement, it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon," notes NPR. "For one, Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."

The courier company FedEx is abandoning a project to develop last-mile delivery robots. In 2019, FedEx partnered with New Hampshire-based DEKA Research and Development Corp, founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, to develop a wheeled robot called Roxo for last-mile deliveries. From a report: But FedEx decided to end the project in early October, according to a report in Robotics 24/7. FedEx employees were told of the decision via an email from the company's chief transformation officer, Sriram Krishnasamy, who explained a new corporate strategy called "DRIVE." "Although robotics and automation are key pillars of our innovation strategy, Roxo did not meet necessary near-term value requirements for DRIVE. Although we are ending the research and development efforts, Roxo served a valuable purpose: to rapidly advance our understanding and use of robotic technology," Krishnasamy wrote. Roxo is a 62-inch-tall (1,575-mm) package bot; it weighs 450 lbs (204 kg) and has a cargo capacity of up to 100 lbs (45 kg). It was designed to navigate around sidewalks and roadsides and between pedestrians and parked cars to deliver its cargo to a customer's door. It combines a 360-degree lidar sensor with 360-degree long-range cameras above its rounded shell. There are 180-degree stereo cameras and a 360-degree radar sensor around the base, and a display that can deliver messages is set into the front of the bot.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

Despite warnings that AI will rob humans of jobs, "Somehow we sacks of meat — though prone to exhaustion, distraction, injury and sometimes spectacular error — remain in high demand," writes New York Times columnist Farhad Majoo. AI has yet to replace humans in supposedly at-risk professions like truck driving and fast-food services.

Majoo's conclusion? "Humans have been underestimated." It turns out that we (well, many of us) are really amazing at what we do, and for the foreseeable future we are likely to prove indispensable across a range of industries, especially column-writing. Computers, meanwhile, have been overestimated. Though machines can look indomitable in demonstrations, in the real world A.I. has turned out to be a poorer replacement for humans than its boosters have prophesied.

What's more, the entire project of pitting A.I. against people is beginning to look pretty silly, because the likeliest outcome is what has pretty much always happened when humans acquire new technologies — the technology augments our capabilities rather than replaces us. Is "this time different," as many Cassandras took to warning over the past few years? It's looking like not. Decades from now I suspect we'll have seen that artificial intelligence and people are like peanut butter and jelly: better together.

It was a recent paper by Michael Handel, a sociologist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that helped me clarify the picture. Handel has been studying the relationship between technology and jobs for decades, and he's been skeptical of the claim that technology is advancing faster than human workers can adapt to the changes. In the recent analysis, he examined long-term employment trends across more than two dozen job categories that technologists have warned were particularly vulnerable to automation. Among these were financial advisers, translators, lawyers, doctors, fast-food workers, retail workers, truck drivers, journalists and, poetically, computer programmers.

His upshot: Humans are pretty handily winning the job market. Job categories that a few years ago were said to be doomed by A.I. are doing just fine. The data show "little support" for "the idea of a general acceleration of job loss or a structural break with trends pre-dating the A.I. revolution," Handel writes.
Handel notes that despite AI's high performance in analyzing X-rays, the number of (human) radiologists keeps increasing, with worries that the supply of (human) radiologists may not keep up with demand.

One Stanford radiologist recently argued that instead, "The right answer is: Radiologists who use A.I. will replace radiologists who don't."

Amazon is shutting down tests of its home delivery robot, the latest sign that the e-commerce giant is starting to wind down experimental projects amid slowing sales growth. From a report: Work on Scout, an autonomous machine launched about three years ago, has already been halted, according to a person familiar with the situation. Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll said the Scout team was being disbanded and would be offered new jobs in the organization. About 400 people were working on the project globally, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. A skeleton crew will continue to consider the idea of an autonomous robot, but the current iteration isn't working.

[...] The Seattle-based company began testing the cooler-sized bots on suburban sidewalks outside Seattle in 2019, before expanding the trials to Southern California, Georgia and Tennessee. The slow-moving devices, accompanied by human minders during tests, were designed to stop at a front door and pop open their lids so a customer could pick up a package. Amazon said the battery-powered robots were part of an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in its delivery operations.

Several robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, are pledging not to support the weaponization of their products and are calling for others in the industry to do the same, according to a letter shared first with Axios. From the report: The open letter highlights the erosion of consumer trust in robots as among the reasons not to allow them to be used as weapons. "We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues," the companies said in the letter. The companies pledged not to add weapons technology themselves or to support others doing so. And "when possible" they said they will review customers' plans in hopes of avoiding those who would turn the robots into weapons, in addition to exploring technical features that could prevent such use. In addition to Boston Dynamics, five other firms signed on to the commitment: Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics and Unitree Robotics.

Fast-food French fries and onion rings are going high-tech, thanks to a company in Southern California. From a report: Miso Robotics in Pasadena has started rolling out its Flippy 2 robot, which automates the process of deep frying potatoes, onions and other foods. A big robotic arm like those in auto plants -- directed by cameras and artificial intelligence -- takes frozen French fries and other foods out of a freezer, dips them into hot oil, then deposits the ready-to-serve product into a tray.

Flippy 2 can cook several meals with different recipes simultaneously, reducing the need for catering staff and, says Miso, speed up order delivery at drive-through windows. "When an order comes in through the restaurant system, it automatically spits out the instructions to Flippy," Miso Chief Executive Mike Bell said in an interview. " ... It does it faster or more accurately, more reliably and happier than most humans do it," Bell added.

Walgreens is turning to robots to ease workloads at drugstores as it grapples with a nationwide shortage of pharmacists and pharmacist technicians. From a report: The nation's second-largest pharmacy chain is setting up a network of automated, centralized drug-filling centers that could fill a city block. Rows of yellow robotic arms bend and rotate as they sort and bottle multicolored pills, sending them down conveyor belts. The company says the setup cuts pharmacist workloads by at least 25% and will save Walgreens more than $1 billion a year. The ultimate goal: give pharmacists more time to provide medical services such as vaccinations, patient outreach and prescribing of some medications. Those services are a relatively new and growing revenue stream for drugstores, which are increasingly able to bill insurers for some clinical services.

"This frees up the capacity of our most skilled professionals," said Rina Shah, a group vice president overseeing pharmacy strategy at Walgreens. "We looked at our system and said, 'Why are we filling prescriptions the way we did in 1995?'" Covid-19 increased the demands on pharmacies as they expanded into testing and vaccinations, putting pressure on staff and creating a shortfall of pharmacists that many chains have struggled to fill. Walgreens has reduced pharmacy hours at a third of its nearly 9,000 U.S. stores, and in some markets is offering signing bonuses of up to $75,000 to fill pharmacist jobs.

One piece of news from Tesla's AI Day presentation on Friday that was overshadowed by the company's humanoid "Optimus" robot and Dojo supercomputer was the improvements to Tesla's Full Self Driving software. According to Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy, "there are now 160,000 customers running the beta software, compared to 2,000 from this time last year," reports The Verge. From the report: In total, Tesla says there have been 35 software releases of FSD. In a Q&A at the end of the presentation, Musk made another prediction -- he's made a few before -- that the technology would be ready for a worldwide rollout by the end of this year but acknowledged the regulatory and testing hurdles that remained before that happens. Afterward, Tesla's tech lead for Autopilot motion planning, Paril Jain, showed how FSD has improved in specific interactions and can make "human-like" decisions. For example, when a Tesla makes a left turn into an intersection, it can choose a trajectory that doesn't make close calls with obstacles like people crossing the street.

It's known that every Tesla can provide datasets to build the models that FSD uses, and according to Tesla's engineering manager Phil Duan, now Tesla will start building and processing detailed 3D structures from that data. They said the cars are also improving decision-making in different environmental situations, like night, fog, and rain. Tesla trains the company's AI software on its supercomputer, then feeds the results to customers' vehicles via over-the-air software updates. To do this, it processes video feeds from Tesla's fleet of over 1 million camera-equipped vehicles on the road today and has a simulator built in Unreal Engine that is used to improve Autopilot.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a prototype of a humanoid robot that he said utilizes the company's AI software, as well as the sensors that power its advanced driver assist features. The Verge reports: The robot was showcased at Tesla's AI Day, and reps said it features the same technology used to enable the Full Self-Driving beta in Tesla's cars. According to Musk, it can do more than what has been shown, but "the first time it walked without a tether was tonight on stage." Musk said they're targeting a price of "probably less than $20,000." The back doors of the stage open to reveal a deconstructed Optimus that walked forward and did a "raise the roof" dance move. Musk would admit after the motion that they wanted to keep it safe and not make too many moves on stage and have it "fall flat on its face." "It'll be a fundamental transformation for civilization as we know it." said Musk.

Afterward, the company showed a few video clips of the robot doing other tasks like picking up boxes. Then Tesla's team brought out another prototype that has its body fully assembled but not fully functional. [...] Future applications could include cooking, gardening, or even "catgirl" sex partners, Musk has said, while also claiming that production could start as soon as next year. Musk says the robot is "the most important product development we're doing this year," predicting that it will have the potential to be "more significant than the vehicle business over time."

Musk first announced the "Tesla Bot" at last year's AI Day.