Breaking news this week. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos is formulating her “bad man made me do it” defense, and her attorneys are considering whether or not she should take the stand. Having her stare at the jury with those Manson lamps while articulating, in that truck-driver voice, why her behavior wasn’t totally psychopathic makes about […]
The great American philosopher, Robin Williams, once said that reality is just a crutch for people who can’t face drugs. And he certainly came from a country where that rings true. America consumes huge quantities of drugs like no other. Does something hurt? Here, have some opioids. Does your high school teacher bore you to […]
Less than four months ago, we did a deep dive into the first pure play in self-driving semi-truck stocks with a profile on TuSimple (TSP). We found the business to be intriguing but opted to sit on the sidelines for now until the company puts more miles on the road and money into its bank […]
Amazon (AMZN) is one of those companies that everyone loves to hate. And there are plenty of good reasons. No. 1: Jeff Bezos. No. 2: Most retail investors of modest means (at least the ones who don’t know about fractional share ownership) believe they’re locked out of owning a piece of one of the world’s […]
Traditional industrial robots do one job really well but with little or no flexibility to do anything else – sort of like game show hosts. The name of the game today is automation, and the combination of technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, sensors, and the Internet of Things, among others, is accelerating […]
“Vicarious Surgical develops virtual reality (VR) software for minimally invasive surgery procedures.” That’s what Crunchbase says today, and that’s what we thought they were doing when we first wrote about the company back in 2017 in a piece titled 15 Virtual Reality Startups in Healthcare. At the time, we didn’t think VR surgeries made much […]
If hardware is hard, then smart home robotics is nearly impossible. There are plenty of theories about why people have been slow to adopt robots into the home, aside from the obvious fear-driven Terminator narrative. The most obvious one is that the existing robots don’t do anything more efficiently or effectively than even a teenager […]
“Do you love me?” the robots seemed to ask, as they danced to the tune with the same name. The most common question asked by those who saw that video was whether or not it was real. It was, and if you have a humanoid robot that can maintain its balance enough to do backflips, […]
The low-hanging fruit of autonomous driving would have to be semi trucks. They’re predominantly driven on highways which present fewer challenging conditions than city driving. They ply the same routes, over and over. (Nearly 80% of truck freight goods hauled in the U.S. are moved via 10% of the nation’s trade corridors.) And the shortage […]
We’re still a long way from the robot revolution and subsequent technological singularity promised by futurologists, science fiction writers, and overcaffeinated dorm-room philosophers. That said, robotic technology has come a long way since Honda’s (HMC) advanced humanoid robot, ASIMO, embarrassingly fell down the stairs back in 2006. We humans are so confident in our ability […]