(Natural News) Jobs in the hospitality industry will be the hardest hit as businesses increasingly turn to automation in the face of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The prediction came from a study by the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Researchers from the London-based think tank found that the ongoing pandemic is increasing […]

(Natural News) Artificial intelligence, or AI, has recently taken the labor market by storm. It’s cost-efficient and effective at jobs previously held by humans, such as customer service. But it has yet to earn customer trust, suggests a study published in the journal Marketing Science. Researchers from the U.S. and China examined the responses of customers when faced with AI-controlled […]

(Natural News) Bicycle riders may soon find themselves sharing bike lanes with autonomous delivery robots. Robotic delivery startup Refraction AI recently revealed plans for a lightweight delivery robot that can use bicycle lanes. The company, a brainchild of University of Michigan professors Ram Vasudevan and Matthew Johnson-Roberson, is pitching its five-foot-tall REV-1 as a lightweight, low-cost, autonomous delivery […]

(Natural News) E-commerce monolith Amazon is planning to eliminate all human workers at its Whole Foods Market stores across the country. The Jeff Bezos plan is to replace all human resources with robots as part of a massive technological overhaul of the standard shopping format. Instead of actual human cashiers, for instance, shoppers at Whole […]

(Natural News) No one wants to think about losing a job, especially if you’re supporting a family. But interesting research has revealed what people think about their coworkers getting replaced or losing their own jobs to robots. In a paper published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, scientists from the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Erasmus University […]

(Natural News) Just in time for the global enforcement of so-called “social distancing,” engineering and robotics firm Boston Dynamics has unveiled a new robot “dog” that it says can herd sheep without the need for an actual human shepherd. Known as “Spot,” the yellow and black tech marvel can traverse pastures and herd sheep remotely […]

(Natural News) A recent breakthrough in engineering and robotics just might blur the line between man and machine. Researchers from Linköping University in Sweden have successfully developed and created artificial muscles that run on glucose and oxygen — just like their organic counterparts. According to the researchers, they wanted to develop artificial muscles, which, instead of […]

(Natural News) Three different – and independent – groups of researchers have designed extremely powerful artificial muscles. They claim that the muscles can lift 1,000 times their own weight. The synthetic muscles are designed around either coiled or coiling fibers that can, much like natural muscles, stretch and contract. These artificial muscles could be used […]

(Natural News) The military could deploy autonomous “corona-killing” robots that use ultraviolet (UV) light to disinfect closed spaces. The four-wheeled robots are said to be able to perform tasks in a matter of hours that would take human workers days to complete. Turning robot targets into virus killers To develop the disinfecting robots, a company called Marathon […]

(Natural News) As healthcare and emergency personnel work to stop the spread of the coronavirus, they also put themselves at risk of catching the disease themselves. Now, scientists are arguing that robots could be used to do some of the “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs that these people currently have to do, helping reduce the risks that […]