I was struck by her pessimism, which she told me was shared by friends from California to Georgia to New Hampshire. In an already fragile world, one increasingly beset by climate change and the breakdown of the international order, AI looms in the background, threatening young people's ability to secure a prosperous future. Just a few days before our drive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was telling the US Federal Reserve's board of governors that AI agents will leave entire job categories "just like totally, totally gone." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios he believes AI will wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company will eliminate jobs in favor of AI agents in the coming years. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff they had to prove that new roles couldn't be done by AI before making a hire.

Why did natural processes on Earth lead to the creation of biological entities with natural intelligence, rather than computer systems with artificial intelligence (AI)? Even though silicon is the eighth most abundant element in the Solar system, waiting for a silicon chip to be made by a random sequence of chemical or geological processes would be equivalent to expecting a cat who happens to be walking on a keyboard to type a literary masterpiece. There is no conceivable random path that would lead to self-replicating computers out of the soup of chemicals on the early Earth. However, as I reviewed in an extensive textbook titled Life in the Cosmos, published in 2021 with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam, there is a reasonable path to explaining biology from the same initial conditions. Starting from the building blocks of silicon chips, computer designers and programmers accomplish complex abstract tasks.

Once again the global robotics community rallied to provide a unique opportunity for amateurs and hobbyists to share their robotics projects alongside academics and industry professionals. Below are the recorded sessions of this year. Thanks sincerely on behalf of the RRS22 committee to every applicant, participant, and audience member who took to time to share their passion for robotics. We wish you all the best in your robotics endeavors. As a volunteer run endeavour in it's second year, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Air, land, and sea-launch-able, the fully autonomous, AI-controlled missile known as the Ice Breaker has finally been revealed. A fifth-generation, self-guided missile designed to attack at long distances and travel extremely close to the ground while resisting electronic jamming and other countermeasures, the stealthy Ice Breaker is set for a field demonstration at the Farnborough International Airshow, July 18-22. In science fiction, high-tech missiles can hug the earth's surface, avoid natural obstacles and enemy ordinance alike, survive electronic jamming efforts, and then use complex machine learning to locate, attack, and destroy their intended target with robotic efficiency. In the real world, and even as hypersonic weapons are beginning to enter the modern theater of war, such theoretical, ultra-smart missiles have yet to come to fruition. More recently, rumors of an air-launched, long-range, self-guided and AI-controlled missile surfaced when Israeli manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems premiered the Ice Breaker's predecessor naval weapon, the Sea Breaker sea-launched missile in 2021.