Research challenges long-held assumptions about how automation will affect employment. Studies in various countries found that automation is associated with more jobs, fewer working hours , and higher productivity.

Visual robots typically perceive the three-dimensional world through sequences of two-dimensional images, but they don’t always know what they’re looking at. For instance, Tesla’s self-driving system has been known to mistake a full moon for a traffic light.

Machines are doing light janitorial work in the uncontrolled environment of Google’s offices. Everyday Robots, a new spin-out from Google’s experimental X Development division, unleashed 100 robots to perform an array of cleanup tasks.

Things are really starting to get going in the field of AI. After many years (decades?!) of focusing on algorithms, the AI community is finally ready to accept the central role of data and the high-capacity models that are capable of taking advantage of this data.

Robots are tremendously useful machines, and I would like to see them applied to every task where they can do some good. Yet we don’t have enough programmers for all this hardware and all these tasks.

Flippy 2, a robotic fry station from California-based Miso Robotics, has been newly deployed in a Chicago White Castle location.

A new machine learning method aims to improve a machine’s ability to determine and locate points of interest.

War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?

Amazon unveiled a robot that patrols users’ homes, scopes out strangers, and warns of perceived dangers.

A remote sniper used an automated system to take out a human target located thousands of miles away.What happened: The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad used an AI-assisted rifle in the November killing of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist,

Tesla unveiled its own AI chip and — surprise! — plans for a humanoid robot.What’s new: At Tesla’s AI Day promotional event, the company offered a first look at an upcoming self-driving computer powered by custom AI chips.

One of the world’s largest makers of farm equipment is doubling down on self-driving tractors. John Deere agreed to pay $250 million for Bear Flag Robotics, a California startup that upgrades conventional tractors.

The U.S. plans to build nearly a dozen new civilian AI research labs. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) committed $220 million to fund 11 National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, complementing seven other AI research institutes that were established last year.

Insects that spread pollen to fruiting plants are in trouble. A possible alternative: Robots. Farmers in Australia and the U.S. are using robots from Israeli startup Arugga Farming to pollinate greenhouse tomatoes.

The independent research lab OpenAI wowed technology watchers in 2019 with a robotic hand that solved Rubik’s Cube. Now it has disbanded the team that built it. OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba revealed that OpenAI shuttered its robotics program last October.