A few weeks ago, I got into an intense discussion with a good friend, who's a surgeon. He does important work, literally saving lives for a living. But I said his days in the operating room might just be numbered: the robots are coming. Already, driverless trucks are making their way across Europe, and "virtual employees" are starting to replace call center jobs. By some counts, surgery is not far off on the machine-learning hit list.

UPS said its drone successfully delivered an inhaler from Beverly, Massachusetts, to a summer camp a few miles away. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. UPS said its drone successfully delivered an inhaler from Beverly, Massachusetts, to a summer camp a few miles away.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your 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. Frankly, I'm not sure why this is only now a thing: Be right back: need to resurrect my lost childhood. This video documents our field experiments at White Sands National Monument [in New Mexico] with the RHex robot, in March 2016. It demonstrates the great potential for RHex to assist aeolian scientists in desert research.

Chatbots have taken the world by storm with their efficient conversation, ubiquitous nature, interactive and predictive approach. But can they replace human interaction and customer service? Well, right now they can assist customer service and e-commerce operations. A bot is ideal for businesses who want to delegate monotonous tasks and expand customer service. As chatbots are available 24X7, they can answer burning questions of customers immediately.

Machine learning may be neck and neck with "big data" in the race to being Hollywood's favorite catch-all term for technology as magic. Like big data, such outsider interest is driven by real successes of the approach. "We didn't know how to get a car to drive itself 10 years ago. Now we are very close," says Thibaut Lamadon, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Netflix recommendations, AI assistants in our homes, and even our image searches for cat pictures have been invisibly improved by machine learning, a branch of computer science focused on giving computers the ability to recognize patterns and to learn and adapt to given contexts without being explicitly programmed for them.

We now live in an age where machines can teach themselves without human intervention. This perpetual self-education can produce insights that are helpful in making proper and productive decisions for us across a variety of fields, from medicine to interstellar space travel. Let's take a look at what Machine Learning is, how it works, and how it will change the world we live in. Machine learning (ML) deals with systems and algorithms that can learn from various data and make predictions. An example is predicting traffic patterns at a busy intersection--a program can run a machine learning algorithm containing data about past traffic patterns and, having "learned" previous data, it can devise better predictions of future traffic patterns.

Don't get me wrong, I'm practically optimistic about artificial intelligence (AI). This past summer, I subscribed to TechCrunch's bot on Facebook Messenger. And while I wouldn't call my interactions a relationship, they're getting closer to serving me the stories I want. Or maybe they're a lot smarter than I think: the last note I received featured two posts on AI. I recently upgraded to iOS 10 and doesn't it seem like Siri's improved?

Internet experts and highly engaged netizens participated in answering an eight-question survey fielded by Elon University and the Pew Internet Project from late November 2013 through early January 2014. Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from that. Among the key themes emerging from 1,896 respondents' answers were: - Advances in technology may displace certain types of work, but historically they have been a net creator of jobs. This page holds the content of the survey report, which is an organized look at respondents elaborations derived from 250 single-spaced pages of responses from ...

The first-ever pop song written by artificial intelligence was unveiled earlier this week by Sony CSL Research Laboratory. The song, which is called'Daddy's Car', was composed by an AI system called Flow Machines. The Flow Machines software got its music knowledge from a huge database of sheet music with songs in varying styles and wrote that track after being given a style prompt from a human composer. The melody and harmony was composed by AI and then a human musician, French composer Benoît Carré, produced, mixed and wrote lyrics for the track. 'Daddy's Car', which you can hear below, is expected to be on an album of songs entirely composed by AI due out in 2017.

Travers Smith has joined the growing number of law firms looking at artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve their working processes. The firm has begun trialling the use of due diligence technology developed by software company RAVN Systems in its corporate department. RAVN offers a wide variety of services with its AI engine, including e-discovery, data search tools and contract governance process automation. A number of other law firms have signed up to work with the company recently. In May, Linklaters became the first magic circle firm to sign up to an AI provider when it agreed a deal to use RAVN as its provider for a number of automated tasks.