The Future

In April, Canadian-based fast-food chain Freshii came under intense scrutiny after the company pivoted to serving customers via ‘virtual cashiers’ based in other countries.

Instead of having a Canadian employee take customer orders, Freshii hired employees from Nicaragua, Bolivia and Pakistan to serve customers by screen, at starkly lower hourly wages to the tune of $3.75 US an hour. Of course, Ontario’s minimum wage is $15 an hour.

That horse has left the barn. If it can be automated or offshored it will be.

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into human beings. We can grow meat from cell cultures, and we can clone vertebrates.

DETROIT (AP) — Automakers reported nearly 400 crashes of vehicles with partially automated driver-assist systems, including 273 involving Teslas, according to statistics released by U.S. safety regulators on Wednesday.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cautioned against using the numbers to compare automakers, saying it didn’t weight them by the number of vehicles from each manufacturer that use the systems, or how many miles those vehicles traveled.

In 1956, AI pioneer Herbert Simon wrote: ‘Over the Christmas holiday, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine.’ Time has not quite vindicated his claim; few would think that the logical theorem-prover he built in a few hundred lines of code displays ‘thinking’ in any human sense of the term. But it does raise the question: why would someone as clearly brilliant as Simon believe something so patently fanciful?

The New York Times’ documentary, premiering May 20 on FX, puts the world’s richest man’s stylish electric vehicles under the microscope—with occasionally deadly results.

Teslas are stylish, cutting-edge, and immensely popular electric vehicles. With their sleek exteriors, luxurious interiors and dashboards dominated by a single enormous touchscreen, they’re preeminent 21st-century status symbols. While their wow factor is undeniable, however, their safety and reliability record is more debatable, as evidenced by the fact that just last week, Tesla recalled upwards of 130,000 cars because of a not-insignificant new glitch: the onboard infotainment system had a habit of overheating to a dangerous degree, thereby shutting down a variety of basic functions necessary for operation. While a software update was all that was required to fix the glitch, it was merely the latest technological headache for the company, which—depending on which reports you believe—has to date issued recalls on a quarter to half of all its sold cars.

Hmmm…

A Japanese billionaire who purchased a robotics startup that makes petlike companions predicts the machines may be the key in filling the void in human hearts.

Yusaku Maezawa, a 46-year-old who started Japan’s largest online fashion, announced last month that his investment fund bought Groove X, the creator of LOVOT companions, according to CNN Business, which said the terms of the deal are not publicly known.

As human life migrates to a new technological domain, powerful states race to write its rules.

In his book The Imperative of Responsibility, the philosopher Hans Jonas—who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Martin Heidegger but later repudiated his mentor—describes the profound transformation that modern technology has brought about in man’s relationship with nature. The Greeks, he says, were quite capable of praising humanity’s powers to transform the natural environment, but those powers remained within sharp limits. Our inroads into nature were essentially superficial. There was harmony in the end because human activity left the encompassing nature fundamentally unchanged. At most, it scratched the surface.

The service bot will revolutionize warehouses, hospitals, farms, and maybe your home

There are now some 120,000 warehouses globally, and another 50,000 are likely to be added before 2025. Over the next few years, more robots will be deployed into these warehouses—the logistics market—than in all other application categories combined, including farming, medicine, and home use. Just as the 1960s saw the mechanization of industry, with an accompanying boom in productivity and prosperity, the 2020s will be the dawn of the robotification of services.

The same technology that Russia uses to keep its people in line has come to America

In an effort to lower crime rates, American law enforcement is pushing to combine facial recognition with expanded video surveillance. Politicians worried about their re-election chances due to a perceived crime wave see the expansion as necessary. It’s a sharp swing from 2019 and 2020, when cities like San Francisco and New Orleans were banning or at least enacting limits on facial recognition technology due to privacy concerns.

Now, New Orleans plans to roll back its facial recognition prohibition. The Virginia state senate gave law enforcement a late Valentine’s Day gift by passing a facial recognition expansion bill on February 15 — the Democrats who unanimously approved a ban on facial recognition last year suddenly changed their minds, as did five Republicans. New York City wants to expand its facial recognition program to fight gun violence.