automaton
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Amazon Says It Will Retrain Workers It’s Automating Out Of Jobs. But Does ‘Upskilling’ Even Work?
Amazon made waves when it announced late last week that it planned to spend $US700 ($994) million to retrain one-third of its U.S. workforce, 100,000 employees, as part of its “˜Upskilling 2025′ initiative. The sizeable commitment, which the Wall Street Journal notes is “among the biggest corporate retraining initiatives” yet announced, will fund pilot programs,…
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A Startup Says It Can Automate Perfect Weed Even As Earth Burns
Over the years, a companies have claimed to make “the first” smartphone-controlled, automated home grow system. But I have thus far been only pitched by one that positions itself as a solution to growing herbs and marijuana in the age of climate catastrophe. That honorific belongs to Seedo, an Israeli company whose “fully automated hydroponic…
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There Is Absolutely No Reason To Trust The Safety Record Of Tesla’s Autopilot System
Tesla has long lurked in a category of its own in the self-driving car race; where Uber and Google’s Waymo are building fully autonomous vehicles essentially from the ground up, Elon Musk’s electric car company is slouching towards autonomy through a series of increasingly sophisticated updates to its semi-autonomous Autopilot system. Because Teslas are not…
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This Company Is Betting The Future Is Personal AI Avatars, So It Made Me One
In January 2019, when China Central Television, the largest broadcast network in the most populous nation in the world, aired a special to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the hosts welcomed four life-sized “personal artificial intelligences” to share the stage with them. Called PAIs, they were three-dimensional holographic replicas of the presenters that moved, spoke,…