Communications Communications is an integral part of any smart entity. Without communication an entity cannot be smart (it won’t be aware of its context, hence it would not be able to adapt to it). Better communications foster smarter behavior, it is an integral component of smart machines (and smarter humans/machines …
Read More »Meet Coffee Haus, a personalised coffee making robot
I have posted news of robots flipping hamburgers, of robo-waiters and now is time of robo-coffee. At first having a robot to serve coffee may seem an overshoot: we already have coffee vending machines in many places accepting coins (and more recently smartphone enabled payments) that in some way are …
Read More »Digital Transformation vs Jobs
A quick map of the correlations among Digital Transformation, Automation and Knowledge Society. My chicken scratch… I characterise the Digital Transformation as the shift from the Economy of Scarcity, based on atoms, to the Economy of Abundance, based on bits. This shift is crucial since out of that there are …
Read More »Robots may be more respectful of the elderly…
I recently run onto a study by the Brookings Institutions as I am preparing to give a talk on the future of work. The study focuses on the US but there are several similarities that would make it applicable to other parts of the world. One of the thing that …
Read More »Are collaborative robots fading away?
2018 has closed with the demise of Baxter (and Sayer) the first collaborative robots created back in 2012 by Rethinking Robotics. At the end of October 2018 the company announced it was closing down since they failed to be acquired by a bigger robotic company and were no longer able …
Read More »Digital Transformation vs jobs II
According to Gartner the combined deployment of automation and artificial intelligence in developed markets will start increasing jobs from 2020 on. This may not be the case in developing market where the insourcing of production by developed Countries, mostly Western European and US, will depress production and where skilled labour …
Read More »Digital Transformation in Health Care – I
The Digital Transformation –DT- is pervasive, I cannot imagine a single area not affected by it. However, if I would have to pick up one that will be completely disrupted by the DT and whose disruptions will affect the Society as a whole, the Individual and all what’s in between …
Read More »Learning like a child
Machine learning is making significant progress, soft agents are duplicating themselves to explore different strategies and learn in the process, researchers are finding new ways to tag reality (like movie clips) to let machine learning by capturing those tags. Children do not need any of that to learn. They experience …
Read More »From farm to factory
Just last month I reported on Vertical farming as an alternative agriculture. Now I saw a news on fully robotised agriculture, looking much more like a factory than a farm. Iron Ox, an appropriate name I would say, a California company based in San Carlo, is demonstrating a completely automated …
Read More »How are automation and AI going to affect the job market?
I was asked by Justine Spack, Content Administrator in IEEE Technical Activities, to share a few thoughts on how automation/AI may affect the job market. This is what I shared: Robots have become much more flexible, can learn, can operate in cluster – more recently in team (robots and humans) – …
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