Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Wendy's Plans New Underground Delivery System for Mobile Orders BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 2023 - 04:00 PM Fast food chain Wendy's is testing new technology to automate its stores. This is more bad news for human workers as automation and artificial intelligence invade the fast food industry. Wendy's announced a new partnership with Pipedream, a hyper logistics company, to pilot-test the first underground autonomous robot system that will allow food from the kitchen to be sent to designated parking spots via an underground network of pipes. "The partnership marks another bold step for Wendy's in driving industry innovation as it strives to serve digital-forward customers with greater ease, speed, and accuracy," Wendy's wrote in a press release. "We know that serving orders quickly and accurately leads to increased customer satisfaction. "Pipedream's Instant Pickup system has the potential to unlock greater mobile order speed...

Experiment contradicts Einstein and reveals ‘spooky quantum action’ with superconducting qubits 30 meters apart Story by Raúl Limón • May 11, 2023 6PM EDT Physicist James Trefil once said that quantum mechanics is a “place where the human brain will simply never feel comfortable.” This discomfort happens because nature, at a microscopic scale, obeys laws at odds with our perception of macroscopic reality. These laws include superposition (a particle can simultaneously be in different states, like Erwin Schrödinger’s live and dead cat), and quantum entanglement at a distance. Albert Einstein described the latter as “spooky action at a distance,” a principle allowing particles separated by distance to respond instantaneously and behave as a single system. A spectacular experiment that defies the speed of light was recently published in Nature by an international team of scientists led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, collaborating with Spain’s Institute of...

AI Is About To Be Everywhere Authored by Aden Tate via The Organic Prepper blog, May 10, 2023 Do you remember when drones were first released to the commercial market? There was a lot of talk about the privacy implications of them, and more than one case of where people were flying them over other peoples’ property, looking in peoples’ windows, and more of the like. Now, drones are firmly entrenched in modern society and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. They’ve not only been incorporated into militaries throughout the world, but they’re now in search and rescue operations, used for photography, security, and more. During Covid, Baltimore PD even wanted to use them to enforce social distancing. You probably don’t even think about it anymore. Now enter AI. AI is already all around you, but most recognize that ChatGPT ushered in a new era of AI. Right now, we’re all in the same stage that we were when drones were first released – theorizing about potential fears, costs, and wh...

Wendy's Unveils Google-Powered AI Chatbot At Drive-Thru BY TYLER DURDEN TUESDAY, MAY 09, 2023 - 09:00 PM Wendy's is reportedly developing an artificial intelligence chatbot powered by Google's natural-language software designed to automate drive-thrus. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Wendy's Chief Executive Todd Penegor, who said the fast-food chain's chatbot would be rolled out in June at a company-owned restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The Wendy's drive-thru chatbot "will be very conversational," Penegor explained. He said, "You won't know you're talking to anybody but an employee." Wendy's software engineers have been working with Google to build a large language model to understand words, popular expressions, and phrases in various dialects and accents when a customer orders. It'll understand acronyms unique to Wendy's, like "JBC" for a junior bacon cheeseburger. "Google Cloud's generative...

Scientists just made a massive breakthrough on an alternative to lithium-ion batteries: ‘These batteries are essential’ Story by Laurelle Stelle • May 6, 2023 Researchers have recently discovered a way to make an efficient battery out of zinc — an inexpensive, commonly found metal — instead of the rare metals used in lithium batteries. Most rechargeable batteries today are lithium-ion batteries, which include other metals like cobalt and nickel, Tech Xplore reports. As electric vehicles (EVs) and large-scale energy storage get more common, we’ll need more and more of those metals — but because they’re uncommon, the costs are often massive. Many researchers are working on cheaper battery options to reduce or replace these metals. One Chinese company has created a car powered by a sodium battery, and a University of Maryland researcher has invented a partly biodegradable battery made of zinc and crab shells. Researchers have even found not one but two ways to store energy in ordinary...

'Godfather Of AI' Quits Google And Warns World About Impending 'AI-Driven' Crisis BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, MAY 03, 2023 - 09:50 PM The "Godfather of AI" resigned from his position at Google, where he has worked for over a decade. He joined a growing chorus of critics who warn of the existential risk artificial intelligence systems pose to humans. On Monday, Google computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton tweeted: "In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly." In an interview with The New York Times, Hinton said it was only after quitting Google that he could openly talk about the dangers of AI. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. "Maybe what is going on in th...

CEOs are getting closer to finally saying it — AI will wipe out more jobs than they can count Story by hchowdhury@insider.com (Hasan Chowdhury) • Yesterday 9:38 AM Tech workers are finding out what it's like to be replaced by AI. IBM said on Monday that it would pause hiring on roles that it thought AI could do instead. It's the boldest statement yet from tech firms turning to AI to help them get efficient. What's it like to be told that you're not just out of a job, but that your bosses think your job can be done by AI? Tech workers are about to find out. On Monday, per a report by Bloomberg, it emerged that IBM is preparing to pause hiring on roles that it believed could be better performed by AI. That leaves 7,800 jobs at the tech giant vulnerable to being eradicated for good. Since the release of ChatGPT, tech CEOs have been racing to decide if the generative AI technology underlying the buzzy chatbot is more than a gimmick and can deliver on its promises to...