Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies Covid exposed the lack of data on the country's 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.03 EDT Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. Are you going outside for work? He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond.

Pope Francis, on a visit to Singapore, has warned of the negative effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on society and called for "fair" wages for migrant workers. The comments by the head of the Catholic Church came on Thursday as the high-tech city-state became his final stop on a 12-day Asia Pacific tour. Technology developments risk isolating individuals and putting them into a false reality, Francis said, adding that AI should be used to bring people closer together and to promote understanding and solidarity within society. He also cautioned that AI should not make people forget about what is important: human relationships. This is not the first time the 87-year-old pontiff has weighed in on AI.

JERUSALEM – For Mitchai Sarabon, a Thai fieldhand working on Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel, Oct. 7 started like any other Saturday. His one day off a week, the 32-year-old said, he woke early and began doing his laundry. His friends – a mix of Thai migrant workers and Nepalese agricultural students – were also milling about the compound where they lived on the edge of the kibbutz, taking care of various personal tasks, when suddenly they heard gunshots. "Suddenly, I saw one of the Nepalese guys being shot, others ran to hide in a bomb shelter and then the terrorists arrived," Sarabon recounted to Fox News Digital in a video interview from his home in Udon Thani, Thailand, on Friday. "They threw a grenade inside, some of the people died instantly and others ran away, they were shot dead too."

FIFA, the international governing body of association football,* has announced it will use AI-powered cameras to help referees make offside calls at the 2022 World Cup. The semi-automated system consists of a sensor in the ball that relays its position on the field 500 times a second, and 12 tracking cameras mounted underneath the roof of stadiums, which use machine learning to track 29 points in players' bodies. Software will combine this data to generate automated alerts when players commit offside offenses (that is: when they're nearer to the other team's goal than their second-last opponent and receiving the ball). Alerts will be sent to officials in a nearby control room, who will validate the decision and tell referees on the field what call to make. FIFA claims this process will happen "within a few seconds and means that offside decisions can be made faster and more accurately."

Barely a week of the COVID crisis goes by without a government or major health organization launching a chatbot to help in the information and business recovery effort. For the immediate future, bots will play a key role in public health awareness, and at the personal level in health checks and as mental health companions, with health bots estimated to be worth $700 million by 2025. Chatbots got a big lift in IT and business circles during the early weeks of the COVID crisis. They helped provide a worrying public with honest information and answering their questions at volumes that no call centre could manage, launching in days not weeks, and proving that most bots can happily work without AI bells and whistles to deliver key benefits. Now we are, hopefully, past the peak of the virus, the need for bots is maintaining a solid pace.

The vegetables you eat with your Sunday roast may soon be picked by a robot. Farmers in Cornwall are testing a machine invented using European funding that picks cauliflowers from the field without bruising them. It works in a similar way to the human hand by squeezing each cauliflower before deciding whether it is ready to be harvested. The GummiArm robot is believed to be a answer to any migrant staff shortages that may arise when the UK leaves the EU. A cauliflower picking robot has been developed which can tell when the vegetable is ready for harvest and pull it out of the ground without damaging it.

"It is because of them that my little boy smiles again," a mum's heartfelt thanks to the owners of a dog with skin condition vitiligo, and the Singaporean creator of a selective dating app comes to its defence. Two young kids with a long-term skin condition are making headlines after meeting a dog sharing the same rare autoimmune disease. Eight-year old Carter, from Arkansas, developed vitiligo in 2014, a condition characterised by areas of the skin losing their pigmentation. Ava, who is 10 and from Canada, also has vitiligo which she developed when she was four. But Carter and Ava have more than just that in common.

Octopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables. And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Robotic milking machines, in which cows queue up to milk themselves, are now mainstream, while systems tat automatically feed or track the health of livestock are on the rise.

He Zhigang's eyes pleaded with the elevator dial as he stood waiting on the ground floor. The red numbers wouldn't budge. He glanced at his phone. He pushed back his helmet, lifted the delivery bag of steamed buns and prepared to run up 20 flights of stairs. The hungry office worker probably won't remember who brought him lunch on a Friday afternoon, or that it was 11 minutes and 20 seconds before the allotted time.

Details of the fallout from the Brexit vote may take months to become clear, but there are concerns the UK pulling out of the European Union could lead to the loss of many low skilled migrant workers. But this apparent loss could be technology's gain, according to the findings from one think-tank. According to a new report from the Resolution Foundation, shortfalls in the human workforce could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. A new report from a think-tank says shortfalls in the workforce post-Brexit could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. According to findings from the Resolution Foundation, low-skilled jobs in agriculture and the food industry currently carried out by large numbers of EU workers could be automated.