Companion robots are playing an ever-increasing role in helping busy people look after the elderly and children. With an aging population and an increasing labor shortage, the demand for companion robots for elder care and children's companions is on the rise. Xiaoyuzaijia is an intelligent companion robot produced by Zaijia.com, a Beijing-based startup engaged in internet hardware and intelligent home appliances businesses. It specializes in security monitoring, human-computer emotional communication and entertainment functions. If the elderly people are ill at home, the robot can bring medicine and water. The robot will open the door when the guest comes.

President Trump argues that too many US workers have lost their jobs to foreign peers as companies have offshored manufacturing. US companies need to bring those jobs back and, in doing so, restore America's industrial greatness. His diagnosis isn't altogether wrong: fewer companies manufacture cars, for instance, in the US than was previously the case. But this thesis is too simplistic. US companies are really just trying to allocate capital efficiently when they manufacture goods outside of the US.

Buyers and vendors are seen at Shenzhen's Seg electronics market, a popular place for hardware startup entrepreneurs to buy components for their inventions and prototypes in Shenzhen, China. Did you know that your product might be copied in China even before you ship it? While copying happens elsewhere, including Facebook blatantly copying Snapchat features or Google Home being a strong echo of Amazon's echo, Chinese copycats can be particularly aggressive. Realistically, the gigantic Chinese supply chain, built over decades with some of the dollars from our past and future iPhones, cannot possibly move overnight (or over a U.S. presidential term). As a result, most high-tech manufacturing will remain in China--at least for a while.

Artificial intelligence is primed to pervade everyday life, from automonous cars to intelligent ads that anticipate your desires. How will these shifts vary globally, and what do they mean for the future of work, life, and commerce? Two big thinkers share their views: Darrell West, editor in chief of TechTank at the Brookings Institution, and Stephanie Wander, who designs prizes for XPrize. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He completed a PhD in from Emory University's business school and two post-docs at MIT and Harvard.

The patter of automated machinery fills the air inside wire-basket manufacturer Marlin Steel's bustling factory in a rugged industrial section of this city. Maxi Cifarelli, 25, of Baltimore, peers through safety goggles at a flat screen, her left knee bent and heel resting on her chair. Two years after earning a fine arts degree from Towson University with a specialty in interdisciplinary object design, she now spends her work days working with a personality-free machine with a name to match: a computer numerical control, or CNC, router. With automation poised to sweep through the economy, some fear that it will kill more jobs than it creates. But Cifarelli's experience is the opposite. She befriended automation, instead of fighting it, and she has a job because of it.

This is part of a series on my quest to learn as much as possible about AI. To know why I'm doing this, check out my first post. In grad school, I primarily studied Ancient Greek philosophy. My only published piece of academic research is on his Atlantis myth. But now I work at a tech company and I'm writing about artificial intelligence -- a subject I'm very interested in but know little about.

The question of whether robots will replace human jobs has been hotly debated for decades, but the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence – and the populist socio-political environment in which we find ourselves – have given the debate around automation and employment an added sense of urgency. A report by the Nomura Research Institute indicates that by 2035 nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots, and recently we've started to see these predictions materialise. Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life made 34 employees redundant by replacing them with IBM's Watson Explorer AI system, which is capable of analysing and interpreting data to automatically calculate payouts to its policyholders. This AI system will be able to read tens of thousands of medical certificates and factor in the length of hospital stays, medical histories and any surgical procedures before calculating payouts, but in spite of being described by the firm as "cognitive technology that can think like a human," the sums will not actually be paid until they have been approved by an actual member of staff. And it is this aspect of human oversight that proves crucial to the conversation: Instead of treating Artificial Intelligence and Automation as a zero-sum game and pitching AI as an adversary to human employment, it is important to point out that technological advances generally correlate to increased prosperity in the long-term.

Helen of Troy may have had a "face that launch'd a thousand ships", according to Christopher Marlowe, but these days her visage could launch a lot more besides. She could open her bank account with it, authorise online payments, pass through airport security, or raise alarm bells as a potential troublemaker when entering a city (Troy perhaps?). This is because facial recognition technology has evolved at breakneck speed, with consequences that could be benign or altogether more sinister, depending on your point of view. High-definition cameras combined with clever software capable of measuring the scores of "nodal points" on our faces - the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose, for example - are now being combined with machine learning that makes the most of ever-enlarging image databases. Applications of the tech are popping up all round the world. In China, for example, fried chicken franchise KFC recently unveiled its first "smart restaurant" that uses facial recognition to predict what meal customers are likely to want, based on their age, gender and the time of day, while payments giant Alipay is experimenting with "smile to pay" tech.

Given the subtle differences between AI and human intelligence, it's reasonable to expect that an autonomous AI system will generate its own criteria for judging what passes as new [scientific] knowledge. New knowledge which humans no longer experience as something they themselves have produced would shake the foundations of human culture." This will start with dense, urban areas, but over time every single square meter of every part of the globe will be recorded. Advances in computer vision & AI mean this data will be usable at scale, which will revolutionise advertising, law enforcement, and bring us back to a pre-privacy world." "Text Classification Using Neural Networks" submitted by gk_(@gk_).

I mean, I know they are, but around me the 3 major supermarkets within walking distance got rid of them....Anyway, I know they still exist, but I do think our robot future is not quite as inevitable as people think. Worrying about the impact of future automation on jobs seems to be a cool tech away of ignoring the current fucked and bullshit jobs situation. And, yes, automation has been going on for decades, which is actually my point. There's nothing new about it, and I don't know why people think there will be this sudden automation discontinuity. The robots have been here for awhile, and they aren't really going away, but that doesn't mean the sci-fi dystopian workless future is just around the corner.