Walmart Patents Robot Carts

Can robot carts compete with Amazon?

A shopping cart is mostly empty space. At the end of a shopping run, when the cart is brimming with groceries and goods, it becomes fully useful, but it isn’t until that point, and once it’s full, it doesn’t help the person trying to buy two cartfulls of stuff on their own. Walmart, the physical retail giant, doesn’t want people to worry about the inadequacies of carts while shopping. So they filed a patent for a self-driving robot cart.

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Google’s Ray Kurzweil: The Business Of Extending Human Life Going Into “High Gear”

The futurist says that we’re getting closer and closer to “reprogramming” the human body.

Over the last many centuries, human life expectancy has very gradually lengthened with improved health and medical technologies and research. In the next 20 years, we can expect our expected life spans to be extended at a far more rapid pace than in the past.

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Report: AI will eliminate 6 percent of jobs in five years

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs, according to a Forrester report.

“By 2021, a disruptive tidal wave will begin,” said Brian Hopkins, VP at Forrester, in the report. “Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service, and consumer services.”

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The next trick for machine learning is generating videos from photos

Show a human any photograph and they’ll able to predict what happens next with pretty decent accuracy. The woman riding her bike will keep on moving. The dog will catch the frisbee. The man is going to have a pratfall. And so on. It’s such a basic skill that we don’t consider the vast amount of information that is used to make these predictions — concerning gravity, inertia, the nature of pratfalls, etc. — and teaching computers to do the same is proving to be a key challenge in machine vision.

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The first AI-judged beauty contest: Robots are racist

With more than 6,000 applicants from over 100 countries competing, the firstinternational beauty contest judged entirely by artificial intelligence just came to an end. The results are a bit disheartening.

The team of judges, a five robot panel, attempted to pick winners from the submitted photos in hopes that it could determine which faces most closely resembled the idea of “human beauty.” Each of the five robot judges used artificial intelligence to analyze specific traits that contribute to perceived outer beauty.

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Ask This Customer Service Robot for a Hammer

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“I’m looking for a hammer,” I tell a wheeled rectangle idling at a conference expo area in the San Francisco Union Square Hilton Hotel. The rectangle moves toward me, and I jump.

Fellow Robots CEO Marco Mascorro and chief information officer Thavidu Ranatunga tells me there’s nothing to worry about; it won’t crash into me. This particular display robot made by their Silicon Valley startup is programmed for Ranatunga to control with a remote, though in stores it will be autonomous.

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Modern Farm Tractors Feature Everything But the Farmer

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As Detroit car makers and Silicon Valley tech giants vie to bring driverless cars to U.S. roads, one of the world’s largest tractor makers is looking to do the same down on the farm.

Case IH, the agricultural-machinery unit of CNH Industrial NV, this week unveiled a sleek, aggressive-looking red-and-black machine at the annual Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa.

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The Robot Baby Project: Amsterdam researchers create robots that can mate and reproduce

One of the trademarks that distinguishes robots from humans is the ability to reproduce. This dividing between man and machine just got blurrier. Researchers in Amsterdam have created robots that can mate and spawn offspring through a process similar to human reproduction.

Robots have created quite a stir in the media recently, as more and more machines take on human tasks. Some estimates suggest automation could take over half of the work force.

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AI’s Healing Power

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Artificial intelligence originally aspired to replace doctors. Researchers imagined robots that could ask you questions, run the answers through an algorithm that would learn with experience and tell whether you had the flu or a cold. However, those promises largely failed, as artificial intelligent algorithms were too rudimentary to perform those functions.

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.