As someone who quite enjoys the Zen of tidying up, I was only too happy to grab a dustpan and brush and sweep up some beans spilled on a tabletop while visiting the Toyota Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts last year. The chore was more challenging than usual because I had to do it using a teleoperated pair of robotic arms with two-fingered pincers for hands. As I sat before the table, using a pair of controllers like bike handles with extra buttons and levers, I could feel the sensation of grabbing solid items, and also sense their heft as I lifted them, but it still took some getting used to. After several minutes tidying, I continued my tour of the lab and forgot about my brief stint as a teacher of robots. A few days later, Toyota sent me a video of the robot I'd operated sweeping up a similar mess on its own, using what it had learned from my demonstrations combined with a few more demos and several more hours of practice sweeping inside a simulated world.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Artificial intelligence will help close the gender gap by handling more domestic chores and thereby allowing women more time for work and leisure, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF's conclusion stems from new research showing that advancements in automation and AI will allow robots to take over a significant proportion of domestic chores over the next decade. Specifically, a panel of AI experts estimated that, based on a list of 17 common domestic tasks, an average of 39% of the time spent per task could be automated within 10 years. The findings were published in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed journal.

Having a never-ending list of household chores is something we could all do without. But relief is in sight, as experts say we could be spending 39 per cent less time on these tiresome tasks in 10 years. That's because many household chores will be automated, according to a study led by the University of Oxford. Grocery shopping is the task predicted to see the largest reduction in human input, with 59 per cent of the effort handed over to algorithms and robots. But when it comes to physical childcare, humans will still take on most of the responsibility, with tech predicted to take over just 20 per cent of jobs.

Is a human-shaped robot like Optimus, the Tesla Bot, the right path to travel if we want to achieve useful robots and automated help in all aspects of our working and personal lives? That's basically the promise of Optimus, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk says will usher in "a fundamental transformation for civilization as we know it." One thing is undeniable: there's an abiding appeal to human shaped and human sized robots, as Irena Cronin, CEO of Infinite Retina, recently told me. Part of the value of copying the human form: the world is built for humans. Cars, homes, machines, factories, warehouses ... all of our built environment is designed by and for human beings as inhabitants, operators, drivers, or workers. And Tesla's not the only one attempting to create humaniform robots.

The life satisfaction of both partners and the woman's percentage of housework turned out to be the most important predictors of union dissolution, when scholars affiliated to Bocconi's Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy used a machine learning (ML) technique to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. The couples were observed, on average, for 12 years, leading to a total of 18,613 observations. In their article, newly published online on Demography, Bruno Arpino (University of Florence), Marco Le Moglie (Catholic University, Milan) and Letizia Mencarini (Bocconi), used a ML technique called Random Survival Forests (RSF) to overcome the difficulty to manage a large number of independent variables in conventional models. "A clear-cut example of the potential difficulties of considering all variables and their possible interactions concerns the'big five' personality traits," Professor Mencarini said. "To account for both partners' traits (10 variables) and all their two-way interactions (25 variables), one would need to include 35 independent variables, which would be very problematic in a regression model."

A prime candidate for secular canonisation – and a personal hero of mine – is Frances Gabe. She was a visionary, a terrible neighbour (she antagonised hers with a succession of snarling great danes and a penchant for nude DIY) and the inventor of the self-cleaning home. Gabe, who died in 2016 at 101, transformed her Oregon bungalow into a "giant dishwasher", with a system of sprinklers, air dryers and drains, plus self-cleaning sinks, bath and toilet. "Housework is a thankless, unending job," Gabe said. I agree with Gabe – and with Lenin, who condemned housework as "barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery".

He's a certified drug and alcohol counselor who opened a sober living house at the peak of last winter's deadly COVID-19 surge and is on-site at least six days a week. She works for a production company, colonized their kitchen table for her two outsize computer monitors and has stayed largely locked up in their 600-square-foot Mar Vista apartment, where they now dine on TV trays. "When L.A. was, like, the worst place on Earth for COVID, I was going out and looking at three houses a day," scouting locations for Hyperion Sober Living, said co-owner Jack Shain. Shain's job means he's out in the world nearly every day, where it's impossible to tell the vaccinated from the sick. Cara Ferraro's allows her to stay home with the cats, her anxiety and the ever-present pile of dishes in the sink.

Who will be crowned the world's first trillionaire? Mark Cuban says there's one disruptive trend that'll bring a whole new meaning to the word "rich." You likely know Cuban as a star investor on ABC's Shark Tank. The billionaire also owns the Dallas Mavericks. "The world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI." Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most hyped up trend on the planet.

Who will be crowned the world's first trillionaire? Mark Cuban says there's one disruptive trend that'll bring a whole new meaning to the word "rich." You likely know Cuban as a star investor on ABC's Shark Tank. The billionaire also owns the Dallas Mavericks. "The world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI." Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most hyped up trend on the planet.

High-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has his sights set on building robots that can do housework, have conversations, and play games. In working on these different robotic abilities, Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said he hopes to advance the artificial intelligence algorithms that will be needed to create them. Musk is working on this project alongside Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Sam Altman, as part of OpenAI, an open-source A.I. research company. In a blog post Monday they wrote: "A significant fraction of our research bandwidth is being spent on fundamental research. We'll always be developing and testing new ideas... This is important--our current ideas will not be enough to achieve our long-term goal."