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

Automation Nation: America's Largest Employer 'Secretly' Tests Self-Driving Floor-Scrubbers by Tyler Durden Nov 24, 2017 7:30 PM Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon, America’s middle class must come to the realization tha t the country’s largest employer–Walmart is quietly testing an army of robots that soon will replace their jobs. The latest installment is an autonomous floor scrubber being tested at five store locations near the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. The autonomous cleaning robot dubbed Emma, an A.I. navigated system capable of operating floor care equipment on nightshifts, is able to clean the entire store front without human interaction. San Diego-based startup Brain Corp., works with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop novel machine learning algorithms that focus on taking jobs from middle class Americans. BrainOS is the company’s flagship product that enables robots to “perceive their environ...

Self-driving cars programmed to decide who dies in a crash Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press Published 2:38 p.m. ET Nov. 23, 2017 | Updated 2:06 p.m. ET Nov. 24, 2017 See how self-driving cars prepare for the real world inside a private testing facility owned by Google's autonomous car company, Waymo. USA TODAY WASHINGTON — Consider this hypothetical: It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit. As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car. Does the car: ...

Tesla's Elon Musk warns we only have 'a 5 to 10% chance' of preventing killers robots from destroying humanity Elon Musk was speaking to employees at his firm, Neuralink, this month He said that efforts to make AI safe only have 'a 5-10% chance of success' The warning comes shortly after Musk said that regulation of AI was drastically needed because it's a 'fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation' By Shivali Best For Mailonline PUBLISHED: 08:50 EST, 23 November 2017 | UPDATED: 08:50 EST, 23 November 2017 Elon Musk has been very vocal about his concerns over artificial intelligence, and now the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has quantified his worries. In a recent talk, Musk claimed that efforts to make AI safe only have 'a five to 10 per cent chance of success.' The warning comes shortly after Musk claimed that regulation of artificial intelligence was drastically needed because it's a 'fundamental risk ...

Facial recognition is tracking customers as they shop in stores, tech company says Retailers and malls are installing technology to track customers and collect data about consumer demographics, an IT company says Facial recognition technology is used to identify a customer's gender, age and ethnicity, according to Mark Lunt, group managing director at Jardine OneSolution Data can help identify customers for offline retailers: executive  Annie Lin, Special to CNBC Published 12 Hours Ago CNBC.com 9:39 PM ET Tue, 21 Nov 2017 | 02:14 Retailers are using facial recognition to collect data about customers as they shop in stores, according to an IT company with insight into the space. "One of the big things brick-and-mortar retailers are getting into now is knowing their customers ... tracking who's entering their mall and how they're behaving," said Mark Lunt, group managing director at Asia-based Jardine OneSolution. JOS works with the ...

Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt On Fake News, Russia, And “Information Warfare” “One of the things I did not understand,” says Schmidt, “was that these systems can be used to manipulate public opinion in ways that are quite inconsistent with what we think of as democracy.” BY AUSTIN CARR 10.29.17 Ever since the 2016 presidential election, Alphabet, the tech giant that owns Google, has been under intense scrutiny to acknowledge its role in trafficking the Russia-backed disinformation campaign that potentially helped shape the outcome. In some of the most unequivocal comments yet, the company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, recently acknowledged to Fast Company that the search giant didn’t do enough to safeguard its services against Russian manipulation. “We did not understand the extent to which governments–essentially what the Russians did–would use hacking to control the information space. It was not something we anticipated strongly enough,” Schmidt said. “I worry that t...

Scientists zapped people’s brains with magnetic pulses and it changed their taste in music Participants' enjoyment of music, and the amount they were willing to spend on it, were both affected by stimulation of neural circuits By Josh Gabbatiss Science Correspondent November 23,2017       Stimulating someone's brain with magnetic pulses is enough to change their taste in music, according to new research. Using a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, Scientists managed to change the enjoyment of music felt by their subjects. Not only did the treatment alter the way participants rated music, it even affected the amount of money they were willing to spend on it. Showing that the way people value music can be changed using this technique is “an important – and remarkable – demonstration that the circuitry behind these complex responses is now becoming better understood,” said Professor Robert Zatorre, a neurologist...

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us By Jim Hoagland November 22 at 6:58 PM MARRAKESH, Morocco Driverless cars and trucks rule the road, while robots “man” the factories. Super-smartphones hail Uber helicopters or even planes to fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas. Machines use algorithms to teach themselves cognitive tasks that once required human intelligence, wiping out millions of managerial, as well as industrial, jobs. These are visions of a world remade — for the most part, in the next five to 10 years — by technological advances that form a fourth industrial revolution. You catch glimpses of the same visions today not only in Silicon Valley but also in Paris think tanks, Chinese electric-car factories or even here at the edge of the Sahara. Technological disruption in the 21st century is different. Societies had years to adapt to change driven by the steam engine, electricity and the computer. Today, change is instant and ubiquitous. It a...