Monthly Archives: February 2017

Q. Is it possible to talk with Siri on non-Apple devices?

The short answer is no, Siri is a feature only available from Apple. It is the voice-controlled Intelligent Personal Assistant installed on Apple devices.

Controlling devices with voice commands are hot right now, and Apple Siri has plenty of company. Microsoft has Cortana. Google has Google Voice. Samsung has Viv. Amazon has Alexa. Each has a common set of abilities, along with capabilities unique to that assistant. For example, any of them can tell you the weather, but only Siri can play content on AppleTV, and only Alexa can order products from Amazon.

There is also a wide variety of devices to support these assistants. In addition to laptops, tablets, and phones, a new category of desktop device has appeared in the last year. The only one so far to get much traction is Amazon Echo, which is a line of devices ranging from $50 to $150. We are still in the early-adopter stage of desktop voice assistants, but there is an abundance of interesting developments to explore.

Note that while Siri is Apple-only, most of the other assistants are available on multiple models via an app.

Q. I have a small room inside my house where the light switch is in an inconvenient place. I have to awkwardly fumble around to reach it. Can home automation help?

Because you mentioned home automation, I need to start with a warning. Home automation is a loosely defined term that includes a mix of products and services. Many of them show great promise, but they are not fully baked yet.

There are incompatible standards, a device from company A is unlikely to work with a device from company B. Some vendors have gone out of business, stranding users. Often a device will solve one problem only to create two new problems. I will write about home automation in the coming months, but at the moment, my advice is to steer clear. Wait until the products mature.

Now back to your light switch.

When I was very young, my grandmother fell down the cellar steps because the switch inside the cellar door was in an odd place. Fortunately, she escaped with only a few bruises. It may seem like overkill for some, but I think switch placement is about safety as much as convenience, especially in homes built before modern electrical codes. I had a similar safety issue in my garage, and I solved it with the help of a licensed electrician and a wall switch with a built-in occupancy sensor. These switches sense movement in the room and turn on the power when needed. Better models include two sensors, one for motion and one for ambient light, so the light only turns on when the room is both occupied and dark. In the right situation, sensor switches are a worthwhile investment.

Q. My phones battery no long-er lasts an entire day. The battery seems to go from 20% to empty very quickly. What can I do besides replace the phone?

Try restarting the phone. A simple off-on cycle never hurts and often helps. If the problem remains, the next step is to look for an app that consumes too much power. Newer phones have a Battery Setting screen that lists which apps use the most power. With this information, you may be able to put your phones power consumption on a diet.

When these software fixes do not work, it is time to look at hardware. Is the phone still under warranty? If the phone is old enough to be out of warranty, the battery is probably near the end of its life. Generally when a battery ages, the battery meter becomes less dependable. There are apps that reveal a phones battery cycle count, which is a good indicator to determine if the battery has developed a fault, or has merely been used up .

If you work though the steps above and still do not have enough power, the solution is to add a bigger battery. Mophie (mophie.com) makes a line of Juice Pack phone cases that incorporate a battery. They come in different sizes, everything from small enough to add just a few hours to very large multi-day workhorses. A good battery case will add a few hours of usability each day, and it will add many months to the overall lifetime of the phone itself.

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Tech talk: Voice-command devices, and home automation - The Daily Herald

Now that Andy Puzder, President Donald Trumps nominee for Labor U.S. Secretary of Labor, has withdrawn himself from the nomination process, America may have delayed the creep of automation, but make no mistake: it is definitely still coming.

While I wont be serving in the administration, I fully support the president and his highly qualified team, Puzder said in a statement on Wednesday, announcing he was stepping down amid a flurry of accusations, including that he was an abusive husband.

However, Puzders love of automation is hardly unique among the modern CEO class, and theres no reason to think that the Trump administrations eventual replacement nominee will differ all that much. As has been pointed out, Trumps incessant tweeting about job losses to immigrants has been accompanied by a notable lack of tweets about losses to automation. A writer at the Harvard Business Review recently dug into precisely what the incentives for that might be.

Its also worth pointing out that nobody on the political spectrum is seriously putting forward real anti-automation legislation, like employment quotas or simple restrictions on technology. Even among progressives, the focus is on dealing with automation, not bringing it to a halt. On the podcast Pod Save America, President Obama said that he thinks American legislators probably have to be more creative about anticipating whats coming down the pike. Automation is relentless and its going to accelerate.

Whats different about the Trump-Puzder approach is not acceptance of the inevitability of automation, but the acceptance of all the negative social consequences that may very well come with it.

Up until Wednesday afternoon, this was the mentality that was about to take control of labor policy for the entire country. Theres no reason to think that wont still happen even if people organize against the next nominee as well.

Protests sprang up at fast food locations, and employees of Puzders own companies have expressed opposition to his nomination.

Puzder sees the labor market as a source of burgers and fries thats it. Hes been an outspoken proponent of immigration in the past, an oddity in Trumps White House, because it imports people who will take the low-paying jobs that keep fast food chains in business. He has not displayed any belief that employers are in any way obligated to provide more to an employee than the market is capable of forcing that employer to provide.

To some, his nomination was a sign that the new White House was serious about implementing conservative economic principles, and strengthening the economy by increasing the breadth of opportunity. To others, this view ignores the history of labor law as having grown the economy by increasing the average workers purchasing power.

It also fails to incorporate any conception of a minimum expectation of comfort for Americans who work full time. After all, banning child labor in 1938 also made labor more expensive, and drove employers to hire fewer people but on the upside, all of the people employed from that point forward were adults.

Puzders companies have been linked to a large number of employee complaints, and theres now a lawsuit in the works, brought by a group of fast food employees.

Photos via Getty Images / Justin Sullivan, Getty Images / Jeff Curry

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Puzder's Withdrawal Won't Slow Creeping Automation - Inverse

The American truck driver is soon to be an endangered species. Some 3.5 million professionals get behind the wheel of trucks 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 is seeking volunteers willing to be ferriedaround Londons winding streets with no one at the wheel. MIT researchers recently determined the most efficient wayfor driverless trucks to transport goods something called platooning. The guy behind Googles first self-driving car now runs autonomous trucking startup Ottoin San Francisco.

Truckers may be among the most vulnerable to automation but theyre certainly not alone. Over the past year weve 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 theyre telling of things to come.

Were 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 do, as humans? Augment ourselves.

Augmentation was the running theme of this years 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 wouldnt make a potential employee more competitive in the future job market (except, perhaps, for documentary filmmaker Rob Eyeborg Spences prosthetic eye camera). With this in mind, we explored the ways in which augmentation may safeguard us from automation.

Humans have extraordinary brains the best in the animal kingdom but in AI weve created minds that exceed our own in many ways. Sure, humans still hold the title for outstanding general intelligence, as todays AI systems excel at the specific tasks theyre 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 that he co-founded the billion-dollar nonprofit OpenAI to promote friendly AI in December 2015. Six months later, he told a crowd at theCode Conferencehe wants to develop a digital neural layer colloquially called 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 brains ability to receive, process, and communicate information. Its 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, thats 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 brains input-output capacity was too enticing to overlook.

Were 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.

Musk hasnt 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. Were 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 rsum 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.

As robust as we are in mind, humans are desperately delicate in body. Were 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.

Were fleshy, fragile things, prone to break and tear under pressure.

Like neural lace, these suits arent 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 Ive 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 exoskeletonfor 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 thats 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. Its 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 theyve 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. 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] workers attention and decision making. Theres a lot of unstructured work we cant 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 bodys 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.

Its 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.

Theres 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 doesnt 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.

Despite the progress thats been made in the past few years, superhuman strength and intelligence lie somewhere in the hazy futurescape, inaccessible to most of todays 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.) The authors advice is primarily meant for knowledge workers, however, 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 dont think its 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 dont 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 its going to be a very difficult time for all human workers, Davenport said. Im optimistic that many of them will make the transition but not all of them will. Im 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. Thats what a lot of my writing has been about roles that knowledge workers can play that either involve working alongside smart machines or doing something they dont.

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.

Theres another evolution of AI though, the kind that keeps Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking up at night: artificial general intelligence, which can basically do anything a human can intellectually.

What happens when these arise?

All bets are off, Davenport said.

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Can Augmentation Save Workers from Job Automation? | Digital ... - Digital Trends

Can automation work without good data supporting it? The simple answer is very likely to be no. Naturally, the next question would be: Why?

To understand this, we must first consider the impacts that goodand baddata can have on automation.

What is automation?

Automation can come in many forms, but essentially it is taking something that is run manually (by a person) and developing a machine or program to run that process automatically. This is quite a complex achievement when you consider all the potential variables that need to be managed by the automated process (AP). Designers of the AP need a very detailed understanding of the physical parameters, mechanical parameters and quality parameters to properly deliver automation.

Some aspects of automation are quite easy to envisage like car production automation where we often see images and videos of cars on the production line being constructed automatically by an army of robot arms. Other areas, such as the monitoring of quality and outcomes, are not so readily seen, even though they are there in the background. The computer systems that power an AP are not just there to direct the robots they are very often changing the way the AP runs making subtle changes based on tolerance test outcomes.

When does data matter?

Analytical results and tolerance test outcomes are an area where data quality and management is critical. The AP will be required to deliver a product to a given specification, within certain tolerances. For example, in drug production, every pill has a concentration of drug product within 0.01% of target or every pill is within a certain range of size. These critical variables form the basis of success criteria and therefore product acceptance.

If the variables are not measured, stored and analysed correctly, then the AP will not deliver meaning the product could have issues. Measuring variables is quite a simple process, but how accurate, precise and true the measures are, is very important. Each variable is slightly different, but you need to know these differences exist so that product quality can be assessed. And, since trueness is a derivative of other measures, it must be calculated and this is where the quality of the data is critical.

If the format and scale of the variable measured are not captured, you can expect complications. For example, if I collect data on a pill size, but I dont note the scale, 5.567 could mean 5.567mm or cm or m. If the scale in this example is not captured correctly, it risks not being readable by a human or a computer.

This ambiguity introduces risk into the data process youre likely to be either guessing or estimating the meaning of something, not using its real meaning. This also introduces risk into your decision making processes, which could lead to the release of defective products. In pharmaceuticals, this could mean including the wrong concentration of an active ingredient in a drug product, which would have serious repercussions.

Every measure of a variable needs to have the value, known significant figures, scale, time and date of collection, in a computer readable format, as a bare minimum. This enables calculations to be conducted and the values obtained to be used for decision-making.

Without this minimal information, decisions made about the data might be incorrect and the decisions become even trickier to automate. The goal of an AP is that all aspects are automatedthe elimination of human intervention. The systems need to be able to make their own decisions.

Take the example of the pill case. If a pill is too big, it gets removed from the process. Sometimes, this is as simple as letting the correct size pills fall through a hole which is too small for the larger pills. But in other processes, the analysis and decisions cannot be conducted using physical sorting. Here, the results of the variable test are critical and need to be captured, stored and time stamped as described above.

The format and context of results, including significant figures and units, is as critical as the data that is used in aggregate calculations to establish other parameters like trending mean, precision and accuracy. Without this information, calculations can, and do, go wrong.

For any automation to be successful, there needs to be high-quality data for it to run on. Without good quality data management this critical aspect can give rise to risk and errors in the process precisely the element that the automation process is intended to remove or significantly reduce.

Bad data and poor data management rigour introduces unwanted risk in automation and should be avoided at all costs. Management of the process data underpins many aspects of quality and product-based decisions, so the importance and subtleties should be considered when designing new automation processes or updating the old. Some types of automation, like pill size, can exist without data centred decisions. But those that rely on other variables, such as those intrinsic to the product composition, must be managed with good data. Without it, automation will just speed up the production of an unwanted product wasting time, money and resources.

Paul Denny-Gouldson heads the overall strategic planning for the various market verticals and scientific domains at IDBS. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Essex University in 1996, and has authored more than25 scientific papers and book chapters.

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The Impact of Bad Data in Automation: Why Quality Management is Critical - R & D Magazine