Google Assistant can share your personal info in Allo chats
For now, Allo is the one place where regular Android users can get a taste of Google Assistant, the AI helper that’s otherwise reserved for Google’s own Pixel phones. You can call on it during a chat with one or more folks, and it can do a search, set reminders and even tell a joke. Google has just given it a new trick that should make it more useful — letting you share contacts, calendar appointments and other personal info.
To use it, you just type “@google,” and then tap the assistant when it pops up. You can then ask for a meeting date or airline reservation, for instance, and it will privately show you any of the information that it can find. From there, you can tap “share now” to show the info to other parties in the Allo chat.
That makes it easy to quickly give pals a contact number without having to look it up, for instance. Or, if you’re trying to coordinate a work trip, you can have Google Assistant give your hotel reservations to colleagues during a chat.
Google Hangouts, the predecessor to Allo (and still the preferred chat app of many Google users), has had similar capabilities for a few years now — it’ll even listen in to conversations and let you share your location if someone asks where you are. Facebook recently launched similar capabilities for its “M” Messenger AI assistant, too. It’s debatable whether they’ll make you more productive, but Google needs to draw interest to Allo however it can.
Via: Android Police
Source: Google
AppGratis Shuts Down
AppGratis today announced that, after seven years of operations and more than 50 million app installs globally, it has shut down today.
The service offered hand-picked apps for free or up to 90% off on a daily basis through its website and Android app, and formerly through its iPhone app, but its popularity had seemingly faded over the years.
Apple removed AppGratis from the App Store in April 2013 as part of a broader crackdown on apps which might be “similar to or confusing with the App Store.” AppGratis said it was “far from finished” despite the huge blow, and it went on to last nearly four more years until its shutdown today.
App discovery remains an issue on the App Store, which has some two million apps according to our sister website AppShopper. Last year, Apple introduced search ads on the App Store to help developers promote their apps, but the feature is not particularly helpful to those with limited marketing budgets
(Thanks, Joe!)
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Apple in ‘Early Stages’ of Discussions for Apple Pay in South Korea, Android Pay Likely to Launch First
A few Apple executives have had meetings with South Korean financial authorities, spurring a rumor that the Cupertino company is beginning to make headway in its attempt to launch Apple Pay in the country. Sources speaking with The Korea Herald said that Apple’s legal director and senior counselor met with the country’s financial authorities back in November to discuss Apple Pay, but the company has yet to have another meeting with the government.
As it stands, Android Pay is believed to launch in South Korea ahead of Apple Pay. According to an anonymous source from a local card company, “the technology development with Google for Android Pay is in full swing,” with Google having already partnered with card companies like KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Lotte and Hyundai in order to develop online and offline payment systems.
For Apple, the country’s involvement and work on Apple Pay “is still in an early stage,” potentially due to South Korea’s lack of wide NFC terminal adoption in retail stores. Google is said to be developing an online payments feature for Android Pay that could circumvent the need of an NFC terminal. For Apple Pay to be widely adopted, the company may have to wait for more NFC support — which its mobile wallet requires — in the country.
Apple’s executives recently held a meeting with South Korean financial authorities, a move that can be viewed as the company testing the waters before fully reviewing a potential launch here, sources said Wednesday.
“Apple said they will partner with local credit card companies in the future but did not elaborate on the specific details,” the source said.
To start such a mobile payment service in Korea, the company should have another meeting with the financial authorities to decide whether it will be registered as an electronic financial business operator. Apple is not yet scheduled to have such a meeting with the government.
In participating retail locations and apps, Apple Pay is currently available in the U.S., UK, China, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, France, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain. Apple previously had trouble introducing another of its services, Apple Music, in South Korea due to the country’s strict copyright laws.
Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: South Korea
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Amazon’s delivery drones could use parachutes to drop off packages
Why it matters to you
Although some of its delivery-drone ideas may seem a bit wacky, they show Amazon’s determination to explore all facets of the platform in order to make it a reality.
Amazon has been working on the design of its delivery drone for several years now as it continues its bid to launch a regular service for customers living close to its fulfillment centers.
At the end of last year the company trumpeted the completion of its very first drone delivery in the United Kingdom. This was a significant milestone, for sure, though strict regulations — similar to those in the U.S. — mean the service is currently limited to only a few customers and is unlikely to be rolled out more widely anytime soon.
One of the challenges continuing to occupy engineers is how to drop off the packages safely. The current design of Amazon’s Prime Air delivery drone sees it landing on the ground and automatically plopping out the ordered item from a compartment. However, in urban areas, with their myriad of obstacles, such a delivery method may prove more difficult, and could also expose the flying machine to additional risks such as excited pets or even ne’er-do-wells looking to intercept deliveries as the drone nears its destination.
Amazon’s drone team has evidently been exploring different ways of dropping off ordered goods, with a recently granted patent focusing on landing guidance systems such as parachutes, compressed air, and landing flaps. Put simply, the drone would assess the landing site from up high before releasing the package from the optimum position. With the package headed presumably for someone’s yard, the drone would monitor its descent. If a sudden breeze kicked up, the drone could send a signal to technology on the package to deploy one of the aforementioned systems in order to steady the consignment, or steer it to its precise landing point if it begins to veer off course.
With all the extra kit involved, it sounds like a costly solution, though the concept may ultimately lead to a refined, more efficient method along similar lines. Yes, this is just a patent, so it’s far from certain that Amazon will be parachuting products into people’s yards anytime soon. Or possibly ever.
More: Drones are now delivering pizza to paying customers in New Zealand
It should be noted that Amazon has patented a range of ideas for its drone technology, some wackier than others. One idea is to turn church steeples and the top of street lights into docking stations so the machine can recharge and therefore fly greater distances to customer addresses, while another proposed a seemingly off-the-wall idea involving an “airborne fulfillment center” — effectively a flying warehouse suspended from a blimp — that its drones could also use as a base.
Robots and AI are coming for our jobs, but can augmentation save us from automation?
The American truck driver is soon to be an endangered species. Some 3.5 million professionals get behind the wheel of these vehicles in the United States every year, making it one of the most common jobs in the country. In a couple decades, every last one may be out of work due to automation.
Industry giants around the world are investing in autonomous vehicles. In Australian mines, Rio Tinto employs hundred-ton driverless trucks to transport iron ore. Volvo wants to ferry volunteer passengers around London’s winding streets. MIT researchers recently determined the most efficient way for driverless trucks to transport goods. The guy behind Google’s first self-driving car now runs an autonomous trucking startup called Otto in San Francisco.
Truckers may be among the most vulnerable to automation but they’re certainly not alone. Over the past year we’ve seen an AI attorney land a job at a law firm, Hilton hire a robotic concierge, and even — ahem — “robojournalists” cover the U.S. election. As far as we know, none of these bots have caused a human to get laid off — but they’re telling of things to come.
“We’re trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits.”
The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution will transform the job market, eliminating over five million jobs in the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum.
So what do we, as humans, do? Augment ourselves.
Augmentation was the running theme of this year’s Bodyhacking Conference in Austin, Texas. Attendees lined up for RFID implants, speakers demonstrated bionic body parts, grinders exhibited artificial senses, and an entire fashion show put “smart” apparel on display. Most of the augmentations were idiosyncratic and wouldn’t make a potential employee more competitive in the future job market (except, perhaps, for documentary filmmaker Rob “Eyeborg” Spence’s prosthetic eye camera). With this in mind, we explored the ways in which augmentation may safeguard us from automation.
Augment our brains
Humans have extraordinary brains — the best in the animal kingdom — but in AI we’ve created minds that exceed our own in many ways. Sure, humans still hold the title for outstanding general intelligence, as today’s AI systems excel at the specific tasks they’re designed for, but algorithms are advancing fast. Some are even learning as they work. A year ago, AI experts thought it would take at least another decade for an algorithm to defeat a top-tier Go player. And then this happened.
Entrepreneur, futurist, and headline-staple Elon Musk is so concerned about AI he co-founded the billion-dollar nonprofit OpenAI to promote “friendly” AI in December 2015. Six months later, he told a crowd at Recode’s annual Code Conference about his want to develop a digital neural layer — colloquially called a “neural lace” — to augment humans on par with AI. He echoed these comments at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, suggesting that such a symbiosis could potentially solve the “control problem and the usefulness problem” likely to face future humanity.
This rolled electronic mesh can be injected through a glass needle.
Harvard University
The concept is relatively simple: A neural lace is some sort of material that boosts the brain’s ability to receive, process, and communicate information. It’s an extra layer, perhaps a kind of electronic mesh, that physically integrates with the brain and turns the mind into a kind of supercomputer.
If this sounds like science fiction, that’s because it is. Or it was. The term was first coined by sci-fi author Iain M. Banks in his Culture series.
But almost exactly one year before Musk made his comment at the conference, a team of nanotechnologists at Harvard University published a paper called “Syringe-injectable electronics” in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, in which they described an ultra-fine electronic mesh that can be injected into the brains of mice to monitor brain activity and treat degenerative diseases. The possibility for such a material to augment the brain’s input-output capacity was too enticing to overlook.
“We’re trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits,” co-author Charles Lieber told Smithsonian Magazine. “We have to walk before we can run,” he added, “but we think we can really revolutionize our ability to interface with the brain.”
Heisenberg Media
Musk hasn’t kept completely quiet about his neural lace aspirations either. In August he told an inquisitive Twitter follower that he was “Making progress” on the project. In January he said an announcement may come this month.
A functioning neural lace is still realistically many years off but, augmented by such a device, humans could conceivably compete with AI at computational tasks currently left to machines, while maintaining our high levels of intuition, decision making, and general intelligence. We’re already cyborgs. With smartphones and the internet as external brains, we boast superhuman intelligence. But analog outputs like typing and speech are slow compared to digital speeds. Imagine listing under the skills section on your résumé the ability to query a database, receive a response, and relay that information to a colleague in the fraction of a second it takes Google to display search results. It would make you a desirable candidate, indeed.
Augment our bodies
As robust as we are in mind, humans are desperately delicate in body. We’re fleshy, fragile things, prone to break and tear under pressure. Robots, on the other hand, are rugged, and capable of tackling strenuous tasks with relative ease.
But robots are also fairly inflexible. Where a human can seamlessly transition from one action to another, machines tend to do just one thing well and need to be recalibrated to perform new tasks.
Enter exosuits. Fitted with these powered external skeletons, humans assume superhuman strength while limiting risk of injury associated with bending and lifting. Think Iron Man or the metallic gear worn by Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow.
We’re fleshy, fragile things, prone to break and tear under pressure. Robots are rugged and capable of tackling strenuous tasks with relative ease.
But, like the neural lace, these suits aren’t stuck in science fiction. Engineers at Hyundai, Harvard, and the United States Army are actively developing systems to serve paraplegics, laborers, and soldiers alike.
“What I’ve been working on in my lab for years is to combine the intelligence of the [human] worker with the strength of the robot,” Hoomayoon Kazerooni, director of the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, told Digital Trends. “Robots are metal, they have more power than a human. Basically, the whole thesis is to combine human decision making, human intelligence, and human adaptability with the strength and precision of a robot.”
Through his robotics research, Kazerooni founded SuitX, a company that created the PhoeniX medical exoskeleton for patients with spinal cord injury and a modular, full-body exosuit called the Modular Agile Exoskeleton (MAX).
“We use robotic devices where we have repetitive tasks,” Kazerooni said. “Anything that’s dangerous we also automate. These are structured jobs.”
MAX features three components: backX, shoulderX, and legX, each of which assists its titular region, minimizing torque and force by up to 60 percent.
“These machines reduce forces at targeted areas,” Kazerooni said. “So, it’s basically supporting the wearer, not necessarily from a cognitive point of view by telling workers how to do things, but by letting the workers do whatever tasks they’ve done in the past with reduced force.”
Kazerooni recognizes that machines may someday be so cheap and efficient that human workers simply become an expensive liability. However, until then, the best way to keep laborers safe, productive, and employed may be to augment their physicality.
“The state of technology in robotics and AI is not to the point that we can employ robotics to do unstructured jobs,” he added, “which require a [human] worker’s attention and decision making. There are a lot of unstructured work we can’t yet fully automate.”
Across the country, in the Harvard Biodesign Lab, a team of researchers are developing a softer side of exosuits.
Packed with small motors, custom sensors, and microprocessors, these soft wearable robots are designed to work in parallel with the body’s muscles and tendons to make movement more efficient. In a recent paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the interdisciplinary Harvard team demonstrated an almost 23 percent reduction in effort with its exosuit compared to unaided walking.
“It’s going to be a very difficult time for all human workers.”
The Biodesign Labs has so far been working with DARPA to develop exosuits to help soldiers carry heavy loads over long distances. However, project lead Ignacio Galiana thinks the suit can find applications beyond the battlefield.
“Factory workers in the automotive, naval, and aircraft industry have to move around very large and heavy parts,” he told Digital Trends. “Having a simple system they can wear under their normal pants can give them an extra strength.
“There’s now even a need for people to get packages delivered the next day, and so postal service personnel have a burden to move heavy packages around quickly,” he added. “If they could wear an exosuit that makes them faster and stronger, that could make their work much easier.”
Galiana doesn’t think humans and robots will compete directly for the same jobs. Instead, he sees them working in parallel — so long as humans can keep up with increasing physical demands.
“Human intelligence and decision making is critical in a lot of factory jobs, and the human brain is really hard to imitate in robots,” he said. “That will be key to keeping workers in the workplace. If you give extra strength to a factory worker who has that decision making and intelligence capabilities, you could see them being more effective and staying in work for longer, working alongside robots.”
Augment our skillset
Despite the progress that’s been made in the past few years, superhuman strength and intelligence lie somewhere in the hazy futurescape, inaccessible to most of today’s workforce and not exactly helpful when trying to figure out what humans should do now to safeguard themselves against automation.
For an immediate answer, we turned to Tom Davenport, co-author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. In 2015, Davenport and co-author Julia Kirby published “Beyond Automation” in the Harvard Business Review, in which they laid out five practical steps workers may take to improve their employability against machines.
In their list, Davenport and Kirby encourage humans to stand out, whether by developing skills outside the realm of “codifiable cognition” (such as creativity) or learning the ins-and-outs of the machines themselves. (After all, someone needs to fix these things when they break down.) However, the authors’ advice is primarily meant for “knowledge workers” not physical laborers, whom Davenport thinks will have a much more challenging transition in the future job market.
“I try to be optimistic,” Davenport told Digital Trends, “because I do think there are some valuable roles that humans can still play relative to these smart machines, but I don’t think it’s a time to be complacent about it. Any type of worker will need to work hard to keep up the right kinds of skills and develop new skills.”
Freightliner was the first truck manufacturer to obtain the right to test an autonomous vehicle in Nevada.
As an example, Davenport points to our friends the truck drivers. “I don’t know how many of them will be willing to develop the computer-oriented skills to understand how autonomous driving works,” he said. And, even if they did take an entry course in programming, what good would it do? Driving in general is a dying profession.
“I think it’s going to be a very difficult time for all human workers,” Davenport said. “I’m optimistic that many of them will make the transition but not all of them will. I’m definitely more pessimistic about certain jobs than others. Even for knowledge workers there will be some job loss on the margins but I believe there are a number of viable roles that they can play. That’s what a lot of my writing has been about — roles that knowledge workers can play that either involved working alongside smart machines, or doing something they don’t.”
Note, when Davenport says “smart machines,” he means narrow AI: systems that do a few specific things really well, such as recognizing faces, playing board games, and creating psychedelic art.
There’s another evolution of AI though, the kind that keeps Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking up at night: artificial general intelligence, which basically do anything a human can intellectually.
What happens when these arise?
“All bets are off,” Davenport said.
Robots and AI are coming for our jobs, but can augmentation save us from automation?
The American truck driver is soon to be an endangered species. Some 3.5 million professionals get behind the wheel of these vehicles in the United States every year, making it one of the most common jobs in the country. In a couple decades, every last one may be out of work due to automation.
Industry giants around the world are investing in autonomous vehicles. In Australian mines, Rio Tinto employs hundred-ton driverless trucks to transport iron ore. Volvo wants to ferry volunteer passengers around London’s winding streets. MIT researchers recently determined the most efficient way for driverless trucks to transport goods. The guy behind Google’s first self-driving car now runs an autonomous trucking startup called Otto in San Francisco.
Truckers may be among the most vulnerable to automation but they’re certainly not alone. Over the past year we’ve seen an AI attorney land a job at a law firm, Hilton hire a robotic concierge, and even — ahem — “robojournalists” cover the U.S. election. As far as we know, none of these bots have caused a human to get laid off — but they’re telling of things to come.
“We’re trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits.”
The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution will transform the job market, eliminating over five million jobs in the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum.
So what do we, as humans, do? Augment ourselves.
Augmentation was the running theme of this year’s Bodyhacking Conference in Austin, Texas. Attendees lined up for RFID implants, speakers demonstrated bionic body parts, grinders exhibited artificial senses, and an entire fashion show put “smart” apparel on display. Most of the augmentations were idiosyncratic and wouldn’t make a potential employee more competitive in the future job market (except, perhaps, for documentary filmmaker Rob “Eyeborg” Spence’s prosthetic eye camera). With this in mind, we explored the ways in which augmentation may safeguard us from automation.
Augment our brains
Humans have extraordinary brains — the best in the animal kingdom — but in AI we’ve created minds that exceed our own in many ways. Sure, humans still hold the title for outstanding general intelligence, as today’s AI systems excel at the specific tasks they’re designed for, but algorithms are advancing fast. Some are even learning as they work. A year ago, AI experts thought it would take at least another decade for an algorithm to defeat a top-tier Go player. And then this happened.
Entrepreneur, futurist, and headline-staple Elon Musk is so concerned about AI he co-founded the billion-dollar nonprofit OpenAI to promote “friendly” AI in December 2015. Six months later, he told a crowd at Recode’s annual Code Conference about his want to develop a digital neural layer — colloquially called a “neural lace” — to augment humans on par with AI. He echoed these comments at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, suggesting that such a symbiosis could potentially solve the “control problem and the usefulness problem” likely to face future humanity.
This rolled electronic mesh can be injected through a glass needle.
Harvard University
The concept is relatively simple: A neural lace is some sort of material that boosts the brain’s ability to receive, process, and communicate information. It’s an extra layer, perhaps a kind of electronic mesh, that physically integrates with the brain and turns the mind into a kind of supercomputer.
If this sounds like science fiction, that’s because it is. Or it was. The term was first coined by sci-fi author Iain M. Banks in his Culture series.
But almost exactly one year before Musk made his comment at the conference, a team of nanotechnologists at Harvard University published a paper called “Syringe-injectable electronics” in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, in which they described an ultra-fine electronic mesh that can be injected into the brains of mice to monitor brain activity and treat degenerative diseases. The possibility for such a material to augment the brain’s input-output capacity was too enticing to overlook.
“We’re trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits,” co-author Charles Lieber told Smithsonian Magazine. “We have to walk before we can run,” he added, “but we think we can really revolutionize our ability to interface with the brain.”
Heisenberg Media
Musk hasn’t kept completely quiet about his neural lace aspirations either. In August he told an inquisitive Twitter follower that he was “Making progress” on the project. In January he said an announcement may come this month.
A functioning neural lace is still realistically many years off but, augmented by such a device, humans could conceivably compete with AI at computational tasks currently left to machines, while maintaining our high levels of intuition, decision making, and general intelligence. We’re already cyborgs. With smartphones and the internet as external brains, we boast superhuman intelligence. But analog outputs like typing and speech are slow compared to digital speeds. Imagine listing under the skills section on your résumé the ability to query a database, receive a response, and relay that information to a colleague in the fraction of a second it takes Google to display search results. It would make you a desirable candidate, indeed.
Augment our bodies
As robust as we are in mind, humans are desperately delicate in body. We’re fleshy, fragile things, prone to break and tear under pressure. Robots, on the other hand, are rugged, and capable of tackling strenuous tasks with relative ease.
But robots are also fairly inflexible. Where a human can seamlessly transition from one action to another, machines tend to do just one thing well and need to be recalibrated to perform new tasks.
Enter exosuits. Fitted with these powered external skeletons, humans assume superhuman strength while limiting risk of injury associated with bending and lifting. Think Iron Man or the metallic gear worn by Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow.
We’re fleshy, fragile things, prone to break and tear under pressure. Robots are rugged and capable of tackling strenuous tasks with relative ease.
But, like the neural lace, these suits aren’t stuck in science fiction. Engineers at Hyundai, Harvard, and the United States Army are actively developing systems to serve paraplegics, laborers, and soldiers alike.
“What I’ve been working on in my lab for years is to combine the intelligence of the [human] worker with the strength of the robot,” Hoomayoon Kazerooni, director of the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, told Digital Trends. “Robots are metal, they have more power than a human. Basically, the whole thesis is to combine human decision making, human intelligence, and human adaptability with the strength and precision of a robot.”
Through his robotics research, Kazerooni founded SuitX, a company that created the PhoeniX medical exoskeleton for patients with spinal cord injury and a modular, full-body exosuit called the Modular Agile Exoskeleton (MAX).
“We use robotic devices where we have repetitive tasks,” Kazerooni said. “Anything that’s dangerous we also automate. These are structured jobs.”
MAX features three components: backX, shoulderX, and legX, each of which assists its titular region, minimizing torque and force by up to 60 percent.
“These machines reduce forces at targeted areas,” Kazerooni said. “So, it’s basically supporting the wearer, not necessarily from a cognitive point of view by telling workers how to do things, but by letting the workers do whatever tasks they’ve done in the past with reduced force.”
Kazerooni recognizes that machines may someday be so cheap and efficient that human workers simply become an expensive liability. However, until then, the best way to keep laborers safe, productive, and employed may be to augment their physicality.
“The state of technology in robotics and AI is not to the point that we can employ robotics to do unstructured jobs,” he added, “which require a [human] worker’s attention and decision making. There are a lot of unstructured work we can’t yet fully automate.”
Across the country, in the Harvard Biodesign Lab, a team of researchers are developing a softer side of exosuits.
Packed with small motors, custom sensors, and microprocessors, these soft wearable robots are designed to work in parallel with the body’s muscles and tendons to make movement more efficient. In a recent paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the interdisciplinary Harvard team demonstrated an almost 23 percent reduction in effort with its exosuit compared to unaided walking.
“It’s going to be a very difficult time for all human workers.”
The Biodesign Labs has so far been working with DARPA to develop exosuits to help soldiers carry heavy loads over long distances. However, project lead Ignacio Galiana thinks the suit can find applications beyond the battlefield.
“Factory workers in the automotive, naval, and aircraft industry have to move around very large and heavy parts,” he told Digital Trends. “Having a simple system they can wear under their normal pants can give them an extra strength.
“There’s now even a need for people to get packages delivered the next day, and so postal service personnel have a burden to move heavy packages around quickly,” he added. “If they could wear an exosuit that makes them faster and stronger, that could make their work much easier.”
Galiana doesn’t think humans and robots will compete directly for the same jobs. Instead, he sees them working in parallel — so long as humans can keep up with increasing physical demands.
“Human intelligence and decision making is critical in a lot of factory jobs, and the human brain is really hard to imitate in robots,” he said. “That will be key to keeping workers in the workplace. If you give extra strength to a factory worker who has that decision making and intelligence capabilities, you could see them being more effective and staying in work for longer, working alongside robots.”
Augment our skillset
Despite the progress that’s been made in the past few years, superhuman strength and intelligence lie somewhere in the hazy futurescape, inaccessible to most of today’s workforce and not exactly helpful when trying to figure out what humans should do now to safeguard themselves against automation.
For an immediate answer, we turned to Tom Davenport, co-author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. In 2015, Davenport and co-author Julia Kirby published “Beyond Automation” in the Harvard Business Review, in which they laid out five practical steps workers may take to improve their employability against machines.
In their list, Davenport and Kirby encourage humans to stand out, whether by developing skills outside the realm of “codifiable cognition” (such as creativity) or learning the ins-and-outs of the machines themselves. (After all, someone needs to fix these things when they break down.) However, the authors’ advice is primarily meant for “knowledge workers” not physical laborers, whom Davenport thinks will have a much more challenging transition in the future job market.
“I try to be optimistic,” Davenport told Digital Trends, “because I do think there are some valuable roles that humans can still play relative to these smart machines, but I don’t think it’s a time to be complacent about it. Any type of worker will need to work hard to keep up the right kinds of skills and develop new skills.”
Freightliner was the first truck manufacturer to obtain the right to test an autonomous vehicle in Nevada.
As an example, Davenport points to our friends the truck drivers. “I don’t know how many of them will be willing to develop the computer-oriented skills to understand how autonomous driving works,” he said. And, even if they did take an entry course in programming, what good would it do? Driving in general is a dying profession.
“I think it’s going to be a very difficult time for all human workers,” Davenport said. “I’m optimistic that many of them will make the transition but not all of them will. I’m definitely more pessimistic about certain jobs than others. Even for knowledge workers there will be some job loss on the margins but I believe there are a number of viable roles that they can play. That’s what a lot of my writing has been about — roles that knowledge workers can play that either involved working alongside smart machines, or doing something they don’t.”
Note, when Davenport says “smart machines,” he means narrow AI: systems that do a few specific things really well, such as recognizing faces, playing board games, and creating psychedelic art.
There’s another evolution of AI though, the kind that keeps Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking up at night: artificial general intelligence, which basically do anything a human can intellectually.
What happens when these arise?
“All bets are off,” Davenport said.
Meizu’s first phone of 2017 is here, and it’s very cheap and cheerful
Why it matters to you
The older Meizu M5 wasn’t the phone for international buyers looking for a bargain. The updated M5s is.
It’s one small step for a man… Well, it’s just a small step period.
Popular Chinese manufacturer Meizu has announced its first smartphone of 2017: The Meizu M5s. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because Meizu announced the M5 in October this year, making the M5s a slightly — and we really do mean slightly — updated version of that phone. One feature in particular makes this a more desirable version for potential international buyers, however.
The design is typically Meizu, a firm that really does stick to a theme with its hardware. It’s no bad thing. The M5s is attractive, and comes wrapped in an aluminum body, with a 2.5D curved glass panel over the 5.2-inch screen. The screen only has a 1,280 × 720 pixel resolution though, which is a shame, but does help keep the price low.
More: Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 4x is a slight update over the Note 4, with one very cute difference
Meizu’s being coy about the processor inside the M5s, claiming it’s a 64-bit, octa-core chip, but stopping short at telling which in the press release. Exploring the official M5s page reveals it’s the MediaTek MT6753, a small step up over the MT6570 used in the M5. It’s supported by 3GB of RAM, and there’s a MicroSD card slot to boost the internal storage space.
There’s a Sony 13-megapixel camera with an f/2.2 aperture and phase detection auto-focus on the back of the M5s, and a 5-megapixel selfie cam with a lower f/2.0 aperture above the screen. Also on the front of the phone is Meizu’s mTouch fingerprint scanner, which has always been a strong performer, and promises to unlock the phone in just 0.2 seconds. Power comes from a 3,000mAh battery, and with it the first major difference between the M5s and the older M5: Fast charging. The 18w system takes the M5s’s battery from flat to 56 percent capacity in 30 minutes, almost matching phones like the OnePlus 3T.
Finally, and the reason anyone wanting a cheap Meizu phone would be advised to check the M5s over the older version, is the presence of Android. The M5 used Yun OS, which is developed for China by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, as its operating system. Both phones have Meizu’s Flyme user interface over the top.
Meizu will release a 16GB and 32GB version of the M5s, in a choice of four colors, with prices converting over to a very reasonable $115 or $145.
Rather than call an ambulance, rotten thief steals phone from barely conscious teen
Why it matters to you
Proof, as if it were needed, that we always need to be vigilant about phone thieves
Thieves, by definition, are unpleasant people; but some just take being scumbags to a whole new level, as proven by this story from Manchester in the United Kingdom. Even if you’re vigilant and protective of your shiny new smartphone — in this case a lovely Google Pixel XL — there’s nothing much you can do if someone wants to take it when you’re in the middle of an asthma attack. Yes, really.
18-year old Evie Merrygold was feeling short of breath at a nightclub in Manchester, and left the building to get some fresh air. However, she left her inhaler inside and subsequently collapsed own the ground as she tried to catch her breath. Merrygold estimates she was unconscious for five minutes, before waking to find a man next to her.
More: Beware of phone thieves on scooters
He told her he was about to call an ambulance, and picked up her phone. Except he didn’t call anyone. Instead, he stole the phone and walked away. A tweet from the Greater Manchester City Centre Police confirms the story, and calls the crime — in a typically understated British fashion — “pretty low.” Merrygold’s quoted as saying, “I just can’t find the words for how that feels. It’s the fact he said he was going to help me and then just went off with my phone.”
Pretty low. Woman on floor having asthma attack Deansgate Locks; man picks up her phone & says he will call ambulance but makes off with it
— GMP City Centre (@GMPCityCentre) February 11, 2017
She recovered from the asthma attack, and wasn’t hurt in the incident, but does wonder if the thief followed her from the club in the first place. Her friends found her a short while later, and although they searched for the phone, it wasn’t found. She later canceled her phone contract, but the thief had already made calls on the stolen device.
Normally, at this point we offer advice on keeping your phone safe, or activating a service like Find My iPhone, in stories like this. They all still apply, but it’s pretty much impossible to do anything about an unexpected asthma attack, and any opportunistic thief who happens to be nearby.
Samsung could reveal Galaxy S8 launch date at MWC
Samsung is likely to drop a few hints about the Galaxy S8 at MWC.
Samsung has already mentioned that it won’t unveil the Galaxy S8 at this year’s Mobile World Congress, with the official launch said to occur a month later — likely on March 29 — at an event in New York. A new report out of Korea suggests that Samsung will reveal the launch date for its upcoming flagship at its MWC event, which is being held on February 26.
The South Korean manufacturer could offer an early look at the Galaxy S8 in the form of a one-minute teaser at the end of its MWC press conference, where we’ll see the Galaxy Tab S3 make its debut. There’s plenty to talk about the device thanks to numerous leaks over the course of the last month, including dual-curved displays for both variants, thin bezels, lack of a home button at the front, rear-mounted fingerrint sensor, and a dedicated button for Samsung’s new AI assistant, Bixby.
Huge Pokémon Go update adds 80 new creatures from Pokémon Gold and Silver games
This is the Pokémon Go update we’ve been looking for.
Niantic is rolling out a sizeable content update to Pokémon Go later this week that will introduce over 80 new Johto Pokémon from the Pokémon Gold and Silver games, including Chikorita, Cyndaquil, Totodile, and others. The new Pokémon will be discoverable in the wild, and won’t just be limited to hatching from eggs, like those that debuted with the December update.
The update will also bring new avatars and added wardrobe options to customize the look of your trainer, new character evolutions, two new berries, and changes to the gameplay mechanics:
When you encounter Pokémon in the wild, don’t be surprised if they react in new ways as you’re trying to catch them. You’ll also notice the addition of new item carousels that allow you to select Berries and Poké Balls directly from the encounter screen. Hone your skills and catch those elusive Pokémon!
Niantic says that the update will be rolled out sometime later this week, following which you’ll be able to catch the new Pokémon. Who’s excited?
Pokémon Go
- Join our Pokémon Go forums!
- How to deal with GPS errors in-game
- Which team should you choose?
- How to play without killing your battery
- The Ultimate Pokémon Go Game Guide!
- Listen to the Pokémon Go podcast!
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