Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Extreme weather to push property insurance higher -Hippo CEO

By Noor Zainab Hussain and Carolyn Cohn

(Reuters) – Extreme weather events and shortage of labor and materials for repairs will push property insurance rates higher in the next several years, the chief executive of U.S. home insurer Hippo said on Tuesday.

As homeowners stayed home during the pandemic, their properties suffered more damage due to issues such as bathroom leaks, and it was harder to get tradespeople in to mop up, Assaf Wand, chief executive officer and co-founder of Hippo said in an interview at the Reuters Future of Insurance USA conference.

“The severity of the claims increased quite significantly,” Wand said, pointing to higher rates charged by plumbers and to buy lumber.

Those prices were likely to normalize as the U.S. economy opens up following the vaccination roll-out, but hurricanes and wildfires are leading to increased damage as more people move to disaster-prone locations, he added.

“I expect to see rates increase over the next several years,” Wand said.

“Labor and materials keep on increasing…the severity of catastrophic events keeps on increasing.”

Insurers are taking increasing note of climate change, with many fearing the rapid changes could make some premiums unaffordable, especially for customers exposed to extreme weather events.

Insurers and banks are also facing stricter regulatory scrutiny over their response to global warming, with shareholders expecting better disclosures and transparency on climate-related risks.

One advantage of the pandemic, however, was that “the world has shifted three to five years forward on digitalization,” Wand added.

Hippo in March said it would go public through a $5 billion merger with a blank-check firm backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, in a sign of rising interest in the fast-growing “insurtech” sector.

Founded in 2015, Palo Alto-based Hippo sells homeowners insurance online.

Home insurance products offered through Hippo are currently available in 32 U.S. states, covering more than 70% of the country’s population, and the company expects its products to be available to 95% of the population by the end of 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the insurance sector to rely heavily on technology to reach customers, helping the “insurtech” sector, which uses artificial intelligence and big data.

Both insurance and technology need to do more on inclusion, Wand said.

“These two are industries that are just not diverse enough,” Wand said, adding that Hippo was hiring data scientists and customer agents from other sectors to help improve diversity.

“We are trying to push and nudge.”

Insurtech Tractable told Reuters earlier this month that it is keen to boost diversity in a typically male-dominated sector, adding that more than 20% of its software engineers are women, above the industry average.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru and Carolyn Cohn in London; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

China could rule world’s technology, UK cyber spy chief says

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) -The West must urgently act to ensure China does not dominate important emerging technologies and gain control of the “global operating system,” Britain’s top cyber spy said on Friday.

In an unusually blunt speech, Jeremy Fleming, director of the GCHQ spy agency, said the West faced a battle for control of technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.

“Significant technology leadership is moving East,” Fleming said at Imperial College London. “The concern is that China’s size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.”

“We are now facing a moment of reckoning,” he said.

World powers will compete to shape the future by developing the best technology, hiring the people with the best brains and dominating the global standards that will govern the technologies, Fleming said.

GCHQ, which gathers communications from around the world to identify and disrupt threats to Britain, has a close relationship with the U.S. National Security Agency and with the eavesdropping agencies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a consortium called “Five Eyes”.

Fleming said that if Britain wished to remain a global cyber power then it would have to develop “sovereign” quantum technologies, including cryptographic technologies, to protect sensitive information and capabilities.

Fleming said quantum computing, which uses the phenomena of quantum mechanics to deliver a leap forward in computation, was getting closer and posed huge opportunities but also risks.

The West should forge ahead with developing quantum-proof algorithms, he said, “so we’re also prepared for those adversaries who might use a quantum computer to look back at things that we currently think are secure”.

He called for better fostering of market conditions to enable innovation, and create a diversity of supply in a broader set of technologies.

Fleming said China was “bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets” while trying to dominate debates about global standards.

He said digital currencies held significant promise to revolutionize the finance sector but posed a potential threat to liberties if abused by illiberal states as they could enable “significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies”.

Russia remains the biggest immediate threat to the West but Communist China’s long-term dominance of technology poses a much bigger problem, he said.

“Russia is affecting the weather, whilst China is shaping the climate,” he said.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Michael Holden, Kate Holton and Timothy Heritage)

Amazon to use AI tech in its warehouses to enforce social distancing

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday launched an artificial intelligence-based tracking system to enforce social distancing at its offices and warehouses to help reduce any risk of contracting the new coronavirus among its workers.

The unveiling comes as the world’s largest online retailer faces intensifying scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and unions over whether it is doing enough to protect staff from the pandemic.

Monitors set up in the company’s warehouses will highlight workers keeping a safe distance in green circles, while workers who are closer will be highlighted in red circles, Amazon said.

The system, called Distance Assistant, uses camera footage in Amazon’s buildings to also help identify high-traffic areas.

Amazon, which will open source the technology behind the system, is not the first company to turn to AI to track compliance with social distancing.

Several firms have told Reuters that AI camera-based software will be crucial to staying open, as it will allow them to show not only workers and customers, but also insurers and regulators, that they are monitoring and enforcing safe practices.

However, privacy activists have raised concerns about increasingly detailed tracking of people and have urged businesses to limit use of AI to the pandemic.

The system is live at a handful of buildings, Amazon said on Tuesday, adding that it planned to deploy hundreds of such units over the next few weeks.

(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M. and Sriraj Kalluvila)

‘Digital twins’ can help create healthier cities after coronavirus

By Rina Chandran

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The use of new technologies, such as virtual reality, by planners to help design more sustainable and healthier cities has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, urban experts said on Friday.

The respiratory disease, which has infected more than 5 million people worldwide, has already triggered the widespread use of robots, drones and artificial intelligence to track the virus and deliver services.

Now, planners and authorities are also turning to new technologies – including so-called Digital Twins of cities, or virtual three-dimensional replicas – to tackle future health crises, said Michael Jansen, chief executive of Cityzenith, a Chicago-based technology firm.

“A Digital Twin that could track the progress of the virus in real-time is the perfect platform for aggregating and distributing information at scale in a crisis,” he said.

“Digital Twins would also help assess and implement economic recovery plans for affected cities and urban regions,” he said.

Virtual Singapore, a digital twin of the island city, models and simulates climate change, infrastructure planning and public health studies, and can be used in crisis management, a spokesman at the Government Technology Agency said.

Modeling a city’s street grids, transport networks, buildings and population can help planners predict how design changes would affect them, said Fabian Dembski, a researcher at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS).

“Cities are complex. But if we can simulate factors such as climate, air quality, traffic flow and movement of people, then planning decisions can be more efficient, equitable, and inclusive,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“But even these models and simulations do not capture human emotions, which play a big role in the success of urban design.”

EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

Dembski and other researchers built a digital twin of Herrenberg, a small city near Stuttgart in Germany.

They then invited residents to use an app to record their emotional responses to simulated scenarios in public spaces.

Using virtual reality, about 1,000 residents noted whether they felt comfortable, happy or unsafe in those areas.

“The idea was to see what they thought made a good public space, and use that data to support planners and architects to improve spaces where residents didn’t feel happy – like areas with heavy traffic or poor lighting,” Dembski said.

“As a planner, you don’t have that kind of information beforehand, and this is a democratic way to do it,” he said, adding that respondents included women, older people, migrants and people with disabilities who are otherwise excluded.

Digital Twins are particularly helpful for cities that are vulnerable to climate change, or are in environmentally fragile areas, as problems can be simulated to find solutions, he said.

Researchers are now modeling pandemics – which have affected urban planning decisions in the past – and also hope to simulate the effects of factors such as regional migration and gentrification on cities, Dembski said.

Technological tools such as Digital Twins “offer the possibility of testing a variety of different concepts,” said Thomas Sprissler, the mayor of Herrenberg.

“Considerably more innovative ideas can be tried out that might otherwise never be tested in reality,” he said.

(Reporting by Rina Chandran @rinachandran; Editing by Michael Taylor. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

How cat videos could cause a ‘climate change nightmare’

By Umberto Bacchi

TBILISI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A stone’s throw from a power station on the barren outskirts of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, a grey warehouse surrounded by metal containers hums to the sound of money.

Inside, hundreds of computer servers work continuously to solve complicated mathematical equations generating the digital currency Bitcoin – burning enough electricity to power tens of thousands of homes in the process.

“Any high-performance computing … is energy intensive,” explained Joe Capes of global blockchain company The Bitfury Group, which operates the facility in Tbilisi.

Cryptocurrencies are one of several new technologies, like artificial intelligence and 5G networks, that climate experts worry could derail efforts to tackle global warming by consuming ever-growing amounts of power.

Data centres processing and storing data from online activities, such as sending emails and streaming videos, already account for about 1% of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

That’s about the same amount of electricity that Australia consumes in a year.

But as societies become more digitalised, computing is expected to account for up to 8% of the world’s total power demand by 2030, according to some estimates, raising fears this could lead to the burning of more fossil fuels.

“If we don’t take into account the carbon footprint, we are going to have a climate change nightmare coming from information technology,” said Babak Falsafi, a professor of computer and communication science at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne.

EFFICIENT DATA

One solution is to improve the efficiency of data centres, which is something operators are naturally prone to do since electricity accounts for a large share of their running costs, according to data experts.

“As a rule of thumb, a megawatt costs a million dollars per year … This obviously catches management’s attention,” said Dale Sartor, who oversees the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center of Expertise for Data Centers in Berkeley, California.

Energy demand from data centres in the United States has remained largely flat over the past decade as improvements in computing have allowed processors to do more with the same amount of power, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

But that is set to change, predict tech analysts.

The 50-year-old trend known as Moore’s Law, which has seen computer chips double in capacity every two years, is expected to slow down as it becomes harder to add any more transistors to a chip.

Some companies have been looking at other ways to make savings.

In Georgia, where most electricity is generated by hydropower, Bitfury deployed a system to reduce the energy needed to cool down its heating servers.

Cooling can account for up to half of a data centre’s total energy use, the company says.

While some of its processors are still cooled with outside air, others are immersed inside metal tanks filled with a special liquid with a low boiling point.

As the liquid boils, the vapour transfers heat away from the processors, keeping them fresh and allowing the company to do away with fans and save water.

“Air is free … but it is not efficient,” explained Capes, who heads Bitfury’s liquid cooling technology subsidiary, adding that the system consumes 40% less electricity than traditional air cooling solutions.

Others have taken similar steps.

A Google data centre in Finland uses recycled seawater to reduce energy use while some companies have opened facilities near the Arctic Circle to benefit from naturally cold air.

But improving efficiency “can only get you so far”, said Elizabeth Jardim, a senior corporate campaigner at environmental group Greenpeace. “At some point you will have to address the type of energy that is powering the facility.”

Tech giants including Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have committed to using only renewable energy but some still use fossil fuels, and more needs to be done to bring others on board, she said.

Jardim suggested governments enact policies to incentivise tech companies to procure green energy and increase transparency around the data sector’s carbon footprint.

LESS CAT VIDEOS

Meanwhile, internet users can also play a role by switching to greener companies or simply reducing their data use, said Jardim.

“Right now data pretty much is equivalent to energy, so the more data something takes the more energy you can assume it’s using,” she said.

Simply sending a photo by email can emit about the same amount of planet-warming gases as driving a car for a kilometre, said Luigi Carafa, executive director of the Climate Infrastructure Partnership, a Barcelona-based non-profit.

“The problem is we don’t really see this, so we don’t perceive it as a problem at all,” he said by phone.

A 2019 study by energy supplier OVO Energy found that if Britons sent one less email a day the country could reduce its carbon output by the equivalent of more than 81,000 flights from London to Madrid.

Global online video viewings alone generated as many carbon emissions as the whole of Spain in 2018, according to French think tank The Shift Project.

“People can already reduce their carbon emissions today if they stop watching cat videos,” said Falsafi, the Lausanne professor, who heads the university’s research centre for sustainable computing, EcoCloud.

“Unfortunately, they are neither aware of the issue nor incentivised to reduce carbon emissions.”

(Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi; Editing by Jumana Farouky and Zoe Tabary. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Despite robot efficiency, human skills still matter at work

Despite robot efficiency, human skills still matter at work
By Caroline Monahan

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Artificial intelligence is approaching critical mass at the office, but humans are still likely to be necessary, according to a new study by executive development firm, Future Workplace, in partnership with Oracle.

Future Workplace found an 18% jump over last year in the number of workers who use AI in some facet of their jobs, representing more than half of those surveyed.

Reuters spoke with Dan Schawbel, the research director at Future Workplace and bestselling author of “Back to Human,” about the study’s key findings and the future of work.

Q: You found that 64% of people trust a robot more than their manager. What can robots do better than managers and what can managers do better than robots?

A: What managers can do better are soft skills: understanding employees’ feelings, coaching employees, creating a work culture – things that are hard to measure, but affect someone’s workday.

The things robots can do better are hard skills: providing unbiased information, maintaining work schedules, problem solving and maintaining a budget.

Q: Is AI advancing to take over soft skills?

A: Right now, we’re not seeing that. I think the future of work is that human resources is going to be managing the human workforce, whereas information technology is going to be managing the robot workforce. There is no doubt that humans and robots will be working side by side.

Q: Are we properly preparing the next generation to work alongside AI?

A: I think technology is making people more antisocial as they grow up because they’re getting it earlier. Yet the demand right now is for a lot of hard skills that are going to be automated. So eventually, when the hard skills are automated and the soft skills are more in demand, the next generation is in big trouble.

Q: Which countries are using AI the most?

A: India and China, and then Singapore. The countries that are gaining more power and prominence in the world are using AI at work.

Q: If AI does all the easy tasks, will managers be mentally drained with only difficult tasks left to do?

A: I think it’s very possible. I always do tasks that require the most thought in the beginning of my day. After 5 or 6 o’clock, I’m exhausted mentally. But if administrative tasks are automated, potentially, the work day becomes consolidated.

That would free us to do more personal things. We have to see if our workday gets shorter if AI eliminates those tasks. If it doesn’t, the burnout culture will increase dramatically.

Q: Seventy percent of your survey respondents were concerned about AI collecting data on them at work. Is that concern legitimate?

A: Yes. You’re seeing more and more technology vendors enabling companies to monitor employees’ use of their computers.

If we collect data on employees in the workplace and make the employees suffer consequences for not being focused for eight hours a day, that’s going to be a huge problem. No one can focus for that long. It’s going to accelerate our burnout epidemic.

Q: How is AI changing hiring practices?

A: One example is Unilever. The first half of their entry-level recruiting process is really AI-centric. You do a video interview and the AI collects data on you and matches it against successful employees. That lowers the pool of candidates. Then candidates spend a day at Unilever doing interviews, and a percentage get a job offer. That’s machines and humans working side-by-side.

(Editing by Beth Pinsker and Bernadette Baum)

China’s robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears

People take pictures of paramilitary officers marching in formation in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Pe

By Cate Cadell

BEIJING (Reuters) – It’s the most sensitive day of the year for China’s internet, the anniversary of the bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, and with under two weeks to go, China’s robot censors are working overtime.

Censors at Chinese internet companies say tools to detect and block content related to the 1989 crackdown have reached unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition.

“We sometimes say that the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and a human is a machete,” said one content screening employee at Beijing Bytedance Co Ltd, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to media.

Two employees at the firm said censorship of the Tiananmen crackdown, along with other highly sensitive issues including Taiwan and Tibet, is now largely automated.

Posts that allude to dates, images and names associated with the protests are automatically rejected.

“When I first began this kind of work four years ago there was opportunity to remove the images of Tiananmen, but now the artificial intelligence is very accurate,” one of the people said.

Four censors, working across Bytedance, Weibo Corp and Baidu Inc apps said they censor between 5,000-10,000 pieces of information a day, or five to seven pieces a minute, most of which they said were pornographic or violent content.

Despite advances in AI censorship, current-day tourist snaps in the square are sometimes unintentionally blocked, one of the censors said.

Bytedance and Baidu declined to comment, while Weibo did not respond to request for comment.

A woman takes pictures in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

A woman takes pictures in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

SENSITIVE PERIOD

The Tiananmen crackdown is a taboo subject in China 30 years after the government sent tanks to quell student-led protests calling for democratic reforms. Beijing has never released a death toll but estimates from human rights groups and witnesses range from several hundred to several thousand.

June 4th itself is marked by a cat-and-mouse game as people use more and more obscure references on social media sites, with obvious allusions blocked immediately. In some years, even the word “today” has been scrubbed.

In 2012, China’s most-watched stock index fell 64.89 points on the anniversary day, echoing the date of the original event in what analysts said was likely a strange coincidence rather than a deliberate reference.

Still, censors blocked access to the term “Shanghai stock market” and to the index numbers themselves on microblogs, along with other obscure references to sensitive issues.

While companies censorship tools are becoming more refined, analysts, academics and users say heavy-handed policies mean sensitive periods before anniversaries and political events have become catch-alls for a wide range of sensitive content.

In the lead-up to this year’s Tiananmen Square anniversary, censorship on social media has targeted LGBT groups, labor and environment activists and NGOs, they say.

Upgrades to censorship tech have been urged on by new policies introduced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The group was set up – and officially led – by President Xi Jinping, whose tenure has been defined by increasingly strict ideological control of the internet.

The CAC did not respond to a request for comment.

Last November, the CAC introduced new rules aimed at quashing dissent online in China, where “falsifying the history of the Communist Party” on the internet is a punishable offence for both platforms and individuals.

The new rules require assessment reports and site visits for any internet platform that could be used to “socially mobilize” or lead to “major changes in public opinion”, including access to real names, network addresses, times of use, chat logs and call logs.

One official who works for CAC told Reuters the recent boost in online censorship is “very likely” linked to the upcoming anniversary.

“There is constant communication with the companies during this time,” said the official, who declined to directly talk about the Tiananmen, instead referring to the “the sensitive period in June”.

Companies, which are largely responsible for their own censorship, receive little in the way of directives from the CAC, but are responsible for creating guidelines in their own “internal ethical and party units”, the official said.

SECRET FACTS

With Xi’s tightening grip on the internet, the flow of information has been centralized under the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department and state media network. Censors and company staff say this reduces the pressure of censoring some events, including major political news, natural disasters and diplomatic visits.

“When it comes to news, the rule is simple… If it is not from state media first, it is not authorized, especially regarding the leaders and political items,” said one Baidu staffer.

“We have a basic list of keywords which include the 1989 details, but (AI) can more easily select those.”

Punishment for failing to properly censor content can be severe.

In the past six weeks, popular services including a Netease Inc news app, Tencent Holdings Ltd’s news app TianTian, and Sina Corp have all been hit with suspensions ranging from days to weeks, according to the CAC, meaning services are made temporarily unavailable on apps stores and online.

For internet users and activists, penalties can range from fines to jail time for spreading information about sensitive events online.

In China, social media accounts are linked to real names and national ID numbers by law, and companies are legally compelled to offer user information to authorities when requested.

“It has become normal to know things and also understand that they can’t be shared,” said one user, Andrew Hu. “They’re secret facts.”

In 2015, Hu spent three days in detention in his home region of Inner Mongolia after posting a comment about air pollution onto an unrelated image that alluded to the Tiananmen crackdown on Twitter-like social media site Weibo.

Hu, who declined to use his full Chinese name to avoid further run-ins with the law, said when police officers came to his parents house while he was on leave from his job in Beijing he was surprised, but not frightened.

“The responsible authorities and the internet users are equally confused,” said Hu. “Even if the enforcement is irregular, they know the simple option is to increase pressure.”

(Reporting by Cate Cadell. Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

Exclusive: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs

FILE PHOTO: A 6-axis robotic arm picks up sorting containers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo

By Jeffrey Dastin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is rolling out machines to automate a job held by thousands of its workers: boxing up customer orders.

The company started adding technology to a handful of warehouses in recent years, which scans goods coming down a conveyor belt and envelopes them seconds later in boxes custom-built for each item, two people who worked on the project told Reuters.

Amazon has considered installing two machines at dozens more warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people.

That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory. Amazon would expect to recover the costs in under two years, at $1 million per machine plus operational expenses, they said.

The plan, previously unreported, shows how Amazon is pushing to reduce labor and boost profits as automation of the most common warehouse task – picking up an item – is still beyond its reach. The changes are not finalized because vetting technology before a major deployment can take a long time.

Amazon is famous for its drive to automate as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. But the company is in a precarious position as it considers replacing jobs that have won it subsidies and public goodwill.

“We are piloting this new technology with the goal of increasing safety, speeding up delivery times and adding efficiency across our network,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. “We expect the efficiency savings will be re-invested in new services for customers, where new jobs will continue to be created.”

Amazon last month downplayed its automation efforts to press visiting its Baltimore fulfillment center, saying a fully robotic future was far off. Its employee base has grown to become one of the largest in the United States, as the company opened new warehouses and raised wages to attract staff in a tight labor market.

A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles. Those have high turnover because boxing multiple orders per minute over 10 hours is taxing work. At the same time, employees that stay with the company can be trained to take up more technical roles.

The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The machines require one person to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue and a technician to fix jams on occasion.

CMC declined to comment.

Though Amazon has announced it intends to speed up shipping across its Prime loyalty program, this latest round of automation is not focused on speed. “It’s truly about efficiency and savings,” one of the people said.

Including other machines known as the “SmartPac,” which the company rolled out recently to mail items in patented envelopes, Amazon’s technology suite will be able to automate a majority of its human packers. Five rows of workers at a facility can turn into two, supplemented by two CMC machines and one SmartPac, the person said.

The company describes this as an effort to “re-purpose” workers, the person said.

It could not be learned where roles might disappear first and what incentives, if any, are tied to those specific jobs.

But the hiring deals that Amazon has with governments are often generous. For the 1,500 jobs Amazon announced last year in Alabama, for instance, the state promised the company $48.7 million over 10 years, its department of commerce said.

PICKING CHALLENGE

Amazon is not alone in testing CMC’s packing technology. JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc, according to a person familiar with its pilot.

Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations, the person said. The company declined to comment.

Interest in boxing technology sheds light on how the e-commerce behemoths are approaching one of the major problems in the logistics industry today: finding a robotic hand that can grasp diverse items without breaking them.

Amazon employs countless workers at each fulfillment center who do variations of this same task. Some stow inventory, while others pick customer orders and still others grab those orders, placing them in the right size box and taping them up.

Many venture-backed companies and university researchers are racing to automate this work. While advances in artificial intelligence are improving machines’ accuracy, there is still no guarantee that robotic hands can prevent a marmalade jar from slipping and breaking, or switch seamlessly from picking up an eraser to grabbing a vacuum cleaner.

Amazon has tested different vendors’ technology that it may one day use for picking, including from Soft Robotics, a Boston-area startup that drew inspiration from octopus tentacles to make grippers more versatile, one person familiar with Amazon’s experimentation said. Soft Robotics declined to comment on its work with Amazon but said it has handled a wide and ever-changing variety of products for multiple large retailers.

Believing that grasping technology is not ready for prime time, Amazon is automating around that problem when packing customer orders. Humans still place items on a conveyor, but machines then build boxes around them and take care of the sealing and labeling. This saves money not just by reducing labor but by reducing wasted packing materials as well.

These machines are not without flaws. CMC can only produce so many per year. They need a technician on site who can fix problems as they arise, a requirement Amazon would rather do without, the two sources said. The super-hot glue closing the boxes can pile up and halt a machine.

Still other types of automation, like the robotic grocery assembly system of Ocado Group PLC, are the focus of much industry interest.

But the boxing machines are already proving helpful to Amazon. The company has installed them in busy warehouses that are driving distance from Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, Manchester and elsewhere, the people said.

The machines have the potential to automate far more than 24 jobs per facility, one of the sources said. The company is also setting up nearly two dozen more U.S. fulfillment centers for small and non-specialty inventory, according to logistics consultancy MWPVL International, which could be ripe for the machines.

This is just a harbinger of automation to come.

“A ‘lights out’ warehouse is ultimately the goal,” one of the people said.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; additional reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington and Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; editing by Greg Mitchell and Edward Tobin)

AI must be accountable, EU says as it sets ethical guidelines

FILE PHOTO: An activist from the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organisations opposing lethal autonomous weapons or so-called 'killer robots', protests at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, March, 21, 2019. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse/File Photo

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Companies working with artificial intelligence need to install accountability mechanisms to prevent its being misused, the European Commission said on Monday, under new ethical guidelines for a technology open to abuse.

AI projects should be transparent, have human oversight and secure and reliable algorithms, and they must be subject to privacy and data protection rules, the commission said, among other recommendations.

The European Union initiative taps in to a global debate about when or whether companies should put ethical concerns before business interests, and how tough a line regulators can afford to take on new projects without risking killing off innovation.

“The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on. It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies,” the Commission digital chief, Andrus Ansip, said in a statement.

AI can help detect fraud and cybersecurity threats, improve healthcare and financial risk management and cope with climate change. But it can also be used to support unscrupulous business practices and authoritarian governments.

The EU executive last year enlisted the help of 52 experts from academia, industry bodies and companies including Google, SAP, Santander and Bayer to help it draft the principles.

Companies and organizations can sign up to a pilot phase in June, after which the experts will review the results and the Commission decide on the next steps.

IBM Europe Chairman Martin Jetter, who was part of the group of experts, said guidelines “set a global standard for efforts to advance AI that is ethical and responsible.”

The guidelines should not hold Europe back, said Achim Berg, president of BITKOM, Germany’s Federal Association of Information Technology, Telecommunications, and New Media.

“We must ensure in Germany and Europe that we do not only discuss AI but also make AI,” he said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan in London; editing by John Stonestreet, Larry King)

Ethical question takes center stage at Silicon Valley summit on artificial intelligence

FILE PHOTO: A research support officer and PhD student works on his artificial intelligence projects to train robots to autonomously carry out various tasks, at the Department of Artificial Intelligence in the Faculty of Information Communication Technology at the University of Malta in Msida, Malta February 8, 2019. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi

By Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh Dave

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Technology executives were put on the spot at an artificial intelligence summit this week, each faced with a simple question growing out of increased public scrutiny of Silicon Valley: ‘When have you put ethics before your business interests?’

A Microsoft Corp executive pointed to how the company considered whether it ought to sell nascent facial recognition technology to certain customers, while a Google executive spoke about the company’s decision not to market a face ID service at all.

The big news at the summit, in San Francisco, came from Google, which announced it was launching a council of public policy and other external experts to make recommendations on AI ethics to the company.

The discussions at EmTech Digital, run by the MIT Technology Review, underscored how companies are making a bigger show of their moral compass.

At the summit, activists critical of Silicon Valley questioned whether big companies could deliver on promises to address ethical concerns. The teeth the companies’ efforts have may sharply affect how governments regulate the firms in the future.

“It is really good to see the community holding companies accountable,” David Budden, research engineering team lead at Alphabet Inc’s DeepMind, said of the debates at the conference. “Companies are thinking of the ethical and moral implications of their work.”

Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president for global affairs, said the internet giant debated whether to publish research on automated lip-reading. While beneficial to people with disabilities, it risked helping authoritarian governments surveil people, he said.

Ultimately, the company found the research was “more suited for person to person lip-reading than surveillance so on that basis decided to publish” the research, Walker said. The study was published last July.”

Kebotix, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup seeking to use AI to speed up the development of new chemicals, used part of its time on stage to discuss ethics. Chief Executive Jill Becker said the company reviews its clients and partners to guard against misuse of its technology.

Still, Rashida Richardson, director of policy research for the AI Now Institute, said little around ethics has changed since Amazon.com Inc, Facebook Inc, Microsoft and others launched the nonprofit Partnership on AI to engage the public on AI issues.

“There is a real imbalance in priorities” for tech companies, Richardson said. Considering “the amount of resources and the level of acceleration that’s going into commercial products, I don’t think the same level of investment is going into making sure their products are also safe and not discriminatory.”

Google’s Walker said the company has some 300 people working to address issues such as racial bias in algorithms but the company has a long way to go.

“Baby steps is probably a fair characterization,” he said.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Editing by Greg Mitchell)