A Dover company is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help trucking companies ship goods from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. Envio 360, with offices in the former mill building at 383 Central Ave. in downtown Dover, offers the trucking industry a platform with AI to manage and optimize the movement of shipping containers. The company draws data from a trucking company's transportation management system (TMS) to create the algorithms in its optimization software. "Here's where the artificial intelligence comes in," said Larry Cuddy Jr., chief commercial officer for Envio 360. "We're not just one and done, because in the course of the day everything happens: Trucks break down, guys call in sick, you got traffic jams on (Interstate) 93, the port closed early, whatever it may be. We continuously optimize to create the best plan every second. According to industry data, 70 percent of all freight moved in the United States is done by trucks, about $700 billion worth of food, medical supplies, fuel and other goods annually. Cuddy describes the company's software as "agnostic." "We can connect into any network, the Internet of Things (IOT), and internet supply chains," he said. "The platform we built is not the system of record.

Popular culture has long used our relationships with machines to grapple with such themes as how one defines life, self-awareness, and, ultimately, what makes up a soul. Perhaps the best reference point for these kinds of philosophical questions comes from Philip K. Dick, whose seminal science fiction work Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? serves largely as the basis for the cult-classic film Blade Runner. Published in 1968, Dick's book offers a simple thesis: the difference between humans and androids is the ability to express love and compassion. Put another way, our differences come down to an ability to genuinely express empathy. The application of empathy is a fundamental driver of customer experience (CX) strategy.

A leading biologist at Harvard, Pardis Sabeti, has called out the replication movement in psychology, calling it a "cautionary tale" of how efforts to reform research may "end up destroying new ideas before they are fully explored." Her argument, in short, is that the "vicious" debate over statistical errors in that field has only stymied further progress. There's "a better way forward," Sabeti says, "through evolution, not revolution." For comparison, she describes what happened in her own field of human genomics: A rash of false-positive results gave way about 10 years ago, without much fuss or incivility, to a new and better way of doing science. "We emerged more engaged, productive, successful, and united," she says.