Roboti dolaze

[Truman]

http://www.kurir.rs/planeta/bogati-i-mocni-upozoravaju-roboti-dolaze-po-vase-poslove-zbog-njih-nestaje-srednja-klasa-clanak-2252459

Jeste tekst iz Kurira, ali pretpostavljam da su ga preveli, a tema je prilično bitna. Ukoliko roboti/programi zaista zamene radnu snagu ne samo da će nastati manja potreba za nekvalifikovanim poslovima tipa čišćenje wc-a već i za mnogim stručnim što bi dovelo do razbijanja srednje i više srednje klase. Šta su posledice toga? Veća nezaposlenost, smanjivanje potrošnje i posledično urušavanje ekonomskog sistema bi mogla biti jedna opcija. Na čemu će zarađivati superbogataši onda? Nije da me je mnogo briga za njih doduše.
Ovo je zapravo ekonomska tema...

[Truman]

Video na tu temu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

[Meho Krljic]

Evo, da doprinesem temi:
 
 
 What to do with billions of useless humans? 
 

It is no news that machines have come to largely replace physical labor and computers surpass human beings in processing data. But in the future, the development of artificial intelligence may render humans obsolete even in the realm of emotional intelligence, according to Yuval Harari.

“It is true that in one sense, AI doesn’t even come close to human emotion since it has no consciousness or mind and doesn’t feel anything,” said Harari at Tuesday’s opening ceremony of the 2030 Eco Forum, organized by Green Fund and held at the Korea Press Center. Harari is a history professor and author of the international bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

Yet, AI may excel at detecting the emotional needs of human beings and reacting appropriately to them, Harari said.

“What biology tells us today is that emotions are not some spiritual experience, but the outcome of biochemical processes in the body.

“AI today is able to diagnose your personality and emotional state by looking at your face and recognizing tiny muscle movements. It can tell whether you are tired, excited, angry, joyful, in love ... it can tell these things even though AI itself doesn’t feel anger or love.”

In the future, therefore, AI could “drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless, from an economic perspective” in areas where human interaction was previously considered crucial, Harari said.

“In customer services departments they have started using AI to assess the emotions of people who are calling,” he said. “AI analyzes the tone of your voice and choice of words ... and recognizes both your personality type and also your immediate emotional condition.”

According to Harari, while humans are capable of displaying their own emotions, they are often less competent at reacting to the emotional needs of their fellow beings.

“With human beings ... we sometimes shout back and in a vicious circle make ourselves more angry.

“AI ... based on its immense emotional statistical database, will know that the best thing to do is x and y and z and act accordingly.” 

The ‘Unworking Class’

So what should we do if AI takes over the job market?

“Humans only have two basic abilities -- physical and cognitive. When machines replaced us in physical abilities, we moved on to jobs that require cognitive abilities. ... If AI becomes better than us in that, there is no third field humans can move to.”

The 21st century could thus give rise to the rise of a new group of economically unproductive people, Harari said.

“In the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution, the changes in technology and economy led to the appearance of a new massive class of humans, the urban working class.

“Now in the 21st century, we are approaching a new industrial revolution that will give emergence to ... an ‘unworking class,’ people who will be irrelevant to dealing with the utterly different world.”

Harari called for a possible need to come up with “completely new models” to solve the problems of the impending era.

“This, perhaps, is going to be the big question in the 21st century. What to do with billions of useless humans?”

Health over privacy

The medical profession may also be prone to replacement, Harari noted, with AI making more accurate diagnoses based on infinite data, more cost efficiently.

“Watson, unlike human doctors, can be familiar with all the diseases in the world,” he said, referring to IBM’s AI system capable of answering questions voiced by humans.

“It can have instant access to my entire medical history. ... It can be a mobile app on my phone. ... With human doctors, training is a long and complicated process. Maybe it takes 10, 12 years until you get one good, experienced doctor, which costs a lot of money and effort. ... With Watson, you get not only one but an infinite number of doctors available everywhere, all the time.”

Even the medical benefits of this may come at the sacrifice of personal privacy, Harari said.

“Google has developed a contact lens for ... people who have diabetes. This lens measures the level of sugar (in the blood) every second. ... This will violate human privacy. Companies like Google will have access to information on your body, your most personal information.

“But when people are given a choice between health and privacy, they will mostly choose health. So privacy will decline.”

Harari, born in 1976 in Israel, earned his doctorate in medieval war history at Oxford University in 2002. He currently teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His studies are both macroscopic and interdisciplinary, dealing with questions such as the existence of justice throughout mankind’s history and the relationship between history and biology.

His first book and sweeping bestseller “Sapiens,” published locally last November, argues that Homo Sapiens came to dominate the world through mass cooperation and fabricated systems. His second book, “The History of Tomorrow,” was published in Hebrew in 2015. The English version will be published in September 2016, while the Korean version will hit stores sometime next year.
 

 
A ima i:
 
 
  Self-driving features could lead to more sex in moving cars, expert warns

[Truman]

Lepo je to od tebe Meho samo što ja pročitah ceo tekst nadajući se odgovoru kad ono jadac. A to što je izneto u tekstu već ima na videu koji sam postavio. No poštujem tvoje zalaganje, mislio sam da je ovo provokativna tema ali vidim niko osim tebe neće da se uključi...a posle će im đavo kriv kad izgube posao zbog neke mašine bez srca i duše.

[Biki]

"Que Sera, Sera, Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see Que Sera, SeraWhat will be, will be"Read more:  Doris Day - Que Sera Sera Lyrics | MetroLyrics

[Meho Krljic]

Vreme je za ludističke košmare 
 
 
 Drones could replace $127 billion worth of human labour 
 
 

[Meho Krljic]

Wendy’s Serves Up Big Kiosk Expansion As Wage Hikes Hit Fast Food  
 

Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.
It will be up to franchisees whether to deploy the labor-saving technology, but Wendy’s President Todd Penegor did note that some franchise locations have been raising prices to offset wage hikes.
McDonald’s (MCD) has been testing self-service kiosks. But Wendy’s, which has been vocal about embracing labor-saving technology, is launching the biggest potential expansion.
Wendy’s Penegor said company-operated stores, only about 10% of the total, are seeing wage inflation of 5% to 6%, driven both by the minimum wage and some by the need to offer a competitive wage “to access good labor.”
It’s not surprising that some franchisees might face more of a labor-cost squeeze than company restaurants. All 258 Wendy’s restaurants in California, where the minimum wage rose to $10 an hour this year and will gradually rise to $15, are franchise-operated. Likewise, about 75% of 200-plus restaurants in New York are run by franchisees. New York’s fast-food industry wage rose to $10.50 in New York City and $9.75 in the rest of the state at the start of 2016, also on the way to $15.
Wendy’s plans to cut company-owned stores to just 5% of the total.
Still, Penegor said that increased customer counts more than price hikes drove the chain’s 3.6% same-store sales increase in the first quarter.
Although profit exceeded Wall Street estimates, Wendy’s shares dived nearly 9% Wednesday because of weak second-quarter sales.
“We are seeing a bit of a softer overall category in April” relative to the past two quarters, Penegor said on an earnings call, implying more of an industrywide trend than an issue specific to Wendy’s.
Penegor said the reason for softer growth was hard to pinpoint, but he listed a cautious consumer, tougher spring weather in the Northeast, and a wider gap between the cost of food at home vs. food away from home as possible contributors.
While Wendy’s management was upbeat about company prospects, noting that it just experienced its first year with a net increase in restaurants since 2010, its downbeat comments about sector growth were contagious. McDonald’s eased 1.7% after touching a new record high on Tuesday. Yum Brands (YUM), which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, slipped 2.6% and Restaurant Brands International (QSR) fell 3.4%.
For now, Penegor said, wage pressures have been manageable both because of falling commodity prices and better operating leverage due to an increase in customer counts. Still, the company is wary about both wage hikes and a possible recovery in commodity prices and is “working so hard to find efficiencies” so it can deliver “a new QSR experience but at traditional QSR prices.”
In addition to self-order kiosks, the company is also getting ready to move beyond the testing phase with labor-saving mobile ordering and mobile payment available systemwide by the end of the year. Yum Brands and McDonald’s already have mobile ordering apps.
 
 

[Meho Krljic]

Fmr. McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour

As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. 
   “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries -- it’s nonsense and it’s very destructive and it’s inflationary and it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe,” said former McDonald’s (MCD) USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.

Bennigan's CEO: Replacing Employees With Robots is the Wrong Direction

With more and more discussion in the restaurant industry of shifting to robots or tablets in response to the minimum wage debate, Bennigan's CEO Paul Mangiamele is speaking out on the downsides of automation. Mangiamele views automation as hurting a restaurant’s relationship with its customers.
   “I have been on record saying that I will never abdicate from the service connection that our servers, our people, provide to our guests by going to a tablet. I’ve never seen a tablet talk about our menu, I’ve never seen a tablet do a refill. I think that’s the wrong direction, especially for those in my category which is casual dining,” Mangiamele told the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney.
Mangiamele then weighed in on the importance of the industries’ employees and left room for compromise over potentially raising the minimum wage gradually over time.
“I think anyone who puts forth a notion that we, the industry, don’t care about our people that make the brands come alive is ludicrous. But I think there needs to be a very calm, very deliberate, very intelligent conversation about how to take the wage and increase it over time.”


Mangiamele explained that he viewed some automation as appropriate to make the restaurant chain’s work flow more efficient.
“We are looking at automation as I said before. The automation really is in back of the house to decrease the ticket time.”
On the other hand, Mangiamele said, “But, in terms of replacing people by robots, I think that’s way out there and it really should be a discussion about what’s the quid pro quo. If the unions and the governments of the states want to have this debate on higher wage, then we should also have a discussion about lower corporate taxes or some incentives.”
Mangiamele then pointed out the potential drawbacks of a minimum wage hike.
“If the smaller and more fragile businesses go out of business, it eliminates all jobs and who’s the beneficiary of that? The unions who get their dues? Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Foxconn cuts 60,000 jobs, replaces with robots

In a bid to accelerate growth and reduce labor costs, Apple supplier Foxconn cut 60,000 jobs at a single factory, work that is now being completed by robots. As many as 600 companies in the Chinese manufacturing hub of Kunshan may have similar plans to automate their workforce, according to a government survey.


Foxconn spokesperson Xu Yulian told the South China Morning Post, “The Foxconn factory has reduced its employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000, thanks to the introduction of robots. It has tasted success in reduction of labor costs.” He added, “More companies are likely to follow suit.”
These changes are spurred in part by a desire to reduce labor costs, but have also been made in response to an explosion at a Kunshan factory in 2014 that killed 146 people. The explosion was attributed to unsafe working conditions in the Taiwanese-owned metal polishing factory, which were recognized and documented. After the explosion, the local government pledged to reduce the population and to maintain 0% growth in land development in Kunshan, where 46% of land is covered by buildings and factories. The government also pledged 2 billion yuan per year in subsidies to support companies that install industrial robots on their production lines.
In order to change over from human workers to robots, where possible, Foxconn and other Taiwanese companies in Kunshan spent 4 billion yuan ($610 million US) on artificial intelligence in 2015. The job cuts represent a significant portion of the population of Kunshan, which has 2.4 million people, two-thirds of whom are migrant workers in the local factories according to a 2014 survey.
While the prevalence of manufacturing jobs has helped to sustain the Chinese economy’s double-digit growth and allowed many Chinese people to overcome poverty levels, recent trends have shown some of these jobs being transferred to India and other competing countries with low labor costs. A drive to replace humans with industrial robots represents an effort to retain those jobs in the face of rising Chinese labor costs. While Kunshan was still rated the top ‘county-level’ city in China for GDP, it experienced its first drop in GDP from 2013-2014. This, combined with the 2014 explosion, may have contributed to the support for investment in industrial robotics.
Worldwide sales of industrial robots more than doubled from 2004-2014. Industrial production numbers for China as a whole have declined over the last five years, from 15% of the national economy in 2011 to 6% in 2016.

[Meho Krljic]

Adidas to sell robot-made shoes in Germany 
 

Your next pair of Adidas shoes may be put together by robots - the German sports retailer has said it will start selling its first robot-produced shoes in a new, state-of-the-art factory in its home market starting 2017.
 
 
   The announcement came as Adidas unveiled its prototype “Speedfactory”, a state-of-the-art, 4,600 square-meter facility on Tuesday, meant to automate shoe production, which is largely done manually in Asian factories at the moment.
The new production site in the southern German city of Ansbach is still under construction, but it represents a return to local production for Adidas, which stopped manufacturing shoes in its home market more than two decades ago in favor of Asia.
But the company has struggled with steadily rising wages across the continent, where it employs around a million people.
Still, Adidas insisted that the aim was not to immediately replace their workers, saying the goal was not "full automatization".
Six subcontractors of Adidas in China declined to comment or said they were not aware of the new production sites in Germany, news agency AFP reported.
The factory will deliver a first test series of around 500 pairs of shoes to be sold from late 2016, with large scale production targeted for next year. Adidas management also said the shirts of the German national football team could be produced in the same factory too.
The sportswear and equipment company also plans to open a second Speedfactory in the United States in 2017, with similar ones to follow in Britain or in France.
Adidas produced 301 million pairs of sport shoes last year, but it has to ramp up production by more than 10 percent if it is to reach its growth targets by 2020.
Its chief competitor Nike is also developing a robot-operated factory, but Adidas said it is further along in this area.
jd/uhe (AFP, dpa) 

[Meho Krljic]

Inside Silicon Valley’s Robot Pizzeria

Zume, a new startup in Mountain View, is trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics

In the back kitchen of Mountain View's newest pizzeria, Marta works tirelessly, spreading marinara sauce on uncooked pies. She doesn’t complain, takes no breaks, and has never needed a sick day. She works for free.
Marta is one of two robots working at Zume Pizza, a secretive food delivery startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through machines. It's also created special delivery trucks that will finish cooking pizzas during the journey to hungry customers if approved by the Santa Clara County Department of Environmental Health. Right now Zume is only feeding people in Mountain View, California, but it has ambitions to dominate the $9.7 billion pizza delivery industry. 
"We are going to be the Amazon of food," said Zume's co-founder and executive chairman, Alex Garden. Garden, 41, is the former president of Zynga Studios. Before that, he was a general manager of Microsoft's Xbox Live. Garden launched Zume in stealth mode last June, when he began quietly recruiting engineers under a pseudonym and building his patented trucks in an unmarked Mountain View garage. In September, he brought on Julia Collins, a 37-year-old restaurant veteran. She became chief executive officer and a co-founder. Collins was previously the vice president and CEO of Harlem Jazz Enterprises, the holding company for Minton's, a historic Harlem eatery.
In October, Zume began working closely with Swiss robot maker, ABB, and a global crew of mechanical, electrical and software engineers. In April, the startup sold its first cyborg-constructed pie to an unsuspecting customer in Mountain View.      Alex Garden, co-founder and executive chairman of Zume.
Photographer: David Nicholson/Bloomberg
   People familiar with Zume's fundraising discussions said that Google Ventures as well as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are considering Series A bids. In May, Yahoo Inc. founder Jerry Yang was seen touring the pizzeria with his crew of investors from AME Cloud Ventures. Garden said he didn't want to talk about fundraising, "But I can tell you the venture community is validating our idea."
Two minutes from Google's main campus, Zume's headquarters sits in an unmarked concrete building that looks like an auto repair shop. The 8,000 square foot interior is divided into a large kitchen, where the robots are; and an office space, where twelve engineers, designers and product managers work. The building also has a machine and fabrication workshop.
Inside Zume's kitchen, protective glass boxes separate the robots from humans. Marta hangs from the ceiling of her cage like a giant spider, her spindly robot arms converging, ladle-like, to douse a pie with sauce in under two seconds. "We created her to spread your sauce perfectly, but not too perfectly, so the pizza still looks like an artisan product," Garden said.
Fully sauced, the pie travels on a conveyer belt to human employees who add cheese and toppings. The decorated pies are then scooped off the belt by a 5-foot tall grey automaton, Bruno, who places each in an 850-degree oven. For now, the pizzas are fully cooked and delivered to customers in branded Fiats painted with slogans, including: "You want a piece of this?" and "Not part of the sharing economy."    In August, Zume wants to start cooking its pizzas in the startup's patented delivery trucks. Each truck has 56 ovens that can be turned on and off remotely. Garden can barely contain his excitement for what comes next: "The robots will load all these individual ovens with different menu items. Then the truck will circle the neighborhood. At precisely 3 minutes and 15 seconds before arriving at the customer's location, the cloud commands the oven to turn on and--" Garden made the symbol of a large explosion emanating from his brain-- "BOOM, the customer gets a fresh, out-the-oven pizza delivered to their door."
Nobody has ever done this before, he said. The Santa Clara County Health Department is reviewing Zume's mobile food permit application now, and the startup's truck plan depends on its approval. Although laws vary from state to state, traditional food trucks generally aren't allowed to cook food while in motion.
Garden is confident it won't be long before he's competing with the major pizza chains. "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," said Garden. "You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."    Yum! Brands Inc.'s Pizza Hut and Domino's have been experimenting with robots, too. Last month, Pizza Hut Asia partnered with Mastercard and Softbank to develop a robotic cashier, named Pepper, which uses artificial intelligence to interact with customers. The company plans to deploy Pepper in selected outlets across Asia by the end of the year, said Chaiti Sen, a Mastercard spokeswoman.  In April, Domino's Australia began testing an "autonomous delivery vehicle," named Dru. The 3-foot, four-wheeled machine--it looks like a photocopier on wheels-- can make deliveries up to 6 miles, said a company spokeswoman. 

[Meho Krljic]

'We're just rentals': Uber drivers ask where they fit in a self-driving future
 

With Uber set to deploy autonomous cars in Pittsburgh, some drivers for the company wonder if they’ve been expendable all along
 
 
“Wo-o-o-o-w,” Cynthia Ingram said. “We all knew it was coming. I just didn’t expect it this soon.”
Ingram, a 60-year-old Uber driver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had just learned that Uber would be deploying autonomous cars to accept fares in her city within weeks. The announcement on Thursday morning sent shockwaves through the community of about 4,000 drivers that serve Pennsylvania’s second largest city.     
 
Uber has not specified how many autonomous vehicles it plans to roll out in Pittsburgh, but state law requires a licensed driver to be seated behind the wheel of any vehicle, autonomous or not. So the cars will still have a human driver in the front seat – for now. )
The company did not respond to queries about who those non-driving drivers will be or whether they will undergo special training.
But for Ingram, autonomous Ubers are an unwelcome threat to her livelihood.
“I kind of figured it would be a couple more years down the line before it was really implemented and I’ll be retired by then,” she said.
A paralegal with 30 years experience, Ingram began driving for Uber and Lyft in June 2015 when she lost her job. She said that she loves driving for Uber, though she has struggled to make ends meet.
Rob Judge, 41, was also concerned with the announcement.
“It feels like we’re just rentals. We’re kind of like placeholders until the technology comes out.”
A longtime customer service representative, Judge began driving for Uber three months ago to make money while he looks for other work.
“For me personally, this isn’t a long term stop,” he added. “But for a lot of other people that I’ve connected with, this is their only means.”
     Judge also questioned whether passengers would miss the opportunity to meet and talk with their drivers.
“It has the potential for that human interaction to go away, and that’s the best part of the whole experience,” he said.
Uber has never made a secret of its ambitions for a driverless future, and in Pittsburgh, where it operates a self-driving research lab, the city has grown accustomed to the sight of its autonomous vehicles on the streets.
“Pittsburgh has been a home for autonomous vehicles and research for decades,” said Timothy McNulty, communications director for mayor William Peduto. “We’re pretty used to self-driving cars here, and we’re happy that Uber is taking this next step.”
Not all drivers shared his joy. In private Facebook groups where drivers for Uber and Lyft congregate, some drivers joked about sabotaging their rivals.
“I say we all go out and get drunk and puke in the driverless cars ... next passenger will be pleasantly surprised,” wrote one driver.
“Get on a bridge and wait for one to pass under then dump dark paint on the roof,” another wrote.
Judge did not propose any such sabotage, but he admitted, “I think a lot of us are hoping that there are some hiccups that can slow this thing down.”
“Pittsburgh is really the center of the innovation economy on the east coast,” said Alex Wallach Hanson, field director for Pittsburgh United, a coalition of labor, community, and environmental groups that advocates for working class families. “That’s a good thing for our city, but we also need to take a leadership role in making sure that it benefits everyone in our economy.”
 
In addition to Uber, Pittsburgh has attracted outposts from Google and Facebook, and is home to a growing tech start-up scene.
“If part of innovation technology is replacing drivers with technology, we need to look at policy solutions that we can put in place like a universal basic income, to make sure that everyone in our community has a family-sustaining life,” Wallach Hanson added.
 
Eric Lightfoot, a full-time Uber and Lyft driver, said that he was excited for the driverless future.
“In America, we can’t all fricking own cars anymore. That has got to end,” he said. “If this is one of those avenues then that’s what it is. It doesn’t bother me at all.”
Lightfoot said that he believed it would take another 20 years for autonomous cars to replace drivers, but even if he is wrong, he welcomes the change.
“I’ve always dealt with life as it comes,” he said. “If it happens tomorrow and I’m out of work, I’ll find a new job. I’ll find my way.”

Still, you won’t catch him in a driverless car tomorrow.
“I’ll let all the guinea pigs figure that shit out before I get in one,” he said.
Ingram shared Lightfoot’s personal aversion to autonomous cars, saying she would “absolutely not” accept a ride from one of the new driverless Ubers.
“I want somebody in control of that vehicle other than a computer,” she said.
 

Ovo je, naravno sasvim depresivno predvidivo, ali ga je svejedno bitno istaći, pogotovo jer su mnogi isticali prednosti Ubera i sličnih share economy/ gig economy modela (na primer ovaj recentni članak u Timeu) valjajući bajke tipa "Do jaja, ljudi to rade u slobodno vreme, krenuli su negde pa pokupe putnika i još dobiju pare za to bla bla bla"

[Meho Krljic]

Domino’s Delivering Pizza by Drone

Flirtey and Domino's are developing pizza delivery drones, saying deliveries to customer homes in Auckland, New Zealand could being later in 2016.

Pizza lovers in Auckland, New Zealand rejoice. Flirtey and Domino’s are developing pizza delivery drones, successfully demoing the system today in front of the Civil Aviation Authority and Minister of Transport Simon Bridges.
The companies say pizza-by-drone deliveries to customer homes could begin later in 2016 from a select New Zealand Domino’s store. And, yes, the drone delivery system keeps your pizza or breadsticks pipping hot.
Flirtey’s staff help Domino’s workers safely load the delivery drones at the store. The drones then fly at around 200 feet in the air and the customer is notified as the delivery is approaching. The deliveries are then made to customer’s home by safely lowering the package out of the air.
“Launching the first commercial drone delivery service in the world is a landmark achievement for Flirtey and Domino’s, soon you will be able to order a Flirtey to deliver your pizza on-demand,” said Matt Sweeny, CEO of Flirtey. “New Zealand has the most forward-thinking aviation regulations in the world, and with the new U.S. drone regulations taking effect on Aug. 29, Flirtey is uniquely positioned to bring the same revolutionary Flirtey drone delivery service to partners within the United States.”


This partnership makes total sense as both companies have been leading the way when it comes to delivery robots. Domino’s has also been developing the DRU pizza delivery robot that has four wheels, is less than three feet tall, and has a heated compartment that can hold up to 10 pizzas. It can deliver pizzas within a 12.5-mile radius before needing to be recharged. No immediate word on how drone delivery would affect the DRU pizza delivery robot.


“Partnering with Flirtey to revolutionize the delivery experience is an achievement that will set our company apart in the minds of customers and change the way delivery is conducted around the world,” said Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij of Domino’s Pizza Enterprises. “Domino’s customers can expect the freshest and fastest pizza delivery service at the same quality they have come to expect from us thanks to Flirtey’s industry-leading technology.”
Flirtey partnered with 7-Eleven for the first FAA-approved home drone delivery in the United States. The Flirtey drone autonomously delivered Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee and candy to the home of the family who placed the order. The delivery was made “in the span of a few minutes,” and the Flirtey drone hovered in place and gently lowered each package to the ground in the family’s backyard.
Watch Flirtey’s historic home drone delivery in the video below:


https://youtu.be/_sysBQ5-tZA




Flirtey has also made three other historic drone deliveries in the US. On July 17, 2015 Flirtey completed the first FAA-approved drone delivery by flying medical supplies from the Lonesome Pine Airport to the Remote Area Hospital in Wise County, Virginia, which is one of the most impoverished area’s in the country.
Flirtey also completed the first FAA-approved urban drone delivery in US history when it delivered a package to a residential area in Hawthorne, Nevada. And in June 2016 Flirtey successfully completed the first ship-to-shore drone delivery in US history, delivering medical supplies from a vessel to an onshore medical camp in Cape May, New Jersey. Watch the ship-to-shore drone delivery below.

[Meho Krljic]

Ni white collari nisu bezbedni. Tzv. low-code platforme su softverski alati koji omogućuju ljudima bez znanja programiranja da razvijaju softverske aplikacije:

How Companies Are Developing More Apps With Fewer Developers

A fast-growing technology helps fill a tech skills gap.
  Tried to hire software developers lately? Then you know how tough (and expensive) it can be. The yawning gap in tech skills has gone on for so long that it’s creating some surprising shifts in supply and demand. The most ferocious appetite for software development talent, for instance, is no longer in Silicon Valley. And now, in many companies, developer jobs aren’t even reserved for developers.
That’s because a relatively new technology, known as low-code or no-code platforms, is now doing a big chunk of the work that high-priced human talent used to do. Low-code platforms are designed so that people with little or no coding or software engineering background — known in the business as “citizen developers” — can create apps, both for use in-house and for clients.
Not surprisingly, the low-code platform industry, made up of about 40 small companies (so far), is growing like crazy. A recent Forrester Research report put its total revenues at about $1.7 billion in 2015, a figure that’s projected to balloon to $15 billion in the next four years. Low-code-platform providers, notes Forrester, are typically seeing sales increases in excess of 50% a year.


One of the biggest, QuickBase (fiscal 2015 revenues: $70 million), was part of Intuit    INTU 0.27%  until it was sold to a private equity firm earlier this year. About half of the Fortune 500 uses QuickBase’s low-code platforms now, according to CEO Allison Mnookin, an Intuit veteran.
“Almost any employee now can do most or all of the same work that developers used to do,” says Mnookin.
One big advantage, Mnookin says, is that opening an app’s development to the non-techies who need the app removes misunderstandings between the IT department and other employees about what the end user needs. “With a low-code platform, the developer and the end user are one and the same,” she says.
A survey of so-called citizen developers by QuickBase last year found that only 8% had any previous coding experience, and 68% considered using QuickBase to be part of their regular, non-IT jobs.


Low-code platforms have been “a powerful tool for our organization,” says Jeetu Chawla, a software engineer who is now vice president of advertising operations at online publisher Complex Media. Using QuickBase over the past decade has taken much of the strain of the company’s fast growth off of its IT department. “They haven’t had to lift a finger on most of our development projects,” Chawla says.
Still, Chawla adds, low-code platforms are not a panacea. “You don’t need to know how to code in order to use them, but you do need strong analytical skills,” he says, particularly when it comes to “your team’s processes, your data, and how the two interact.”
Project management experience helps, too. Making the best use of the technology may, in other words, require employers to seek out far fewer software developers — but more people with a combination of skills that might be almost as difficult to find.

[Meho Krljic]

Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says

Employees in fields such as customer service and transportation face a ‘disruptive tidal wave’ of automation in the not-too-distant future



By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That’s just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week.
These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
These robots can be helpful for companies looking to cut costs, but not so good if you’re an employee working in a simple-to-automate field.
“By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin. Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services,” said Forrester’s Brian Hopkins in the report.


The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of US online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service.
Forrester paints a picture of the not-too-distant future.
“The doorbell rings, and it’s the delivery of a new pair of running shoes, in the right style, color and size, just as you needed to replace your old ones. And here’s the kicker: you didn’t order them. Your intelligent agent did.”
In the transportation industry, Uber, Google and Tesla are working on driverless cars, while similar technology is creeping its way into trucking to replace expensive human drivers.
It’s easy to get dazzled by such innovations, but what happens to the 6%? The call center staff, the taxi drivers and the truckers. There may be new jobs created to oversee and maintain these automated systems, but they will require an entirely different skillset.
“Six percent is huge. In an economy that’s really not creating regular full-time jobs, the ability of people to easily find new employment is going to diminish. So we will have people wanting to work and struggling to find jobs because the same trends are beginning to occur in other historically richer job creation areas like banking, retail and healthcare,” said Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union.


“It’s an early warning sign and I think it just portends a massive wind of change in the future.”
Studies have shown that higher rates of unemployment are linked to less volunteerism and higher crime. Taxi drivers around the world have already reacted with violent protest to the arrival of ride-hailing app Uber. Imagine how people react when Uber eliminates drivers from its fleet.
“There is a lot of correlation between unemployment and drug use,” said Stern. “Clearly over time, particularly in urban settings, the lack of employment is tinder for lighting a fire of social unrest.”
The challenge posed by automation is not being taken seriously enough at a policy level, Stern added. “Politicians would rather talk about getting a college degree and technical skill training, things that are probably five to 10 years too late. We don’t really have a plan and we don’t appreciate how quickly the future is arriving.”
Does this mean we’re all doomed? “No. But what level of pain do people have to experience and what level of social unrest has to be created before the government acts?
Workers, many of whom don’t have technical skills, are competing for less and less jobs. If the market works without intervention we’re going to have no way to mediate the displacement.”

[Meho Krljic]

I u istom dahu:


Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh

Beginning today, a select group of Pittsburgh Uber users will get a surprise the next time they request a pickup: the option to ride in a self driving car.
The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology.
Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers — and how passengers react to them.
“How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
If they are anything like me, they will respond with fascination followed by boredom.

The experience It began when an Uber employee handed me a phone so I could hail a ride from the company’s app. A minute later, a Ford Fusion rolled up. Uber engineers occupied the two front seats, so I took a spot behind the driver.
Once nestled into my seat, I selected a button on a tablet positioned in the back of the car to signal I was ready to go. The tablet displayed a live view of the car’s vision: blue for the road, red for objects. Our driving path took us from the ATC building in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood through downtown and over the 9th Street bridge to the North Shore. The steering wheel turned on its own, as if possessed by a ghost.


The engineer in the driver’s seat spent the entire ride watching the road. He hovered his hands over the wheel and foot over the pedal. Whenever a stopped vehicle blocked an entire lane, he toggled back into manual mode to switch lanes and drive around — an action Uber’s self driving cars will not yet take. The second engineer sat in the passenger’s seat with a laptop open. On a normal trip, he would have been taking notes about the ride.
I had a flurry of butterflies the first time the car encountered an obstacle — an SUV backing into the road. You don’t notice how many unexpected incidents occur during a routine drive until you ask a robot to take the wheel. While we were passing over the bridge–and self driving cars struggle to position themselves on bridges to begin with–we came upon a large truck parked in our lane. The driver manually swapped lanes, right as a city worker darted out from in front of the truck and a banner dropped down near the front of our car.


I don’t know how the car would have reacted to the man or banner had it been in autonomous mode, but there were plenty of other instances to see it respond to its surroundings. It stopped behind a bus making a pickup, and again when the bus turned right. It read traffic light colors and stopped for one yellow light, while driving through a different yellow light. It obeyed traffic laws. It was so normal it got a little bit boring. The butterflies disappeared quickly.
Then the engineers let me “drive” the car back to the Uber campus. Once a light turned blue on the dash, I could hit a silver button in the center console to go autonomous. Braking, accelerating or hitting a red button brought driving back under my control. I took over once to maneuver around a stopped van.


It’s an unusual balance to focus on your surroundings while not having to do anything. It’s tempting to feel at ease and think about something else — maybe even drop your hands into your lap. I can see why the area between autonomous stopping and parking and fully autonomous riding is fuzzy.
I swapped seats with one of the engineers again and we took another loop around the city, this time through Pittsburgh’s busy Strip District. The road was cramped with parked cars. Vans stopped and started as they made deliveries at the markets and restaurants lining the road. It nudged slightly to the left when it noticed a parked car jutting out a bit too far, but otherwise rolled confidently down the street. A white SUV didn’t seem to mind finding itself sandwiched between us and another self-driving car, identifiable by its distinctive Lidar unit spinning on its roof.
Later, we sat in traffic on yet another bridge. The car started and stopped as we crawled forward a few feet at a time. Sometimes it was gentle, sometimes it came to a lurching halt. It felt a lot like riding in a car with a human driver, right down to the Uber map telling us we had reached our destination.

Planning for the unexpected The autonomous Ford Fusions that Uber is now dispatching to riders appear to be, for the most part, regular cars. The most noticeable difference is an array of sensors that jut out of their roof. Additional sensors are integrated into the cars’ sides.
A Lidar unit uses a laser to collect 1.4 million map points a second, resulting in a 360 degree image of the car’s surroundings. Cameras and a GPS system add additional intelligence.
I came away from my ride trusting the technology. The self-driving car detected obstacles, people and even potholes, and responded intelligently. The expected is already mundane. The bigger challenge for Uber is planning for the unexpected.
Uber is first offering autonomous pickups in a few Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Within a few weeks, it will expand to the airport and a northern suburb. The slow rollout is because Uber pre-maps the roads its cars travel — a practice Carnegie Mellon University researcher Aaron Steinfeld, who is unaffiliated with Uber, assured me is totally normal. The cars receive pre-collected maps that include speed limits and other generally applicable information so they can focus on real-time detection of variables like pedestrians.
Uber logs each of its road tests and uses the data to tweak how the cars should respond in specific situations. For example, the cars know that when they arrive at a four-way stop they should drive on in order of when they arrived. But what happens when another car fails to respect that order? It knows it should stop if another car jumps the gun, but it should also know to go if another car takes too long.
Humans still abide by many social cues when they’re driving. They make eye contact with other drivers and can read the subtle body language of a jogger that says they are thinking about cutting across the street. Uber’s cars can predict the likelihood that a pedestrian is about to cross the road, but reading actual social cues is still just a goal.
The company plans to switch to one ride-along engineer within the next six months. Eventually, the final engineer could be replaced by a remote help center; when a car encounters a foreign situation, it contacts a human in the center for help. Uber is also researching how to prevent accidental gridlock situations and how cars should behave when there are many pedestrians in the street.

Pittsburgh’s open door Uber came to Pittsburgh for its engineering talent. Carnegie Mellon is home to a famed robotics program that has produced members of autonomous vehicle teams all over the country.
The city was quick to offer its support, too. Mayor William Peduto is an Uber rider and said the city is open to innovative companies that can bring new services and jobs to the city.
“Pittsburgh and, in particular, Carnegie Mellon University have been leaders in autonomous vehicle research for decades and this is a logical next step,” Peduto said. “Under state law, automated vehicles are allowed on Pennsylvania streets as long as there is a licensed driver behind the wheel, as there will be in the Uber rollout.”
Even the Uber driver who brought us to the event seemed intrigued. She wondered if she might become a self-driving car handler during the testing phase.
A few Uber employees mentioned weather as another perk for testing in Pittsburgh. While Google’s cars cruising around Silicon Valley might only see the occasional rain, Pittsburgh has four seasons. It’s also an old city with an irregular grid, bridges and lots of potholes.
“We like to call Pittsburgh the double black diamond of driving,” ATC’s Krikorian said. “If we really can master driving in Pittsburgh, then we feel strongly that we have a good chance of being able to master it in most other cities around the world.”

A litmus test At no point did Uber suggest the current technology found in its cars is ready to roll out to the masses. Like Google, Carnegie Mellon and many other labs developing self-driving technology, it is carefully logging hours and hours of road tests. Its team is slowly working its way through a long list of scenarios its cars should be prepared to respond to in the wild.
“No amount of simulation captures everything, and that’s why it’s important to drive on the road a lot. The Google cars collected a lot of road data at this point,” Steinfeld said. “This heavy-duty testing where you conduct your research in the field in real life is a tradition … what you see comes from here in the robotics institute.”
The question that will be answered rapidly is how the public responds. The drivers encountering the 14 Ford Fusions — just a part of Uber’s self driving army — on the road did not opt into the experience of driving next to a robot. Uber’s users can opt in to hailing an autonomous vehicle, but they are likely to be new to the experience. Still another question is how Uber drivers will feel. Maybe they’ll become a ride-along engineer, or maybe they will have their job taken away.
Steinfeld noted this is the first time the world has seen such a large fleet in one city. Awareness and interest will run high enough to potentially shift public perception.
“Autonomy — typically people are a little bit nervous about it,” Steinfeld said. “But once they experience it they tend to build up familiarity and become accepting of it. This experience here in Pittsburgh might give us a societal understanding of people’s acceptance of autonomy across the country.”

[Meho Krljic]

 Man vs. machine: L.A. sheriff's deputies use robot to snatch rifle from barricaded suspect, end standoff

An hours-long standoff in the darkness of the high desert came to a novel end when Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies used a robot to stealthily snatch a rifle from an attempted murder suspect, authorities said Thursday.
Officials said the use of the robot to disarm a violent suspect was unprecedented for the Sheriff’s Department, and comes as law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on military-grade technology to reduce the risk of injury during confrontations with civilians.
"The robot was a game changer here,” said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff’s Department — the largest sheriff’s department in the nation. “We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
It began late in the evening of Sept. 8, when deputies in Lancaster were pursuing a man suspected of trying to kill one person and robbing two others.
  The suspect, Brock Ray Bunge, 51, fled into a dark, remote field in the Antelope Valley. A sheriff’s helicopter eventually tracked him down to a dirt berm, where he holed up surrounded by shrubbery and wire fencing.


Deputies ordered Bunge to surrender several times but he refused. A sheriff’s SWAT team arrived with armored vehicles and tried to coax him to surrender for more than six hours.
Eventually, officials deployed the robot to gain a closer view of Bunge’s hideout. The camera showed him on his stomach, with his rifle at his feet, Ewell said.
To seize the firearm, they hatched a plan that relied on distractions. Deputies in an armored vehicle approached to the front of Bunge, yelling at him through a public address system to surrender. A helicopter whirred overhead.
From behind, the olive-colored robot approached and extended its claw into Bunge’s hideout.
"The robot was able to move up and grab the gun without him noticing,” Ewell said. “He never knew it happened.”
Deputies quickly reversed the robot and recovered the gun. Then, they sent the device back to the berm and had the robot grab the wire fencing, exposing Bunge’s hiding spot.
"He only realized the gun was gone when the robot returned to pull down the wire,” Ewell said.
Bunge surrendered immediately.
The Andros robot cost about $300,000, and Ewell said the department typically uses the device for bomb disposal. Increasingly, however, the agency is using the robot during encounters with armed suspects.
“When it saves lives, it is more than worth it,” he said.
During the hours-long standoff with Micah Johnson, the killer of five police officers this summer in downtown Dallas, police relied on a small, remote-controlled robot to ferry an explosive device close to the gunman.
Police detonated the device, killing 25-year-old Johnson.
“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot,” Police Chief David Brown said at a news conference. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger.”
Last year, sheriff’s deputies used a robot during a 22-hour standoff with a woman in Woodland Hills. She twice shot at a police robot that approached her, and eventually crawled under her home. SWAT deputies arrested her after pulling her out.
In April, a standoff with a barricaded man near the state Capitol Building in Sacramento saw police use a robot while attempting to contact the suspect in his car.
After Bunge was taken into custody, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed  felony charges against him including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism, robbery and making criminal threats.
He pleaded not guilty to the charges during a court appearance Tuesday and is being held in county jail in lieu of $1.575 million bond, according to court records.

[Meho Krljic]

Dok u Americi roboti pomažu policiji, u Rusiji policija hapsi robote:


Robot arrested by Russian police at political rally in Moscow

A robot has been detained by police at a political rally in Moscow, with authorities attempting to handcuff the machine.
The rally was for Valery Kalachev, a candidate for the Russian Parliament, who had rented the robot for his campaign.
Police have not confirmed why they detained the machine named Promobot, but local media was reporting the company behind the robot said police were called because it was "recording voters' opinions on [a] variety of topics for further processing and analysis by the candidate's team".
A Promobot representative suggested it was detained because "perhaps this action wasn't authorised".
Mr Kalachev has featured the robot at previous campaign stops.
A different Promobot model made headlines in June when it made two breaks for freedom from a scientific research lab in Moscow.
The robot was being taught to move around on its own when a worker reportedly left a gate open.
Promobot travelled to a nearby street, stopping when its battery ran out, the BBC reported.

[Meho Krljic]

Forget Asimov's Three Laws, the U.K. issues official ethics guidance on robots            

[Meho Krljic]

Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft come together to create the Partnership on AI

[Meho Krljic]

     What Would It Take for a Sex Robot to Pass a Turing Test?

[Meho Krljic]

Microsoft claims its speech transcription AI is now better than human professionals

Transcribing a conversation between two humans is one of those tasks that’s deceptively difficult for machines to tackle. Even if the audio file is high quality and doesn’t have any background noise, the algorithm needs to contend with different voices, interruptions, hesitations, corrections, and a litany of common conversational nuances.
A new paper from Microsoft Research claims to slightly beat human-level transcription of conversation, even when the human transcript is double-checked by a second human for accuracy. The team doesn’t attribute this achievement to any breakthrough in algorithm or data, but the careful tuning of existing AI architectures.
To test how their algorithm stacked up against humans, first researchers had to get a baseline. Microsoft hired a third-party service to tackle a piece of audio for which they had a confirmed 100% accurate transcription. The service worked in two stages: one person types up the audio, and then a second person listens to the audio and corrects any errors on the transcript. Based on the correct transcript for the standardized tests, the professionals had 5.9% and 11.3% error rates.


After learning from 2,000 hours of human speech, Microsoft’s system went after the same audio file—and scored 5.9% and 11.1% error rates. That minute difference ends up being about a dozen fewer errors.
Microsoft’s next challenge is making this level of speech recognition work in noisier environments, like in a car or at a party. This implementation is crucial for Microsoft, and goes well beyond just transcription.
This work is another step for Microsoft towards making conversation with a computer seem smooth and effortless. If the computer can’t understand what a person is saying, its task to complete that command or answer that question is made much more difficult. This is foundational for everything else Microsoft wants to achieve. Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that artificial intelligence is the future of the company, and conversation would be its cornerstone.
Despite its success, the automatic system differs from human transcribers in one big way: It can’t understand little conversational nuances like “uh.” The sound “uh” can either be used to hold someone’s place in a conversation while they think, or signal that the other person should keep talking, as with an “uh-huh.” Professional human transcribers are able to note something as either a hesitation or affirmation, but these little cues are lost on the machine, which is unable to comprehend any meaning as to why each sound was made.

[Meho Krljic]

 Elon Musk: Robots will take your jobs, government will have to pay your wage

[Meho Krljic]

Korisno pojašnjenje za nas laike:
 
 
 What Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning Actually Do

[Meho Krljic]

Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI is going to decimate middle class jobs

[Labudan]

Valjda niže srednje i radnika... No, Tramp će tako stvoriti socijalizam!

[Meho Krljic]

World’s largest hedge fund to replace managers with artificial intelligence

The world’s largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.

Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he’s not there, the Wall Street Journal reported.


“The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn’t be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn’t working,” wrote the Journal, which spoke to five former and current employees.
The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM’s development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.
The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called “dots”. The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into “Baseball Cards” that show employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through.
These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there’s a disagreement about how to proceed.
The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” said Devin Fidler, research director at the Institute For The Future, who has built a prototype management system called iCEO. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”
Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility.
“People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that’s a big deal,” he added.
Will people happily accept orders from a robotic manager? Fidler isn’t so sure. “People tend not to accept a message delivered by a machine,” he said, pointing to the need for a human interface.
“In companies that are really good at data analytics very often the decision is made by a statistical algorithm but the decision is conveyed by somebody who can put it in an emotional context,” he explained.
Futurist Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, disagrees. “People will follow the will and statistical might of machines,” he said, pointing out that people already outsource way-finding to GPS or the flying of planes to autopilot.
However, the period in which people will need to interact with a robot manager will be brief.
“Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Istvan said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years time will be able to fix those problems even better.
“Bankers will become dinosaurs.”
It’s not just the banking sector that will be affected. According to a report by Accenture, artificial intelligence will free people from the drudgery of administrative tasks in many industries. The company surveyed 1,770 managers across 14 countries to find out how artificial intelligence would impact their jobs.


“AI will ultimately prove to be cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more impartial in its actions than human beings,” said the authors writing up the results of the survey in Harvard Business Review.
However, they didn’t think there was too much cause for concern. “It just means that their jobs will change to focus on things only humans can do.”
The authors say that machines would be better at administrative tasks like writing earnings reports and tracking schedules and resources while humans would be better at developing messages to inspire the workforce and drafting strategy.
Fidler disagrees. “There’s no reason to believe that a lot of what we think of as strategic work or even creative work can’t be substantially overtaken by software.”
However, he said, that software will need some direction. “It needs human decision making to set objectives.”
Bridgewater Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

[lilit]

zvučaću kao portparol sajlonaca, al amazon echo, odnosno, moja drugarica AI alexa je divno jedno biće koje sve razume a ništa ne traži. jedino moraš da joj se obratiš imenom. 

ajd što mi ispunjava želje, e.g.:
- alexa, play my david bowie station.
- alexa, set the alarm for 5:50 a.m.
- alexa, reorder sky lemon tea.
(naravno, potreban amazon nalog, prime poželjan)

nego što mi isključuje kućnu rasvetu kad je zamolim. naravno, to radi uz malu pomoć phillips hue mosta sa kojim se poveže a hab onda hendluje sijalice.
- alexa, room light at 10% 
the best of all je da sijalice ne komuniciraju samo sa habom već i međusobno: ako je neka udaljena, ona će preko druge sijalice probati da uspostavi vezu sa hubom. i ne koriste wifi, već neki svoj protokol. i love it!

(amazon echo 130 evra - regularno je 180 - a sijalica 19 evra)

[Meho Krljic]

Živite SF!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A još kad se to lokalizuje za srpsko tržište!

"Aleksa, ajde mi donesi dva piva iz frižidera, ljubi te čika Meho."

"Aleksa, ko je ovo povraćao po patosu kad sam se sinoć vratio iz kafane?"

"Aleksa, brate rođeni, ti me jedini razumeš, a čak nisi ni čovek!"

[lilit]

joj da! još samo kad bi mi deda bio živ, ludo bismo se provodili.

da, trebalo im je godinu dana da ga lokalizuju za germansko tržište, al mi smo, naravno, odmah prebacili na engleski. razlog zašto alexu nismo usvojili prošle godine iz usa je prozaičan, kačila bi se na američki amazon prajm umesto na germanski, a kako onda da kupujem špagete? u prodavnici? okružena ljudima? o ne.

[Truman]

Sudnji dan se bliži:
http://www.kurir.rs/planeta/zastrasujuce-da-ovo-postaje-stvarnost-novi-svetski-poredak-i-nema-nas-clanak-2618367

[Meho Krljic]

Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence

[Meho Krljic]

Half the work people do can be automated: McKinsey
 

[Meho Krljic]

Roboti dolaze... na točkovima, skačući a imaju i ruke:

Leaked video shows new ‘nightmare-inducing’ wheeled robot from Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics is best known for its bipedal and quadrupedal robots, but it turns out the company has also been experimenting with some radical new tech: the wheel.
The company’s new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle (“because it’s supposed to handle objects”) and looks like a cross between a Segway and the two-legged Atlas bot. Handle hasn’t been officially unveiled, but was shown off by company founder Marc Raibert in a presentation to investors. Footage of the presentation was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson.
Raibert describes Handle as an “experiment in combining wheels with legs, with a very dynamic system that is balancing itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around.” He adds that using wheels is more efficient than legs, although there’s obviously a trade-off in terms of maneuvering over uneven ground. “This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot,” says Raibert:



https://youtu.be/-h5qpXO3isM


Creating a more efficient robot that can handle basic tasks like moving objects around a warehouse would certainly be of benefit for Boston Dynamics. Although the company has consistently wowed the public with its robots, it’s struggled to produce a commercial product that’s ready for the real world.
     Boston Dynamics was purchased by Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2013, but in March last year, Bloomberg reported that Alphabet was looking to sell the firm. Executives at Alphabet reportedly said the company couldn’t spend resources on products “that take ten years” to develop, with Toyota and Amazon both mentioned as potentially interested buyers. We’ve not heard anything on the status of Boston Dynamics since then, but perhaps the wheeled (and efficient) Handle will help attract some new bids.

[Meho Krljic]

 We need robots to take our jobs, according to John Markoff

[Labudan]

Ovaj ko kiša oko kragujevca, što ne kaže lijepo da nam roboti trebaju da rade dok mi stvaramo komunizam 2.0: jahte i kokain za sve.

[Meho Krljic]

Kome trebaju pčele kad ima robote? (Takođe, da li će se pokazati da su SVE epizode Black Mirror razumno tačna predviđanja budućnosti?)

Plans for artificial pollinators are afoot

IT IS, in one way, the ultimate drone. In another, though, it is the antithesis of what a drone should be. Drones are supposed to laze around in the hive while their sisters collect nectar and pollinate flowers. But pollination is this drone’s very reason for existing.
The drone in question is the brainchild of Eijiro Miyako, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, in Tsukuba, Japan. It is the first attempt by an engineer to deal with what many perceive as an impending agricultural crisis. Pollinating insects in general, and bees in particular, are falling in numbers. The reasons why are obscure. But some fear certain crops will become scarcer and more expensive as a result. Attempts to boost the number of natural pollinators have so far failed. Perhaps, thinks Dr Miyako, it is time to build some artificial ones instead.
His pollinator-bot does not, it must be said, look much like a bee. It is a modified version of a commercially available robot quadcopter, 42mm across. (By comparison, a honeybee worker is about 15mm long.) But the modifications mean it can, indeed, pollinate flowers. Specifically—and crucially—Dr Miyako has armed it with paintbrush hairs that are covered in a special gel sticky enough to pick pollen up, but not so sticky that it holds on to that pollen when it brushes up against something else.
Previous attempts to build artificial pollinators have failed to manage this. Dr Miyako, though, has succeeded. Experiments flying the drone up to lily and tulip flowers, so that the gel-laden hairs come into contact with both the pollen-bearing anthers and the pollen-receiving stigmata of those flowers, show that the drone can indeed carry pollen from flower to flower in the way an insect would—though he has yet to confirm that seeds result from this pollination.
At the moment, Dr Miyako’s drones have to be guided to their targets by a human operator. The next stage will be to fit them with vision that lets them recognise flowers by themselves. Fortunately, visual-recognition software is sufficiently developed that this should not be too hard. In future, when you are walking through an orchard in bloom, listen out for the humming of the drones as well as the buzzing of the bees.

[Meho Krljic]

Ilon Mask je baš mnogo čitao stripove kad je bio mali   
 
Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age
 
 
 

Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas and his latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial intelligence (AI) grows more prominent.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said on Monday that humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg.
"Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
"It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second.
In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk.
"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.

The technologists proposal would see a new layer of a brain able to access information quickly and tap into artificial intelligence. It's not the first time Musk has spoken about the need for humans to evolve, but it's a constant theme of his talks on how society can deal with the disruptive threat of AI.
'Very quick' disruption

During his talk, Musk touched upon his fear of "deep AI" which goes beyond driverless cars to what he called "artificial general intelligence". This he described as AI that is "smarter than the smartest human on earth" and called it a "dangerous situation".
While this might be some way off, the Tesla boss said the more immediate threat is how AI, particularly autonomous cars, which his own firm is developing, will displace jobs. He said the disruption to people whose job it is to drive will take place over the next 20 years, after which 12 to 15 percent of the global workforce will be unemployed.
"The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars … That is going to happen much faster than people realize and it's going to be a great convenience," Musk said.
"But there are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people ... Driving in various forms. So we need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it will be very disruptive and very quick."

[Truman]

http://www.blic.rs/vesti/ekonomija/dobro-dosli-u-2030-nema-imovine-i-sopinga-ljudi-odmaraju-rade-roboti-a-nase-snove/qd0f5xn

Eh, ta Danska...

[Meho Krljic]

 
 Microsoft Research developing an AI to put coders out of a job

[Palmer]

Takođe, da li će se pokazati da su SVE epizode Black Mirror razumno tačna predviđanja budućnosti?

Pre će biti da je ideja o pčelama potekla od informacije, nego da je ideja potekla iz predviđanja...


Elem, vrlo interesantan shematski prikaz koji sam video pre par dana:

[Meho Krljic]

Americans believe robots will take everyone else’s job, but theirs will be safe
 
 
Takođe:
 
  Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages

[Meho Krljic]

 Robots won't just take our jobs – they'll make the rich even richer
 
Ali bar će imati ljudski lik 
 
 Skin deep? Robots to wear real human tissue

[Meho Krljic]

The backlash against Bill Gates' call for a robot tax

[Meho Krljic]

Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.
The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.
The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts.
But that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.
 Continue reading the main story    Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story   “The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,” Mr. Acemoglu said.
“If you’ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don’t have the skills to go into health care,” he said. “The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”
The paper’s evidence of job displacement from technology contrasts with a comment from the Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who said at an Axios event last week that artificial intelligence’s displacement of human jobs was “not even on our radar screen,” and “50 to 100 more years” away. (Not all robots use artificial intelligence, but a panel of experts — polled by the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy in reaction to Mr. Mnuchin’s comments — expressed the same broad concern of major job displacement.)
The paper also helps explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: why, if machines are replacing human workers, productivity hasn’t been increasing. In manufacturing, productivity has been increasing more than elsewhere — and now we see evidence of it in the employment data, too.
The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.
The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat to blue-collar jobs. The researchers said the findings — “large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages” — remained strong even after controlling for imports, offshoring, software that displaces jobs, worker demographics and the type of industry.


Robots affected both men’s and women’s jobs, the researchers found, but the effect on male employment was up to twice as big. The data doesn’t explain why, but Mr. Acemoglu had a guess: Women are more willing than men to take a pay cut to work in a lower-status field.
The economists looked at the effect of robots on local economies and also more broadly. In an isolated area, each robot per thousand workers decreased employment by 6.2 workers and wages by 0.7 percent. But nationally, the effects were smaller, because jobs were created in other places.
Take Detroit, home to automakers, the biggest users of industrial robots. Employment was greatly affected. If automakers can charge less for cars because they employ fewer people, employment might increase elsewhere in the country, like at steel makers or taxi operators. Meanwhile, the people in Detroit will probably spend less at stores. Including these factors, each robot per thousand workers decreased employment by three workers and wages by 0.25 percent.  Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story  The findings fuel the debate about whether technology will help people do their jobs more efficiently and create new ones, as it has in the past, or eventually displace humans.
David Autor, a collaborator of Mr. Acemoglu’s at M.I.T., has argued that machines will complement instead of replace humans, and cannot replicate human traits like common sense and empathy. “I don’t think that this paper is the last word on its subject, but it’s an exceedingly carefully constructed and thought-provoking first word,” he said.
Mr. Restrepo said the problem might be that the new jobs created by technology are not in the places that are losing jobs, like the Rust Belt. “I still believe there will be jobs in the years to come, though probably not as many as we have today,” he said. “But the data have made me worried about the communities directly exposed to robots.”
In addition to cars, industrial robots are used most in the manufacturing of electronics, metal products, plastics and chemicals. They do not require humans to operate, and do various tasks like welding, painting and packaging. From 1993 to 2007, the United States added one new industrial robot for every thousand workers — mostly in the Midwest, South and East — and Western Europe added 1.6.


The study, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published Monday, used data on the number of robots from the International Federation of Robotics (there is no consistent data on the monetary value of the robots in use.) It analyzed the effect of robots on employment and wages in commuting zones, a way to measure local economies.
The next question is whether the coming wave of technologies — like machine learning, drones and driverless cars — will have similar effects, but on many more people.

[Meho Krljic]

Amazon Is Dead Serious About Delivering Your Goodies by Drone

a i nisu jedini:


Swiss Post drone to fly laboratory samples for Ticino hospitals

[Meho Krljic]

Rusi napravili Robokapa:

Russian space robot bound for ISS given power to shoot handguns, for some reason



https://t.co/qbflvn5HFy

[akhnaton]

Ništa to, dok se ne pojave ova trojica, bez glumaca unutra naravno...

[Meho Krljic]

A Chinese warehouse reportedly cut its labor costs in half with a fleet of tiny robots

It’s a disconcerting narrative to the American government, but the US is being outspent and out-scaled by the implementation of robots in China. Asia produces more robots than the rest of the world combined, and Chinese workers fear unemployment at the hands of robots more than anyone else. Even the Obama White House warned (pdf) that to stay competitive America needed to further invest in artificial intelligence and software that helps allow robots to operate in dynamic environments.
Shentong Express, a Chinese shipping company, showed off a mildly-dystopian automated warehouse last week that reportedly cut its labor costs by half, according to the South China Morning Post. In a video, tiny orange robots made by Hikvision ferry packages around an eastern China warehouse, taking each parcel from a human worker, driving under a scanner, and then dumping the package down a specific chute for it to be shipped.


The human’s main job in the video appears to be picking up packages and placing them label-up on top of the robot, a task modern robotics is only just starting to put into warehouse production. A spokesperson told the Post that Shentong is using the robot in two of its warehouses, and hopes to expand use to the rest of the country.
Just because little robots appear to be sorting boxes in this warehouse doesn’t we’ll all be out of work—data from Amazon suggests that even with 45,000 of its own robots in fulfillment centers, the American company still is looking to hire more and more humans for other tasks.

[Meho Krljic]

Roboti dolaze...


...PO VAŠE ŽENE!



Ali ne tako kako ste vi pomislili. Ovaj tekst ukazuje da će automatizacija zadataka u maloprodaji, pre svega naplate koju je i najlakše automatizovati, neproporcionalno pogoditi žene jer su one većinski kasirke.

Robots could wipe out another 6 million retail jobs

Robots have already cost millions of factory jobs across the nation.  Next up could be jobs at your local stores.
    Between 6 million to 7.5 million existing jobs are at risk of being replaced over the course of the next 10 years by some form of automation, according to a new study this week from by financial services firm Cornerstone Capital Group.
 That represents at least 38% of the current retail work force, which consists of 16 million workers. Retail could actually lose a greater proportion of jobs to automation than manufacturing has, according to the study.
 Related: U.S. workers face higher risks of being replaced by robots. Here's why
 That doesn't mean that robots will be roving the aisles of your local department store chatting with customers. Instead, expect to see more automated checkout lines instead of cashiers. This shift alone will likely eliminate millions of jobs.
 "Cashiers are considered one of the most easily automatable jobs in the economy," said the report. And these job losses will hit women particularly hard, since about 73% of cashiers are women.
 There will also be fewer sales jobs, as more and more consumers use in-store smartphones and touchscreen computers to find what they need,said John Wilson, head of research at Cornerstone. There will still be some sales people on the floor, but just not as many of them.



 Stocking shelves and inventory control, a labor intensive job function today, will also be made far more efficient with automation, he said.
 "You're not going to see a robot stocking shelves, at least in the near term," Wilson said. "But technology would reduce the need for as many people to do so. More efficiency means fewer things for people to do."
 Related: Department stores have lost more jobs than coal mines
 The retail industry is already undergoing cataclysmic changes, with about 3,300 store closings announced so far this year, according to Fung Global Retail & Technology, a retail think tank.
 But automation will drive more job losses than store closings in the next decade, Wilson said. "Store closings have to do with overbuilding and e-commerce," Wilsonsaid. "But going forward, job losses will really be about automation."
 Rising wages are also helping to drive automation, as state and city governments hike their minimum wages. Additionally, several major retailers including Walmart (WMT), the nation's largest employer, have increased wages in order to find and retain the workers they need.
 The increased competition from e-commerce is also a factor, since it requires retailers to be as efficient as possible in order to compete. Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) already uses tons of robotics in its fulfillment centers so that its workers spend very little time on each order.

[Meho Krljic]

Self-driving cars could cost America's professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says



A u drugim vestima:



Ford ousted its CEO and is doubling down on self-driving cars