The best of both worlds: How to solve real problems on modern quantum computers

Firms such as Serco and Virgin Active pull facial recognition and fingerprint scan systems used to monitor staff attendanceDozens of companies including national leisure centre chains are reviewing or pulling facial recognition technology and fingerprint scanning used to monitor staff attendance after a clampdown by the UK’s data watchdog.In February, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered a Serco subsidiary to stop using biometrics to monitor the attendance of staff at

If the experience of robot-served fast food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasantOn 1 April, the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff.CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A s

No one should be surprised that artificial intelligence is following a well-worn and entirely predictable financial arc “Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we know?” Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia, which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages – rather as Elisabeth

Scientists say an overreliance on sight and sound is having a detrimental effect on people’s wellbeing and that our devices should deliver a multisensory experience“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” So went the first line of audible dialogue in a feature film, 1927’s The Jazz Singer. It was one of the first times that mass media had conveyed the sight and sound of a scene together, and the audience was enthralled.There have been improvement

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANYAUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGOEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 J

Plug in some prompts and the ‘ChatGPT for music’ whips up a song in seconds – if you don’t mind slightly silly lyricsHeralded as the ChatGPT for music, Suno AI is the latest iteration of generative artificial intelligence to flood social feeds, wowing users with its (ahem) lyrical prowess.Plug in the musical style you want, a genre and a prompt for lyrics and Suno can spit out a full song for you in a matter of seconds.Coffee, you’re my fuel for the soul (oh-oh)
Wit

We tend to think about hopping robots from the ground up. That is, they start on the ground, and then, by hopping, incorporate a aerial phase into their locomotion. But there’s no reason why aerial robots can’t approach hopping from the other direction, by adding a hopping ground phase to flight. Hopcopter is the first robot that I’ve ever seen give this a try, and it’s remarkably effective, combining a tiny quadrotor with a springy leg to hop hop hop all over the place.S

Last December, the AI Institute announced that it was opening an office in Zurich as a European counterpart to its Boston headquarters and recruited Marco Hutter to helm the office. Hutter also runs the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, arguably best known as the origin of the ANYmal quadruped robot (but it also does tons of other cool stuff).We’re doing our best to keep close tabs on the institute, because it’s one of a vanishingly small number of places that currently exist where

Last December, the AI Institute announced that it was opening an office in Zurich as a European counterpart to its Boston headquarters, and recruited Marco Hutter to helm the office. Hutter also runs the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, arguably best known as the origin of the ANYmal quadruped robot (but they also do tons of other cool stuff).We’re doing our best to keep close tabs on the institute, because it’s one of a vanishingly small number of places that currently exist where

Concentration of power among just six big tech companies ‘could lead to winner takes all dynamics’Just six major technology companies are at the heart of the AI sector through an “interconnected web” of more than 90 investments and partnerships links, the UK’s competition regulator has warned, sparking increased concern about the anti-competitive nature of the technology.Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said AI foundation mode

Video of official from Unit 8200 in February 2023 raises questions about Israel’s denials of use of AI in GazaA video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel’s cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine learning “magic powder” to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza.The footage raises questions about the accuracy of a recent statement about use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which said it &ldqu

AI to be used by researchers to scour documents for information on women omitted from chronicles written by men about menFour centuries ago Dublin had an official city “scavenger” who was tasked with running sanitation teams to clear streets of human and animal waste. In return, the scavenger earned tolls from shopkeepers and traders.It could have worked well, except the contractor decided to cut costs and maximise profits by deploying just two carts rather than six. Dung piled up an

Project will analyse multitude of documents to uncover female Irish experiences from 1500 to 1700Four centuries ago Dublin had an official city “scavenger” who was tasked with running sanitation teams to clear streets of human and animal waste. In return, the scavenger earned tolls from shopkeepers and traders.It could have worked well except the contractor decided to cut costs and maximise profits by deploying just two carts rather than six. Dung piled up and the city stank. This up

This is how these bosses get rich: by hiding underpaid, unrecognised human work behind the trappings of technologyIn 2021, when Amazon launched its first “just walk out” grocery store in the UK in Ealing, west London, this newspaper reported on the cutting-edge technologies that Amazon said made it all possible: facial-recognition cameras, sensors on the shelves and, of course, “artificial intelligence”. The first customers queued outside, excited to experience the future

Consumers Health Forum calls on Australian government to address ‘significant safety concerns’ about prescribing without any conversation with patientGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastAustralia’s health regulator is fielding complaints about the use of artificial intelligence during telehealth prescribing, and patients being issued with prescriptions without ever speaking with a doctor.A spokesperson for the Australian Health Practitioner

Rapid and resourceful technological improvisation has long been a mainstay of warfare, but the war in Ukraine is taking it to a new level. This improvisation is most conspicuous in the ceaselessly evolving struggle between weaponized drones and electronic warfare, a cornerstone of this war.Weaponized civilian first-person-view (FPV) drones began dramatically reshaping the landscape of the war in the summer of 2023. Prior to this revolution, various commercial drones played critical roles, primar

Launches within 12 hours of each other, and more activity expected in industry over summerOpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of each other, as the industry gears up for a burst of activity over the summer.The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI’s hit chatbot Chat-GPT.

Adam Schiff introduces bill amid growing legal battle over whether major AI companies have made illegal use of copyrighted worksA bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force artificial intelligence companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train thei

Major elections around the world so far this year have not suffered from systematic malicious interference, says global affairs chiefGenerative AI is overblown as an election risk, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg, who claims the technology is more useful for defending democracy than attacking it.Speaking at the Meta AI Day event in London on Tuesday, the social network’s global affairs chief said that the evidence from major elections that have already been run this year around the wo

Audio shared with the New York Times appears to record executives discussing purchase of the US books giant to feed into its large language modelsStaff at technology company Meta discussed buying publishing house Simon & Schuster last year in order to procure books to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools, it has been reported.According to recordings of internal meetings shared with the New York Times, managers, lawyers and engineers at Meta met on a near-daily basis betwee

His claims come with a caveat that shortages of training chips and growing demand for power could limit tech evolutionSuperhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector’s power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas “superhuman” is generally defi

IDF cyber-intelligence chief Yossi Sariel exposed online by social media activity and accidental government leakThe commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, is facing fresh embarrassment after it emerged that an extensive digital trail identifying him as a senior intelligence official has been exposed online for years.The Guardian revealed on Friday how Yossi Sariel, whose name had been protected by the Israeli state, inadvertently disclosed his identity online in a s