Jeff Bezos has wanted a home robot for a long time. By 2017, Amazon's founder, an avid sci-fi fan, had repeatedly asked the company's engineers and executives about the feasibility of such a project, says Ken Kiraly, a vice president who helped create the Kindle ebook reader. That was the year Amazon's special projects team judged that it was finally the right time to begin building a home robot, due to the maturity of artificial intelligence and robotics, falling cost of sensors and computer chips, and risk that competitors had similar plans. They got started despite one big unknown: what Amazon's home robot would be good for. "Robots are hard," says Kiraly, who put together the team on the project.

But the drive also showed that the technology is not yet ready to realize its potential. Each day, Kodiak rotated a new team of specialists into the cab of its truck, so that someone could take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong. These "safety drivers" grabbed the wheel multiple times. Tech start-ups like Kodiak have spent years building and testing self-driving trucks, and companies across the trucking industry are keen to reap the benefits. At a time when the global supply chain is struggling to deliver goods as efficiently as businesses and consumers now demand, autonomous trucks could alleviate bottlenecks and reduce costs.

There are huge volumes of child sexual abuse photos and videos online--millions of pieces are removed from the web every year. These illegal images are often found on social media websites, image hosting services, dark web forums, and legal pornography websites. Now a new tool on one of the biggest pornography websites is trying to interrupt people as they search for child sexual abuse material and redirect them to a service where they can get help. Since March this year, each time someone has searched for a word or phrase that could be related to child sexual abuse material (also known as CSAM) on Pornhub's UK website, a chatbot has appeared and interrupted their attempted search, asking them whether they want to get help with the behavior they're showing. During the first 30 days of the system's trial, users triggered the chatbot 173,904 times.

From reminding potty-training toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a "conversation partner", voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born. But the rapid rise in voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri could, researchers suggest, have a long-term impact on children's social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills. "The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities," said Anmol Arora, co-author of an article published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood. A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behaviour to devices that are, said Arora, "essentially a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence." The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone, volume, emphasis or intonation.

Scheduling nurses in the emergency department of St. Michael's Hospital used to be a painful four-hour-a-day job. Now it's done in 15 minutes thanks to an automated program built by data scientists at Unity Health, where a team of more than 25 employees is harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve care. Unity Health includes St. Mike's, St. Joseph's Health Centre and Providence Healthcare. The team has also created an early warning system that alerts doctors and nurses if a patient is at risk of going to the ICU or dying. The programs are just two of more than 40 that have gone live since 2019, when the analytics department was founded, largely due to Dr. Tim Rutledge, Unity's CEO, who believes the technology can dramatically change health care.

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity -- for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans. According to the theory, advances in AI -- specifically of the machine learning type that's able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly -- will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. Except that it will never happen. Co-authors University at Buffalo philosophy professor Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, founder of German AI company Cognotekt argue that human intelligence won't be overtaken by "an immortal dictator" any time soon -- or ever.

In the very near future, Amazon's famed voice assistant, Alexa, may sound quite different from the dutiful (and impersonal) voice you've grown accustomed to since it rolled out in 2014. At least, that's what Rohit Prasad, Amazon's senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, announced at Amazon's re:MARS conference, a global artificial intelligence (AI) event that Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos hosted over the summer. With just a one-minute audio sample, the technology could bring a loved one's voice bounding through an Echo device's speakers. Prasad used a short presentation to show the audience how the new speech-synthesizer technology could help us forge lasting memories of our deceased relatives. "Alexa, can grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?" A young boy asked a cute Echo speaker with big Panda eyes.

A robot can autonomously navigate inside a building using nothing but a magnetometer and a detailed map of local magnetic anomalies. The technique could provide a means for people and robots to find their way around large buildings, but the technology may be some way off commercial application because of the hefty cost and the size of the sensors. Satellite navigation systems like Russia's GLONASS, the European Union's Galileo and China's BeiDou can provide accurate location information all …

Many AI systems become smarter by relying on a brute-force method called machine learning: they find patterns in data to, say, figure out what a chair looks like after analyzing thousands of pictures of furniture. New research suggests patiently correcting artificial intelligence (AI) when it asks dumb questions may be key to helping the technology learn. Stanford University scientists trained a machine learning AI to identify gaps in its knowledge, as well as to formulate often-stupid questions about images that strangers would answer. When people responded, the system received feedback prompting it to adjust its inner mechanisms to behave similarly in the future; the researchers also "rewarded" the AI for writing smart questions to which humans responded. The AI absorbed lessons in language and social norms over time, refining its ability to compose sensible and easily answerable queries.

Chaganti, R., Vinayakumar, R., Alazab, M., and Pham, T.D. Stegomalware: A Systematic Survey of Malware Hiding and Detection in Images, Machine Learning Models and Research Challenges, Cornell University, October 6, 2021.