Automation has disrupted work for centuries. Two hundred years ago in Britain, the Luddites rose in rebellion, smashing the machines that made their weaving skills obsolete. Today it's high status cognitive jobs that are under threat. Earlier this year ROSS, a legal version of IBM's Watson, was launched and hailed as the first artificially intelligent lawyer. Future iterations may put lawyers out of work.

The possibility that the impending robot revolution could well take most of the jobs away from humanity, leaving us as empty, directionless husks as we search for meaning in a world without toil has been widely discussed and debated. But it looks like it might be worse than we feared: Even our dogs are going to lose their jobs. Researchers from the University of Sydney and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics are working on a new robot that can monitor and herd farm animals, and keep an eye on farmers' crops, entirely on its own, according to Smithsonian Magazine. They recently put the bot through a series of tests on a farm, including running it over rough terrain and through streams, and herding cows and horses, to see if it could stand up to the task of working on its own on a farm. The jauntily named SwagBot was designed by the researchers to aid ranchers in some of Australia's more remote areas, where towns and neighbors can be hours apart, to herd livestock more effectively.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your organic Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Parrot hasn't shown off anything new in like... a week... So it's jolly well time that they entertain us with some new products: I'm so, so happy that smartphone control has been ditched for an honest RC controller.

Would you do what a robot told you to do? If people stealing food right under the eyes of a bot is anything to go by, RoboCop is still a long way off. In a twist on a common psychology experiment, in which a picture of a pair of eyes seems to make people behave more honestly, Guy Hoffman at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues stationed a robot guard to watch over a table of snack food labelled with a "reserved" sign in a student common room. The team used a mObi robot made by US robotics company Bossa Nova. This does not have a threatening appearance, like some security bots -- such as the Knightscope (pictured) -- but it has eyes that looked around the room.

They say'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', but in a new event the beholders are robots. The Beauty.AI beauty contest used five algorithms to evaluate youthfulness, face symmetry, skin and other parameters, and then compare them to models and actors in a database. Now, the systems have announced the winners from more than 6,000 user-submitted selfies of individuals who live all over the world and range in ages of 18 to 69. The Beauty.AI beauty contest put together of robot judges to determine the winners. More than 6,000 people from around the world submitted head shots to be analyzed by the algorithms.

Star Wars could soon be headed to the battlefield. The Department of Defence has shown off a prototype of its'hoverbike,' a rectangular shaped quadcopter that has been named the Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle, or JTARV. It is working with New Zealand inventors Malloy Aeronautics on the radical machine that could take troops into battle and deliver supplies. The Army Research Laboratory has shown off a prototype of its'hoverbike,' a rectangular shaped quadcopter that has been named the Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle, or JTARV The'hoverbike' is similar to a quadcopter, using four standard helicopter style rotors, overlapped with each other. The full sized design uses a motorcycle engine and controls.

A number of recent studies predict that robots will replace millions of human workers as artificial intelligence continues to evolve. In a way, none of this is new: Technological advances often result in a reduced need for human employees. Manufacturers have been using automation for many decades, and in more recent years, states have been phasing out human tollbooth operators in favor of electronic, cashless toll systems. However, the prospect of being replaced by an intelligent machine strikes a particularly foreboding nerve in many people. It doesn't matter if that "machine" is an algorithm-driven software program running on enterprise IT infrastructures or actual, physical robots imbued with artificial intelligence (AI).

Robot brothels could soon be commonplace as Britain's sex industry undergoes a technological revolution. A leading law professor claims that technology can clean up the industry, wiping out issues such as sexually transmitted disease and sex slavery. NUI Galway Law professor John Danaher believes that robots, which can be mass-produced, could even legalise the industry, which only regulates humans. Robot brothels could soon be commonplace as Britain's sex industry undergoes a technological revolution. Pimps and brothel-owners would be free to set up businesses offering cyborg sex to anyone who demands it without legal sanction, he said.

A range of studies in recent months has warned of an imminent job apocalypse. The most famous of these suggests that up to 47 per cent of US jobs are at high-risk of automation over the next two decades. Another study finds 54 per cent of EU jobs are likely automatable, while the chief economist of the Bank of England has argued that 45 per cent of UK jobs are similarly under threat. This is not simply a rich country problem either, as low-income economies look set to be hit even harder by automation. It would seem that we are on the verge of a mass job extinction.

The mystery of how Parkinson's disease progresses could be cracked thanks to researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) and machine learning. Deborah Apthorp of the ANU Research School of Psychology has won funding for a study that will track early symptoms with the aim of finding possible indicators of progression, using machine learning. This research has received 138,930 over 5 years from the Perpetual Impact Philanthropy Grant. As it stands, the type of Parkinson's a diagnosed patient has or how quickly it will progress is hard to determine. Apthorp noted in an ANU report that some individuals can be fine for quite a while while others can experience a more rapid progression.