Innovation in artificial intelligence led to the evolution of smarter robots.

A robot is a machine that is programmed by a computer. It is capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically without human intervention. A robot can be directed by an external control device, or the control may be inserted within it. Robots are created to stimulate the human form. Most robots are task-performing machines, designed focusing on sharp functionality, rather than expressive aesthetics.

Since the covid-19 pandemic, the world has changed entirely. The entire globe has become dependent on technology so as to stay connected and get the work done more than ever before. Robots have evolved as a safer option as social distancing has become the norm. Robots have become an essential part of everyday life.

Robots are not a mechanical body which is unachievable, rather it is a computer-based artificial brain that is still well below the level of elegance needed to build a human-like robot.

Robots as Customer Service Mechanism

ING, the bank’s robotics team in Poland has launched a service called SAIO, which is an AI-powered solution that enables companies whether small or medium-sized to robotize their business. SAIO can be used to mechanize financial processes and also, it can be put into work in other areas of a company like HR, logistics where the administration is needed.

A Robot that Cleans

Since Covid-19 it has become more important to clean rooms and with social distance, one has to do the cleaning work by oneself. But some robots are being used to clean and disinfect homes and hospitals. To kill all types of viruses and bacteria, companies like UVD Robots, Xenex, Tru-D, Puro Lighting, and Surface are using ultraviolet-C light. In New York Puro’s UV lamps are being used to clean subway cars and buses. In India, Milagrow introduced three new robots, Milagrow iMap Max, Milagrow iMap 10.0, and Milagrow Seagull to clean homes with a touch of a button. These robotics mops not only clean the house but can clean themselves too. Further, some robots have arms that can pick up items, open drawers, move objects, and even open and close doors without any physical contact and also, sanitize the room with UV light and chemical hydrogen peroxide spray.

A Robot that Reads

This is something that is completely different. Already software bots have existed for many years which have the ability to automate repetitive, algorithm-based computer tasks by simply imitating the way humans work with applications. But now comes something smarter, a robot that can read. ING has been developing a smart robot which is an intelligent content service. Such robots have been trained to recognize information in a document like an invoice or payslip and this is done by using AI algorithms. This simplifies the work of the customers as well as the service provider. Also, it is not just a document it can read, rather photos, chats, and other content can be processed automatically in this way.

A robot that Can Cook

With digital transformation taking place rapidly, now there are technologies that are surprising. There are robots that cook. It can flip a burger, make a cup of coffee, etc. In India, Rebel Foods uses a fusion of software, robotics, and automation to prepare food. It uses robotics-led smart friers which identify the shape of the food and based on that shape can regulate the oil temperature automatically without human intervention. The company also uses a Visual AIQC Machine, called a SWAT machine which stands for Size, Weight, Appearance, and Temperature. Every dish prepared is put on a machine that scans it and accepts or rejects it accordingly. Also, some robots can make burgers while the staff is busy taking orders online or cleaning their restaurants.

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These collaborative robots can safely work alongside humans.

Artificial intelligence and robotics have become so familiar to us that we have some of these elements in our daily lives. For example, the voice assistants and connected devices at our homes have all a tinge of these disruptive technologies. It would have been impossible to get here without them. In such a scenario, another technological innovation taking the stage is cobots, which are collaborative robots. According to reports, the global collaborative robots market size is expected to reach US$11,684.7 million by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 42%.

Cobots are robots that can work efficiently and safely alongside humans. They have in-built sensors and can easily learn from demonstrations. It can be deployed across different industries to perform various tasks. Here is a list of the top 7 cobots available in the market in 2021.

1. APAS

The German Trade Association has certified APAS as an inherently safe collaborative robot. Automatic production Assistant or APAS is capable of efficient human-robot collaboration. They are simple to use and quick to deploy. Covered with sensitive skin, APAC cobots can sense an impact and stop immediately by ensuring safety. APAS was introduced to the market in 2014 and still serves a lot of industries with more efficiency.

2. YuMi

This cobot by ABB and efficiently works along with humans without any barriers. This is a dual-arm robot and is able to work on the same task as humans and can accurately handle things ranging from a needle to a computer. YuMi consists of cameras, a two-finger parallel gripper, and a suction cup to enhance the functionality. It is very easy to program.

3. Franka Emika Panda

Franca Emika Panda is a collaborative robot system that includes a robotic arm and its control. This cobot comes with a payload of 3kg and consists of a wrist camera, 7DOF with torque sensors, a two-finger gripper, and an intuitive PC interface. The torque sensors in the arm enable stiffness and compliance. Its robotic arm has a human touch sense, is easy to program and set up, and has a direct user interface called Pilot.

4. Aubo i5

This is a cobot with a 5kg payload and is efficient for pick and place applications. Aubo i5 is also capable of machine tending, screwing, marking, and other applications. It has an advanced design and can be programmed using ROS. They are easy to move with a smaller footprint and have a great competitive edge, and also reduce production costs. It can be deployed in the manufacturing sector, wherein it can unburden humans from doing harmful and repetitive tasks.

5. Aura

A product from Comau an industrial manufacturer, Aura is a collaborative robot with an advanced use robotic arm with six safety levels and a modular approach. It can be used in a variety of tasks in collaborative mode and can also be switched to a non-collaborative mode with high speed. It has powerful proximity sensors, high 170 kg payload, a powerful collision avoidance system, and enables users to mount the robot upside-down. Aura has a fully collaborative hollow wrist and collision avoidance system that can be used on the cobot and the tools.

6. NEXTAGE

It is a cobot produced by Kawada industries. This humanoid robot can move easily and has a standard specification that includes an image recognition system. It has two robotic arms with six axes and can perform highly complex tasks. It comes with a 2D wrist camera and the motors are constricted to 80W to make it safer.

7. CORO

This collaborative robot is developed by Life Robotics and was introduced in 2016. The main feature of CORO is its telescopic arm and it allows the user to remove one joint while retaining the versatility in cases where they have to reach different areas. Its main applications include pick and place, cosmetics, logistics, and the food industry. It has a payload of 2kg. It can be programmed through demonstration and is sold in the Asian market.

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These novels will give an imaginative perspective about artificial intelligence.

Do you find artificial intelligence and its capabilities fascinating? Then you’ll want to check out these sci-fi novels with stories about robots and AI bots. The novels in this list include anti-hero tales about robot uprising and stories about AI bots co-existing with humans and falling in love with them too. Sci-fi AI novels offer an innovative and imaginative insight into this disruptive technology that we see around in our day-to-day lives. Every recommendation in this list is unique, which raises many questions in curious minds. What would you do if you were the protagonist of these stories? What would you do if AI devices around you came to life? Ponder while you read.

Sci-fi Novels About Artificial Intelligence and Robots

1. Speak

Author: Louisa Hall

Speak is a collection of stories from multiple narrators with one common theme, artificial intelligence. The plot of this novel explores a world where artificial intelligence has replaced human interaction and all of its essence. In the end, the book talks about humanity’s longing for communication, connection, and relationships.

2. Idoru

Author: William Gibson

Set in the early 21st century, Idoru is the second book in Gibson’s Virtual Light Trilogy. The story revolves around a human falling in love with an AI construct. Packed with all things tech, Idoru is a novel about a rockstar, Rez, who wants to marry Rei Toei, an AI popstar. His managers are worried that Rez is being manipulated by a digital entity, so they hire a data analyst to investigate. Set in Japan and a digital world, this book was published in 1996, when such a plot was quite ahead of its time.

3. The Prey Of Gods

Author: Nicky Drayden

Imagine a futuristic South Africa with personal robots co-existing with humans. The economy is booming but the world is still imperfect. There’s a hallucinogenic drug that is causing chaos, AI robots are threatening humanity, and an ancient demigoddess is preying on humans to regain her lost powers. Yes, this is exactly the plot of this sci-fi mind-boggling novel.

4. A Closed and Common Orbit

Author: Becky Chambers

The protagonist of the story, Lovelace, is just a ship’s AI. Following a suspenseful incident, she wakes up dawning a new body and experiences total system shutdown and a reboot due to which she loses all her memory. Throughout the story, Lovelace learns to survive in the universe and discovers her true self. To help her, she finds a companion Pepper, an engineer who is determined to help her learn and grow like her new self.

5. Robopocalypse

Author: Haniel H.Wilson

With a cool name and a cooler cover, this book takes us to a time of war where robots and humans are against each other. A global network of machines is controlled by a supreme artificial intelligence named Archos that turns machines into deadly enemies. When the robots attack, the majority of the human race is turned to dust, except for a few who regroup to fight back.

6. Machine’s Like Me

Author: Ian Mcewan

This story is set in an alternative version of 1980s London where Alan Turing has achieved a breakthrough in artificial intelligence and synthetic humans are a reality. When the main character, Charlie, gets his hands on some money, he immediately buys a synthetic human named Adam. Together with his loveless friend Miranda, he designs Charlie’s personality, which then leads to a love triangle.

7. The Night Sessions

Author: Ken Macleod

The year is 2037 and robots have religious faith too. When a priest is killed in Glasgow, the police suspect an atheist group, the clear oddity among the population. But the allegations soon took a drastic turn as something even more dangerous had risen from the ashes.

8. Daemon

Author: Daniel Suarez

The death of a legendary game architect brings a dormant computer program, Daemon, back to life, starting a chain of events. Daemon reads the news, recruits human followers, and enables assassinations. In comes Detective Peter Sebeck to stop the virtual killer from seeing the end of humanity.

9. Neuromancer

Author: William Gibson

This award-winning book is about a data thief. He gets mixed up with the wrong kind of people who cripple his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. After this setback, he is recruited by a mysterious person to check out the most powerful artificial intelligence system. This starts an adventure that makes the reader sit on the edge of this seat.

10. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Author: Harlan Ellison

Published in 1967, the story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where all who remain are four men and one woman. The entire human race barring them has been wiped out by artificial intelligence, which eventually becomes self-aware and forms hatred towards humanity. The five survivors are tortured like prisoners in this sadistic tale of violence. This gory novel received a lot of backlash from science fiction writers but also won a Hugo award for this kind of imagination.

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Soft-bodied robots are an extremely important tool in the wider field of robotics, as traditional and rigid-bodied robots are not able to complete the same types of tasks. The former interacts with humans more safely, and they can do things like fit into tight spaces. 

One of the major challenges involved with soft robots is that they must know where all of their body parts are to complete programmed tasks, and this becomes more difficult as soft robots are able to deform in almost infinite ways.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a new deep learning algorithm that helps engineers design soft robots in a way that enables them to collect more data on their surroundings. The algorithm works by suggesting an optimized placement of sensors within the robot’s body. This enables it to complete assigned tasks while interacting with the environment.

Alexander Amini is co-lead author of the research along with Andrew Spielberg, both PhD students in MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The research was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters with other co-authors including Lillian Chin, PhD student, and Wojciech Matusik and Daniela Rus, professors at the university.

“The system not only learns a given task, but also how to best design the robot to solve that task,” Amini says. “Sensor placement is a very difficult problem to solve. So, having the solution is extremely exciting.”

Rigid vs. Soft Robots

One of the biggest advantages of rigid robots is that they have a limited range of motion, and while this seems like a downside, it means the finite number of joints and limbs lead to more manageable calculations.

These calculations are easier to work with when it comes to algorithms controlling mapping and motion planning. Soft robots cannot do the same as they are flexible.

“The main problem with soft robots is that they are infinitely dimensional,” Spielberg says. “Any point on a soft-bodied robot can, in theory, deform in any way possible.”

In the past, researchers have used an external camera to chart the robot’s position, which is then fed back into the robot’s control program. The new team looked for a way to create a soft robot untethered from external aid.

“You can’t put an infinite number of sensors on the robot itself,” Spielberg continues. “So, the question is: How many sensors do you have, and where do you put those sensors in order to get the most bang for your buck?”

The researchers developed a novel neural network architecture that can optimize sensor placements and learn to efficiently complete tasks. They first split the robot’s body into different regions called “particles.” 

The neural network used each particle’s rate of strain as an input, and through trial and error, the network can learn the most efficient sequence of movements for a given task. The network also keeps track of which particles are used more than others so that the network’s inputs can be adjusted.

Outperforming Humans in Sensor Placement

The network suggests the placement of the sensors on the robot by optimizing the most important particles. In tests, the algorithm outperformed humans when it came to locating the most efficient places to put the sensors.

The algorithm was then tested against a series of expert predictions.

“Our model vastly outperformed humans for each task, even though I looked at some of the robot bodies and felt very confident on where the sensors should go,” says Amini. “It turns out there are a lot more subtleties in this problem than we initially expected.”

According to Spielberg, the new development could help automate the robot design process and help come up with new algorithms to control robot movements. 

 “…we also need to think about how we’re going to sensorize these robots, and how that will interplay with other components of that system,” he says. “That’s something where you need a very robust, well-optimized sense of touch. So, there’s potential for immediate impact.”

“Automating the design of sensorized soft robots is an important step toward rapidly creating intelligent tools that help people with physical tasks,” says Rus. “The sensors are an important aspect of the process, as they enable the soft robot to “see” and understand the world and its relationship with the world.”

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Soft robots collect more useful information about their surroundings

Creating soft robots has been a long-running challenge in robotics. Their rigid counterparts have a built-in advantage: a limited range of motion. Rigid robots’ finite array of joints and limbs usually makes for manageable calculations by the algorithms that control mapping and motion planning.

A team of MIT researchers developed a deep learning neural network to aid the design of soft-bodied robots.

Soft-bodied robots are able to interact with people more safely or slip into tight spaces with ease. Soft robots are not so tractable. But for robots to reliably complete their programmed duties, they need to know the whereabouts of all their body parts. That’s a tall task for a soft robot that can deform in a virtually infinite number of ways. The algorithm developed by MIT researchers can help engineers design soft robots that collect more useful information about their surroundings. The deep-learning algorithm suggests an optimised placement of sensors within the robot’s body, allowing it to better interact with its environment and complete assigned tasks. The advance is a step toward the automation of robot design. “The system not only learns a given task, but also how to best design the robot to solve that task,” says Alexander Amini. “Sensor placement is a very difficult problem to solve. So, having this solution is extremely exciting.”

Soft-bodied robots are flexible and pliant—they generally feel more like a bouncy ball than a bowling ball. “The main problem with soft robots is that they are infinitely dimensional,” says co-author Andrew Spielberg. “Any point on a soft-bodied robot can, in theory, deform in any way possible.” That makes it tough to design a soft robot that can map the location of its body parts. Past efforts have used an external camera to chart the robot’s position and feed that information back into the robot’s control program. But the researchers wanted to create a soft robot untethered from external aid.

“You can’t put an infinite number of sensors on the robot itself,” says Spielberg. “So, the question is: How many sensors do you have, and where do you put those sensors in order to get the most bang for your buck?” The team turned to deep learning for an answer.

The researchers developed a novel neural network architecture that both optimises sensor placement and learns to efficiently complete tasks. First, the researchers divided the robot’s body into regions called “particles.” Each particle’s rate of strain was provided as an input to the neural network. Through a process of trial and error, the network “learns” the most efficient sequence of movements to complete tasks, like gripping objects of different sizes. At the same time, the network keeps track of which particles are used most often, and it culls the lesser-used particles from the set of inputs for the networks’ subsequent trials.

Spielberg says their work could help to automate the process of robot design. In addition to developing algorithms to control a robot’s movements, “we also need to think about how we’re going to sensorize these robots, and how that will interplay with other components of that system,” he says. And better sensor placement could have industrial applications, especially where robots are used for fine tasks like gripping. “That’s something where you need a very robust, well-optimized sense of touch,” says Spielberg. “So, there’s potential for immediate impact.”

“Automating the design of sensorised soft robots is an important step toward rapidly creating intelligent tools that help people with physical tasks,” says coauthor Daniela Rus. “The sensors are an important aspect of the process, as they enable the soft robot to “see” and understand the world and its relationship with the world.”

The research will be presented during April’s IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics and will be published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.  

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Are you ready to co-exist with artificial intelligence and robots?

Toyota, one of the biggest automobile manufacturers is employing artificial intelligence to make a futuristic city for 2,000 staff members and families. Yes, of course, the city will be powered by robots as well. The city will be governed by an operating system and will have roads dedicated for self-driving vehicles to carry on without any hassle.

Toyota has begun laying the foundation for a 175-acre smart city in Japan. The company says that artificial intelligence and futuristic technologies will act as a ‘living laboratory” which raises many eyebrows. Being built at the base of Mount Fuji, the “Woven City” will be situated approximately 62 miles from Tokyo.

The aim of building such a city is to serve as a testing ground for modern technology that can be established across other urban environments like robotics, AI, and interconnected smart homes.

Toyota announced this futuristic project at CES 2020 in January last year. The company had said that the city will have three types of roads which will be connected at the ground level – one road for pedestrians, one for pedestrians using their personal vehicles like e-scooters, and one road just for self-driving cars. While these roads will be for the public, the city will also have one conventional road underneath the city that will be used to move goods.

In 2018, Toyota launches its self-driving vehicle, the e-Palette which is expected to be the Woven City project’s main transport. Toyota said that their e-Palette is “scalable and customizable” for various functions like ride-sharing, delivery services, mobile offices, and even hotels.

The 2,000 staff and families will live in smart homes with AI technology and various integrated robotic systems to assist everyday life and sensor-based artificial intelligence to monitor people’s health and other basic needs.

The project is divided into phases and the first phase will have about 360 residents of varying age groups, rising to 2,000 including a few Toyota employees and their families along with scientists and inventors who will keep checking the effectiveness of the technological solutions.

Will all the futuristic technology cause hindrance to human connections? Toyota has said “encouraging human connection will be an equally important aspect of this experience. Building a complete city from the ground up, even on a small scale like this is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the city’s infrastructure.”

About the AI technology, Mr Toyoda said, “With people, buildings, and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data sensors, we will be able to test connected AI technology, in both the virtual and the physical realms, maximizing its potential.

Concept Of An Interconnected Smart Home

A smart home lets the homeowner control all the smart devices remotely from anywhere with a steady internet connection. This means that a person can control security functions, temperature, lighting, etc. remotely.  Smart home devices come with self-learning skills to learn the owner’s schedules and make choices on their own accordingly. If a smart home is fitting with smart lights, it automatically turns the light on and off, saving electricity. Smart home security systems intimate the owner when it detects an expected motion. These small yet effective conveniences make human lives easier.

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Could giving robots voice help them learn human commands?

Robots have become an integral part of human’s daily lives. They help us in numerous ways, from performing complex tasks to lifting heavy weights and assisting the elderly, playing with kids, and entertaining people at events. They can interact with people in any scenario. However, construing a human language still a challenge for robotic systems. Training them with real-world experiences and knowledge about the world could help robots understand natural language.

People use language to express emotions, direct behavior, ask and answer questions, provide information, and ask for help. Language-based interfaces for robots require minimal user training and expression of a variety of complex tasks.

In a paper, researchers from MIT describes a new way to train machines. They noted that children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and understanding what they see and hear. With keeping that in mind, they created a tool called semantic parser that mimics the experience of children learning a language. Parsers are already being used for web searches, natural-language database querying, and voice assistants. The system observes captioned videos and links the words that speakers say with recorded objects and actions.

As parsers are trained in sentences annotated by humans, they could be used to improve natural interaction between humans and robots. According to the paper, a robot equipped with the parser could observe its environment to reinforce its understanding of spoken commands, even when the spoken sentences are not fully grammatical or clear.

Earlier, Analytics Insight reported that how giving voice to robots within healthcare influence human perception. Already, robots are delivering a wide range of healthcare services and opportunities to medical personnel and advancing patient care delivery. In this article, we noted how researchers at the University of Auckland and Singapore University of Technology & Design have been using speech synthesis techniques to create robots that sound more empathetic. As part of their study, researchers tested a hypothesis on how a robot’s voice can impact users’ understanding by conducting a simple experiment using a robot called Healthbot. They used a professional voice artist for the robot’s voice, which was recorded while reading dialogs in two voice variations: a flat monotone and an empathetic voice.

More broadly, teaching a machine to speak and making them able to recognize human voice is a crucial yet effective step as spoken language is the most intuitive form of interaction for humans. In 2018, it was reported that researchers in Japan attempted to bring audition, or power of listening, to robots. Proposed by Tokyo Institute of Technology Professor Kazuhiro Nakadai and Professor Hiroshi G. Okuno of Waseda University in 2000, “Robot Audition” is a research area. For this, they turned their research public and made it open-source software. This essentially helped them generate interest and diversified the research. Their research was officially registered in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

So, when robots and robotics systems are able to learn and recognize the human language, they will have a more emphatic impact on people’s lives.

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South Korean researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology that enables robots to complete their assigned missions by making independent decisions on what actions to take.

The state-run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced on Tuesday that it had developed ‘ActionBrain’ technology that clears the way for robots to make their own decisions on whether to take independent or collaborative actions to carry out their missions.

In Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, the way things operate, in general, is based on the rules pre-set by developers.

This way of operation, however, has limits particularly when an unexpected situation occurs or when the environment dramatically changes, with devices having difficulty adapting to new situations.

Against this backdrop, the ETRI developed the ActionBrain technology by applying deep learning technologies such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

If this technology is applied to production robots at smart factories, they can develop so-called behavior intelligence for collaborative production, while being able to communicate with other robots.

Even when the actual working conditions are changed from pre-set conditions, the robots can self-correct to ensure optimal operation.

This technology can also be applied to unmanned surveillance drones that can be used to monitor natural disasters or other emergencies.

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“Artificial intelligence (AI) has a substitutive role – it ensures that difficult, dirty and dangerous work is done more and more by machines and less and less by human beings,” says Professor Frank Pasquale from Brooklyn Law School.

While AI is poised to disrupt our work and lives, these technologies can be harnessed through wise regulation. So rather than replacing individuals, AI should assist them in completing tasks that are more fulfilling or by augmenting work that is often classified as professional.

Can robots replace human intelligence?

Should people be taking more courses like computer science or technical fields that will help them understand AI better?

“Yes, but I don’t think they should replace existing courses. I think that we need to have a more expanded view of education,” says Prof. Pasquale, who will discuss how AI can promote inclusive prosperity at the annual lecture for The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation at UNSW Sydney on Tuesday 20 October at 11am.

AI can play an important role in education and helping teachers plan and deliver courses – but it is not a replacement.

Similarly in the tax arena, shifting the focus to tax robots is not the right solution. “When it comes to understanding the nuances in tax policies, tax robots are not ideal,” he said.

“We need to have a more well-rounded tax policy that is looking at excessive capital income being taxed, rather than the machines being used to generate that.”

It is also important to question universal basic income, Prof. Pasquale adds: “I think universal basic services is critical because it’s important for the future of labour policy.”

Does AI still need human intervention?

What’s really surprising over the past few years, according to Prof. Pasqual, is how tasks that many assumed would be completed by AI (self-driving cars, for example), are nowhere ready to be adopted en masse.

The self-driving car is itself a warning about issues with AI, he warns. “First, there are the basic technical problems that occur,” he said.

“Secondly, will we have to redesign roads and traffic patterns to accommodate self-driving cars? Do we rely less on public transport, or develop other forms of public transit?

“All of those are not just technical questions, but they’re very deeply political and social questions that involve a lot more than just AI.”

How can AI transform the field of law?

In many simple transactions, AI has the potential to perform work currently undertaken by certain legal personnel, such as the granting of a licence to hunt or fish.

“But there are also areas where AI can be beneficial by assisting current attorneys in deciding which case to bring in, deciding the types of arguments and doing better legal research,” Prof. Pasquale says.

“In various places that are purely financial, I could see another displacement effect where, like in tax law, it might be that we code taxes as opposed to simply having a verbal description of them.”

And Australia’s Robodebt issue, for example, highlighted the fact that excessive automation cannot be achieved successfully without human oversight.

“We have to always keep an eye on it. We’ll see a lot of enthusiasm about automating AI in law, but it’s going to be a slow process,” Prof. Pasquale says.

AI in business

AI has been increasingly playing an important role in business. Some companies, for example, have started using AI in the recruiting process by analysing candidates’ facial expressions, tone of voice and the rate of speech in job interviews.

Such AI is said to be able to determine if an interviewee would be a good employee, based on current employees’ expressions, facial patterns and tone of voice.

“I think that’s troubling because people deserve to be judged on the basis of known characteristics and known qualities, and not on an AI that’s cross-correlating thousands or millions of variables with existing employees.”

Prof. Pasquale refers to it as an ‘alien intelligence’ as it is devoid of human analysis.

However, AI can be of benefit in the medical sector, specifically when it comes to assisting doctors with improving medical diagnoses.

Looking at the Australian healthcare system, Prof. Pasquale says it would make sense to invest in AI capacity, particularly using data that Australia already has.

“Part of the future of the industrial policy of AI is convincing governments to invest in homegrown talent, and to avoid just doing the easy thing and partnering with Google or Facebook or any other big organisation,” he says.

“It is really interesting to see how the use of AI can be different in a county’s industrial strategy”

While AI has the potential to contribute to job losses if poorly planned and timed, medical AI has the power to make labour more valuable and easier.

“I think that if we can envision a future where AI is permitted to increase productivity, and increase the value of labour, then we are on a path to a much happier outcome for everybody,” Prof. Pasquale says.

Prof. Pasquale will further discuss how AI can promote inclusive prosperity at the annual lecture for The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation at UNSW Sydney on Tuesday 20 October at 11am. You can register for the online event here.

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Phil Duffy, Vice President, Product, Program and UX Design for Brain Corp, joined host Daniel Litwin to tackle a broad, yet critical topic in today’s automated world – how robotics are building new bridges between employees and technology.

Brain Corp builds the software for autonomous mobile robots, or AMRS, used by retailers and grocery stores across the world and counts several Fortune 500 customers among its client base, including Walmart, Kroger, Giant Eagle, Schnucks and Simon Property Group.

Duffy provided some key insights from the front lines regarding how those customers and others are leveraging AMRs during the pandemic, how the rapidly growing of adoption of robotic solutions could continue into the new normal and beyond, and the impact of robotics on day-to-day operations during COVID and into global reopening.

“We’ve known about robots in warehouses and industrial settings for 20-odd years, but the robots that scale in open-to-public spaces … are a fairly new thing,” Duffy said. “Up until recently, customers have been nervous about the prospect of robots in open spaces. What’s really happened during COVID is that a lot of the customers we deal with in the robotics industry have recognized that there’s an opportunity here to gain value.”

Essentially, that translates to robots taking over dull and monotonous jobs, allowing human employees to take on cleaning and other critical tasks during this uncertain period.

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