Robots and AI could save a million NHS working days a year and free staff to focus on care, a blueprint for the Health Service says. Technological improvements could mean that frontline workers would no longer have to waste as much time on administrative tasks, Ministers say. The blueprint claims'robotic process automation' could handle back-office tasks up to ten times faster than humans, saving 30 per cent in costs and with fewer errors. It is one of the reforms in the NHS workforce plan, which the Government hopes will save taxpayers £10 billion. The 15-year scheme sets out radical measures to plug a deficit of up to 360,000 NHS staff by creating an army of junior and apprentice roles, and speeding up clinical training.

For five years or so, I have been running around as a pale imitation of Paul Revere, yelling, "The robots are coming! At schools, social settings, with family and friends, or even to complete strangers with whom I fell into conversations, I have uttered the same warning: "It's critical that you or your children identify a career -- now -- that won't be taken over by robots and artificial intelligence." My particular midnight ride started well before the pandemic reared its ugly head. But the pandemic may have planted a seed in the minds of certain CEOs that human beings are the weakest link on their chain to profit and prosperity. When the first "Terminator" movie was released -- eerily enough, in 1984 -- the world was introduced to Cyberdyne Systems and its "Skynet" artificial superintelligence system, which not only gained self-awareness but realized it could do everything infinitely faster and better than its human creators. Well, ever since that movie got people asking, "What if," the fictional theme -- and warnings about AI -- have been morphing into reality. The latest example of a technology poised to replace a human workforce is ChatGPT, the chatbot auto-generative system created by Open AI for online customer care. It is a pre-trained generative chat, which makes use of natural language processing, or NLP. The source of its data is textbooks, websites and various articles, which it uses to model its own language for responding to human interaction. It's certainly not a stretch to believe that any number of CEOs might think, "Interesting… A self-teaching artificial intelligence system that won't call in sick, doesn't need to be fed or to take bathroom breaks, does not require health care, but can and will work 24/7/365." Not shockingly, it has been reported that Microsoft, which is laying off 10,000 people, announced a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment" in this revolutionary technology, which apparently is growing smarter by the day. Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, warned in an interview with the New York Post: "AI is replacing the white-collar workers.

Ending global hunger has long been a critical goal for the global community. When the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals were released in 2014, ending hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition formed SDG2. Though there has been some progress in the fight against hunger – ongoing conflicts, climate change, economic downturns and the COVID-19 pandemic have been major barriers to achieving SDG2. As of 2020, according to the UN, 720 and 811 million people globally faced hunger, and current estimates suggest that 660 million people may still face hunger in 2030. Professor Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics engineer at the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics, will this week speak at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Global Conference on Sustainable Plant Production in Rome (2-4 November).

Historically, researchers in materials discovery have devised and tested options through some mix of hunches, informed speculation, and trial by error. But it's a difficult and time-consuming process simply given the vast array of possible substances and combinations, which can send researchers down numerous false paths. In the case of electrolyte ingredients, "you can mix and match them in billions of ways," says Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, a co-author of the Nature Communications paper, and a cofounder and chief scientist at Aionics. He collaborated with Jay Whitacre, director of the university's Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and the co-principal investigator on the project, along with other Carnegie researchers to explore how robotics and machine learning could help. The promise of a system like Clio and Dragonfly is that it can rapidly work through a wider array of possibilities than human researchers can, and apply what it learns in a systematic way.

Thanks to the recent efforts of such figures as Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and British Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the issue of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been back at the forefront of the public discussion on economic issues, along with the various arguments and justifications for introducing such a policy. While many of these justifications have become quite familiar over the years of waxing and waning interest in UBI, it is interesting to note the recent surge of interest in one particular argument, which sounds more like something from a science fiction novel than an economics textbook. This argument runs roughly as follows: In the not too distant future, rapidly advancing technology will allow robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform many of the jobs now being done by humans and to do so more cheaply and efficiently than humans ever could. This will result in robots/AI replacing humans in almost all jobs, making the vast majority of people permanently unemployed, and without Universal Basic Income, how will they (the people) be able to keep food on their tables? Of course, the idea that advances in labor-saving technology will lead to catastrophic unemployment and declining living standards is hardly new, arguably dating back to ancient Greece or earlier, and economists (not to mention the facts of history) have been refuting the idea for nearly as long as economics has existed as a self-conscious science.

A: Customers are more focused on their well-being. And they are focused on how we can provide exclusivity. Some of these trends will stay post-pandemic. We've launched our new wellness brand, Aspire, to accommodate wellness. And we accelerated our plans to offer wellness classes online.

A humanoid robot has quickened sight-restoring research by finding the best conditions to grow replacement retina layers from human stem cells. The AI system known as Maholo took just 185 days to complete experiments that would have taken humans two and a half years. In just a quarter of the time, Maholo processed trial-and-error research made up of 200 million possible conditions. The robot was created by a joint research group at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamic Research (BDR) in Kobe, Japan, to grow functional retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells from stem cells. The degeneration of the RPE, which is a supportive layer of cells that lies underneath our photoreceptors, is commonly seen in a progressive disease that is the main cause of blindness in the elderly.

Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron (previously Deep Science), aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers -- particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence -- and explain why they matter. This week in AI, researchers discovered a method that could allow adversaries to track the movements of remotely-controlled robots even when the robots' communications are encrypted end-to-end. The coauthors, who hail from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, said that their study shows adopting the best cybersecurity practices isn't enough to stop attacks on autonomous systems. Remote control, or teleoperation, promises to enable operators to guide one or several robots from afar in a range of environments.

More fast food chains than ever are testing robots and AI to cut costs. Advanced technology can be used to decrease the number of workers needed for food preparation and service. Robots are being used to take orders, prepare food, and even deliver it to customers. More fast food chains than ever are testing robots and AI to cut costs. Advanced technology can be used to decrease the number of workers needed for food preparation and service.

Four-fifths (80%) of small and medium-sized enterprises in Scotland expect to employ robots or other artificial intelligence (AI) by 2035, study findings show. Nearly half (49%) believe they will be reliant on renewable energy sources to power this advancement in technology. And three-quarters (75%) say improving eco-friendliness will help their profitability and make them more attractive to investors. When asked what roles robots would have, 36% of SMEs expect them to be used for tidying the workplace. Carrying out hazardous tasks (39%) and entertainment (46%) were also cited.