If the experience of robot-served fast food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasant On 1 April, the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff. CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and topp ..read more

A lonely dog buys himself a robot companion and learns to see the world in a joyous new light in Spanish director Pablo Berger’s exquisite, Oscar-nominated film It’s an almost entirely dialogue-free animation, captured with pleasingly simple, almost naive 2D character design. The warm and disarming storytelling is bolstered by the film’s unassuming use of humour. But come to Robot Dreams well stocked with tissues: Pablo Berger’s exquisite, bittersweet, Oscar-nominated buddy movie about the bond between a dog and a robot matches Spike Jonze’s Her as one of cinema’s most devastating and profound ..read more

US firm hopes to lead in artificial intelligence and other sectors – and has built a model that could control humanoid robots The chipmaker Nvidia has extended its lead in artificial intelligence with the unveiling of a new “superchip”, a quantum computing service, and a new suite of tools to help develop the ultimate sci-fi dream: general purpose humanoid robotics. Here we look at what the company is doing and what it might mean ..read more

Tech such as laptops, tablets and instant messaging has more positive effect on wellbeing, says thinktank Exposure to new technologies including trackers, robots and AI-based software at work is bad for people’s quality of life, according to a groundbreaking study from the the Institute for Work thinktank. Based on a survey of more than 6,000 people, the study analysed the impact on wellbeing of four groups of technologies that are becoming increasingly prevalent across the economy ..read more

Yvonne Whalley on the rise of AI actors. Plus a letter from Mike Peacock on Donald’s Sinden’s Othello So, the TV director James Hawes has told parliament’s culture, media, and sport committee that within three to five years, soaps will be created by artificial intelligence (TV soaps could be made by AI within three years, director warns, 22 February). He is, of course, not the first to make this prediction. Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential, first performed at the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough in 1998, is a case in point. He foresaw a time when soaps would be routinely performed by robo ..read more

City council approves year-long contract with Knightscope to rent a K5 robot to respond to door alarms at the airport An autonomous robot is due to become the latest addition to San Antonio International Airport’s security apparatus. Following a 7 to 3 vote on Thursday by the San Antonio city council, city officials approved a year-long contract with Knightscope, a California-based developer of autonomous security robots, to rent its K5 robot for $21,000 ..read more

For all the billions spent, the dream of these vehicles ruling the roads remains just that. It would be much smarter to focus on public transport Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle. Moreover, the recent withdrawal from the market of a leading provider of robotaxis in the US, coupled with the introduction of strict legislation in the UK, suggests that the developers’ hopes of monetising the concept are even more remote than befo ..read more

Agnieszka Pilat calls herself a ‘propaganda artist’ for technology. But when the machines are sold to governments, police and military, what’s the line between art and an ad? The artist is completely focused, a black oil crayon in her hand as she repeatedly draws a small circle on a vibrant teal canvas. She is unbothered by the three people closely observing her every movement, and doesn’t seem to register my entrance into this bright white room inside the National Gallery of Victoria. The artist is a robot; more specifically, Basia is a 30kg “Spot” robot dog designed by Boston Dynamics. You’v ..read more

Machine apparently identified man inspecting it as one of the boxes it was stacking A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot’s sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province ..read more

Meeting in Manchester is part of worldwide action – including Black Friday protests – over tax, market abuse and workers’ rights It was about 3am on a night shift in May last year when Amazon worker Christine Manno tried to retrieve a box stacked high in the warehouse in St Peters, Missouri. She was 30ft in the air, strapped to a harness and standing on the edge of the raised platform of a truck. She was recovering from operations on her injured hands for carpal tunnel syndrome, a neurological disorder, and the weight of the box shot pains through her neck and back. “It was like an electric sh ..read more