Amazon said it has made a "fundamental leap forward in robotics" after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses. Vulcan – which launches at the US firm's "Delivering the Future" event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer's extensive operation. Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of robotics, described Vulcan as a "fundamental leap forward in robotics. It's not just seeing the world, it's feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now." The robots will be able to identify objects by touch using AI to work out what they can and can't handle and figuring out how best to pick them up.

When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I'll call Ted. He was so sick with pneumonia that he was struggling to breathe. His primary-care physician had prescribed one antibiotic after another, but his symptoms had only worsened; by the time I saw him in the hospital, he had a high fever and was coughing up blood. His lungs seemed to be infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium so hardy that few drugs can kill it. I placed an oxygen tube in his nostrils, and one of my colleagues inserted an I.V. into his arm. We decided to give him vancomycin, a last line of defense against otherwise untreatable infections.

Humanoid robots which can pick up packages with robotic arms are working alongside human workers in an Amazon warehouse in the U.S., the retail giant has announced. The humanoid robot called Digit is under test in a warehouse in Texas, and has arms and legs and can grasp and handle packages like a human worker. Amazon now has 750,000 robots working in facilities around the world, but the move to humanoid robots is new - sparking fears for the future of human workers at the company. The company has denied that it intends to move to'robot only' warehouses. The bipedal robot is currently being used to shift empty tote boxes in the warehouse: it is five foot nine inches tall, weighing 140lb - and can pick up and carry objects weighing up to 35lb.

Amazon is experimenting with a humanoid robot as the technology company increasingly seeks to automate its warehouses. It has started testing Digit, a two-legged robot that can grasp and lift items, at facilities this week. The device is first being used to shift empty tote boxes. The company's ambitious drive to integrate robotics across its sprawling operation has sparked fears about the effect on its workforce of almost 1.5 million humans. Tye Brady, the chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, claimed that – although it will render some jobs redundant – the deployment of robots would create new ones.

Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI's new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years--an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public. Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions. And, for the first time, such predictions didn't seem abstract. When an A.I. bot like ChatGPT can write a coherent story or essay in seconds, and visual applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, produce similarly comprehensible images you have to wonder if human creativity--slow and often uncertain--might be superfluous.

For decades, one of the hardest problems for robot developers to crack has been something seemingly mundane: how to replicate the human hand's ability to pick up stuff. The tech giant last month unveiled a collection of new robots, one of which is suited to replacing humans in the most common job at Amazon – picking up items and placing them elsewhere. The linchpin of this new kind of automation is a robot arm – appropriately named Sparrow after the tenacious, pervasive bird – that combines advanced artificial intelligence, a variety of grippers, and the speed and precision that is now standard in off-the-shelf industrial robotic arms. The announcement was easy to miss, coming as it did amid a run of news that, in part, illustrated some of the challenges Amazon is trying to tackle with its automation effort. The company began layoffs of corporate employees in mid-November, part of a sweeping cost-cutting effort to deal with the aftereffects of its rapid expansion during the pandemic. The company's workforce more than doubled during that period, to exceed 1.6 million as of early this year.

Trapped in a metal cage in a corner of a 350,000 sq ft Amazon warehouse outside Boston last week a lonely yellow robot arm sorted through packages, preparing items to be shipped out to customers who demand ever-faster delivery. Soon it will be joined by others in a development that could mean the end of thousands of jobs and, Amazon argues, the creation of thousands of others. As the robot worked, a screen displayed its progress. It carefully packed a tub of protein powder, next came a box of napkin rings then … a tube of hemorrhoid cream. As 100 journalists from around the world snapped pictures, someone switched the screen to hide the cream.

Amazon built an ecommerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliably--but a new robot called Sparrow could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines. Sparrow is designed to pick out items piled in shelves or bins so they can be packed into orders for shipping to customers. That's one of the most difficult tasks in warehouse robotics because there are so many different objects, each with different shapes, textures, and malleability, that can be piled up haphazardly. Sparrow takes on that challenge by using machine learning and cameras to identify objects piled in a bin and plan how to grab one using a custom gripper with several suction tubes.

Texas A&M University has joined a new nationwide program that aims to boost college-level curricula about responsible artificial intelligence. The university was selected as a participant in February through an application process headed by the College of Liberal Arts, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Department of Philosophy. Maria Escobar-Lemmon, associate dean for research and graduate education in the College of Liberal Arts, highlighted two objectives of the program. The first is to bring different points of view into the topic of artificial intelligence. "This program is being offered by the National Humanities Center, and it's an alliance between the National Humanities Center and Google that is intended to broaden the range of voices to include humanistic scholars so that we have people with different backgrounds, training and disciplinary perspectives engaging on the issue," Escobar-Lemmon said.

Amazon and MIT today announced the establishment of the Science Hub, a collaboration that will focus on areas of mutual interest, beginning with artificial intelligence and robotics in the first year. To get the hub started, Amazon will provide gift and sponsored research funding over the next five years to support research and academic fellowships on campus. The primary goals of the hub are to ensure the benefits of AI and robotics innovations are shared broadly -- both through education and by advancing research -- and to broaden participation in the research from diverse, interdisciplinary scholars, and other innovators. "AI and robotics have an enormous impact on every aspect of our lives, fundamentally changing how we work, learn, access resources and services, and connect to one another -- so it's critical we conduct research that advances the field in ways that are responsible, effective, and beneficial to society," said Aude Oliva, a senior research scientist and director of strategic industry engagement in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. "We take an expansive view of AI and robotics to include expertise from across all five of the Institute's schools. We're excited by the potential of collaborations with industry leaders who bring their insights to the research, want to support the next generation of talent, and are best positioned to implement what is learned."