Boston Dynamics' New Warehouse Robot Threatens Millions Of Jobs The next phase of

Boston Dynamics' New Warehouse Robot Threatens Millions Of Jobs

https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/s...?itok=I5FacRR9

The next phase of automation has begun...

Fri, 03/29/2019 - 21:45
146 SHARES

The economy of the 2020s will be more volatile, and recessions could be more extreme. The collision of automation in the workforce will trigger economic disruptions far more significant than what seen in agriculture to industry (1900 to 1940) when nearly 40% of the workforce was displaced.
In the next ten years, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, or about 40 million, crushing the bottom 90% of Americans the hardest.
Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of developing new automation technologies.
The Waltham, Mass.-based company has released a new video of its warehouse robot, a "mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets."

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...%20working.png
Dubbed Handle, the robot uses an on-board vision system with a large suction cup arm to track boxes and then move them to a pallet. The video below shows several robots in a warehouse moving boxes to a pallet and conveyor belt, a task that would typically be completed by humans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns

Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns

“When Handle places a boxes onto a pallet, it uses force control to nestle each box up against its neighbors,” Boston Dynamics said. “The boxes used in the video weigh about 5 Kg (12 lbs), but the robot is designed to handle boxes up to 15 Kg (30 lbs). This version of Handle works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall).”

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...t%20handle.png

Warehouse workers probably won’t have to worry about Handle taking their jobs anytime soon. That also means the more than 600,000 Amazon employees, mostly fulfillment center jobs, are safe for now but could be in jeopardy in the next 3 to 5 years.
The next phase of automation has begun, and it will accelerate in the years ahead. Forty million Americans are at risk of losing their jobs to automation by 2030.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...-millions-jobs

Scientists Begin Teaching AI Robots To Evolve & Reproduce

https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/s...?itok=Yq2VNg2L

Evolutionary roboticists have decided to begin teaching artificial intelligence powered robots to evolve and reproduce. Why should humans go to the trouble of building more robots when a robot could do it instead?

Fri, 03/29/2019 - 20:45
147 SHARES

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Evolutionary roboticists have decided to begin teaching artificial intelligence powered robots to evolve and reproduce. Why should humans go to the trouble of building more robots when a robot could do it instead?

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...robots-ai2.jpg

According to Futurism, this is known as high-tech Darwinism. The researchers’ ultimate goal is to design artificial intelligence and robots that can analyze their own source code and mate with others by combining bits and pieces of their code with that of other robots. This would create “offspring,” much like organic life, Futurism reported. But it isn’t actually anything like organic life, actually. But evolutionary roboticists who have this new goal have high-tech Darwinism to the extreme. Apparently, just like biological life evolves to fill ecological niches, these robots’ offspring might be better adapted to their environments that their architects specifically built them for.
An interesting future awaits once high-tech Darwinism becomes successful. And Wired reported that some scientists are well on their way to making this technology a reality.

Computer scientists at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam built a simplified system that shows how future robots might swap and combine their “genetic” information.
Their recent research, published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence and which involved programming two parent robots to code a new “offspring,” found that the resulting offspring contain a mixture of the parents’ code as well as some modules that seemed to have mutated or been blended on its own. –Futurism

David Howard, one of the scientists on the project, told Wired that there’s a positive spin to all of this.

“It gives you a lot of diversity, and it gives you the power to explore areas of a design space that you wouldn’t normally go into.”

But others see this as a way to permanently force human beings into extinction.

“One of the things that makes natural evolution powerful is the idea that it can really specialize a creature to an environment,” Howard told Wired.

But natural evolution doesn’t sound anything like robot evolution. Humans are making themselves obsolete and our two cents is that this will not end well for humanity.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...olve-reproduce