robocalypse

You know how sometimes you look at a piece of research and think, "I suppose it's an interesting technical problem, but isn't teaching an AI to hunt and kill humans a pursuit fundamentally dangerous t

When you think about crowdsourced work, you probably think about Mechanical Turk and, maybe, Uber. On the one hand, an anonymous platform where people feel like mechanical parts. On the other hand, a

For many people, the robot-populated future is a zero-sum game; it's either going to be us or them running things. Headlines are rife with dire predictions: “Robots will take over most jobs in 30 ye

I was challenged recently to “name one job in the future that won’t be automated.” I was stumped. I couldn’t think of one job that someday won’t be dehumanized. That got me thinking about th

One might ask why we would ever want to create robots that can do human work when we have so many people who need jobs. The goal of robotics should not be to replace humans with robots, but rather to

Leading venture capitalists, scientists and CEOs all have the same prediction for AI: machines will take jobs away, “eat the world” and, ultimately, overthrow humanity. These histrionics have driv

A recent Pew report found that a majority of Americans believe that most human jobs could be automated by 2065. It’s no wonder, then, that talk about technological unemployment is becoming increasin

Is nothing sacred? The rugged trails that over history have been trod by cowboys, gauchos, ranch hands, and in Australia, swagmen, are now to be presided over by cold, calculating machines. SwagBot is

While more and more jobs are being forfeited to robots and artificial intelligence, is it conceivable to convey to machines a responsibility as complicated as cybersecurity? The topic is being hotly d

In my recent travels through Singapore, I witnessed all that this city-state is doing to become a “Smart Nation." My trip was instructive on many levels, but the primary point that became ever more

In the popular media, we talk a lot about robots stealing jobs. But when we stop speculating and actually look at the real world of work, the impact of advanced robotics is far more nuanced and compli

“Enjoy your com-FORT-able stay,” says a robot front-desk clerk at Japan’s Robot Hotel. Do you thank the robot for its awkward salutation? Or maybe you hesitate for a moment before shuffling off

Robots and artificial intelligence have come a long way since a Roomba entered your home to vacuum your floor and Siri gave you advice on the best Italian restaurants in your parents’ neighborhood.

It's another victory for the machines: a robotic surgical system outperformed humans and robot-assisted human operators in a soft-tissue procedure, bringing us that much closer to automated medical ca

There's a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as Nao, as creepy as Spot and BigDog, or as anthropomorphic as Atlas, it might be more practical than all of them. It

How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question (actually, there's no maybe about it), but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it's actually so

Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. isn't happy with <a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/tag/boston-dynamics/">Boston Dynamics</a>, its robotics subsidiary. According to a <a target="_blank" href="

Using your hand to grasp a pen that's lying on your desk doesn't exactly feel like a chore, but for robots, that's still a really hard thing to do. So to teach robots how to better grasp random object

Imagine you're a hunter-killer robot, hovering over the broken wasteland that used to be the world of men. You have surprised a group of biologicals in an act of petty insurrection, and they have spli

The <a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/tag/robocalypse/">Robocalypse</a> is near: Osaka-based <a href="http://www.hajimerobot.co.jp/en/">Hajime Research Institute</a> is working on a <a href="http:/