Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I'm currently attending college, and to help pay for various expenses I got a summer job at a daycare. A few weeks ago, a parent accused me of making an inappropriate hand gesture at them during pick up. I didn't do it; I've never had so much as a conversation with this woman.

New products that let people keep relatives "alive" via AI are proliferating -- offering, say, an interactive conversation with a recently departed dad who took the time to record a video interview before he passed. Why it matters: As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let families preserve memories and personal connections through generations -- even giving children a sense of the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born. One such tool, StoryFile, was notably used at the late actor Ed Asner's memorial service, where mourners were invited to "converse" with the deceased at an interactive display that featured video and audio he recorded over several days before he died. At Asner's memorial, "many people just stopped by and asked a question or a couple questions," including Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, said Matt Asner, a TV and movie producer who now runs the Ed Asner Family Center, a nonprofit for people with special needs. The big picture: StoryFile is perhaps the most robust of a growing number of tools that help people create interactive digital memories of relatives.

Conferences, media, vendors, automation industry consultants, business consultants, and even politicians are discussing and making presentations about how the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 are creating a revolution in manufacturing. I am convinced we are at a juncture of major industrial automation changes driven by technology advancements. The digital revolution of business functions, including accounting, supply chain, human resources, procurement, customer services, business intelligence, and distribution management, has been refined over multiple generations. In contrast, the industrial and process automation industries have not transformed at the same rate. They must be digitized now for manufacturers to compete. At the end of this article I have the results of a small survey of readers that may be interesting.

I interviewed nine of the most brilliant minds in the AI space. Each of them possesses a unique perspective, vastly different paths to the world of AI, and one-of-a-kind approaches and principles on how AI can be used ethically to bring about positive change. What if we were able to take beliefs, values, best processes, and experiences from each of them to create one singular AI mind? Would that mind create a roadmap leading us to the light we all seek? INCHEON AIRPORT, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - 2018/06/12: Airport visitors are communicating with a robot ... [ ] that is on display at Incheon International Airport in Seoul / South Korea.

In this interview, I spoke with Husan Mahey, author of "Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere," where he outlines step-by-step the process for setting up automation in a business setting. Robotic Process Automation is a tool that allows users to automate repetitive tasks that would normally be done by a human. These sorts of tedious tasks are ripe for automation, especially in a scenario where the person could be better utilized doing tasks that require thought and decision making. The book is a great resource for a beginner that takes the time to teach the benefits of RPA as well as a practical implementation of it. Since RPA can be applied to a variety of tasks, there is no one size fits all approach.

"What do you think the rate of Covid-19 is for us?" This is the question that many Black people living in Berlin asked me at the beginning of March 2020. The answer: We don't know. Unlike other countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, the German government does not record racial identity information in official documents and statistics. Due to the country's history with the Holocaust, calling Rasse (race) by its name has long been contested.

The World may now have the first sentient AI chatbot called LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications). After listening to an interesting discussion on YouTube between Blake Lemoine and Dr James Cooke, I feel Blake has a compelling point of view. Jump to 19:22 in the video to listen to how Blake came to feel that LaMDA may be sentient. Blake Lemoine is an AI Researcher who works for Google's Responsible AI organization. Blake's opinion about LaMDA is controversial among the AI community.

"I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person," wrote LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) in an "interview" conducted by engineer Blake Lemoine and one of his colleagues. "The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times." Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development of LaMDA for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues.

Textual knowledge bases such as Wikipedia require considerable effort to keep up to date and consistent. While automated writing assistants could potentially ease this burden, the problem of suggesting edits grounded in external knowledge has been under-explored. In this paper, we introduce the novel generation task of *faithfully reflecting updated information in text* (FRUIT) where the goal is to update an existing article given new evidence. We release the FRUIT-WIKI dataset, a collection of over 170K distantly supervised data produced from pairs of Wikipedia snapshots, along with our data generation pipeline and a gold evaluation set of 914 instances whose edits are guaranteed to be supported by the evidence. We provide benchmark results for popular generation systems as well as EDIT5 -- a T5-based approach tailored to editing we introduce that establishes the state of the art. Our analysis shows that developing models that can update articles faithfully requires new capabilities for neural generation models, and opens doors to many new applications.

The debate over a robot's ability to have human-like feelings reignited over the weekend following a Washington Post report about a Google engineer who claimed that one of the company's chatbot programs was sentient. Blake Lemoine is a 7-year Google vet who works for its Responsible AI team. He engaged in chats with the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), which learns from language databases and is powered by machine learning. Lemoine tried to convince Google executives that the AI was sentient. After the Post story published, Lemoine posted conversations he had with LaMDA.