Artificial Intelligence-Driven Robots: Moving Right Along, Literally

Ten of them in nine weeks, all provided by Fox News or Fox Business, and most by one of their leading technology writers.  Which ones do you like?

First, “AI robot changes your tires and balances them, too” (Kurt Knutsson, News, May 12^th).  The company Automated Tire, Inc. “has unveiled SmartBay, an AI-powered robotic tire change platform built for dealerships, tire shops and service centers.  The system handles tire changes, wheel balancing and vehicle inspections with minimal human intervention,” all that while leaving “the wheel on the car.”  These devices seem to be available now.

Next, “Rideable robot looks ready to stomp all over us” (Kurt Knutsson, News, May 19^th).  This one, from Unitree, costs $574,000, and “can carry a passenger, smash bricks and shift into a four-legged form.”  It looks like a real-life GoBot, and its “most likely uses seem to be entertainment, exhibitions, research, security demos or specialized industrial testing.”  You can probably buy one now - if you want to.

More practically, “AI robotic beehives installed in Florida community claim 70% reduction in colony collapse threatening crops” (Brittany Miller, News, May 21^st).  They are called BeeHome systems and are made by Beewise (note how these robot manufacturers are specializing around their offerings).  The product, now in use in Land O’ Lakes, “uses robotics, sensors and artificial intelligence to monitor hive health and protect colonies from environmental threats,” and “arrives as bee populations across the United States continue facing pressure from parasites, pesticides, disease and extreme weather conditions.”

Fourth, an improvement in an area getting automaton attention for not only years but decades: “Humanoid robots work nonstop in package test” (Kurt Knutsson, News, May 24^th).  This time, three of them, made by Figure AI and using its “in-house AI system” “without human control,” “crossed more than 24 hours of continuous autonomous operation after a test that was supposed to last only eight hours kept running.”  So, “if robots can keep working through long shifts, what happens to people who do this work today?”  Although “businesses… will want to know how often the robots fail, how much maintenance they need and whether they can handle messy conditions without slowing down the whole operation,” per Knutsson “if companies can make these robots reliable, safe and affordable, the warehouse floor could look very different in the years ahead.”

We used to hear how automata could not make up hotel rooms, which made it news when “Humanoid robot cleans first US apartment” (Kurt Knutsson, News, May 31^st).  This service, offered now by Gatsby only in San Francisco, costs $150 and involves one of them arriving as prescheduled “to clean your apartment,” including “dishes, surfaces, floors, making the bed and folding laundry.”  Although “routine work is autonomous,” and no person arrives with the robot, “harder tasks can be handled through remote human teleoperation.”  This service needs a longer success record, but as with the others here, the proof of concept has been completed.

Sixth, two other companies have made progress on a situation above, as “Warehouse robots move packages without human handoff” (Knutsson again, News, June 30^th).  The firms, Ambi Robotics and Pickle Robot Company (so much for focused names), have “announced a commercial integration that connects Pickle Robot’s trailer-unloading robots with Ambi Robotic’s AmbiStack pallet-building system.”  The author especially liked the handoff ability, something which is still almost always left to humans; that capability may often turn out to make the difference between worthwhile and doubtful automation.

Next, “Zoox robotaxi redesign brings big rider upgrades” (Knutsson, News, July 3^rd).  That “company has updated its custom-built electric robotaxi with new comfort and usability upgrades”; it “added more padding and ergonomic curves to the seats and headrests,” for comfort, and “updated the color, materials and finish,” which they maintain will make it seem “a calmer cabin.”  These are available in San Francisco and Las Vegas, with Miami and Austin “listed as “Now Arriving” on its ride pages.”  Zoox has a track record of success, and these improvements have no real chance of damaging that.

Eighth, “Starship delivery robots leave campuses for cities” (Knutsson, News, July 6^th).  Remember “those little white robots that once rolled across college sidewalks with lattes, fries and late-night snacks”?  They are “getting a new assignment,” as Starship “will wind down its U.S. university campus operations and redeploy more than 1,200 robots toward grocery chains and hot food delivery in cities across the United States and Europe.”  The choice to remove them was a matter of “focus,” and will not take effect until next year.  The move to city sidewalks is challenging, and may take a long time.

Next, “Hyundai Motor brings Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot to FIFA World Cup in groundbreaking activation” (Scott Thompson, Business, July 6^th).  “A special guest delivered the match ball to the head referee on the pitch” before a game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and you can probably guess who - or, rather what - that guest was.  Its product name was Atlas, “an advanced humanoid robot” that also “performed” for spectators in other ways, so Hyundai, per a top manager, could “demonstrate that the future isn’t something we imagine - it starts now.”  The article had no mention of malfunctions, which, despite the lack of practicality, was excellent for the company.

Last, “Humanoid robots perform live surgery in world first” (Jesse Watson, News, July 14^th).  “Surgeons remotely guided” two robots, which “copied the surgeons’ movements rather than making medical decisions” “through two gall bladder removal procedures” on pigs.  The test “marked the first time teleoperated humanoid robots,” as opposed to “surgical robots” which have been used before, “successfully completed live gallbladder surgeries.”  Another step.

All these developments are favorable, and point out how robots, especially in human form, are a fast-moving, effective area of artificial intelligence.  There will be many, many more, and most of these here will propagate, some dramatically.  That, without any real doubt, will be extremely positive.

Artificial Intelligence on the Job - What’s Happening?

Although AI has not clearly been eliminating jobs, a lot has been going on with it at work.

Its effect on the up-and-down popularity of working from home hasn’t been moving in the direction many would expect, as “Return to office gaining momentum as AI reshapes corporate strategy” (Arabelle Bennett, Fox Business, November 2nd).  Per Newmark, “a global commercial real estate advisory firm that counsels Fortune 500 occupiers and major landlords on leasing, strategy and transactions,” “artificial intelligence is driving a surprising surge in office demand.”  That company’s president says these companies are “making bold moves” to “re-skill” employees “and have them retrained in artificial intelligence.”

Speaking of up and down, we next got “More!  More!  More!  Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use” (Kevin Roose, The New York Times, March 20th).  As “at tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t.”  “An engineer at Open AI processed 210 billion “tokens” - enough text to fill Wikipedia 33 times - through the company’s artificial intelligence models over the last week,” and “at Anthropic, a single user of the company’s A.I. coding system, Claude Code, racked up a bill of more than $150,000 in a month.”  “Some tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI” had “internal leaderboards that show how many tokens… each worker consumes,” and on which “employees compete(d).”  The logical worker response is for them to use AI nonconstructively, which would put an end to this rather shortsighted practice.  Indeed, on June 18th, less than three months later, the Times printed Eli Tan’s “Tech Workers Maxed Out Their A.I. Use.  Now They’re Trying to Minimize It.”; the change came from “the bills from companies, like Anthropic and OpenAI, that provide A.I. tools - and they were not cheap.”  Going from almost mandating it to putting “some monthly limits on A.I. coding tools” - was that embarrassing, or just the cost of learning?

In what might be another natural outcome of such maxing out, “Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable” (Kalley Huang, Eli Tan and Kate Conger, The New York Times again, May 8th).  In order for that organization’s management officially “to capture employee data so Meta’s artificial intelligence models could learn “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers,”” it gathered “what employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen”; as a result, “many workers immediately revolted” and “blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous.”  In conjunction with substantial announced upcoming layoffs, many workers there were showing “anger and anxiety.”

Specifically, “What Are A.I. Agents Actually Doing?” (Cade Metz, The New York Times, June 4th).  “A San Francisco start-up called Arena, which tracks hundreds of thousands of artificial intelligence users, is trying to take some of the mystery out of what” tasks it is performing.  It found that 17% in “agent mode” were “code-writing,” 10% were for “research,” and almost as many were for making images, creating “documents like graphs and spreadsheets,” and to “brainstorm ideas.”  Significant shares also were spent on “creative writing or tutoring and education,” along with “code debugging” and “chatting.”  A wide variety.

Yes, it seems clear that “We’re Only Starting to Grasp the Pitfalls of Using A.I. at Work” (Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, June 29th).  Although “at a conference where two human resources executives said that treating A.I. agents like real employees was a way to increase productivity and to put their companies on the cutting edge,” “in an experiment involving dozens of companies with A.I. employees, the researchers found that managers tended to vet documents less carefully when told an A.I. employee had produced them,” and they “missed errors that other managers caught when told they were vetting the work of a human.”  As AI models “tend to favor work produced by artificial intelligence” causing a “potentially consequential form of implicit ‘anti-human’ bias,” and AI models do not often “cooperate and seek win-win outcomes” as people do, we can question whether businesses are using too much AI.  

Should companies slow down?  That would be hard for many to do, but it might be the best choice.  As these stories show, the race, even when it is about implementing artificial intelligence, is not always to the swift.

June Jobs Report Slightly Warm, with AJSN Showing Latent Demand Up Seasonally to 17.5 Million

If you were looking for an exciting Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary this morning, you didn’t get one.  So I will parse what we got for you. 

Instead of double the predicted number of net new nonfarm payroll positions, we got half, 57,000 instead of a published 110,000 estimate.  Otherwise, most of the numbers were not disappointing.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment lost 0.1% to reach 4.2%, and the unadjusted variety stayed at 4.4%.  Measured adjustedly, the number of unemployed fell 200,000 to 7.1 million.  There were 100,000 fewer long-term jobless, out for 27 weeks or longer.  Those working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping such positions while looking unsuccessfully for full-time ones, also lost 100,000, to 4.7 million.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll wages rose 11 cents, again close to inflation, to $37.64.  Two outcomes worsening were the two showing Americans’ connection to work, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, off 0.3% to 61.5% and down 0.2% to 59.0% respectively. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, which shows how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew they would be easy and routine to get, gained 310,000 to the following:

 

The largest shifts came from the count of those officially jobless, pushing the AJSN up 515,000, and those wanting work but not looking for it for the past year, moving it down 239,000 - no others were more than 55,000 either way.  Of the AJSN, 38.5% was from those employed, up 2.3% from last month.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN was almost unchanged, losing 52,000, with its largest input differences from those discouraged, down 139,000, and those saying they did not want a job, up 136,000. 

How, overall, did we do?  When taking the outcomes above, that those not in the labor force decreased almost 300,000, and remembering that fewer people work in June than in May, we did well.  It wasn’t huge, but it was positive and broad-based.  We cannot get discouraged about missing projections, as those do not affect anything except our perceptions.  The turtle took a small step forward.