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You may have already seen them in restaurants: waist-high machines that can greet guests, lead them to their tables, deliver food and drinks and ferry dirty dishes to the kitchen. Some have cat-like faces and even purr when you scratch their heads. But are robot waiters the future? It's a question the restaurant industry is increasingly trying to answer. Many think robot waiters are the solution to the industry's labor shortages. Sales of them have been growing rapidly in recent years, with tens of thousands now gliding through dining rooms worldwide. "There's no doubt in my mind that this is where the world is going," said Dennis Reynolds, dean of the Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership at the University of Houston. The school's restaurant began using a robot in December, and Reynolds says it has eased the workload for human staff and made service more efficient. But others say robot waiters aren't much more than a gimmick that have a long way to go before they can replace humans. They can't take orders, and many restaurants have steps, outdoor patios and other physical challenges they can't adapt to. "Restaurants are pretty chaotic places, so it's very hard to insert automation in a way that is really productive," said Craig Le Clair, a vice president with the consulting company Forrester who studies automation. Still, the robots are proliferating. Redwood City, California-based Bear Robotics introduced its Servi robot in 2021 and expects to have 10,000 deployed by the end of this year in 44 U.S. states and overseas. Shenzen, China-based Pudu Robotics, which was founded in 2016, has deployed more than 56,000 robots worldwide. "Every restaurant chain is looking toward as much automation as possible," said Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin-based maker of robot servers. "People are going to see these everywhere in the next year or two." Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his Madison Heights, Michigan, restaurant, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics. The robot was so successful he added two more; now, one robot leads diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees pile dirty dishes onto a third robot to shuttle back to the kitchen. Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save him money. A robot costs around $15,000, he said, but a person costs $5,000 to $6,000 per month. Zhai said the robots give human servers more time to mingle with customers, which increases tips. And customers often post videos of the robots on social media that entice others to visit. "Besides saving labor, the robots generate business," he said. Interactions with human servers can vary. Betzy Giron Reynosa, who works with a BellaBot at The Sushi Factory in West Melbourne, Florida, said the robot can be a pain. "You can't really tell it to move or anything," she said. She has also had customers who don't want to interact with it. But overall the robot is a plus, she said. It saves her trips back and forth to the kitchen and gives her more time with customers. Labor shortages accelerated the adoption of robots globally, Le Clair said. In the U.S., the restaurant industry employed 15 million people at the end of last year, but that was still 400,000 fewer than before the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association. In a recent survey, 62% of restaurant operators told the association they don't have enough employees to meet customer demand. Pandemic-era concerns about hygiene and adoption of new technology like QR code menus also laid the ground for robots, said Karthik Namasivayam, director of hospitality business at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business. "Once an operator begins to understand and work with one technology, other technologies become less daunting and will be much more readily accepted as we go forward," he said. Namasivayam notes that public acceptance of robot servers is already high in Asia. Pizza Hut has robot servers in 1,000 restaurants in China, for example. The U.S. was slower to adopt robots, but some chains are now testing them. Chick-fil-A is trying them at multiple U.S. locations, and says it's found that the robots give human employees more time to refresh drinks, clear tables and greet guests. Marcus Merritt was surprised to see a robot server at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta recently. The robot didn't seem to be replacing staff, he said; he counted 13 employees in the store, and workers told him the robot helps service move a little faster. He was delighted that the robot told him to have a great day, and expects he'll see more robots when he goes out to eat. "I think technology is part of our normal everyday now. Everybody has a cell phone, everybody uses some form of computer," said Merritt, who owns a marketing business. "It's a natural progression." But not all chains have had success with robots. Chili's introduced a robot server named Rita in 2020 and expanded the test to 61 U.S. restaurants before abruptly halting it last August. The chain found that Rita moved too slowly and got in the way of human servers. And 58% of guests surveyed said Rita didn't improve their overall experience. Haidilao, a hot pot chain in China, began using robots a year ago to deliver food to diners' tables. But managers at several outlets said the robots haven't proved as reliable or cost-effective as human servers. Wang Long, the manager of a Beijing outlet, said his two robots have both have broken down. "We only used them now and then," Wang said. "It is a sort of concept thing and the machine can never replace humans." Eventually, Namasivayam expects that a certain percentage of restaurants — maybe 30% — will continue to have human servers and be considered more luxurious, while the rest will lean more heavily on robots in the kitchen and in dining rooms. Economics are on the side of robots, he said; the cost of human labor will continue to rise, but technology costs will fall. But that's not a future everyone wants to see. Saru Jayaraman, who advocates for higher pay for restaurant workers as president of One Fair Wage, said restaurants could easily solve their labor shortages if they just paid workers more. "Humans don't go to a full-service restaurant to be served by technology," she said. "They go for the experience of themselves and the people they care about being served by a human."  

Italy is temporarily blocking the artificial intelligence software ChatGPT in the wake of a data breach as it investigates a possible violation of stringent European Union data protection rules, the government's privacy watchdog said Friday. The Italian Data Protection Authority said it was taking provisional action “until ChatGPT respects privacy,” including temporarily limiting the company from processing Italian users' data. U.S.-based OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, didn’t immediately return a request for comment Friday. While some public schools and universities around the world have blocked the ChatGPT website from their local networks over student plagiarism concerns, it’s not clear how Italy would block it at a nationwide level. The move also is unlikely to affect applications from companies that already have licenses with OpenAI to use the same technology driving the chatbot, such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The AI systems that power such chatbots, known as large language models, are able to mimic human writing styles based on the huge trove of digital books and online writings they have ingested. The Italian watchdog said OpenAI must report within 20 days what measures it has taken to ensure the privacy of users' data or face a fine of up to either 20 million euros (nearly $22 million) or 4% of annual global revenue. The agency's statement cites the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and noted that ChatGPT suffered a data breach on March 20 involving “users' conversations" and information about subscriber payments. OpenAI earlier announced that it had to take ChatGPT offline on March 20 to fix a bug that allowed some people to see the titles, or subject lines, of other users’ chat history. “Our investigation has also found that 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus users might have had personal data revealed to another user,” the company said. “We believe the number of users whose data was actually revealed to someone else is extremely low and we have contacted those who might be impacted.” Italy's privacy watchdog lamented the lack of a legal basis to justify OpenAI's “massive collection and processing of personal data” used to train the platform's algorithms and that the company does not notify users whose data it collects. The agency also said ChatGPT can sometimes generate — and store — false information about individuals. Finally, it noted there's no system to verify users' ages, exposing children to responses "absolutely inappropriate to their age and awareness.” The watchdog's move comes as concerns grow about the artificial intelligence boom. A group of scientists and tech industry leaders published a letter Wednesday calling for companies such as OpenAI to pause the development of more powerful AI models until the fall to give time for society to weigh the risks. “While it is not clear how enforceable these decisions will be, the very fact that there seems to be a mismatch between the technological reality on the ground and the legal frameworks of Europe” shows there may be something to the letter's call for a pause “to allow for our cultural tools to catch up,” said Nello Cristianini, an AI professor at the University of Bath. San Francisco-based OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, announced this week that he’s embarking on a six-continent trip in May to talk about the technology with users and developers. That includes a stop planned for Brussels, where European Union lawmakers have been negotiating sweeping new rules to limit high-risk AI tools, as well as visits to Madrid, Munich, London and Paris. European consumer group BEUC called Thursday for EU authorities and the bloc’s 27 member nations to investigate ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots. BEUC said it could be years before the EU's AI legislation takes effect, so authorities need to act faster to protect consumers from possible risks. “In only a few months, we have seen a massive take-up of ChatGPT, and this is only the beginning,” Deputy Director General Ursula Pachl said. Waiting for the EU’s AI Act “is not good enough as there are serious concerns growing about how ChatGPT and similar chatbots might deceive and manipulate people.”

For the two weeks that the Hackneys’ baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room. They stayed with their daughter around the clock when she was moved to a rehab center to regain her strength. Finally, the 8-month-old stopped batting away her bottles and started putting on weight again. “She was doing well and we started to ask when can she go home,” Lauren Hackney said. “And then from that moment on, at the time, they completely stonewalled us and never said anything.” The couple was stunned when child welfare officials showed up, told them they were negligent and took their daughter away. “They had custody papers and they took her right there and then,” Lauren Hackney recalled. “And we started crying.” More than a year later, their daughter, now 2, remains in foster care. The Hackneys, who have developmental disabilities, are struggling to understand how taking their daughter to the hospital when she refused to eat could be seen as so neglectful that she’d need to be taken from her home. They wonder if an artificial intelligence tool that the Allegheny County Department of Human Services uses to predict which children could be at risk of harm singled them out because of their disabilities. Also Read: ChatGPT by Open AI: All you need to know The U.S. Justice Department is asking the same question. The agency is investigating the county’s child welfare system to determine whether its use of the influential algorithm discriminates against people with disabilities or other protected groups, The Associated Press has learned. Later this month, federal civil rights attorneys will interview the Hackneys and Andrew Hackney’s mother, Cynde Hackney-Fierro, the grandmother said. Lauren Hackney has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder that affects her memory, and her husband, Andrew, has a comprehension disorder and nerve damage from a stroke suffered in his 20s. Their baby girl was just 7 months old when she began refusing to drink her bottles. Facing a nationwide shortage of formula, they traveled from Pennsylvania to West Virginia looking for some and were forced to change brands. The baby didn’t seem to like it. Her pediatrician first reassured them that babies sometimes can be fickle with feeding and offered ideas to help her get back her appetite, they said. When she grew lethargic days later, they said, the same doctor told them to take her to the emergency room. The Hackneys believe medical staff alerted child protective services after they showed up with a baby who was dehydrated and malnourished. That’s when they believe their information was fed into the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, which county officials say is standard procedure for neglect allegations. Soon, a social worker appeared to question them, and their daughter was sent to foster care. Over the past six years, Allegheny County has served as a real-world laboratory for testing AI-driven child welfare tools that crunch reams of data about local families to try to predict which children are likely to face danger in their homes. Today, child welfare agencies in at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., have considered using algorithmic tools, and jurisdictions in at least 11 have deployed them, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The Hackneys’ story — based on interviews, internal emails and legal documents — illustrates the opacity surrounding these algorithms. Even as they fight to regain custody of their daughter, they can’t question the “risk score” Allegheny County’s tool may have assigned to her case because officials won’t disclose it to them. And neither the county nor the people who built the tool have ever explained which variables may have been used to measure the Hackneys’ abilities as parents. “It’s like you have an issue with someone who has a disability,” Andrew Hackney said in an interview from their apartment in suburban Pittsburgh. “In that case … you probably end up going after everyone who has kids and has a disability.” As part of a yearlong investigation, the AP obtained the data points underpinning several algorithms deployed by child welfare agencies, including some marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” offering rare insight into the mechanics driving these emerging technologies. Among the factors they have used to calculate a family’s risk, whether outright or by proxy: race, poverty rates, disability status and family size. They include whether a mother smoked before she was pregnant and whether a family had previous child abuse or neglect complaints. What they measure matters. A recent analysis by ACLU researchers found that when Allegheny's algorithm flagged people who accessed county services for mental health and other behavioral health programs, that could add up to three points to a child’s risk score, a significant increase on a scale of 20. Allegheny County spokesman Mark Bertolet declined to address the Hackney case and did not answer detailed questions about the status of the federal probe or critiques of the data powering the tool, including by the ACLU. “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on lawsuits or legal matters,” Bertolet said in an email. Justice Department spokeswoman Aryele Bradford declined to comment. NOT MAGIC Child welfare algorithms plug vast amounts of public data about local families into complex statistical models to calculate what they call a risk score. The number that’s generated is then used to advise social workers as they decide which families should be investigated, or which families need additional attention — a weighty decision that can sometimes mean life or death. A number of local leaders have tapped into AI technology while under pressure to make systemic changes, such as in Oregon during a foster care crisis and in Los Angeles County after a series of high-profile child deaths in one of the nation’s largest county child welfare systems. LA County’s Department of Children and Family Services Director Brandon Nichols says algorithms can help identify high-risk families and improve outcomes in a deeply strained system. Yet he could not explain how the screening tool his agency uses works. “We’re sort of the social work side of the house, not the IT side of the house,” Nichols said in an interview. “How the algorithm functions, in some ways is, I don’t want to say is magic to us, but it’s beyond our expertise and experience.” Nichols and officials at two other child welfare agencies referred detailed questions about their AI tools to the outside developers who created them. In Larimer County, Colorado, one official acknowledged she didn’t know what variables were used to assess local families. “The variables and weights used by the Larimer Decision Aide Tool are part of the code developed by Auckland and thus we do not have this level of detail,” Jill Maasch, a Larimer County Human Services spokeswoman said in an email, referring to the developers. In Pennsylvania, California and Colorado, county officials have opened up their data systems to the two academic developers who select data points to build their algorithms. Rhema Vaithianathan, a professor of health economics at New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology, and Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Social Work, said in an email that their work is transparent and that they make their computer models public. “In each jurisdiction in which a model has been fully implemented we have released a description of fields that were used to build the tool, along with information as to the methods used,” they said by email. A 241-page report on the Allegheny County website includes pages of coded variables and statistical calculations. Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein’s work has been hailed in reports published by UNICEF and the Biden administration alike for devising computer models that promise to lighten caseworkers’ loads by drawing from a set of simple factors. They have described using such tools as a moral imperative, insisting that child welfare officials should draw from all data at their disposal to make sure children aren’t maltreated. Through tracking their work across the country, however, the AP found their tools can set families up for separation by rating their risk based on personal characteristics they cannot change or control, such as race or disability, rather than just their actions as parents. In Allegheny County, a sprawling county of 1.2 million near the Ohio border, the algorithm has accessed an array of external data, including jail, juvenile probation, Medicaid, welfare, health and birth records, all held in a vast countywide “data warehouse.” The tool uses that information to predict the risk that a child will be placed in foster care two years after a family is first investigated. County officials have told the AP they’re proud of their cutting-edge approach, and even expanded their work to build another algorithm focused on newborns. They have said they monitor their risk scoring tool closely and update it over time, including removing variables such as welfare benefits and birth records. Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein declined the AP’s repeated interview requests to discuss how they choose the specific data that powers their models. But in a 2017 report, they detailed the methods used to build the first version of Allegheny’s tool, including a footnote that described a statistical cutoff as “rather arbitrary but based on trial and error.” “This footnote refers to our exploration of more than 800 features from Allegheny’s data warehouse more than five years ago,” the developers said by email. That approach is borne out in their design choices, which differ from county to county. In the same 2017 report, the developers acknowledged that using race data didn’t substantively improve the model’s accuracy, but they continued to study it in Douglas County, Colorado, though they ultimately opted against including it in that model. To address community concerns that a tool could harden racial bias in Los Angeles County, the developers excluded people’s criminal history, ZIP code and geographic indicators, but have continued to use those data points in the Pittsburgh area. When asked about the inconsistencies, the developers pointed to their published methodology documents. “We detail various metrics used to assess accuracy — while also detailing ‘external validations,’” the developers said via email. When Oregon’s Department of Human Services built an algorithm inspired by Allegheny’s, it factored in a child’s race as it predicted a family’s risk, and also applied a “fairness correction” to mitigate racial bias. Last June, the tool was dropped entirely due to equity concerns after an AP investigation in April revealed potential racial bias in such tools. Justice Department attorneys cited the same AP story last fall when federal civil rights attorneys started inquiring about additional discrimination concerns in Allegheny’s tool, three sources told the AP. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying the Justice Department asked them not to discuss the confidential conversations. Two said they also feared professional retaliation. IQ TESTS, PARENTING CLASS With no answers on when they could get their daughter home, the Hackneys’ lawyer in October filed a federal civil rights complaint on their behalf that questioned how the screening tool was used in their case. Over time, Allegheny’s tool has tracked if members of the family have diagnoses for schizophrenia or mood disorders. It’s also measured if parents or other children in the household have disabilities, by noting whether any family members received Supplemental Security Income, a federal benefit for people with disabilities. The county said that it factors in SSI payments in part because children with disabilities are more likely to be abused or neglected. The county also said disabilities-aligned data can be “predictive of the outcomes” and it “should come as no surprise that parents with disabilities … may also have a need for additional supports and services.” In an emailed statement, the county added that elsewhere in the country, social workers also draw on data about mental health and other conditions that may affect a parent’s ability to safely care for a child. The Hackneys have been ordered to take parenting classes and say they have been taxed by all of the child welfare system’s demands, including IQ tests and downtown court hearings. People with disabilities are overrepresented in the child welfare system, yet there’s no evidence that they harm their children at higher rates, said Traci LaLiberte, a University of Minnesota expert on child welfare and disabilities. Including data points related to disabilities in an algorithm is problematic because it perpetuates historic biases in the system and it focuses on people’s physiological traits rather than behavior that social workers are brought in to address, LaLiberte said. The Los Angeles tool weighs if any children in the family have ever gotten special education services, have had prior developmental or mental health referrals or used drugs to treat mental health. “This is not unique to caseworkers who use this tool; it is common for caseworkers to consider these factors when determining possible supports and services,” the developers said by email. Before algorithms were in use, the child welfare system had long distrusted parents with disabilities. Into the 1970s, they were regularly sterilized and institutionalized, LaLiberte said. A landmark federal report in 2012 noted parents with psychiatric or intellectual disabilities lost custody of their children as much as 80 percent of the time. Across the U.S., it’s extremely rare for any child welfare agencies to require disabilities training for social workers, LaLiberte’s research has found. The result: Parents with disabilities are often judged by a system that doesn’t understand how to assess their capacity as caregivers, she said. The Hackneys experienced this firsthand. When a social worker asked Andrew Hackney how often he fed the baby, he answered literally: two times a day. The worker seemed appalled, he said, and scolded him, saying babies must eat more frequently. He struggled to explain that the girl’s mother, grandmother and aunt also took turns feeding her each day. FOREVER FLAGGED Officials in Allegheny County have said that building AI into their processes helps them “make decisions based on as much information as possible,” and noted that the algorithm merely harnesses data social workers can already access. That can include decades-old records. The Pittsburgh-area tool has tracked whether parents were ever on public benefits or had a history with the criminal justice system — even if they were minors at the time, or if it never resulted in charges or convictions. The AP found those design choices can stack the deck against people who grew up in poverty, hardening historical inequities that persist in the data, or against people with records in the juvenile or criminal justice systems, long after society has granted redemption. And critics say that algorithms can create a self-fulfilling prophecy by influencing which families are targeted in the first place. “These predictors have the effect of casting permanent suspicion and offer no means of recourse for families marked by these indicators,” according to the analysis from researchers at the ACLU and the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group. “They are forever seen as riskier to their children.” As child welfare algorithms become more common, parents who have experienced social workers’ scrutiny fear the models won’t let them escape their pasts, no matter how old or irrelevant their previous scrapes with the system may have been. Charity Chandler-Cole, who serves on the Los Angeles County Commission for Children and Families, is one of them. She landed in foster care as a teen after being arrested for shoplifting underwear for her younger sister. Then as an adult, she said, social workers once showed up at her apartment after someone spuriously reported that a grand piano was thrown at her nephew who was living at her home — even though they didn’t own such an instrument. The local algorithm could tag her for her prior experiences in foster care and juvenile probation, as well as the unfounded child abuse allegation, Chandler-Cole says. She wonders if AI could also properly assess that she was quickly cleared of any maltreatment concerns, or that her nonviolent offense as a teen was legally expunged. “A lot of these reports lack common sense,” said Chandler-Cole, now the mother of four and CEO of an organization that works with the court system to help children in foster care. “You are automatically putting us in these spaces to be judged with these labels. It just perpetuates additional harm.” Chandler-Cole’s fellow commissioner Wendy Garen, by contrast, argues “more is better” and that by drawing on all available data, risk scoring tools can help make the agency’s work more thorough and effective. GLOBAL INFLUENCE Even as their models have come under scrutiny for their accuracy and fairness, the developers have started new projects with child welfare agencies in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and Arapahoe County, Colorado. The states of California and Pennsylvania, as well as New Zealand and Chile, have also asked them to do preliminary work. And as word of their methods has spread in recent years, Vaithianathan has given lectures highlighting screening tools in Colombia and Australia. She also recently advised researchers in Denmark and officials in the United Arab Emirates on how to use technology to target child services. “Rhema is one of the world leaders and her research can help to shape the debate in Denmark,” a Danish researcher said on LinkedIn last year, regarding Vaithianathan’s advisory role related to a local child welfare tool that was being piloted. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded a national study, co-authored by Vaithianathan and Putnam-Hornstein, that concluded that their overall approach in Allegheny could be a model for other places. HHS’ Administration for Children and Families spokeswoman Debra Johnson declined to say whether the Justice Department’s probe would influence her agency’s future support for an AI-driven approach to child welfare. Especially as budgets tighten, cash-strapped agencies are desperate to find more efficient ways for social workers to focus on children who truly need protection. At a 2021 panel, Putnam-Hornstein acknowledged that “the overall screen-in rate remained totally flat” in Allegheny since their tool had been implemented. Meanwhile, foster care and the separation of families can have lifelong developmental consequences for the child. A 2012 HHS study found 95% of babies who are reported to child welfare agencies go through more than one caregiver and household change during their time in foster care, instability that researchers noted can itself be a form of trauma. The Hackneys’ daughter already has been placed in two foster homes and has now spent more than half of her short life away from her parents as they try to convince social workers they are worthy. Meanwhile, they say they're running out of money in the fight for their daughter. With barely enough left for food from Andrew Hackney’s wages at a local grocery store, he had to shut off his monthly cell phone service. They’re struggling to pay for the legal fees and gas money needed to attend appointments required of them. In February, their daughter was diagnosed with a disorder that can disrupt her sense of taste, according to Andrew Hackney’s lawyer, Robin Frank, who added that the girl has continued to struggle to eat, even in foster care. All they have for now are twice-weekly visits that last a few hours before she’s taken away again. Lauren Hackney’s voice breaks as she worries her daughter may be adopted and soon forget her own family. They say they yearn to do what many parents take for granted — put their child to sleep at night in her own bed. “I really want to get my kid back. I miss her, and especially holding her. And of course, I miss that little giggly laugh,” Andrew Hackney said, as his daughter sprang toward him with excitement during a recent visit. “It hurts a lot. You have no idea how bad.”

BARCELONA, Mar 3 (AP/UNB) — The father of the cellphone was there. So was Huawei and a host of other Chinese tech companies. Tens of thousands of visitors also flocked to the MWC tech fair to be dazzled by the latest advances in AI, smartphones, robotics and much more. The metaverse got a lot of attention at the show, also known as Mobile World Congress, as companies cash in on the hype surrounding new virtual worlds for work and play. SK Telecom’s virtual reality air taxi flight simulator was one of the most popular demonstrations, with long lines to take a virtual ride. There were robot dogs to remotely inspect infrastructure and holograms for virtual learning, along with speeches from wireless industry executives and backroom schmoozing with government officials. Some 80,000 people were expected to attend the world’s biggest wireless trade show, which wraps up its four-day run in Barcelona on Thursday. Here’s a look at some highlights: SCROLL AND FOLD While MWC smartphone launches don’t get as much attention as they used to because innovations have slowed, devices with nifty screens took the spotlight. Motorola added the wow factor by unveiling a phone with a screen that rolls out. Double tap your fingers on the side, and the display automatically extends from 5 inches long (13 centimeters) to 6.5 inches by unscrolling from the bottom. Motorola’s owner, Chinese tech brand Lenovo, also showed off a laptop with a rolling screen, which took about 19 seconds to unscroll to its fully extended position. The company said they’re concept devices and unlikely to hit the market anytime soon. Other brands including Samsung and China’s Oppo and Tecno also released their latest folding designs. Phones with foldable screens have drawn attention from consumers, but “whether that interest then translates into sales is a different question,” said Gerrit Schneemann, senior analyst at GfK Boutique. “For the next few years, I think they’ll still be a real niche market in the overall smartphone market. Growing, but still — relatively speaking — relatively small.” AI CHAT GLASSES Artificially intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT have taken the tech world by storm, and U.K. startup XRAI Glass is joining the fray with augmented reality glasses. The company’s virtual assistant app was designed to work with smart viewer glasses to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing better understand what’s happening around them. Speech is transcribed from other people nearby and the subtitles are displayed onto the lenses or an attached smartphone. Now XRAI (pronounced X-ray) has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology into its app and glasses setup. “People can ask questions such as general knowledge or recipes or anything they like,” CEO Dan Scarfe said. “Or they can actually ask questions of their conversation. So, ‘Hey, XRAI, can you please summarize this conversation?’ Or, ‘Hey, XRAI, what was the name of the town that we were just talking about?’” For those with hearing loss, it can be helpful to have an AI assistant recap a conversation in which multiple people were talking, the company says. DIGITAL HUMANS People might feel better interacting with AI chatbots if they had human faces. That’s the thinking at D-ID, an Israeli startup, which launched a new interface for its “digital human” — essentially an online avatar that can work with AI-chat systems to hold conversations. “We had the chatbot in the past. They didn’t work,” said CEO Gil Perry, because they could only answer specific questions with specific answers. Now, “large language models are bringing huge improvements to traditional chatbots.” Generative AI systems like ChatGPT can create readable text and hold conversations based on what they’ve learned from so-called large language models — vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media. Perry demonstrated by asking a question to the chatbot’s face on his laptop, whose response was eerily lifelike. He said safeguards would prevent D-ID’s technology from being used maliciously.  “The idea here is not to replace anyone and not to convince anyone that what they’re seeing is true,” Perry said. It’s just that humans are “used to communicating with faces.” REMOTE CONTROL CARS At German mobility startup Vay’s display, a driver was steering a car around a course marked with pylons. But the car was 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles) away in Berlin. The company’s technology enables cars to be driven by remote “tele-drivers.” So far, so standard. The twist is in Vay’s business model, which is a cross between taxi service and car rental. When a user hails a ride, a tele-driver will steer one of its electric cars to the pickup point for the customer, who will take over the driving duties. At the destination, the car will be taken away by a remote driver. No need to park. The company says it’s the first in Europe to be allowed to operate cars on public streets without a human driver inside. It has 20 certified tele-drivers so far and plans to launch the service soon in Germany and the U.S.  “We’re talking, you know, hopefully months,” CEO Thomas von der Ohe said. One of the main goals is to rid city streets of cars that are parked and not used for most of the day. The service will be “a big step to start creating an alternative so people don’t buy the second car or the third car maybe in the near future,” von der Ohe said. “Also not the first car. ” AUGMENTED REALITY EXPERIENCES Software company Amdocs demonstrated AR technology that could be used for “next-generation immersive experiences” for both fans and security staff at big-ticket sports games. For example, soccer fans attending a match in person could buy a package of extras for their AR glasses, including exclusive replay videos and live stats shown on their lenses to “augment” their game experience. The same glasses also could be used as an extra tool for security staff at the game, with additional safety features including a security database. In a simulation at MWC, guards were alerted to rowdy fans trying to climb the gates. A known soccer hooligan was flagged on the database, his face and details flashing up on the lenses. Users, viewing the scene from the guard’s perspective, scanned the crowd as the glasses picked out faces before identifying the suspect so he could be apprehended — an unsettling display bordering on Orwellian.  

A demonstration on how the use of 5G will make it possible to secure high-risk industrial management in the future has been exhibited at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. King Felipe of Spain on Monday inaugurated the four-day conference of all the telecom companies of the world. Some 80,000 delegates are expected at the annual gathering of the big players of the telecom industry. At the Mobile World Congress, many tech manufacturers are announcing 5G technology for virtual interactive applications, robot clusters, automated driving, smart wearables, automated patrol inspections, smart mining, smart tunneling, and other applications in coal mining. The 5G has been the centre of attention at this year’s congress. The industry giants have been demonstrating the necessary use of 5G technologies not only in industrial production but also in people’s lives. The demonstrations of 5 G-powered devices include, among others, unmanned helicopters and routers. T-Mobile is exhibiting unmanned helicopters. This helicopter can take off and land safely with passengers without a pilot. The helicopter can even make an emergency landing by choosing the nearest safe place if it detects any adverse conditions while flying in the sky. The 5G router will be completely different from the current routers. Meanwhile, the 5G technology will completely overhaul the routers we see today. The 5G-powered wireless routers will only connect to the network through a code from a specific operator. And with the bandwidth that this router will have, it will be possible to keep all kinds of smart devices in the family connected to high-speed Internet.  

The man credited with inventing the cellphone 50 years ago had only one concern then about the brick-sized device with a long antenna: Would it work? These days Martin Cooper frets like everybody else about his invention’s impacts on society — from the loss of privacy to the risk of internet addiction to the rapid spread of harmful content, especially among kids. “My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” said Cooper, who spoke with The Associated Press at the telecom industry’s biggest trade show in Barcelona, where he was receiving a lifetime award. Yet the 94-year-old self-described dreamer also marvels at how far cellphone design and capabilities have advanced, and he believes the technology’s best days may still be ahead of it in areas such as education and health care. “Between the cellphone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said Monday at MWC, or Mobile World Congress. Cooper, whose invention was inspired by Dick Tracy's radio wristwatch, said he also envisions a future in which cellphones are charged by human bodies. It’s a long way from where he started. Also Read: Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a New York City street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier. To needle the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype — which weighed 2.5 pounds and was 11 inches long — to call to his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. “The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?’ And it did,” he said. The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution, but looking back on that day Cooper acknowledges, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment.” He spent the better part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market, helping to launch the wireless communications industry and, with it, a global revolution in how we communicate, shop and learn about the world. Still, Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they will be “distributed on your body,” perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times.” Batteries could even be replaced by human energy. “You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?” he imagined. While he dreams about what the future might look like, Cooper is attuned to the industry's current challenges, particularly around privacy. In Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, regulators are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing technology and other companies to build up rich profiles of users. “It’s going to get resolved, but not easily,” Cooper said. “There are people now that can justify measuring where you are, where you’re making your phone calls, who you’re calling, what you access on the Internet.” Smartphone use by children is another area that needs limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have “various internets curated for different audiences.” Five-year-olds should be able to use the internet to help them learn, but “we don’t want them to have access to pornography and to things that they don’t understand,” he said. As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments. However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”

King Felipe VI of Spain on Monday inaugurated the Mobile World Congress (MWC)-2023, an annual get-together of the big players of the telecom industry.  Some 80,000 delegates are expected at the four-day get-together of all the industrial titans, which is back to near full strength following years of pandemic-related disruption.  The Spanish King inaugurated the congress in front of about one and a half million people in Barcelona. The country’s president Prado Sanchez also attended the opening ceremony. One of the aspects of this year’s event is the addition of ‘Velocity’, the outline of an upcoming smart world. Velocity is a global initiative by the telecom industries around the world which is the centre of focus in this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC).  According to the velocity initiative, nearly one billion people will be connected to the 5G network by the end of 2023. Countries around the world are expected to come under smart technologies from next year.  The initiative was taken to ensure that no country is left behind on the way forward to digital transformation.  In a world divided by culture, ethnicity, and language, the velocity initiative also aims to bridge the gap among the people around the world.  Hundreds of thousands of tech enthusiasts from more than 200 countries attended the opening ceremony of the event. At the ceremony, King Felipe called on everyone to ensure the humane use of technology for the future.  “We will go further with technology. However, innovators and service providers need to be aware that their  technology doesn't dehumanize people and turn them into heartless machines,” he said.  The telecom industry giants have pledged to be at the forefront of the "tsunami of innovation." "We are at the doors of a new change of era driven by the intersection of Telco, Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Web3," said Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, boss of Spanish operator Telefonica and current chairman of industry body GSMA, which organizes the Barcelona event. He promised the telecoms industry would be at the forefront of the "tsunami of innovation", adding: "Without telcos there is no digital future." GSMA Chairman said, the purpose of this year's Mobile World Congress is a little different than before, which is reflected in the main theme. This year's main theme is to ensure the use of information technology to build a world free from poverty This year's Mobile World Congress has the exhibition center of ten thousand companies from almost two hundred countries. Industrial titans like Huawei, Nokia and Samsung are set to showcase their latest innovations, flanked by smartphone makers like Oppo and Xiaomi and network operators like Orange, Verizon, and China Mobile.  The world is now gripped by a fear that the machine is leading to the destruction of human civilization. Tech giants from around the world said they are working on humanizing the machines. They’re also showing people how technology is changing people's lives and the pattern of work. According to the innovators attending the conference, it is now necessary for people to learn about new technologies. Technology will not replace people’s jobs, rather it will make their work easier, they said.     

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was set to announce a “major scientific breakthrough” Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, something called net energy gain, according to one government official and one scientist familiar with the research. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the breakthrough ahead of the announcement. Granholm was scheduled to appear alongside Livermore researchers at a morning event in Washington. The Department of Energy declined to give details ahead of time. The news was first reported by the Financial Times. Read: NASA’s newest moon rocket lifts off 50 years after Apollo Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy, displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said it was a significant step nonetheless. “It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.” Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control. Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste. Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction. The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur. Read: Top 10 Health and Medicine Breakthroughs of 2021 Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said an announcement that net energy had been gained in a fusion reaction would be significant. But he said there’s a long road ahead before the result generates sustainable electricity. He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion. “You still don’t have the engine and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.” The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer. It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said it has been challenging to reach this point because the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot -- it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is an incredible challenge, he said. Net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics. “That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone,” he said. It takes enormous resources and effort to advance fusion research. One approach turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company. Last year the teams working on those projects in two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.

NASA’s new moon rocket blasted off on its debut flight with three test dummies aboard early Wednesday, bringing the U.S. a big step closer to putting astronauts back on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago. If all goes well during the three-week, make-or-break shakedown flight, the rocket will propel an empty crew capsule into a wide orbit around the moon, and then the capsule will return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific in December. After years of delays and billions in cost overruns, the Space Launch System rocket thundered skyward, rising from Kennedy Space Center on 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of thrust and hitting 100 mph (160 kph) within seconds. The Orion capsule was perched on top, ready to bust out of Earth orbit toward the moon not quite two hours into the flight. The moonshot follows nearly three months of vexing fuel leaks that kept the rocket bouncing between its hangar and the pad. Forced back indoors by Hurricane Ian at the end of September, the rocket stood its ground outside as Nicole swept through last week with gusts of more than 80 mph (130 kph). Although the wind peeled away a 10-foot (3-meter) strip of caulking high up near the capsule, managers gave the green light for the launch. NASA expected 15,000 to jam the launch site, with thousands more lining the beaches and roads outside the gates, to witness NASA’s long-awaited sequel to Project Apollo, when 12 astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 and 1972. Crowds also gathered outside NASA centers in Houston and Huntsville, Alabama, to watch the spectacle on giant screens. Cheers accompanied the rocket as it rode a huge trail of flame toward space, with a half-moon glowing brightly and buildings shaking as though hit by a major quake. “For the Artemis generation, this is for you,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called out, referring to all those born after Apollo. The liftoff marked the start of NASA’s Artemis lunar-exploration program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister. The space agency is aiming to send four astronauts around the moon on the next flight, in 2024, and land humans there as early as 2025. “You have earned your place in history,” Blackwell-Thompson told her team following liftoff. “You’re part of a first. Doesn’t come along very often. Once in a career maybe. But we are all part of something incredibly special: the first launch of Artemis. The first step in returning our country to the moon and on to Mars.” The 322-foot (98-meter) SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, with more thrust than either the space shuttle or the mighty Saturn V that carried men to the moon. A series of hydrogen fuel leaks plagued the summertime launch attempts as well as countdown tests. A fresh leak erupted at a new location during Tuesday night’s fueling, but an emergency team managed to tighten the faulty valve on the pad. Then a U.S. Space Force radar station went down, resulting in another scramble, this time to replace an ethernet switch. Orion should reach the moon by Monday, more than 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Earth. After coming within 80 miles (130 kilometers) of the moon, the capsule will enter a far-flung orbit stretching about 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) beyond. The $4.1 billion test flight is set to last 25 days, roughly the same as when crews will be aboard. The space agency intends to push the spacecraft to its limits and uncover any problems before astronauts strap in. The mannequins — NASA calls them moonequins — are fitted with sensors to measure such things as vibration, acceleration and cosmic radiation. “There’s a fair amount of risk with this particular initial flight test,” said mission manager Mike Sarafin. The rocket was supposed to have made its dry run by 2017. Government watchdogs estimate NASA will have spent $93 billion on the project by 2025. Ultimately, NASA hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. But many hurdles still need to be cleared. The Orion capsule will take astronauts only to lunar orbit, not the surface. NASA has hired Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop Starship, the 21st-century answer to Apollo’s lunar lander. Starship will carry astronauts back and forth between Orion and the lunar surface, at least on the first trip in 2025. The plan is to station Starship and eventually other companies’ landers in orbit around the moon, ready for use whenever new Orion crews pull up. Reprising an argument that was made during the 1960s, Duke University historian Alex Roland questions the value of human spaceflight, saying robots and remote-controlled spacecraft could get the job done more cheaply, efficiently and safely. “In all these years, no evidence has emerged to justify the investment we have made in human spaceflight — save the prestige involved in this conspicuous consumption,” he said. NASA is waiting until this test flight is over before introducing the astronauts who will be on the next one and those who will follow in the bootsteps of Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Most of NASA’s corps of 42 active astronauts and 10 trainees were not even born yet when Apollo 17 moonwalkers Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed out the era, 50 years ago next month. “We are jumping out of our spacesuits with excitement,” astronaut Christina Koch said Tuesday. After a nearly yearlong space station mission and all-female spacewalk, Koch, 43, is on NASA’s short list for a lunar flight. So is astronaut Kayla Barron, 35, who finally got to witness her first rocket launch, not counting her own a year ago. “It took my breath away, and I was tearing up,” Barron said. “What an amazing acccomplishment for this team.”

A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth. The galactic slam occurred at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles (11.3 million kilometers) away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the space rock at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit. “We have impact!” Mission Control's Elena Adams announced, jumping up and down and thrusting her arms skyward. Telescopes around the world and in space aimed at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Though the impact was immediately obvious — Dart’s radio signal abruptly ceased — it will take as long as a couple of months to determine how much the asteroid’s path was changed. The $325 million mission was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space. “As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” Adams later told a news conference, the room filling with applause. “I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely, I will.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reminded people earlier in the day via Twitter that, “No, this is not a movie plot.” He added in a prerecorded video: ”We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the real-life stakes are high." Monday’s target: a 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid named Dimorphos. It’s a moonlet of Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger that flung off the material that formed the junior partner. The pair have been orbiting the sun for eons without threatening Earth, making them ideal save-the-world test candidates. Launched last November, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager. Dart’s on-board camera, a key part of this smart navigation system, caught sight of Dimorphos barely an hour before impact. “Woo hoo!” exclaimed Adams, a mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins. With an image beaming back to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with growing excitement as Dimorphos loomed larger and larger in the field of view alongside its bigger companion. Within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the pictures; it looked like a giant gray lemon, but with boulders and rubble on the surface. The last image froze on the screen as the radio transmission ended. Flight controllers cheered, hugged one another and exchanged high fives. Their mission complete, the Dart team went straight into celebration mode. There was little sorrow over the spacecraft's demise. “Normally, losing signal from a spacecraft is a very bad thing. But in this case, it was the ideal outcome,” said NASA program scientist Tom Statler. Johns Hopkins scientist Carolyn Ernst said the spacecraft was definitely “kaput," with remnants possibly in the fresh crater or cascading into space with the asteroid's ejected material. Scientists insisted Dart would not shatter Dimorphos. The spacecraft packed a scant 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), compared with the asteroid’s 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms). But that should be plenty to shrink its 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around Didymos. The impact should pare 10 minutes off that. The anticipated orbital shift of 1% might not sound like much, scientists noted. But they stressed it would amount to a significant change over years. “Now is when the science starts,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, planetary science division director. “Now we’re going to see for real how effective we were.” Planetary defense experts prefer nudging a threatening asteroid or comet out of the way, given enough lead time, rather than blowing it up and creating multiple pieces that could rain down on Earth. Multiple impactors might be needed for big space rocks or a combination of impactors and so-called gravity tractors, not-yet-invented devices that would use their own gravity to pull an asteroid into a safer orbit. “The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program to help them know what was coming, but we do,” NASA’s senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin said, referring to the mass extinction 66 million years ago believed to have been caused by a major asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or both. The non-profit B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, has been pushing for impact tests like Dart since its founding by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago. Monday’s feat aside, the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, warned the foundation’s executive director, Ed Lu, a former astronaut. Significantly less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects in the deadly 460-foot (140-meter) range have been discovered, according to NASA. And fewer than 1% of the millions of smaller asteroids, capable of widespread injuries, are known. The Vera Rubin Observatory, nearing completion in Chile by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Energy Department, promises to revolutionize the field of asteroid discovery, Lu noted. Finding and tracking asteroids, “That’s still the name of the game here. That’s the thing that has to happen in order to protect the Earth,” he said.