Robot Apocalypse, no jobs available!

states and jobs under attack

Many news stories about robots have a bit of fun joking about the impending robot apocalypse when the machines no longer need us. For many people, a more frightening and real possibility is that a robot may be coming for their jobs. It can feel odd to celebrate the admittedly fascinating advances in fields like self-driving cars and manufacturing robots, because these devices are quite likely to replace humans. Still, this is nothing new — automation has been taking over human jobs for as long as we’ve had the capacity to worry about such things as a society. As we approach a new age of automation, what will become of us?

Robotic technology has come a long way in just the last decade. We’ve gone from contraptions that could barely get up on two feet or pick up an object, to advanced robots that cannot be knocked down or can place small components in a smartphone chassis. Just look at how Foxconn has improved the monotonous task of assembling small electronics.

Last year, the company explained that its plans to replace some of its workforce were on hold because the robotic arms it had designed were not precise enough to add components to iPhones based on Apple’s stringent requirements. However, a few months ago, Foxconn announced that an improved version of the Foxbot had resulted in the elimination of 60,000 human workers in its factories. The robots are simply better at repetitive tasks than humans who demand bathroom breaks and wages.

In the same vein, there’s Amazon and its network of massive warehouses. These facilities still rely on human workers, but the company has also increased automation with robots manufactured by Amazon’s Kiva subsidiary. These squat automatons jet around the building, picking up shelves and other heavy objects to move them where humans can pick your order more easily. Amazon insists this is not about eliminating jobs, but it’s not exactly ending its efforts to automate the warehouse game. The company hosts robotics competitions that encourage engineers to develop computer vision systems and graspers that can identify and pick up products from a shelf. That’s one of the main things humans still do in Amazon’s warehouses.
Self-driving cars are further from reality, but they could make an even bigger impact on the way we live and work. Google is at the forefront of this technology, and has been testing the cars for several years. The company is keen to point out that in all the miles it has driven, there have been virtually no accidents, and most of those were caused by the fallible humans behind the wheel. More recently, Uber has started researching self-driving car technology, which could one day allow it to do away with the human drivers it contracts with.
Self-driving cars still have a long way to go — for example, they currently only work in good weather with well-defined streets. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to make these systems more reliable. It’s going to have huge economic impact when that happens. There are an estimated 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, and many of those jobs could vanish in short order.
The trend toward increasing automation is going to continue over the coming years, it’s inevitable. What does that mean for all those people?
A robot does not strictly want anything yet, but the people who own the businesses want them to take over for human workers. Automation reduces the cost of production, so businesses invest in it. Right now that means robots and AI. Those who feel this will be detrimental to the middle class point out that the technology being developed now is considerably more capable than what we’ve dealt with in the past.
Manufacturing has long since disappeared as a substantial source of jobs in the developed world now that automation has taken over. It was the same story when farming automation took over a century ago. These populations have been shunted into service-oriented jobs, many of the same jobs that are now threatened by improved robotics and artificial intelligence. Some economists worry that technology is “destroying jobs faster than it is creating them.”  With powerful computer vision, artificial intelligence, and humanoid robots just around the corner, it might not be long before more jobs than ever before are handed over to robots.
If this school of thought is right, more capable robots could further suppress income for already low-income workers. No one’s going to hire a human to pack boxes when a robot can do it better. The question is whether or not society will come up with new industries as a result of our increasing automation.
A great economic thinker once worried aloud that the deployment of new machinery would soon “totally exclude” the labor of workers. Thousands of people were on the verge of being out of work, and then what would they do? This line of reasoning probably sounds familiar because we hear people saying the same basic thing just a few paragraphs up, but this wasn’t a modern economist worrying about robots. It was Thomas Mortimer, the English writer and economist writing about automated sawmills in 1772’s “Elements of Commerce.”
From the very moment machines became capable of taking on a repetitive task with greater efficiency than a human, we’ve been gripped by a fierce existential worry about our own obsolescence. And indeed, automation has slowly but surely pushed people out of industries.
There’s a certain discomfort when we talk about a new innovation in robotics that seems aimed at taking over for a human worker. It’s undeniably cool when someone improves a humanoid robot that could so easily slip into our daily lives — after all, the world is designed around humans, so humanoid robots make sense. Maybe on some level that’s the goal, but the unending march of progress is not necessarily malicious.
Looking at the history of automation, the doomsday predictions have never come true. There’s never been an explosion of long-term unemployment because of it. Sure, people lose jobs, and that’s genuinely unfortunate. No one wants that, but automation frees humans from menial labor—the sort of jobs people would rather not do anyway. Letting robots do what humans used to do could improve everyone’s quality of life in the long-term as new industries and better jobs appear. If there’s any way for a business to make money with human workers, you can be sure they’ll find it.
This transition still requires humanity to work together — something we often stink at. Some believe we’re reaching a point where a developed society simply doesn’t need everyone to work. If that’s the case, do we use something like universal basic income to encourage volunteer work and entrepreneurship? A robot may come for your job one day, but maybe that could end up benefiting you. We just don’t know exactly how yet. The next few years are going to be interesting.

The gamers combo pack

The idea of a portable PC gaming system that could handle a wide range of games and operating systems is an attractive one. But a recent Kickstarter that claims it can deliver such a product should be taken with an extremely large grain of salt.
At first glance, the Portable Game System for PC games (PGS), by PGS Labs, looks as if it ticks all the right boxes. It’s intended to boot both Windows 10 and Android Marshmallow, and it claims it can handle streaming from other devices. The team behind the project claims to have done their initial testing on a Cherry Trail-equipped Surface 3 before settling on baseline specifications. The PGS, they say, will ship in two flavors: The PGS Lite will feature a 5.5-inch screen, 1280×720 resolution, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage, while the PGS Hardcore will feature a 5.7-inch screen, 2560×1440 resolution, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The price on these two systems is supposedly $230 and $280, respectively, if you opt for Early Bird pricing.
Here’s where the problems start. The Atom x7-Z8750 microprocessor at the heart of the PGS is only capable of playing a handful of last-generation titles at sub-30 FPS frame rates. While some games, like Arkham City, can reportedly average 26-32 FPS at medium settings, most are confined to minimal graphics — and that’s according to PGS’s own testing. What an independent review would reveal is anyone’s guess, but the Atom microprocessor isn’t known for having much graphics horsepower and there’s no special sauce here that would change that. You can play certain games on an Atom SoC, but not many, and not well.
Even if the low game detail levels and rock-bottom frame rates aren’t enough to put you off, the list of claimed features should ring warning klaxons. PGS claims it will implement dual booting of both Android and Windows operating systems, despite the fact that both Microsoft and Google have expressed a distinct lack of interest for such configurations. Again, this type of dual-boot configuration may be technically possible, but it’s scarcely an option that Microsoft or Google are going to want to support.
PGS also claims that it’ll support streaming from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as well as other PCs. Xbox One and PC is a given, but the PS4? That’s not happening without Sony’s buy-in, and so far, Sony has yet to announce any partnerships with third-party would-be console “developers” with a Kickstarter campaign and delusions of grandeur. PGS also mentions LTE support — but again, that implies that the company is partnering with a US carrier to provide LTE connectivity. That’s not a trivial feature to add. It can take six months or more for companies like AT&T or Verizon to perform network testing, and it’s not an inexpensive process.
The other features, like a secondary display mode, are easy to promise on paper, but ensuring that both displays function properly in the wide variety of PC titles takes extensive testing and troubleshooting — neither are capabilities that PGS has demonstrated the slightest ability to provide. And while $230 and $280 may be early bird pricing, the $100K initial fund is ludicrously low for a console system like this.
The long and short is this: However nice it might be to have a portable PC gaming experience, this would-be device isn’t going to provide it. No no-name initiative from a random group of inventors based on Kickstarter funding ever could. This kind of project would require a deep lift from a company vested in the Microsoft ecosystem — not what we’ve got here.

a step closer to Invisibility

Invisibility, the abilities in fictional movies is actually possible. Not the power stuff and all, but the use of invisibility cloaks or wears. True harry porter comes to mind but it is totally different from what we think or watched in the movie. Not magic or spells but making an entity not perceivable by a person
Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have been able to quantify fundamental physical limitations on the performance of cloaking devices, a technology that allows objects to become invisible or undetectable to electromagnetic waves including radio waves, microwaves, infrared and visible light.
The researchers' theory confirms that it is possible to use cloaks to perfectly hide an object for a specific wavelength, but hiding an object from an illumination containing different wavelengths becomes more challenging as the size of the object increases.

Andrea Alù, an electrical and computer engineering professor and a leading researcher in the area of cloaking technology, along with graduate student Francesco Monticone, created a quantitative framework that now establishes boundaries on the bandwidth capabilities of electromagnetic cloaks for objects of different sizes and composition. As a result, researchers can calculate the expected optimal performance of invisibility devices before designing and developing a specific cloak for an object of interest. Alù and Monticone describe their work in the journal Optica.

Cloaks are made from artificial materials, called metamaterials, that have special properties enabling a better control of the incoming wave, and can make an object invisible or transparent. The newly established boundaries apply to cloaks made of passive metamaterials—those that do not draw energy from an external power source.

Understanding the bandwidth and size limitations of cloaking is important to assess the potential of cloaking devices for real-world applications such as communication antennas, biomedical devices and military radars, Alù said. The researchers' framework shows that the performance of a passive cloak is largely determined by the size of the object to be hidden compared with the wavelength of the incoming wave, and it quantifies how, for shorter wavelengths, cloaking gets drastically more difficult.

For example, it is possible to cloak a medium-size antenna from radio waves over relatively broad bandwidths for clearer communications, but it is essentially impossible to cloak large objects, such as a human body or a military tank, from visible light waves, which are much shorter than radio waves.

"We have shown that it will not be possible to drastically suppress the light scattering of a tank or an airplane for visible frequencies with currently available techniques based on passive materials," Monticone said. "But for objects comparable in size to the wavelength that excites them (a typical radio-wave antenna, for example, or the tip of some optical microscopy tools), the derived bounds show that you can do something useful, the restrictions become looser, and we can quantify them."

In addition to providing a practical guide for research on cloaking devices, the researchers believe that the proposed framework can help dispel some of the myths that have been developed around cloaking and its potential to make large objects invisible.

"The question is, 'Can we make a passive cloak that makes human-scale objects invisible?' " Alù said. "It turns out that there are stringent constraints in coating an object with a passive material and making it look as if the object were not there, for an arbitrary incoming wave and observation point."

Now that bandwidth limits on cloaking are available, researchers can focus on developing practical applications with this technology that get close to these limits.

"If we want to go beyond the performance of passive cloaks, there are other options," Monticone said. "Our group and others have been exploring active and nonlinear cloaking techniques, for which these limits do not apply. Alternatively, we can aim for looser forms of invisibility, as in cloaking devices that introduce phase delays as light is transmitted through, camouflaging techniques, or other optical tricks that give the impression of transparency, without actually reducing the overall scattering of light."

Alù's lab is working on the design of active cloaks that use metamaterials plugged to an external energy source to achieve broader transparency bandwidths.

"Even with active cloaks, Einstein's theory of relativity fundamentally limits the ultimate performance for invisibility," Alù said. "Yet, with new concepts and designs, such as active and nonlinear metamaterials, it is possible to move forward in the quest for transparency and invisibility."

القيادة 3D، وسيارة أن يذهب 360

هل مدفوعة من أي وقت مضى إلى حدث، وأنت ترى هذه المساحة الصغيرة حيث يمكنك يمكن أن الحديقة سيارة YUR، ولكن هل يمكن أن ليس لأنك لا يمكن أن تدفع في اتجاه معين؟ هل حاولت من أي وقت مضى لوضع سيارتك في حالة محددة لمساعدة وصول فعال؟ هل تريد أن يحرر بعض المساحة في أماكن لوقوف السيارات كنت تملك؟ كذلك قد يكون هذا مجرد الإجابةالمساهمة في تحرير أندرو Liszewski، جزمودو، أحاط علما أيضا كيف يمكن أن تويوتا صدى يديرد في "التحرك في أي اتجاه، وتدور 360 درجة، والانزلاق الى مكان وقوف السيارات مما يجعل وقوف السيارات الموازية أسهل من القيادة الفعلية".وليام يديرد هو مخترع مجموعة من العجلات التي يمكن ان تتحرك سيارته لا إلى الأمام فحسب، بل جانبية أيضا. في مهمة واحدة السائقين عادة ما أكره هو وقوف السيارات. ميزة أن يأتي بسهولة إلى الذهن حول هذه العجلات هي استخدام مجموعة في ركن السيارة بشكل متواز.وقال ماندلباوم، ميزة أخرى ستكون في متفوقا سيارتك "أقرب إلى حملة الظهور نافذة" بحيث لم يكن لديك للوصول حتى الآن.في الفيديو الذي شاهده "، وعجلات إنطلق بسرعة وصغيرة تويوتا صدى في جميع أنحاء درب إلى الأمام، الى الوراء، اليسار واليمين وفي الدوائر. يتم نقل السيارة إلى الأمام وإلى الوراء بالطريقة العادية، ويسار / يمين عندما أنابيب الإطارات الدورية الداخل أو الخارج ".ولكن مهلا، كيف تعمل في الواقع؟ ماثيو رينولدز في سلكي: "إنه لا يعطي أي تفاصيل حول التكنولوجيا وراء خلقه، ولكن عجلات احادي أخرى تعمل من خلال وجود أقراص صغيرة حول الحافة الخارجية للعجلة التي تسمح للعجلة الانزلاق جانبية فضلا عن أن تكون الأمام مدفوعة و إلى الوراء. وقد كانت هذه العجلات في جميع أنحاء لمدة قرن تقريبا وهي شائعة جدا في الروبوتات المستقلة الصغيرة لكنهم أبدا تم تركيبها على السيارات اليومية المتاحة على نطاق واسع. "لا، انها ليست الأولى من نوعها، في أن "مفهوم عجلة متعددة الاتجاهات ليست جديدة تماما، منذ عدة إطارات مثل هذه موجودة خصيصا للمركبات البناء التي تحتاج إلى التحرك في طرق محددة، ولكن هذا نموذج معين وقال كاترينا دينيس في معكوس تبرز ".وقال الملاحظات الفيديو تعمل بالطاقة يديرد عجلات من 24،000 رطل من عزم الدوران تطبيقها مباشرة على الهواء في الإطارات.وقال يديرد يمكن انسحب على أي سيارة. "هذا هو أول تطبيق العالم الترباس على أي شيء مع عجلات".في وقت سابق من هذا العام، مارس، لندن فري برس، ألقيت نظرة على العمل يديرد ل. "عجلات متعددة الاتجاهات، أو عجلات mecanum، قد حول للسنوات ال 50 الماضية. شركات مثل هوندا وتويوتا قد اخترع بالفعل عدة إصدارات مختلفة. وقال يديرد عجلة له لديها تصميم أفضل، ويمكن أن تعمل على جميع الأسطح."ماذا بعد؟ وقال يديرد في مذكرات الفيديو أن "هذه هي دليل على نماذج مفهوم لكي يثبتوا انهم العمل. وسيتم تصفية عجلات مصنعة لاستهداف متطلبات التطبيق."وقال يديرد، الذي تحدث مع معكوس، "أود أن أرى [عجلة] المستخدمة في كل سوق." وأعطى كأمثلة في مناولة المواد، والروبوتات المتنقلة، التنقل الشخصي والسيارات مستقلة. وقال "كما لأخذ المنتج إلى الأسواق، يديرد أكثر من مستعدة" كتب دينيس. وقال يديرد، "في نهاية المطاف سوف أحضر هذا لتسويق نفسي أو أن الشركة المناسبة الحصول على الحق في ذلك."

What we know about jupiter

Look towards the north-west after sunset and there is currently one bright point of light that easily stands out relative to everything around it. That is the planet Jupiter, shining with an intense and steady glow.

After a journey of five years, and decades in the planning, NASA's Juno spacecraft has achieved orbit around Jupiter. Soon begins the next stage in humanity's quest to explore the largest of the gas giants in our solar system. But what do we know of Jupiter to date?

Brightest, biggest, first

Jupiter's brightness in the night sky is due to its enormous size. It is by far the biggest planet of the solar system, containing more than double the mass of all the other planets, moons, comets and asteroids combined.

Its great size suggests that Jupiter was also the first planet to form around the sun. The planets emerged out of the debris left over when an interstellar cloud of gas and dust coalesced to form our star. Early in its life, the young sun generated a wind that blew away most of the remaining interstellar cloud, but Jupiter was able to hold on to that history.

Locked up in Jupiter, therefore, is the recipe for how a solar system is made – the ingredients from which the planets and other smaller bodies came to be, and the processes and conditions that enabled this material to come together to form such amazing and diverse worlds.

King of the planets

Jupiter, along with Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn, have all been observed since ancient times as they are easily visible in the night sky. Different cultures who studied the stars also realised that these objects were unique; they did not stay fixed in their relative patterns or constellations as the stars did but moved according to different rules.

They were referred to as the wandering stars by the ancient Greeks and derived from this term came the name planet.

It is remarkable just how aptly Jupiter is named. We are now aware that Jupiter is the largest and most massive of the planets so it is fitting to be named for the Roman king of the gods, who was also the god of the sky. While in Greek mythology, Jupiter's counterpart is Zeus, the supreme god of ancient Greece.

But Jupiter is not the brightest of the planets, that record is held by Venus. However, Jupiter and Venus are very different in how they wander across the sky. Nowadays we can explain that difference by where they are positioned in the solar system.

Venus, being an inner planet, remains close to the sun, appearing as the evening star after sunset or the morning star before sunrise. Whereas Jupiter, being an outer planet, can wander across the entire sky.

Jupiter holds the secrets to the early solar system. Credit: NASA/ FUSE / Lynette Cook

This motion, along with the planet's brightness, would've helped to mark Jupiter as the king of the planets.

Revolutions around Jupiter

In the year 1610, from late January through to early March, the astronomer Galileo used his new telescope to observe Jupiter. He easily identified and tracked first three, and then four bright points of light. They formed a straight line either side of Jupiter, but their positions were constantly and steadily changing relative to the planet.

Galileo in his publication Sidereus Nuncius, confidently and quite correctly explained this motion as the objects being in orbit around Jupiter. Here was proof that everything in heaven did not orbit the Earth, which at the time led to conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church.

Galileo had discovered Jupiter's four major moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – each worlds within their own right and often referred to as the Galilean moons.

Since that time numerous more moons have been discovered and in the past few decades the count has jumped to 67 known satellites, the greatest number of any planet. It's no wonder Jupiter is often called a mini-system of its own.

The Great Red Spot

Saturn has its rings, Earth has its blue oceans and Jupiter has its vibrant and swirling bands of clouds. Jupiter rotates very quickly, spinning once every 10 hours. This drives the dynamic weather patterns seen in Jupiter's cloud tops.

One of the big questions regarding Jupiter is just how deep do these clouds descend?

Furthermore, in recent times Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot has been found to be shrinking. This massive storm system measuring about twice the size of Earth, has been a feature of the planet since it was first observed in 1664.

But recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show that the storm may now be less than half the size of some historical measurements. Since the 1930s astronomers have tracked this downsizing but more recently, the shrinking appears to be happening more rapidly.

The shrinking Great Red Spot over 20 years. Credit: NASA

Radiation Hazard

Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of all the planets. At Jupiter's poles the magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's and the field extends for millions of kilometres in space, even reaching past the orbit of Saturn.

The dynamo powering Jupiter's magnetic field is thought to be a layer of liquid hydrogen deep within the planet. Hydrogen is under such high pressure inside Jupiter that it becomes a liquid. As such, it takes on the characteristics of a metal; it can conduct electricity because the electrons within the hydrogen atoms are able to move around.

With the addition of Jupiter's fast spin, it's the perfect combination to create the powerful magnetic field.

This magnetic field traps charged particles - electrons, protons and ions - some originating from the solar wind but also flying in from Jupiter's Galilean moons, particularly volcanic Io.

Some of the particles are funnelled towards Jupiter's poles, creating Jupiter's impressive aurora that are 100 times brighter than the aurora experienced on Earth.

Jupiter’s inner magnetosphere and the bright radiation belts. Credit: NASA/JPL

Other particles become trapped by the magnetic field giving rise to Jupiter's radiation belts, an insanely intense version of the Earth's van Allen belts. Jupiter's magnetic field accelerates these particles to such a degree that they zip up and down the belt at nearly the speed of light, creating the most hazardous radiation zone in the solar system.

Breaking all the records

Jupiter is the largest, most massive, fastest rotating, most hazardous planet of the solar system. It has the strongest magnetic field and the greatest number of known satellites. It has held onto the pristine gas from the interstellar cloud that gave rise to our sun.

Its strong gravitational influence has helped to move material around our solar system, potentially scattering ice, water and organic molecules from the outer cold regions of the solar system into the inner solar system where it could be captured by the Earth.

The first planets to be found orbiting around other stars were hot Jupiters, an apt description for exoplanets with masses similar to Jupiter that orbit very close to their stars and therefore have high surface temperatures.

One of the most long-standing questions that the Juno spacecraft will answer is how did Jupiter form? Did it begin with a rocky core that then attracted an enormous atmosphere or was Jupiter's origin more akin to a star and could it possibly have collapsed directly out of the solar nebula remaining gaseous right through to its core? 

The next 18 months are set to be very interesting as the Juno spacecraft increases our understanding of the great gas giant, Jupiter.

016-07-jupiter.html#jC