Previously immune to the threat of techno-replacement (unless you want to count robot pets like Sony’s Aibo), sheepdogs in New Zealand are currently facing competition from the encroaching wave of automation, courtesy of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot.
A new video shows Spot carrying out a variety of assistive agricultural tasks, including inspecting crops and, yes, herding sheep.
While it’s unlikely a real-life sheepdog has much to fear from Boston Dynamics’ bounding machine, it’s a pretty impressive demonstration for the canine-inspired robot, which finally went on sale last year after years of research and development in the lab.
In the video released May 19, Spot is shown navigating rugged environments to capture real-time data. This information can then be fed back to those who require it.
A press release issued by Boston Dynamics and robot operations software platform Rocos describes how this could be useful in scenarios such as helping farmers to “access information such as more accurate and up-to-date yield estimates.”
“The age of autonomous robots is upon us,” Rocos CEO David Inggs said in a statement. “We’re working with organizations like Boston Dynamics to help accelerate the adoption of robotics. By connecting robots to the cloud, we can help them combine a cloud software layer with robotics to achieve physical automation at scale. Our customers are augmenting their human workforces to automate physical processes that are often dull, dirty, or dangerous.”
Boston Dynamics isn’t the only company to have canine robots out working in the real world. ANYbotics, the Swiss robotics company that makes the four-legged ANYmal robot, has already started using the robots for carrying out tasks such as inspections on oil rigs.
Ultimately, this is where the value of these robots is going to be seen. No, farmers aren’t necessarily going to do away with centuries of tradition by replacing sheepdogs with robots. But being able to demonstrate genuinely helpful applications and tasks is what is going to make the business case for robots such as Spot and ANYmal. If they really can prove their worth in this way, that’s something far more valuable than just another fun viral video that shows off these robots’ impressive dance moves in the lab.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.