Walmart Canada says robots are coming to two Ontario warehouses

In a Calgary warehouse almost as big as eight football fields, an army of robots whir about, carrying massive quantities of merchandise bound for Walmart Canada customers.

Some of the robots zip around the hulking facility transporting pallets of merchandise fresh off delivery trucks. Another resembling a giant arm moves the pallets onto conveyor belts. A third group are labellers.

Together, they shave down the time it takes to get products from trailers into the facility by 90 per cent — and their overlord, Walmart Canada, hopes this is just the start. It plans to bring robots to Mississauga and Cornwall, Ont., distribution centres over the next five years.

Will they be forced to have diverse robots? Like a Trannybot?

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Meta’s AI image generator accused of racism

Meta’s AI image generator has been criticised for failing to conceive of interracial couples — becoming the latest tech tool to be accused of bias.

The feature repeatedly failed to create pictures of Asian men with white women and vice versa, users complained, despite the company’s white founder, Mark Zuckerberg, being married to a Chinese-American woman, Priscilla Chan.

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OpenAI’s voice-cloning tool is too effective for public use

OpenAI has said it is withholding a voice-cloning tool from public release over safety fears.

The artificial intelligence company, which created the instant messaging tool ChatGPT, claims its Voice Engine programme can clone a person’s voice with 15 seconds of recorded speech.

It announced the technology on Friday, a week after filing a trademark application for the same name.

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Roscoe the robot dog takes the bullets instead of police during armed raid

A police force has paid tribute to its robotic dog which was shot three times during an armed raid.

Roscoe, part of a Massachusetts state police bomb squad, was sent into a house to find an armed suspect during a seven-hour stand-off on March 6.

Justin Moreira, 30, had allegedly held his mother at knifepoint, Barnstable Police Department said.

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OpenAI Wooing Hollywood Studios, Talent Agencies to Encourage Filmmakers to Use AI

Artificial intelligence technology is coming to Hollywood a lot faster than many could have anticipated. This week, OpenAI is reportedly making the rounds to studios and talent agencies in a bid to promote Sora, the text-to-video generative AI application that its developers hope will revolutionize the way Hollywood makes movies and TV shows.

Gonna be a lot of unemployed in Hollywood.

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain-chip enables paralysed man to use computer … and play video games for hours

Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink livestreamed its first patient implanted with a chip using his mind to play online chess.

Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralysed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device.

The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts.

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AI could have catastrophic consequences — is Canada ready?

Nations — Canada included — are running out of time to design and implement comprehensive safeguards on the development and deployment of advanced artificial intelligence systems, a leading AI safety company warned this week.

In a worst-case scenario, power-seeking superhuman AI systems could escape their creators’ control and pose an “extinction-level” threat to humanity, AI researchers wrote in a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of State entitled Defence in Depth: An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI.

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AI poses ‘extinction-level’ threat and US government must be given new ’emergency powers’ to control technology, warns State Department report

A new US State Department-funded study calls for a temporary ban on the creation of advanced AI passed a certain threshold of computational power.

The tech, its authors claim, poses an ‘extinction-level threat to the human species.’

The study, commissioned as part of a $250,000 federal contract, also calls for ‘defining emergency powers’ for the American government’s executive branch ‘to respond to dangerous and fast-moving AI-related incidents’ — like ‘swarm robotics.’

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US fast-tracks new fighter drones to outsmart China and Russia

Ghost Bat Fighter Drone

The United States is moving rapidly towards developing a new generation of jet fighter drones piloted by artificial intelligence (AI) which are intended to outsmart China and Russia in any future conflict.

The Pentagon is due soon to select a shortlist from five companies competing for the project with the aim of beginning production of more than 1,000 of the super-fighter drones by 2028.

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Something Like Fire – Will the AI revolution warm us or burn us?

Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren’t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can’t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine.

Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn’t foresee and don’t understand. “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside,” AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, “you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.”

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Gemini AI exposes the progressive playbook

By now, most of you have probably seen the preposterous images generated by Google’s new AI conversation app, Gemini. Admitting to ‘missing the mark’, Google has withdrawn the image generator for tweaking, but not before the bot revealed an aversion to white people that was plainly cultivated by its overlords. Users discovered it was nearly impossible to prompt Gemini to produce pictures of ethnic Europeans, especially white men. Douglas Murray is right to object that the word is misused, but then I can misuse it, too. This is digital genocide!

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Google Has Changed

I have been amused by many of the reports of Google Gemini’s peculiar behavior (for excellent examples see here, here, here, here, and read Jeff’s piece), but, in my view, the most interesting thing about this episode is what it has shown about where Google now is as a company. All told, Google Gemini has yielded precisely the opposite reaction that Google’s famous search engine did upon its release. In 1998, those of us who were using AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or whatever found Google and said, “wow, that’s incredible!” This week, everyone who has had some experience with other AI products has found Gemini and said, “what total garbage!” (Or worse.)

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Expect Google’s Gemini 2.0 to be even worse

Accurate depiction of woke society.

The days when Google was held up as a paragon of cool tech innovation are long gone. Today, its search results are manipulated and crammed with ads, YouTube demonetises accurate information it doesn’t like, and just a few weeks ago the company released Gemini, an AI model that refuses to generate images of white people.

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