Recommended Reads on the Robot and AI Beat This Week

Mark Zuckerberg to Build AI to Help at Home and Work
The CEO of Facebook has set himself an interesting goal for 2016: building an AI assistant to help out around the home and at work. It is, perhaps, a remarkable indication of how sophisticated Zuckerberg thinks the AI technologies Facebook is working on could become. Then again, maybe the tech wunderkind has been watching too many Iron Man movies?

The End of Lawyers? Not So Fast.
John Markoff of the New York Times writes about the latest research on the way automation could disrupt the job market. That research suggests that it would be harder for AI to replace lawyers than has often been assumed. This is partly because some of the relevant tasks they perform are not well structured, making it difficult for an AI to anticipate how to behave. Markoff recently wrote an interesting book, called Machines of Loving Grace, which chronicles the history of efforts to replace humans, as well as efforts to augment them.

Artificial Intelligence Finally Entered Our Everyday World
A piece in Wired looks back at what was a breakout year for artificial intelligence. From instant translation and face recogntion, to surprisingly intelligent chatbots, advances in neural networks helped advance the state of the art significantly in 2015.

Nvidia Announces “Supercomputer” for Self-Driving Cars at CES 2016
You can expect a lot of automotive news from this year’s show in Las Vegas, but Nvidia’s efforts to dominate the market for automated driving computer hardware are especially interesting. Nvidia’s self-driving chips are already used by Tesla, and as the price drops, we can expect a lot more cars to get smarter and more automated.

SynTouch Is Giving Robots the Ability to Feel Textures Like Humans Do
Here’s an interesting piece, from Wired, about they way that efforts to imbue robots and prosthetics with a sense of touch could enable product designers to communicate the textural qualities of the stuff they make.