Robert Gordon has written a magnificent book on the economic history of the United States over the last one and a half centuries. His study focuses on what he calls the "special century" from 1870 to 1970--in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after. The book is without peer in providing a statistical analysis of the uneven pace of growth and technological change, in describing the technologies that led to the remarkable progress during the special century, and in concluding with a provocative hypothesis that the future is unlikely to bring anything approaching the economic gains of the earlier period. The message of Rise and Fall is this. For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off. Gordon focuses on growth in the United States.

As athletes and coaches begin to adopt IoT technology, 21st century fans are beginning to expect more from sporting events. The world of robotics and AI have so much to offer in terms of event management, so why not bring bots to stadiums the world over? Concierge robots could bring so much to the sports fan experience. Fans come from far and wide to attend major events, such as the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Tour de France, and so on. They stay in hotels, hostels, and shared-homes.

The sun was sparkling on the Mediterranean Sea on the afternoon when a graduate student from my lab tossed our prize robot into the water for the first time. I watched nervously as our electronic creation sank beneath the waves. But the bot didn't falter: When we gave it the command to swim, it filled its expandable mantle with water, then jetted out the fluid to shoot forward. When we ordered it to crawl, it stiffened its eight floppy arms in sequence to push itself along the sandy bottom and over scattered rocks. And when we instructed it to explore a tight space beneath the dock, the robot inserted its soft body into the narrow gap without difficulty.

LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 03: The Apple logo is displayed on the back of an iPhone on August 3, 2016 in London, England. Apple is continuing to make inroads into artificial intelligence. The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech behemoth bought Turi, a machine learning platform, for 200 million, according to sources at GeekWire. Apple would not confirm the move to USA TODAY, but said the company buys smaller technology companies "from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The Cupertino-based tech behomouth appears to be coming to terms with slumping demand for the iPhone by expanding into other markets, including artificial intelligence.

Around October 2015, Google announced it would be using artificial intelligence to help deliver its search results. This machine-learning AI system is called RankBrain. Since RankBrain uses machine-learning AI, it learns by itself, consuming web pages and search queries by the second with the intent of delivering the best and most relevant results to users. You need to understand that this is an addition to Google's algorithm and not an algorithm update such as Hummingbird, Penguin, etc. In fact, it is reported that RankBrain is now Google's third most important signal contributing to search queries and results.

This article has been reposted from Robohub.org Flying robots perform 100th show on Broadway, using new localization technology and algorithms designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil for their new show PARAMOUR. Since April, a troupe of eight flying machines has been performing in a Cirque du Soleil Broadway show called PARAMOUR. This group of quadcopters has completed its first 100 shows in front of a live theater audience, without a single incident. Given the string of recent safety incidents with drones (there's more), this begs the question: How was this accomplished? The Paramour quadcopters were designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich and were transformed into flying lampshades in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A machine intelligence system, dubbed Emma AI, is starting a fund that hopes to outsmart the humans and computers that make a living trading stocks. Shaunak Khire, Emma's creator, claims his system differs from current finance computing -- high-frequency trading and "quant" data science -- because its system of neural nets takes into account a more complex set of factors affecting stocks, like management changes or monetary policy in Europe, that other programs miss. "This is not algorithmic trading," he said. "This is literally replication of an analyst." I hope they put a fleece on the AI. For some reason "Emma will start trading stocks from pharma giant GSK and Tesla along with U.S. Treasury bonds," which seems like sort of a limited coverage universe for this robot analyst, but everyone's got to start somewhere.

The chatbot lawyer that overturned hundreds and thousands of parking tickets is now tackling another problem: homelessness. London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed "the world's first robot lawyer", Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI). Now, Browder, 19, wants his chatbot to provide free legal aid to people facing homelessness. He said: "I never could have imagined a parking ticket bot would appeal so much to people. Then I realised: this issue is bigger than a few parking tickets."

Some people got a good laugh when a chatbot was given its own Twitter account – and was then transformed into a Holocaust-denying racist in 24 hours and swiftly taken offline. The Microsoft chatbot – called Tay – is a piece of software which can communicate with others with no human involvement. This bot was equipped with artificial intelligence but was easily manipulated by Twitter users. Teaching a robot works just like drilling an innocent, unknowing child, as artificial intelligence learns from the sum of its experiences, much like human beings. The more often a subject is talked about, opinions expressed, and certain wordings used, the more likely the software is to consider it normal and use it.