Robopocalypse Report #11

This time we have a droneless report!  Woo!  A first!  So we'll start with the next most photogenic of the Robopocalypse: the self driving car.

CNET runs an article about how the self driving car is driving innovation in computer objection recognition.

Future producer of self driving cars (well, almost there for highway driving now) Tesla had its Model S hacked.  This required physical access to the car unlike the other car hacks recently.  However, this is my greatest concern with the self driving car.  I would love to use it as a way to pick up my kids and drop them off for lessons and whatnot.  I cannot, not just because of the foreseeable requirement to have an adult 'driving' because I can all too easily see a hacker-kidnapper taking control of the car to deliver the kids inside wherever rather than to where they were supposed to go.

Would be self driving taxi car company Uber is apparently bleeding out money rather quickly and if reports are true, you have to wonder if they are going to survive long enough to field their fleet for the robopocalypse.

Moving away from the self driving car, MIT is working on improving the teleoperation of robots.  In some ways this is not new technology: it was even used for the Johnny 5 robot in Short Circuit 2.  However, I can only imagine with modern computers its far, far better.

There have been increasing calls to ban autonomous weapons.  Everyone is invoking the Terminator for this.  Others have started calling them weapons of mass destruction in their calls for a ban.  I had an essay I was working on about the overuse of the term 'mass extinction' on an old computer, but the computer was lost and I didn't have a backup.  It seems WMD is hitting that level, too.  OTOH, autonomous weapons?  What are we talking here?  The mythical forever flying machines with solar powered lasers?  Or a mine?  Anything which requires human permission before firing?  Or a 5th generation atlas with an AK?  The definition above is really, really broad and will never make it into reality based on what is being proposed here.  

The Japanese have their robo hotel with the really odd kiosks for checking in.  The brits have taken their own version of the hotel of the robopocalypse.  Here's a review of the "Hub by Premier Inn."

And to round out the Robopocalypse Report #11, IBM has purchased Merge Healthcare, a medical imagery company, for use with its Watson AI system for a cool BILLION dollars.  Watson is either going to make IBM incredibly wealthy or crash the company.  Is this IBM's 747 moment?