I'd love to have a robot butler. Previous attempts have been hilariously unsuccessful – so i'm not holding my breath – but the goal is certainly worth chasing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-23/amazon-is-said-to-be-working-on-another-big-bet-home-robots Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out…

Find yourself snowed under with no time to come up with your next big idea? Most of us come back from holidays refreshed and with new goals and objectives – but how do we achieve that level of innovative ideation on a more regular basis? Make time – two hours a week, locked away from…

“AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said at Davos said. “Any time you work with technology, you need to learn to harness the benefits while minimising the downsides.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/google-ceo-ai-will-be-bigger-than-electricity-or-fire The technology could eliminate…

As more and more services compete for valuable kerb space (deliveries, ride shares, taxis, emergency vehicles), having a common framework, platform, and language to share valuable data on utilisation and timings can help city planners optimise rules and maximise value, ensuring they do this without compromising customer confidentiality (does the city need to know who…

A fascinating insight – what traces would be left of a civilisation which died out 4 million years ago? Certainly nothing on the surface (the oldest is only 1.8m years), and fossils are incredibly rare (only a few thousand dinosaur fossils exist despite their 180m year existence) – but what about chemical traces? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=technology_review&utm_source=facebook.com…

Assembling an Ikea chair in 20 minutes, rather than the 5 that a person takes, doesn’t seem like much of an advance. But while computers excel at trigonometry and logic games like chess, evolution’s billion year head start on interacting with the physical environment means that advances like this are drawing us (very) slowly closer…

Apple’s new robot, Daisy (an upgraded version of a robot announced in 2016), can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour, sorting the parts for reuse and recycling, extracting parts which traditional recyclers are unable to safely or cost effectively remove. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/apple-earth-day-daisy-iphone-recycling-a8312951.html Apple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones…

The move to paperless movement of goods in these extraordinarily complex logistics chains has the potential to unlock massive benefits, reducing the cost of movements, by shortening the time it takes for goods to cross checkpoints and borders – an example 32 day journey of perishable goods could be completed in 20. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/drowning-in-a-sea-of-paper-world-s-biggest-ships-seek-a-way-out Globalization has…

I have no idea about the game that the author is engineering manager for, but this is a good write up of a framework for assessing technical debt, including the value of resolving it now vs later (never) https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt Bill Clark discusses classifying and managing tech debt at Riot.

While I’m sure that eventually, the process could have been automated, anyone who’s tried this even at a trivial scale would tell you to get the process working first, then to automate. So I don’t get how Tesla ended up in this position. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips-his-tesla-cap-to-humans-after-robots-undercut-model-3 Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who’s built up an aura around how…