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Posts Tagged ‘robots’

Stop saying “robots are coming for your job”; start saying “Your boss wants to replace you with a robot”

Tech reporter and sf writer Brian Merchant (previously) calls our attention to the peculiar construction of the problem statement in articles about automation and obsolescence, in which "robots are coming to steal your job."

The thing is robots don't (yet) autonomously arrange to show up at your workplace, uninvited, and take your job. Instead, your ...

Pogoing robot looks like it’s having fun bouncing through an obstacle course

Salto is a single-legged, hopping robot that its UC Berkeley inventors compare to a "hyper-aggressive pogo-stick." Previously, Salto was constrained to a highly-structured indoor environment with a motion caption system. Now though, roboticists Justin Yim and Eric **** have imbued Salto with the onboard smarts to bounce freely through the world albeit still under human ...

Why is Facebook doing robotics research?

It's a bit strange to hear that the world's leading social network is pursuing research in robotics rather than, say, making search useful, but Facebook is a big organization with many competing priorities. And while these robots aren't directly going to affect your Facebook experience, what the company learns from them could be impactful in ...

Watch a robot solve a Rubik’s cube in less than half a second

We previously posted about a robot that solved a Rubik's Cube in .637 seconds. Somehow I missed this astounding clip of an MIT robot killing that previous world record by spinning a solution in .38 seconds. I would think that at those speeds, the specific starting state of the scrambled cube can have a ...