Category Archives: robots

Pokémon Sleep, which you play by sleeping, is out this year

The Pokémon Company has finally revealed some details on its most anticipated product: Pokémon Sleep. The mobile app was first announced in 2019, and today, during a livestream, the company revealed a pair of trailers that show off the actual experience.

Essentially, the game is a sleep tracker, where you interact with the pokémon in the app by, well, sleeping. Depending how you snooze — sleep is divided into three types: dozing, snoozing, and slumbering — you’ll attract different kinds of creatures.

https://www.theverge.com/23616586/pokemon-sleep-trailer-release-mobile-game

Robots Won’t Save Japan addresses the Japanese government’s efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.

This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501768040/robots-wont-save-japan/#bookTabs=1

Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care

The reality, of course, is more complex, and the popularity of robots among Japanese people relies in large part on decades of relentless promotion by state, media, and industry. Accepting the idea of robots is one thing; being willing to interact with them in real life is quite another. What’s more, their real-life abilities trail far behind the expectations shaped by their hyped-up image. It’s something of an inconvenient truth for the robot enthusiasts that despite the publicity, government support, and subsidies—and the real technological achievements of engineers and programmers—robots don’t really feature in any major aspect of most people’s daily lives in Japan, including elder care. 

https://www-technologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/amp/

Our future could be full of undying, self-repairing robots. 

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT and StableDiffusion being the talk of the town right now, it might feel like we’ve taken a giant leap closer to a sci-fi reality where AIs are physical entities all around us.

Indeed, computer-based AI appears to be advancing at an unprecedented rate. But the rate of advancement in robotics – which we could think of as the potential physical embodiment of AI – is slow.

Could it be that future AI systems will need robotic “bodies” to interact with the world? If so, will nightmarish ideas like the self-repairing, shape-shifting T-1000 robot from the Terminator 2 movie come to fruition? And could a robot be created that could “live” forever?

https://theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/theconversation.com/amp/our-future-could-be-full-of-undying-self-repairing-robots-heres-how-196664

How do we stop the robot takeover? As AI gets smarter, meet the academics on a mission to save humanity from the matrix

The dawning of AI’s golden age poses all manner of tricky questions. If we allow machine intelligence to do our jobs and clean our houses, pick our music and television, generate our art and essays, judge our legal cases and diagnose our illnesses, what will be left for us to do? What’s so special about being human in the age of advanced artificial intelligence? What’s so special about being human at all?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-do-we-stop-the-robot-takeover-oxford-dons-have-a-plan-c39dzkkfw?shareToken=f96f5f0df5a961ea2486ac2d4e2e290d

Digital Twins Are Set For Rapid Adoption In 2023

The idea of digital twins — digital representations of physical systems, products or processes that serve as indistinguishable counterparts for purposes such as simulations, testing, monitoring and maintenance — has been around for some time. But indications are the concept’s time has come for wider adoption to support business applications.

https://frankdiana.net/2023/01/24/digital-twins-are-set-for-rapid-adoption-in-2023/

Related Report: Pre-emptive Culture Mapping: Exploring a System of Language to Better Understand the Abstract Traits of Human Interaction | presentation slides

Apple to Expand Smart-Home Lineup, Taking On Amazon and Google

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant has struggled in the home space and has ceded much of the market to its rivals. Its current devices remain limited in their functionality, with Apple’s Siri voice-control service lagging behind Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant. The new devices — along with upcoming changes to Siri — are aimed at turning around Apple’s fortunes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/apple-to-expand-smart-home-lineup-taking-on-amazon-and-google

An A.I. Pioneer on What We Should Really Fear

Whenever there’s a lot of patterns, a lot of data, A.I. is very good at processing that — certain things like the game of Go or chess. But humans have this tendency to believe that if A.I. can do something smart like translation or chess, then it must be really good at all the easy stuff too. The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa. You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. It’s crazy.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/26/magazine/yejin-choi-interview.html