Tag: Bot or Not

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Boston Dynamic gears up to sell robot dogs

SpotMini robotic dog
Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert points out the cameras on his company’s SpotMini robotic dog, including a “butt-cam.” (TechCrunch via YouTube)

Cue the “Black Mirror” theme music: Boston Dynamics says it’s putting its scary SpotMini robotic dog on sale next year.

The company’s founder, Marc Raibert, made the announcement on May 11 at a TechCrunch robotics event at the University of California at Berkeley.

“SpotMini is in pre-production now.  We’ve built 10 units that’s a design that’s close to a manufacturable design. We built them in-house, but with help from contract, manufacturing-type people,” Raibert said.

“We have a plan later this year to build 100 with contract manufacturers,” he said, “and that’s the prelude to getting them in a higher-rate production which we hope to start in the middle of next year.”

Raibert declined to say what the price will be. Potential applications could range from surveillance to office deliveries to home chores.

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White House convenes AI summit

AI summit
Michael Kratsios, who’s currently in charge of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, addresses scores of executives, experts and officials at a White House summit focusing on artificial intelligence. (OSTP via Twitter)

The White House brought together scores of industry representatives for a summit focusing on artificial intelligence and its policy implications today — including representatives from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook — and set up an advisory panel of government officials to assess AI’s impact.

The Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence will advise the White House on AI research and development priorities, and will help forge partnerships involving government agencies, researchers and the private sector, according to Nextgov.

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Policy experts seek intelligent ways to regulate AI

AI panel
The World Economic Forum’s Kay Firth-Butterfield, Carnegie Mellon University’s Lorrie Faith Cranor and Wired’s Tom Simonite discuss AI governance during a conference at Carnegie Mellon. (CMU via YouTube)

Regulations for the proper use of artificial intelligence are almost as inevitable as the rise of AI itself — but the way it’ll be done is far from clear.

“This isn’t as simple as just ‘trust,’ ” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, project head for AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “This is more complex, because the technology itself is very fast, changing all the time, and is complex as well.”

Firth-Butterfield and other policy experts weighed in on the challenges of regulating AI, and dropped some hints about the road ahead, today at the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI in Pittsburgh.

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Elon Musk touts scary movie about AI

Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks about AI in “Do You Trust This Computer?” (Cinetic / Papercut Films via YouTube)

If you want to get really scared about the future, you could see “A Quiet Place” this weekend at your local theater — or you could stream “Do You Trust This Computer?”

The latter movie, about the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence, comes with a thumbs-up from Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who has long voiced serious concerns about AI.

Musk is one of the prominent interviewees in “Do You Trust This Computer?” — which was made by Chris Paine, the filmmaker behind “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Paine’s new 78-minute documentary had its premiere on April 5.

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Report dials down the risk to jobs from automation

Fulfillment center
An automated guided vehicle trundles packages inside an Amazon fulfillment center in Dupont, Wash. Automation is expected to affect a wide range of occupations. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

A working paper written for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that about 14 percent of the jobs in 32 OECD countries, including the U.S., are at high risk of being automated.

That raw figure may not sound as dire as some of the previous numbers cited for the effect of automation and artificial intelligence on employment, and that’s what’s been grabbing the headlines over the past couple of days. But a close reading of the report, published last month, shouldn’t lead anyone to brush off the issue — as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did last year.

The authors of the study, Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, say the level of automation risk varies widely from country to country. Slovakia comes in on the high side (33 percent), while the projected risk is only 6 percent in Norway.

The high-risk percentage for the U.S. is 10 percent, which is significantly lower than the 47 percent that was cited in a provocative 2013 study by Oxford researchers. But even 10 percent translates to about 15 million U.S. jobs.

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Tech experts get real about automation and jobs

Automation panel
Artefact Group CEO Rob Girling moderates a panel on the social effects of automation. The panelists include Google Research’s Dan Liebling, Uber’s Caleb Weaver, Microsoft Research’s Ece Kamar, Microsoft veteran Cesar Keller and Avanade’s Aaron Reich. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It’s a thrilling time for technology, with innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics propelling society ever faster forward. But is it too fast?

That’s a question that came up more than once on March 21 during a panel discussion on automation’s impacts on society and work, presented at Seattle University by the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest.

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ANA unveils ambitious vision for telepresence

Telepresence robot
Telexistence’s Telesar V robot takes its cues from a human wearing a headset and manual control apparatus. The robot is an inspiration for the ANA Avatar Vision. (University of Tokyo / Tachi Lab)

All Nippon Airways’ newly announced sponsorship of a $10 million contest for real-life avatars is just one part of a grander vision that aims to break down barriers through robotic telepresence.

“We see ourselves not as an airplane operator, but as a company that aims to bridge the gaps between the different cultures that exist in our world,” Kevin Kajitani, assistant manager for ANA’s Digital Design Lab and Innovation Research, told GeekWire today. “And that’s where we see the avatars fitting in.”

The way Kajitani and his colleagues define them, avatars are robots that are remotely controlled by humans, enabling their operators to see, hear, feel and interact freely in a remote environment in real time.

Such systems already exist — one example is Japan’s touchy-feely Telesar V robot. ANA’s vision is aimed at facilitating a quantum leap in sophistication.

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$10 million Avatar XPRIZE to boost telepresence

XPRIZE android
The ANA Avatar XPRIZE aims to promote the development of real-life avatars. (XPRIZE Illustration)

All Nippon Airways is sponsoring a $10 million, four-year competition to spur the development of real-life avatars that could provide telepresence over a span of dozens of miles.

Registration opens today for the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, with XPRIZE founder and executive chairman Peter Diamandis presiding over a high-profile kickoff at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.

In a news release, Diamandis explained that our ability to experience faraway locales, or provide on-the-ground assistance where needed, is typically limited by cost and time constraints.

“The ANA Avatar XPRIZE can enable creation of an audacious alternative that could bypass these limitations, allowing us to more rapidly and efficiently distribute skill and hands-on expertise to distant geographic locations where they are needed, bridging the gap between distance, time and cultures,” he said.

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Amazon patent suggests robots can service servers

Mobile robots
This simplified version of a patent-application diagram shows robots checking a set of computer server racks. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Does something need checking out in your data center? Before you send out a technician, why not send out a robot?

That’s the upshot of a newly published Amazon patent for mobile robots that are designed to respond to the report of a glitch, check out the computer server that may be having an issue, hook into it if necessary and gather data for a fix.

The system, described in an application that was filed back in 2014, even calls for having the machine use its robotic manipulator to pull out a suspect part and install a replacement if need be.

There’s no sign that Amazon Web Services already has robotic IT workers on the job, servicing the hundreds of thousands of computer servers it has in data centers around the globe. Plenty of patents never get implemented, and Amazon didn’t immediately respond to GeekWire’s emailed inquiry about its intentions.

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Uh-oh: Scary dog robots learn to open doors

SpotMini robot
Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot props a door open. (Boston Dynamics via YouTube)

We all laughed at the video of a robot falling over while trying to turn a doorknob.

Who’s laughing now?

In the latest creepy video from the roboticists at Boston Dynamics, one four-legged, doglike SpotMini robot walks up to a closed door, seems to peer up at the latch, then backs away to wait for another SpotMini to come around the corner.

The second robot has a mechanical arm where its head should be. It uses a hand to turn the latch, pull open the door, and keep holding it open while both robots traipse on through.

The similarities to the velociraptors’ doorknob-turning scene in “Jurassic Park” didn’t go unnoticed.

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