Automation is changing the face of nearly every industry in the world, but the construction industry may lead the way for robots.
The Associated Press reports on the intersection between tech and construction, with new startups unleashing a wave of innovation in robots, drones, and software. A big part of the reason is that construction companies can’t find workers. But robots don’t mind getting dirty.
“To get qualified people to handle a loader or a haul truck or even run a plant, they’re hard to find right now,” mining plant manager Mike Moy told the AP. “Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore. They want a nice, clean job in an office.”
Employees at a masonry company in Colorado recently learned how to operate a bricklaying robot named SAM, short for Semi-Automated Mason. SAM can lay 3,000 bricks in an eight-hour shift using a conveyer belt and robotic arm. Rather than fearing job loss, however, the workers welcome the opportunity to automate some of their more mundane tasks.
“There are lots of things that SAM isn’t capable of doing that you need skilled bricklayers to do,” said Brian Kennedy of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. “We support anything that supports the masonry industry. We don’t stand in the way of technology.”
Built Robotics is a startup from Noah Ready-Campbell, a former Google engineer and son of a construction worker, who’s designing self-operating excavators, backhoes, and other construction vehicles. “The idea behind Built Robotics is to use automation technology make construction safer, faster, and cheaper,” he said. “The robots basically do the 80 percent of the work, which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous. And then the operator does the more skilled work, where you really need a lot of finesse and experience.”
Other machines are being used to analyze and report on the work itself. Doxel is a roving robot that’s used to monitor whether construction projects are proceeding according to schedule, keeping projects within budget. By tracking and analyzing activity at an often-chaotic job site, Doxel can track progress and identify potential problems before they arise.
Drones are another tool developers can use to simplify time-intensive tasks. For example, a drone from a company named Kespry uses 3-D mapping to survey and quantify huge piles of rock and sand across a huge site measuring dozens of acres in less than two hours. A contractor with a truck-mounted laser would take a full day for the same task.
“Not only is it safer and faster, but you get more data, as much as ten to a hundred times more data,” said Kespry CEO George Mathew. “This becomes a complete game changer for a lot of the industrial work that’s being accomplished today.”
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.