Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing "Money," one of the novels that defined the nineteen-eighties, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary icon. "I have spent weeks in a PacMan-fed stupor, unwilling and unable to think about anything else," he wrote in "Invasion of the Space Invaders," his "addict's guide" to the nascent arcade. Amis was not alone in his obsession. The Japanese-made game, in which players guide an auto-munching yellow head through a Daedalian maze, consuming a trail of pellets while fleeing four candy-tone ghosts, earned more than a billion dollars in quarters in its first year, surpassing the highest-grossing "Star Wars" film at the time. Pac-Man towered, Amis wrote, over "a vast garbage dump of rocky romances and wrecked careers."

Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that's what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service. Bixby is being loaded on the Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones, which were announced on Tuesday. Bixby is an agent that can help the smartphones talk, recommend, and remind, said Mok Oh, vice president of service strategy at Samsung. The AI service is being positioned as a more intuitive way to use and interact with smartphones.

People have been losing jobs to robots since the 1990's, a new report has revealed. When one or more robots was introduced into the workforce between 1990 and 2007, it led to the elimination of an average of six jobs. During those years, robots accounted for the loss of about 670,000 manufacturing jobs, and this is expected to rise in the coming years as robots continue to take over tasks previously performed by people. The effects of automation on employment for men are about 1.5-2 times large than those for women The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimated that one more robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 0.25-0.5 per cent. Between 1993 and 2007, the authors of the report wrote that'the stock of robots in the United States and Western Europe increased fourfold'.

NASA may have equipped its Mars Curiosity rover with an impressive array of scientific instruments, but the robot attaché's size and $2.5-billion price tag give its operators ample reason to steer clear of terrain that could jeopardize its mission. Which is a shame, because much of Mars' craggy, cave-ridden, boulder-strewn landscape is so treacherous (planetary geologists literally call it chaos terrain), that big, expensive robots like Curiosity can't risk accessing it. That's why NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built Puffer. Short for Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, Puffer is the agency's latest origami-inspired device. JPL has experimented previously with collapsible solar panels based on the Japanese art of folding paper.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable?

Politicians like President Donald Trump often demonize trade deals and undocumented immigrants for their suspected downward pressure on labor and job supply, but a study published Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicated that the economic threat of artificial intelligence may be far more serious. With the introduction of one robot per 1,000 workers, the percent of the population employed could drop by between 0.18 and 0.34 percentage points, while wages could fall by between a quarter and a half of a percentage point, according to the study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. That may not sound like much, but, for perspective, Amazon.com The fast food restaurant Wendy's announced plans in February to install ordering kiosks at 1,000 of its stores by the end of 2017. Even stock market traders aren't immune, as investment management firm BlackRock Inc. has recently begun to shift its trade decision-making toward algorithmic and robotic stock pickers.

TODAY, IN 2017, the president's top economic advisor said he had no worries about robots putting people out of work. "In terms of artificial intelligence taking over the jobs, I think we're so far away from that that it's not even on my radar screen," Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told an audience in Washington. "I think it's 50 or 100 more years." Mnuchin has made similarly confounding statements about AI before. "Not even on my radar screen," he said breezily during an Axios interview: Mnuchin's blasé dismissal of AI's potential impact on jobs shouldn't surprise readers because, as the Washington Post reported (August 5, 2016) in an article scarily entitled "Trump's Economic Team Has Six Men Named Steve But No Women," Trump's team of economic advisors, initially comprised of 13 men, seemed woefully imbalanced in many respects.

Donald Trump has another political foe to worry about, with his latest adversary coming in the form of an insubordinate robot.

The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century. Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by Leibniz's dream of a universal "concept language," and the ancient logical system of Aristotle. Dixon goes on to describe the creation of Boolean logic (which has only two variables: TRUE and FALSE, represented as 1 and 0 respectively), and the insight by Claude E. Shannon that those two variables could be represented by a circuit, which itself has only two states: open and closed.1 Dixon writes: Another way to characterize Shannon's achievement is that he was first to distinguish between the logical and the physical layer of computers. Dixon is being modest: the distinction may be obvious to computer scientists, but it is precisely the clear articulation of said distinction that undergirds Dixon's remarkable essay; obviously "computers" as popularly conceptualized were not invented by Aristotle, but he created the means by which they would work (or, more accurately, set humanity down that path).

As our population ages, these caregiver robots will also be useful for the old as well as the young. This is not a rhetorical question. So-called robot nannies are already a hit in Japan and China, and are now beginning to appear stateside. The numbers show why this is an attractive proposition. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 4 million babies are born annually in the United States. What's more, 62% percent of women who gave birth within the last year work outside of the home, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.