Amazon is reportedly developing'humanoid' robots to pop out of delivery vans to deliver packages, eventually replacing the work of delivery drivers. Amazon is reportedly developing'humanoid' robots to pop out of delivery vans to deliver packages, eventually replacing the work of delivery drivers. O ne of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don't need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon's hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.

The Bridge: As your kids learn and grow in the world of technology, they aren't the only ones doing so. Meet LaMDA -- the supposedly sentient AI who is shaking the foundations of technology as we know it. Take a deep breath, because it's about to get really weird. We mentioned LaMDA (Google's "Language Model for Dialogue Applications") in last week's issue on the AI art bot, but only briefly. LaMDA is an AI program developed by Google that no one had heard of until a couple weeks ago, when one of the engineers on the project went public with the information that the AI was sentient, and had the cognitive functions of a 7–8 year old child.

There's a certain oversized quality to a Las Vegas conference center that makes you feel like a child monarch: simultaneously powerful and helpless. Presumably, the rooms and corridors are cavernous because space is cheap in the desert, but the overall effect somehow manages to be stifling. It feels suspiciously big, as if you're never meant to leave. The trappings of a conference do nothing to dispel this feeling: everything is arranged -- your room, your food, your schedule -- and hey, look! They even have robots handing out snacks!

Nine tenths of us pathetic meatbags are just itching for a benevolent AI to take charge of our affairs and make all the big decisions. This according to enterprise software giant Oracle, who for some reason funded a study polling 1,320 "HR leaders and employees" as to whether they would want to be taking orders from a robot. The answer, according to Hurd-n-Katz, is a resounding "yes": 93 percent of those polled said they would trust orders from a robot. "While people are ready to embrace Artificial Intelligence at work, and understand that the benefits go far beyond automating manual processes, organizations are not doing enough to help their employees embrace AI and that will result in reduced productivity, skillset obsolescence and job loss," Oracle said on Thursday in its summary of the survey. In addition to being really eager to be made redundant by machines, the survey claims employees can't say enough about the benefits of automation: 79 per cent of the HR leaders polled think that failure to adopt AI will have negative consequences on their own careers.

When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. "Either I'll be working at General Motors or I'll be working at Steelcase by the end of the year," he vowed in 1984.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is inspiring great optimism for its potential to improve the lives and jobs of its users. But it also inspires great concern for its potential to disrupt industries and automate people out of their jobs. The legal industry is no exception. Tasks once thought to require human intelligence are increasingly being performed, or at least greatly assisted, by computers. The term "artificial intelligence" makes for great marketing copy, evoking images of robots either doing the hard work of law practice while attorneys sit back and collect fees, or -- more likely -- putting the lawyers out of business.

On this last day of the quarter, the stock market is so tickled with its Q1 spoils that it's about to give a bit back. That is how it usually goes when the S&P 500 is up nicely for a three-month stretch, note Bespoke Investment Group's number crunchers. They checked out how the last trading day has gone when the S&P is up at least 5% for a quarter. That final session is typically a bust, with the index retreating 0.4% on average, according to Bespoke's look at the last eight years. But who knows exactly how the S&P will close today?

This year's International Consumer Electronics Show, which wrapped up Sunday in Las Vegas, was an orgy of smarts -- "smart" Internet-connected appliances, smart television sets, smart lawn mowers, smart … everything. The industry's vision of a world of interconnected, programmable devices has become a reality, thanks in part to the ubiquity of broadband Internet connections and the availability of inexpensive chips, sensors and batteries. And the devices do more than just talk to each other. They collect information about the world around them, they learn, they adapt. Robot vacuum cleaners that learn your house's floor plan.

Hal, the Terminator and Matrix movies, Ex-Machina, and I, Robot all trade on the beloved sci-fi meme of robotized AI and the public's collective psyche when it all goes wrong: fascination and fear. After all, if machines become faster, stronger, and brighter than humanity, why wouldn't they turn on their soft, meaty, and dim creators for either enslavement or a full-on purge? Let's face it – machines are getting smarter. AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol at Go came 10 years earlier than predicted, before in fact humanity had worked out the exact number of possible legal Go positions (a number the size of 10170 was completed on January 20, 2016, if you're interested). In 2014, a chatbot glorying in the name of Eugene Goodstead passed the Turing Test by fooling 33 percent of judges into believing it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.

There are a lot of major problems today with tangible, real-world consequences. A short list might include terrorism, U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and biodiversity loss, income inequality, health care, childhood poverty, and the homegrown threat of authoritarian populism, most notably associated with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump. Yet if you've been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you've almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or "AGI." For example, Stephen Hawking has repeatedly expressed that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," and Elon Musk -- of Tesla and SpaceX fame -- has described the creation of superintelligence as "summoning the demon." Furthermore, the Oxford philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, published a New York Times best-selling book in 2014 called Superintelligence, in which he suggests that the "default outcome" of building a superintelligent machine will be "doom." Should we really be worried about a takeover by killer computers hell-bent on the total destruction of Homo sapiens?