The big climax arrives in Act Three. There's an uprising, as the robots take over the factory that created them. By the Epilogue, humankind is all but extinct. Fed up with their treatment, the robots have laid waste to the hands that created them, sparing only a single human — a fellow worker.
It's the final lesson of a play loaded to the artificial gills with allegory. Published 100 years ago (and premiering 99 years ago last month) R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) , by Czech writer Karel Čapek, is best remembered for bringing the word "robot" to sci-fi — and English, generally. It's a key piece of the seven-time Nobel Prize-nominated writer's legacy, who infused deeply held political beliefs into his early science fiction writings.
Many things are taking place:
Photos: Robots at Work and Play - The Atlantic
Virginia legislature clears way for Amazon delivery robots | Smart Cities Dive
Amazon's six-wheeled Scout robot is still in the earlier stages of testing in Irvine, CA and Snohomish County, WA, but the company wrote in a blog post last August that it has completed thousands of shipments already. Amazon has described Scout as a "fully-electric delivery system," which is the size of a cooler and autonomously follows a specified delivery route.
Local governments are seeing a slow growth in delivery robots, which could accelerate if similar bills are passed in other state legislatures across the country. The Washington, DC Council passed a bill in 2018 permitting further deployment of delivery robots, while Postmates unveiled its own delivery robots that same year with a pledge to deploy them in Los Angeles before a wider roll-out.
Do you trust robots? Your answer may depend on how well robots explain
Explainable AI (XAI) is a branch of AI research that examines how artificial agents can be made more transparent and trustworthy to their human users. Trustworthiness is essential if robots and people are to work together. XAI seeks to develop AI systems that human beings find trustworthy – while also performing well to fulfill designed tasks.
At the Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning, and Autonomy at UCLA, we and our colleagues are interested in what factors make machines more trustworthy, and how well different learning algorithms enable trust. Our lab uses a type of knowledge representation – a model of the world that an AI uses to interpret its surroundings and make decisions – that can be more easily understood by humans.
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Meet the burger-flipping robots that may take over fast food kitchens - Los Angeles Times
In a test kitchen in a corner building in downtown Pasadena, Flippy the robot grabbed a fryer basket full of chicken fingers, plunged it into hot oil — its sensors told it exactly how hot — then lifted, drained and dumped maximally tender tenders into a waiting hopper.
A few feet away, another Flippy eyed a beef patty sizzling on a griddle. With its camera eyes feeding pixels to a machine vision brain, it waited until the beef hit the right shade of brown, then smoothly slipped its spatula hand under the burger and plopped it onto a tray.
Robots aren't taking our jobs — they're becoming our bosses - The Verge
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they're working in management, and they're grinding workers into the ground.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment's downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day.
Canada's 'dynamic' plan to protect endangered right whales rests on robots | Science | AAAS
New regulations in Canada should reduce the number of right whales getting tangled up in fishing gear.
With only about 400 North Atlantic right whales remaining, the Canadian government is stepping up its efforts to keep them safe, even as it tries to keep the nation's lucrative snow crab and lobster fisheries in business. Officials yesterday announced the nation's latest plan for reducing the number of these behemoths being hit by ships or tangled up in fishing nets.
The Full Suburban: It's time for robots to rule the chores | The Spokesman-Review
Needing a little rest and relaxation myself, I decided to head down for a quick visit about a month ago. There are no words to describe how welcoming, tranquil and clean the "group home" is. To come from my house, where someone is usually pounding out a song on the piano and every surface is covered with puzzle pieces, homework, cereal boxes and markers – well, entering the California house is like stepping into another dimension.
"Why don't you do a quick tidy a few times throughout the day, or, better yet, get your kids to clean up after themselves?" you may be asking in an unfairly judgmental fashion. Excellent question and one I have no legitimate answer for except to say: My will to tidy has been crushed by the inescapable fact that the mess will just reappear in some form or the other literally minutes after we have gone through the effort to clean it up.
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'Robot' was coined 100 years ago, in a play predicting human extinction by android hands https://t.co/cQdsTk7UgN by… https://t.co/R0j9KqnJeD TechCrunch (from San Francisco, CA) Thu Feb 27 21:39:44 +0000 2020
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