Tag: Bot or Not

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Amazon Go hints at the future of retail stores

Shopping cart
The checkout-less shopping experience envisioned for the Amazon Go store is part of a long-term trend in retail automation. (Bigstock Photo)

First there were supermarket shelves. Then barcode scanners, then self-checkout lines, then online shopping. Amazon’s move to take the grocery checkout counter completely out of the loop is the latest disappearing act for the brick-and-mortar retail experience.

But it’s not unexpected: Walmart and Whole Foods also have been working on ways to streamline grocery shopping, using automation and robotics. And the competition could heat up quickly.

“Retailers will be looking to understand what percentage of their current customers are utilizing Amazon, with the thinking that these will be the customers that are most at risk to the Amazon threat,” Matt Sargent, senior vice president for retail at Frank N. Magid Associates, wrote last week in a post that anticipated Amazon’s latest move.

Magid’s research suggests that Amazon shoppers are weighted in favor of the under-44 population, those with kids in the household, those who go to grocery stores more than once a week, and those who make it a point to buy locally. In short, just the kinds of customers that grocery stores want to hang onto.

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Related story: Amazon to open first checkout-less grocery store in early 2017

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How self-driving buses can ease traffic woes

WEpods shuttle
Self-driving electric buses known as “WEpods” ride the roads in the Netherlands. (Credit: WEpods)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Self-driving cars are all well and good for cross-country trips, but what Madrona Venture Group’s Tom Alberg really wants to see is a self-driving bus that can take him on a winery tour.

“I’m very keen on the idea of navigating a wine van pool, going around between the different wineries,” the influential investment group’s managing director joked.

And there’s a chance Alberg may get his wish, or something close to it, sooner rather than later.

He and other stakeholders in the region’s transportation future gathered at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Conference Center on Dec. 2 for the 2016 Advanced Transportation Technologies Conference, organized by the Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions.

Just after his talk, two Bellevue city council members and Bellevue Mayor John Stokes bent Alberg’s ear about their plans to make the Seattle region an incubator for autonomous transit.

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Trump’s victory highlights automation vs. jobs

Ford auto factory
Robots work on Ford trucks at a factory in Norfolk, Va. The plant was closed in 2007. (Ford Photo)

Six months ago, computer scientist Moshe Vardi felt as if he was a voice crying in the wilderness when it came to automation’s anticipated effect on the job market. No political candidate, it seemed, was talking about the potential impact of autonomous cars and automated manufacturing on future employment.

Today, the topic still isn’t quite on President-elect Donald Trump’s radar screen. But his election has gotten a lot more experts talking about the issue.

“It went from being somewhat esoteric to being practically mainstream,” Rice University’s Vardi told GeekWire.

Since the election, Trump has put jobs front and center on his agenda.

“Whether it’s producing steel, building cars or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland, America, creating wealth and jobs for American workers,” he said this week in a YouTube video.

But Trump’s prescription focuses on renegotiating (or withdrawing from) trade deals, doubling down on fossil-fuel sources, cutting back on regulations and cracking down on work visas.

Even if Trump and congressional leaders follow through on those initiatives, they won’t address what Vardi and other analysts say is a fundamental shift that will transform the very nature of work in the decades to come: the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence.

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The musical instrument you play with your mind

Encephalophone
Neurologist Thomas Deuel practices on the encephalophone in preparation for a gig. (Credit: 9e2)

How many musical instruments can you play without moving a muscle? There’s at least one: the encephalophone, which turns brain waves into tunes with a beat you can dance to.

Swedish Hospital neurologist Thomas Deuel will show how it’s done, with the accompaniment of a musical ensemble, on Oct. 22 at Seattle’s King Street Station as part of the 9e2 arts and technology festival. There’ll be an encore performance on Oct. 24.

Various types of encephalophones have been around for decades, but Deuel’s contraption (patent pending) has a clinical twist: He developed his version to help train the brains of patients who suffer from neurological diseases, strokes or spinal cord injuries.

“At first, I wanted to make a new musical instrument. I thought it’d be really fun and interesting from an artistic standpoint and music standpoint,” Deuel said at this week’s MIT Enterprise Forum on augmented humans. “But as I developed it, I learned a lot about the feedback aspect, and I started thinking, ‘Well, I have all these patients with disabilities … how can I use this for therapeutics?”

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Brain implant gives robotic hand a sense of touch

Robotic hand
Quadriplegic patient Nathan Copeland watches a sensor-equipped robotic hand reach out. (Credit: UPMC / Pitt Health Sciences)

A dozen years ago, an auto accident left Nathan Copeland paralyzed, without any feeling in his fingers. Now that feeling is back, thanks to a robotic hand wired up to a brain implant.

“I can feel just about every finger – it’s a really weird sensation,” the 28-year-old Pennsylvanian told doctors a month after his surgery.

Today the brain-computer interface is taking a share of the spotlight at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, with President Barack Obama and other luminaries in attendance.

The ability to wire sensors into the part of the brain that registers the human sense of touch is just one of many medical marvels being developed on the high-tech frontiers of rehabilitation.

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Study: AI will change our lives but won’t kill us

Image: AI brain
Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the decades ahead, and that will pose a challenge for public policy. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

A 100-year project conceived by Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz to trace the impacts of artificial intelligence has issued its first report: a 28,000-word analysislooking at how AI technologies will affect urban life in 2030.

The bottom line? Put away those “Terminator” nightmares of a robot uprising, at least for the next 15 years – but get ready for technological disruptions that will make life a lot easier for many of us while forcing some of us out of our current jobs.

That assessment comes from Stanford University’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, which is Horvitz’s brainchild. Horvitz, a Stanford alumnus, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the managing director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab.

Horvitz and his wife, Mary, created the AI100 endowment with the aim of monitoring AI’s development and effects over the coming century. The 2030 report represents a first look at AI applications across eight domains of human activity.

“This process will be a marathon, not a sprint, but today we’ve made a good start,” Russ Altman, a bioengineering professor who is AI100’s Stanford faculty director,said today in a news release.

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IBM’s Watson makes AI trailer about AI movie

Image: Morgan
IBM’s Watson AI software selected creepy moments for a trailer touting the AI thriller “Morgan,” including this close-up of the Morgan AI. How meta! (Credit: 20th Century Fox / IBM)

Experts may reassure us that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world anytime soon – but they just might invade the multiplex.

At least that’s the plot developing at IBM, where the Watson artificial-intelligence team programmed a computer to come up with a scary trailer for “Morgan,” a thriller about a genetically modified, AI-enhanced super-human.

GeekWire’s crack team of movie critics gave “Morgan” an average grade of C – but I have to say Watson’s trailer gave me the creeps. Maybe it’s the way short cuts are spliced together to create a sense of ominousness without revealing what the heck is going on. Maybe it’s the eerie music. Or maybe it’s just knowing that a faceless piece of software helped create it.

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Remote-controlled robots roam the office

Image: Deepak Savadatti on robot
Deepak Savadatti, the chief operating officer for BlueDot, carries on a conversation in the startup’s Bellevue office via a BeamPro telepresence robot. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – In a sixth-floor executive suite here, Deepak Savadatti’s robot has its own office with a view.

Savadatti himself may be sitting in front of a computer hundreds of miles away, at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He may be dialing in from a smartphone on the road, or at the beach. No matter where he is, his face pops up on the robot’s screen, his voice issues forth from a speaker, and he can even roll around the office to look out the window.

“My kids are surprised that this is working out so well,” Savadatti told GeekWire via robot. “It’s as real as it’s going to get. The very fact that I can move in and out gives me a lot of freedom to be able to have a real workday.”

It’s close to the ultimate in telecommuting: Savadatti’s telepresence robot lets him do his job as the chief operating officer of Bellevue-based BlueDot, the “innovation factory” founded by veteran tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, while he’s sitting in a home office hundreds of miles away.

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A bot is born: ‘Nigel’ joins the AI crowd

Image: Nigel is born
Kimera Systems says its AI assistant, called “Nigel,” takes advantage of artificial general intelligence or AGI. But that’s a controversial claim. (Credit: Kimera Systems)

There’s a new bot in town: Nigel, a conversational agent that its creators at Oregon-based Kimera Systems say can learn from the behavior of its users.

Nigel was “born” on Friday, when Kimera co-founder and CEO Mounir Shita fired up the program for a private beta test at a birthday party in downtown Portland. The agent is named after one of the software’s principal architects, Nigel Deighton, who passed away in 2013.

Kimera says a public beta version of the program will soon be made available.

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Policymakers need to address automation and AI

Image: Robonaut 2
Robonaut 2 is at work aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both promising to bring good-paying jobs back to America, but analysts say neither of them has addressed one of the biggest challenges looming ahead: the impact of automation and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Some argue that the challenge will soon become impossible to ignore.

“Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders,” Moshe Vardi, an expert on artificial intelligence at Rice University, said before this month’s conventions.

Vardi pointed out that manufacturing employment has been falling for more than 30 years, and yet U.S. manufacturing output is near its all-time high.

“U.S. factories are not disappearing: They simply aren’t employing human workers,” Vardi said.

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