A few month ago we blogged about the on-going robotic debate, Are robots our friends?  This seems to be the question of the year, if not the decade, as digital technology continues to advance. What does this mean for humanity and our workforce? Recently, the New York Times posted an interesting article with a surprising conclusion which claims that “New Research Says Robots Are Unlikely to Eat Our Jobs.” In the article they discuss a new study out by the McKinsey Global Institute, called “A Labor Market That Works: Connecting Talent With Opportunity in the Digital Age,” which states: By 2025, McKinsey estimates, these digital talent platforms could add $2.7 trillion a year to […]

Can you imagine a robot delivering your baby or downloading a file from your favorite designer to print clothes at home on your 3D printer? You might not have to imagine these things for much longer. These are just a few of the amazing advances we are likely to see in the next ten years, according to seven top futurists who were recently interviewed by The Huffington Post. The article titled 7 Top Futurists Make Some Pretty Surprising Predictions About What The Next Decade Will Bring describes these advances and more. Dr. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, computer scientist, and Director of Engineering at Google, believes that by 2025, 3D printers will be printing clothing and even […]

There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, Eric Horvitz recently published a piece about the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Others have commented that AI could take our jobs and even potentially kill us. Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, called artificial intelligence our biggest existential threat at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very […]

Last week the National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Agriculture and NASA announced $31.5 million in new awards to spur the development and use of robots that work cooperatively with people (known as co-robots). The awards mark the third round of funding made through the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), a multi-agency program launched in September 2012 as part of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Initiative, with NSF as the lead federal agency. The 52 new research awards, ranging from $300,000 to $1.8 million over one to four years, advance fundamental understanding of robotic sensing, motion, computer vision, machine learning and human-computer interaction. The awards […]

Inspired by the traditional Japanese art form of origami, researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have figured out how to take flat sheets of specialized paper and plastic and make it self-fold into a complex machine that can “get-up and go”. The robot starts as a flat sheet with embedded electronics, which can then transform autonomously into a functional machine. This is done using shape-memory composites that fold themselves along embedded hinges to recreate fundamental folded patterns. The origami-inspired robot can fold itself in 4 minutes and walk away without human intervention. This demonstrates the potential for both complex self-folding machines and autonomous, self-controlled assembly. “This is a new […]

The CCC-sponsored robotics initiative kicks off next week with the first of four workshops covering the impact, applications and emerging technologies of robotics. Robotics research and development have already transformed our lives in many ways: they perform nearly all the welding and painting on the cars we drive; they enable telerobotic surgery resulting in more reliable outcomes and faster recovery times; they perform millions of scientific experiments and observations in chemistry, biology and medical labs.  Increasingly robotics is also providing improved control and functionality in people’s daily lives: some new model cars can park themselves or provide advanced distance-keeping cruise control and collision warnings; millions of autonomous vacuum cleaners are […]