Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 11, 2019
An emotion-sensing robot arrives on the International Space Station; A researcher expects AI to trigger major job losses in the financial sector; An exosuit that makes it easy to lift heavy weights; An explanation for off-shore holes in the Pacific Ocean floor; and a Steem essay describing how to calculate the moment of a force couple system
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- Emotion-sensing robot launches to assist space station astronauts - Partly inspired by a 1940s era sci-fi comic strip, the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion 2 (CIMON 2) robot headed for the International Space Station (ISS) on board SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket last week. The spherical, English-speaking robot is loaded with algorithms from IBM that help it to detect emotions in human speech. The robot is also trained to act as an objective listener and thereby help humans avoid group-think, and the irrational choices that sometimes accompany it during times of stress. A previous version, CIMON 1, was on the ISS since 2018. h/t Communications of the ACM
- The 2020s could be an apocalyptic decade for Wall Street as artificial intelligence takes over the most popular jobs in finance - According to Cornell's Marcos Lopez de Prado, algorithms that build portfolios and model prices could eliminate as many as 6 million high paying jobs in the finance industry. This aligns with recent studies by IHS Markit and the Brookings Institute. IHS Markit, for example, predicted the loss of 1.3 million finance jobs by 2030, and the Brookings Institution study expects white collar workers to be impacted by AI more than blue collar. (The Brookings study was previously covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 25, 2019.) As-of now, jobs in the finance sector are among the most sought by job-seekers, but banks have already begun the process of rolling out automation and artificial intelligence (AI), and the article notes that workers are not being trained to work alongside of these AI platforms.
- Sarcos Demonstrates Powered Exosuit That Gives Workers Super Strength - This article describes an exosuit by Sarcos Robotics that offers an effortless way for humans to lift weights up to 200 pounds. The IEEE Spectrum auhtor was able to make use of a robotic arm, and to observe a Sarcos operator making use of a prototype suit. The device has sensors that track the human movements, and cause the exosuit to make the exact same movements, with no discernible lag. While it could make any objects feel like zero pounds, it generally lets the wearer feel some resistance for a more natural-seeming experience, and to properly deal with inertia. The amount of resistance that the operator feels is adjustable, through a control on the arm. In order to protect safety, motion is speed-limited, and the exoskeleton will only move if the operator is squeezing triggers in the arm. If the operator releases the triggers, the device locks frozen in place. Creating the device was a 30-year, 30 million dollar project, and commercial versions are expected to ship during late 2020.
Here is a video from the article
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I find the exoskeleton very interesting, as I suspect most of us do. As a kid of 17 I had a job at a seafood processor in Alaska. Halibut come in a range of sizes, are beheaded, the guts scooped out, and then are slid into a shallow pool of water on a specially designed steel tabled surrounded by women with blunt knives - the slime table.
Like slugs, halibut produce copious slime, which the women scraped off with the blades. When they were done, the halibut were transferred to freezer racks, and this is where I came in. My job was to move the 200+ lb. halibut from the pool on the waist high table onto racks ~30 feet away, which were then moved by forklift into blast freezers.
There are only two things you can grab on a headless halibut: the narrowest part of the tail, which on a large halibut is too large to grasp with your hand, but can be cradled in the crook of your arm, and reaching down inside the gut cavity is a small bone that can be pinched between thumb and forefinger, and that enables the weight of the fish to rest on your forearm rather than sliding off if you pinch firmly enough.
This was a difficult job, because halibut can weigh a great deal more than 200 lbs. Twice that without exaggeration. The exoskeleton could not do it, because it cannot be used to rest weight on your forearm, nor has a gripper that could pinch the bone at the base of the halibut's empty gut cavity. Resolving those lacks is not as simple as it sounds, as halibut are a premium product that need to be handled very gently to prevent damaging the meat.
I am reminded of The Ballad of John Henry.
Thanks!
I agree. The exosuit is very interesting. It looks like it would be fun to try, but probably only usable in rigidly controlled situations at first. Since it's limited to 200 pounds, it sounds like it wouldn't be suited for halibut, even if it weren't for the handling challenges.
That's also interesting about the slime. I had no idea that halibut produced slime like that.
Imagine a 300 lb. headless, flat slug. Grab it and stagger over to the freezer racks, to slide it onto a tray. Then imagine stumbling, and dropping the limp, slimy, tapered corpse onto the wet concrete floor. Then envision trying to somehow peel it off the floor, flopping, limp, slippery and slimy, ~six feet long, a foot thick, and a yard wide, weighing 300 lb.s, and stuck to the floor by suction.
That job sucked LOL.
#posh share, here.
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