• Amazon is rumored to be working on new gadgets such as a higher-quality Echo, a home robot, and Alexa-enabled earbuds among other products.
• Such gadgets could give Amazon's popular Alexa assistant a stronger presence both inside and outside the home.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When it comes to gadgets, Amazon is best known for its line of Echo smart speakers, Kindle e-readers, and Fire TVs and tablets. But based on reports, it sounds like the online retail giant has a lot more in its pipeline. 

Amazon is reportedly planning to bring its popular Alexa assistant to a slew of new gadgets including home robots and earbuds. Such a move would give Amazon a way to expand its voice-enabled helper beyond the home, a market in which the company's Echo devices have already maintained a steady lead over rivals like Google. 

Here's a look at the gadgets Amazon is said to be working on. 

SEE ALSO: 25 tiny design features that show Apple's incredible attention to detail

A new Amazon Echo

Amazon is developing a new Echo that could be released by next year, according to Bloomberg. That wouldn't be too surprising considering Amazon has previously released new Echo products in the fall.

The report doesn't say much about the new Echo, other than that it's shaped like a cylinder just like the company's current speaker and that it's wider than the version Amazon sells today. That extra space is being used to fit additional components in the device, the report says.  

Read more: Apple's former Siri chief says today's digital assistants will have a long way to go before they can really understand us

A home robot that can respond to voice commands

Amazon has already established a strong presence in the home through the Echo, and now it's hoping to take that a step further with a domestic robot, as Bloomberg also reported.

The company is developing a household robot that has wheels for roaming about the home and navigates using computer vision, according to the report. Like the Echo, users would be able to interact with it using voice commands. The device is being called "Vesta" internally, and the company is said to have ramped up work on the project in recent months.

If Amazon does move forward with its "Vesta" bot, it's unclear when it will launch. The company planned to announced the robot this year, according to Bloomberg, but it's not ready for mass production just yet. 

A high-fidelity music streaming service

Amazon is reportedly working on a high-definition music service that would offer a better bit rate than CD quality, according to Music Business Worldwide. It's expected to launch before the end of 2019 and could cost $15 per month, the report said citing music industry sources.

That timing suggests there's a chance Amazon could debut the high-fidelity music service alongside the new Echo it's rumored to launch. If Amazon does launch a high-fidelity music streaming service at that price point, it would be cheaper than Tidal, which charges $20 per month for that sound quality. 

Wireless earbuds with Alexa built-in

Amazon could launch its own alternative to AirPods soon enough.

The company will reportedly release voice-activated earbuds powered by its popular Alexa virtual assistant as early as the second half of 2019, according to Bloomberg. In addition to using your voice to ask questions or summon the weather, you'll be able to execute certain tasks through gestures, says the report. Such actions reportedly include tapping to switch between music tracks or end phone calls.  Like AirPods, they are also expected to come in a case that serves as a charger. 

A wearable device that can detect your emotions

Wireless earbuds aren't the only wearable devices Amazon is said to be working on. The company is reportedly developing a wrist-worn gadget that could recognize human emotions, according to Bloomberg.

The voice-activated device has been described as a health and wellness gadget, and it can discern a user's emotional state by the sound of his or her voice, the report says. The product has been codenamed Dylan, and it's unclear how far along it is. It would work in conjunction with a smartphone app. 

The news regarding the product's development comes as rival Apple have been pushing more deeply into health. If Amazon does launch a wrist-worn health device, it would represent yet another area in which Amazon competes with the iPhone maker, along with voice-enabled assistants and music streaming. 

• The Marine Corps has been overhauling its infantry squads, and a handful of Marines recently performed field testing alongside autonomous robots developed by DARPA.
• The robots are part of the agency's Squad X experimentation program, which was started to give infantry Marines the same resources that mounted forces have.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

There are #squadgoals, and then there are squad goals— and only one of them includes a potential future accompanied by autonomous murderbots.

Hot on the heels of the Marine Corps's head-to-toe overhaul of infantry rifle squads, a handful of grunts at the Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California recently conducted field testing alongside a handful of autonomous robots engineered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Squad X Experimentation program.

The Squad X program was launched in 2016 to give dismounted infantry squads the same "highly effective multi-domain defensive and offensive capabilities that vehicle-assigned forces currently enjoy," but infantry Marines simply can't support with current combat loads, according to DARPA.

But that doesn't just mean robotic mules to hump gear: As autonomous platforms become more integrated into current combined-arms squads, Marines will also face a "steady evolution of tactics," as Squad X program manage Lt. Col. Phil Root said in a DARPA release announcing the field tests.

"Developing hardware and tactics that allow us to operate seamlessly within a close combat ground environment is extremely challenging, but provides incredible value," Root said.

During the early 2019 test, a gang of autonomous ground and aerial systems that provided intelligence and recon support for Marines outfitted with sensor-laden vests as they moved between natural desert and mock city blocks at Twentynine Palms, while ground-based units provided armed security for the primary force.

The autonomous systems "provided reconnaissance of areas ahead of the unit as well as flank security, surveying the perimeter and reporting to squad members' handheld Android Tactical Assault Kits (ATAKs)," DARPA said. "Within a few screen taps, squad members accessed options to act on the systems' findings or adjust the search areas."

The additional recon support and added firepower on squad flanks could prove a major boost to Marine squads as continue to evolve in pursuit of that ever-precious lethality. And don't worry: DARPA has your inevitable SkyNet concerns in mind.

"A human would be involved in any lethal action ... But we're establishing superior situational awareness through sufficient input and AI, and then the ability to do something about it at fast time scales."

SEE ALSO: DARPA found a way to reinvent the wheel

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NOW WATCH: Step aboard the USS Kearsarge, the US Navy workhorse that takes Marines to war

• Amazon's next big push into the smart home technology space could be a personal robot, as reports from Bloomberg have indicated.
• Amazon's reported ambitions in the home robot field would come after multiple companies have tried and failed to get the technology to take off — in the past year, three personal-robotics startups all failed.
• A large company like Amazon has many advantages, such as the funding to explore such projects and a smart home platform that's already popular.
• But it might not be enough to address the underlying challenge of convincing consumers why they should want a home robot in the first place.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

The concept of the robotic assistant is almost as old as science fiction itself. And there's been no shortage of tech firms trying to make it a reality — from promising startups founded by experts in robotics and artificial intelligence, to tech behemoths like LG and Samsung. But despite these efforts, robotic butlers that can do more than turn on the lights or provide weather updates feel as far away as ever.

Amazon could be the next major tech company attempting to change this by bringing robots into the home, according to Bloomberg.

The company is reportedly working on a home robot, codenamed "Vesta," that would essentially serve as a mobile version of Alexa that could follow you around the home. Prototypes of the device are said to be about waist high, and the robot would navigate its surroundings using computer vision. It's unclear when Amazon would plan to announce or launch the robot, but Bloomberg reports that it was initially slated to be unveiled this year.

If Amazon does debut a home robot, it would come after numerous startups have done so and failed. Anki, the startup founded by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute alumni that initially gained popularity through its smartphone-controlled race cars, announced in April that it was closing its doors. 

Read more: Amazon blew Prime Day sales out of the water this year, and that could put a bigger target on its back

The once-buzzy startup previously sold two robots, Cozmo and Vector, which both looked like characters plucked from a Pixar film that could fit in the palm of your hand. Their sophisticated facial expressions and ability to read and and navigate their environments made them stand out from other alternatives, but the company ultimately lacked the funding it needed to continue operating, as Recode first reported.

The companies behind Jibo and Kuri, two other home robots that caught media attention for their bubbly, almost human-like personalities, also shutdown over the past year.

It's not just startups that have struggled to bring robots into the mainstream. Large firms such as Samsung, LG,  and Asus have all announced home robots in recent years, many of which are usually draw much attention at the Consumer Electronics Show that takes place in Las Vegas each January. But none of them have made their way into US homes yet.

Amazon upended the e-commerce, smart home, and publishing industries through products like its online store, the Kindle, and the Echo. But developing a home robot will be a challenge even for Amazon, one of the world's most valuable brands, for one important reason: People may not have a reason to want it.

Part of the problem is that robots like Kuri and Jibo didn't offer much more functionality than the devices we already have in our homes — devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, smart home security cameras, and our smartphones already help feed us information and perform common tasks, with more flexibility and a lower price than any home robot. 

They're also considerably more expensive than devices like the Echo, which comes as cheap as $50 if you opt for the Dot model. Jibo was priced at $900, while Mayfield Robotics charged $700 for Kuri. iRobot's Roomba self-piloting vacuum is probably the best example of a successful home robot — one that's proven to be useful for a specific task. 

"The Amazon Echo is available for dirt cheap," said Mukul Krishna, a senior global director of digital media at research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan. "So certainly you're thinking about, OK what is the utility?" 

Proving that a home robot is valuable will likely be Amazon's biggest hurdle. But it will also have to overcome other challenges, like perfecting a robot that can successfully navigate and transition between carpet and wood flooring. It will also have to sell a product that follows you around the home at a time when concerns over consumer privacy are as high as ever.

Of course, Amazon does have some important advantages working in its favor, especially when compared to startups. It has the necessary resources to invest in the development of the technology, and it already has a strong relationship with consumers. Plus, it's already established it Alexa assistant as being a criticial component of the smart home, so there are already many home appliances, products, and apps that are compatible with it. But if this "Vesta" home robot truly is Amazon's next big bet for the home, it's unclear if those assets will be enough. 

"It's not obvious that Amazon would be able to slam dunk succeed in this space," said Frank Gillett, a vice president and principal analyst with market research firm Forrester. "The idea of a home robot, it's a solution looking for a problem." 

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SEE ALSO: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says most people should 'figure out a way to get off Facebook'

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NOW WATCH: All the ways Amazon is taking over your house

• Marine Corps units are incorporating robots that can challenge marksmen in new ways.
• The goal is to give Marines a new kind of challenge to prepare them for different kinds of operations in the future, but the benefits aren't limited to infantry.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

At 2nd Marine Division in North Carolina, troops who have spent their careers shooting at static bull's-eyes on paper are being forced to adapt to a new kind of target — one that can charge at them, move in unexpected directions, respond when engaged and even shout at them in a foreign language.

The division is the first operational unit in the military to employ autonomous Marathon targets: humanoid figures on four-wheeled platforms that can be programmed to operate in concert, and are fast and unpredictable enough to rock the most experienced marksmen back on their heels.

The targets have been a subject of experimentation within the Marine Corps for several years. The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, out of Quantico, Virginia, had taken point on experimentation with the systems, and in 2018 then-Commandant Gen. Robert Neller commissioned a study on how the targets could improve Marines' skills and training quality.

But officials at 2nd Marine Division were not content to wait until a service-wide decision was made on how to use the robots. When Marine Corps budgets became constrained at the end of last fiscal year due to storm repair and other costs, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joshua Smith, division gunner for 2nd Marine Division, said he stepped in to save the experimentation effort.

"When I first approached [2nd Marine Division Commanding Gen. Maj. Gen. David Furness] and told him the Marine Corps could not fiscally afford to keep these targets for the next year, he immediately responded, 'Find a way to get the money; I want these targets for the division,'" Smith told Military.com.

The division ended up leasing 16 targets for a total cost of $2.1 million.

That may sound steep compared to traditional static targets, but Smith notes having targets that move means he can modernize or alter any range cheaply in the space of an hour.

The Marine Corps, Smith said, recently abandoned a plan to convert all its rifle ranges from yards to meters — an effort that would allow Marines to operate more easily with other services and other nations' militaries — because of the towering cost, estimated at $1 million per berm.

"How do you do that on the cheap? You move the target," he said. "You don't move the berm."

Smith said he's now finding range configuration limited only by his own imagination. And the same, he said, is true for employment of the targets, which not only test marksmanship skills through evasive, human-like maneuvering, but also make a convincing enemy force that can leave troops dry-mouthed when they charge a shooter at 10 miles per hour.

He said the Marine Corps-commissioned study found the targets could increase individual marksmanship effectiveness on a moving target dramatically over the course of just one day.

"A Marine went anywhere from a 20-30% hit rate on a moving target to 80-90%," Smith said. "Imagine, if I can do reps and sets like that all the time, how I could increase lethality at the individual level."

A primary objective for Smith this year is the collection of more data: usage rates and statistics demonstrating increases in lethality across 2nd Marine Division.

"We're trying to show that these are a valuable target to us," he said.

They're already wildly popular, with wait lists for division units to use them. Smith said units preparing to deploy get priority; others get in line.

He has brought out the targets for unit events such as the 2nd MarDiv squad competition in June and July, where a group of targets simulated an enemy patrol. A Marine Corps squad ambushed the simulated enemy with an M18 claymore mine, then fired on the robots when they scattered in a realistic human response to the attack.

"When we first leased them, it was sort of little-known that we had these targets. When I got Marines in front of them, that's when the usage rates went up," Smith said. " ... Marines are asking why are these not on every range."

Among his future plans is a live-fire range in which the targets work their way inside an infantry unit's perimeter, putting human troops on the defensive. Having 16 of the humanoid targets means a rifle squad can be matched or even outnumbered by a yelling, advancing simulated enemy.

"As we get out of the [Iraq/Afghanistan] conflicts, what that was, we always outnumbered our enemy," Smith said. "Now, as the [Defense Department] starts to look at peer-versus-peer, we try to give that to the Marines now. A rifle squad is fighting a rifle squad. A fire team is fighting a fire team."

It's not just the ground-pounders who can benefit from the targets, though. Smith said amphibious assault vehicle crewmen have fired on the targets using their guns, and tanks have been able to train their 7.62mm coaxial machine guns on them.

"Some of the stuff we would like to see in the future is the ability to incorporate some of our higher-caliber munitions," he said. "Right now, we're up to 7.62 and some of the smaller fragmentation [rounds]. We would love to incorporate mortars. ... Those are some of the things we have been looking at."

Smith said he's also thinking about how to rig the targets to "shoot back" at human troops, possibly by incorporating the Instrumented Tactical Engagement Simulation System, or ITESS, essentially a high-tech version of laser tag.

Marine Corps-wide, Smith said he'd like to see eight to 16 of the targets fielded to each infantry battalion. But whether or not the service springs for the technology, he's confident his Marines will be able to keep training with them.

"This is going to be up to [Headquarters Marine Corps] for them to find the budget," he said. "Within 2nd Marine Division, we're going top watch this very closely and see what the institution does. If it doesn't go the way we would like it to go, I will tell you with confidence that Gen. Furness will give me guidance to find said money and keep these targets within the division."

— Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

SEE ALSO: The Marine Corps' first new sniper rifle since the Vietnam War is finally ready for combat

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NOW WATCH: Watch Ford's delivery robot that walks on two legs like a human

• Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reportedly told scientists he wanted to "seed the human race" with his DNA by impregnating 20 women at a time at his New Mexico ranch, according to The New York Times.
• The idea may be connected to Epstein's interest in transhumanism: the belief that the human brain and body can and should be artificially enhanced using modern science and technology.
• Epstein reportedly discussed the New Mexico baby ranch idea with various scientists, but there is no evidence that he acted on it.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jeffrey Epstein, who was charged earlier this month with trafficking dozens of underage girls, reportedly told various scientists in the early 2000s that he wanted to "seed the human race" with his DNA, according to The New York Times.

Epstein said he'd do this, The Times reports, by impregnating 20 women at a time at his ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

There is no evidence to suggest that Epstein took any steps toward making this vision a reality. But the idea reportedly stemmed from Epstein's interest in the philosophy of transhumanism: The belief that people can (and should) artificially enhance the human body using modern technology.

Transhumanists herald genetic engineering and artificial intelligence as promising ways to improve human performance. They advocate, essentially, for the use of technology — including nanomedicine, robotics, brain-computer integration, and more — that alters typical human physiology in order to better our body and brain.

Epstein was fascinated with transhumanism

According to The Times, Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, remembers talking to a NASA scientist who said Epstein's New Mexico baby ranch idea was inspired by the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank in Escondido, California. The sperm bank operated from 1979 to 1999 and was incorrectly rumored to contain only the sperm of Nobel laureates.

Read More:Jeffrey Epstein reportedly told scientists he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz also told The Times that Epstein once brought up the topic of how humans could be improved genetically at a lunch that Epstein sponsored.

Epstein's dual interest in furthering his own DNA and "improving" the human gene pool plays into the biggest criticism of the transhumanist ideology: that it's on par with eugenics.

Eugenics is the science of deliberately breeding human beings to increase the likelihood of certain characteristics. It's associated with Nazi ideology — the party favored blond, blue-eyed, Aryan people and used the idea of eugenics to justify genocide.

Transhumanism's political legacy

Many transhumanists, however, are interested in other ways to improve human performance that don't have to do with altering the gene pool.

Prior to the 2016 election, for example, presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan promised to work towards halting aging and death by merging technology with human biology. Istvan founded the Transhumanist Party, a political party focused on using science and tech to solve major problems facing humanity.

Istvan sees aging and death as the biggest plagues of our time, and thinks technology offers a cure. He supports, for example, the use of bionic organs as transplants when natural organs fail.

"I think people have just been conditioned to believe that this is just a natural part of existence, that that's the program," Istvan previously told Business Insider. "And so our job is to uncondition that. To tell them actually it was the program until we reached the 21st century and now all of a sudden we realize that with genetics and bionics and robotics that we have a real chance of stopping death and treating it as something much more similar to a disease than some natural phenomenon."

Cryonics, the controversial process of freezing a body with the goal of bringing it back to life later, also has a place in transhumanist thinking. Currently, it only works for human embryos. But according to The Times, one unnamed transhumanist said he and Epstein once chatted about cryonics, and Epstein said he'd want his head and penis frozen.

SEE ALSO: This guy is running for president with the goal of using science to cure death and aging

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Google's DeepMind AI just taught itself to walk

• Some tech products, like smart speakers and self-driving cars, make the world a better place. However, they may have a dark side that gives tech experts pause.
• Technologies like deepfakes, de-pixelation, and door-opening robots, seem to serve no purpose other than to keep us awake at night.
• We rounded up 11 of the creepiest technologies you didn't realize you should be worried about.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The 21st century is a great time to be alive. We drive electric cars, we're curing diseases with CRISPR, and we'll soon be returning to the moon in rockets more reusable than the Space Shuttle ever was. 

But it's not all silicon and sunshine — our future has a healthy dose of "Black Mirror," thanks to a slew of technologies that are downright creepy. Some of these technologies seem promising but can be easily perverted in frightening ways. Others seem to serve no purpose other than to creep us out.

Here are the 11 technologies that are so creepy they're keeping tech experts and futurists awake at night. 

SEE ALSO: 9 predictions from old sci-fi movies that actually came true

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China’s "social credit" system

If you've seen the "Black Mirror" episode "Nosedive," you're familiar with the idea of using social media reputation as a sort of social currency for keeping a job, getting an apartment, and using other everyday services. What you might not realize is that China is actually implementing that very thing in real life.

"It's arguably the largest social engineering experiment in human history, enabled by artificial intelligence, especially face recognition, and big data analytics," Lukas Kovarik, CEO of Bohemian AI, told Business Insider. "You can lose your credit for criticizing the communist party as well as for not having your dog on a leash. Low-scoring citizens are banned from traveling, work, or private schools. Your mugshot can even be shown in movie theatres before the movie."

Smart speakers

What could be less intimidating than a smart speaker? Products like Amazon Echo (powered by the Alexa personal assistant) and Google Home are popular household companions that respond to voice commands. But many experts are wary, citing the creepy behavior lurking just around the corner — like cases in which Amazon has already mishandled sensitive private recordings.

"I'm skeptical that these devices are not listening to our conversations,"Heather Vescent, a futurist at The Purple Tornado, said, citing reports of Amazon employees explicitly playing back Alexa recordings.  Consider that when you place Alexa in your bedroom. 

Deepfakes

Deepfakes — a notorious technology that uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to seamlessly replace faces in a video — might have some superficially beneficial applications. But on the whole, it's not just creepy, but existentially terrifying. Imagine being able to swap one person's face onto another person's body in full, high-resolution video.

There are already deepfake video editors available, and they're no more complicated than traditional video editing software. It's already been used for revenge porn and political propaganda. What happens when it's impossible to tell legitimate video from video manipulated using deepfake technology?

Aaron Lawson, a scientist at SRI International's Speech Technology and Research Laboratory, said this may lead to political instability and chaos as people lose faith in media. "It's going to lead to confusion about basic reality and encourage a sense that truth is just your opinion, based on the assumption that everything has been faked," Lawson said. 

Self-driving cars

We were promised flying cars, but it looks increasingly what we're really getting is self-driving cars. Already, some cars on the road have autopilot or drive-assist modes that can handle common driving situations. Can they drive more safely on average than humans? Arguably, yes — especially over time, as carmakers learn from past mistakes and vast volumes of real-world driving data.  

But what you might not think about is that self-driving cars will, by their very role of "taking the wheel," eventually have to make life and death decisions. What happens when your car is faced with a real-world Trolley Problem, in which the only available options are to run into either this person or that person? Will the car prioritize the driver's life, or the life of a pedestrian? These are decisions humans have never left to machines in the past. 

"There will certainly be unintended consequences we have not thought through,"Vescent said. 

3D body scanning

As a society, we're slowly acclimating to the use of 3D body scanners, especially at airport security. But retailers are tentatively experimenting with body scanners as well. Amazon, for example, is experimenting with it as a revolutionary way to custom fit apparel you buy online. 

In an age when social media companies are accused of violating customers' privacy and banks are not immune from cyberattacks, it's no surprise that futurists like Harsha Reddy worry about ways your exact body specifications can be misused online.

"If your personal data is available online, including a scan of your body, this can be a whole other level of creepiness," Reddy said. 

Smart baby monitors

Smart baby monitors are a part of the emerging Internet of Things, and they're welcomed by many parents because they allow you to see, hear, and talk to your baby from anywhere in the house. 

But "smart" sometimes seems synonymous with "hackable," and we've already seen hackers gain access to smart monitors, like one especially creepy case in which a stranger threatened to kidnap a family's baby. And it can get worse. 

"Someone speaking to your child and asking them to open a door or a window or go to a particular place is probably the worst that could happen with this type of technology," said Donata Kalnenaite, futurist and president of Termageddon.

Re-identifying anonymous people

Evidence is building that anonymization — the act of stripping identifying information from private data to make subjects in tests and studies anonymous — simply doesn't work. Researchers in the UK and Belgium have recently published a study in which they showed how easy it is to re-identify a specific person from a dataset that has been used for research. They were able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of users from a given dataset, even when the dataset was incomplete. 

That might sound somewhat academic and perhaps irrelevant to your life, but Ilia Sotnikov, a cybersecurity expert at Netwrix, says it has far-reaching, creepy implications. 

"Even heavily sampled anonymized datasets can't satisfy modern privacy standards, whether it's captured for medical research or Siri voice assistance," Sotnikov told Business Insider.

Privacy might be dead. 

Brain-computer interfaces

Once the stuff of science fiction, sophisticated brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming a reality. And like many of the leading technologies in the news, this one is also being developed by real-world Tony Stark, Elon Musk.

Neuralink is working to develop high-bandwidth implantable computer interfaces that will allow doctors to restore sensory and motor function in people who are severely disabled through strokes and other neurological disorders. But of course, it won't end there. Once BCI technology advances far enough, Musk hopes it can be used to enhance ordinary human brain function with better memory and cognitive abilities, as human brains and artificial intelligence merge. 

The very concept might sound creepy to some, but there are even more distressing implications.

"It opens our bodies to an unknown amount of threats. Eventually, this technology may present an opportunity for people to be hacked into, and that control could be all-encompassing — physical, mental, and emotional," Hypergiant CEO Ben Lamm told Business Insider. 

Voiceprint recognition systems

Voiceprint recognition has moved out of the sci-fi movie realm and into commercial reality, with some banks and credit unions using voiceprints to improve customer service. Since a voiceprint is a unique way to identify a customer, voiceprints can avoid answering security questions or remembering passcodes.

But that introduces a new creepy concern: criminals cloning your voice. It's not a 10-year-from-now proposition. AI startup Lyrebird has already demonstrated the ability to convincingly clone voices.

Futurist Laura Mingail is concerned about the risk that thanks to artificial intelligence, voice cloning can be done by secretly recording a short sample of your voice.

"If your credit card is stolen, that theft is easy to identify,"  Mingail told Business Insider. "But if your voice is stolen and used, you can't yet track its usage, or all the implications of its theft — whether it's used to access personal banking information, to speak with family members, employers, or even the press. The abilities of AI to do voice cloning in mere minutes gives an entirely new meaning to losing your voice."

De-pixelating pixelated images

We're used to seeing pixelation used to mask faces, license plates, and secure undisclosed locations, so much so that we intuitively know that a pixelated image is intended to protect someone or something's identity. Pixelation works for the very reason that the "sharpen and enhance" trope on television doesn't— if something is pixelated, there isn't enough information to refine it into a sharp, identifiable image. 

At least, that used to be true. But in 2016, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech created software that can "see through" intentionally pixelated images to understand what's behind the masking. It uses neural networks, naturally — in other words, artificial intelligence — and has had great success defeating YouTube's privacy blur tool. 

"This means that the most vulnerable people whose faces must be protected from publicity can't in fact be protected at all, Kovarik told Business Insider.

Sophisticated robots

Some science fiction tropes are iconic. The robot apocalypse, for example, which has fueled six "Terminator" movies and a TV series so far, relies on robots that hunt down humans. 

With that image burned into the collective consciousness, you might think that robotics companies would avoid creating robots that look like they're a few iterations from killbot, but that's not the way Boston Dynamics rolls.

For at least two decades, the company has been rolling out increasingly sophisticated and ever creepier robots capable of overpowering and outrunning humans. And now Boston Dynamics has a robot that can open doors to search rooms to see where we're hiding from them.  

• Creator is a start-up restaurant in San Francisco that uses a robot to make burgers.
• The restaurant is backed by Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. and already has a waitlist to get in. 
• Creator's robot makes your burger in five minutes or less, placing toppings and condiments with precision. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Here, a robot makes your burger from start to finish.

Alex Vardakostas: I grew up flipping burgers, my parents had a restaurant. [I've] made a lot [of burgers] in my life. Making that many burgers for folks, all the time, you start to realize that there are a lot of missed opportunities to make things a little better for everybody.

Vardakostas: Right now we have a system with 350 sensors, 20 computers, 50 actuators, and algorithms, and codes all over the place but we're finally here. It's finally able to do it.

How does it work?

Vardakostas: So what we have is one of the most advanced culinary instruments out there. It does pretty some cool stuff. One, it makes literally the freshest burger ever.

The first step after you place your order, is a bun will go into the system and it's a whole brioche roll. In other words, [it's] not the pre-sliced variety that you might be used to.

Using a whole roll keeps it fluffy and preservative-free, since it isn't exposed to air.

The brioche roll is sliced, buttered, and toasted.

Next, the toppings are sliced fresh.

Vardakostas: In the middle of the robot is basically a huge refrigerator. It's a case that contains lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, onions. We have two types of cheese that we grate to order directly on the bun and then 15 different sauces.

So the robot will do different things simultaneously. There's a lot of software tracking to make sure the timing matches up. And so while we're building the burger with the toppings, like slicing tomatoes, pickles, grating cheese, melting cheese, at the same time, the meat is being ground and placed into the griddle, and then cooked to order.

Every single ingredient is elevated one way or another.

The robot combines technological precision with gourmet techniques.

Vardakostas: It uses some gourmet techniques that are pretty much impractical to do by hand. So, as an example, we literally align the meat as it's coming out of the grinder to go vertically along with your bite, so your incisors hit the seams of the meat and crumbles in your mouth, as opposed to having your teeth have to cut through them.

The robot also uses artificial intelligence to cook each burger perfectly.

Vardakostas: There are 11 thermosensors just watching everything from the ambient temperature, to the temperature of the cooking surfaces, and adjusting [them] every single time. We don't cook any burger the same [way].

How does it taste?

Melia: This is really good.

Vardakostas: It's dangerous.

Vardakostas: I think one of the most exciting things about Creator is that we're serving [a] very high quality, gourmet burger with high-end ingredients at six bucks.

Currently, Creator only has one location in San Francisco...

And there's a waitlist to get in.

Vardakostas: Solving an engineering challenge like this has been incredibly difficult. It's not just a technology play or something like that. We wanted to make the best dining experience ever.

There's been a conversation about [robots] taking away jobs and I think that the reality is, it doesn't make sense for us to have to fear better tools and better equipment. At the end of the day, it's making a much higher quality product at a lower price available to everybody. This impacts everyone who eats, which is all of us.

Are robots the future of the restaurant industry?

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• YouTube reportedly removed multiple videos from its platform of robots fighting, claiming they showed "the deliberate infliction of animal suffering."
• Multiple robot makers have posted to social media to say their YouTube videos were removed for content violations, even after moderators manually reviewed the marked videos.
• Many of the robot-fighting videos have since been allowed back onto the platform.
• YouTube's efforts to moderate content have been widely criticized not only by robot builders, but by the LGBTQ community, right-wing politicians, and child safety advocates.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Robot makers and builders are calling out YouTube for taking down videos of robot fights for allegedly depicting animal cruelty.

Multiple YouTube creators, including many who have been contestants on the TV competition BattleBots, received emails from YouTube notifying them that some of their robot-fighting videos have been taken down from the platform. According tothese robot builders, YouTube wrote to creators that their videos were taken down for showing "the deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight."

"Today is a sad day," one affected robot maker, Jamison Go, wrote on Facebook. "Robot builders across the world cried out in agony as YouTube's algorithm falsely identified personal videos of robot sport as 'animal cruelty' and 'cock fighting'. Today I lost nine videos but others lost hundreds or more."

Another creator, named Sarah Pohorecky, told VICE that one of her videos was recently removed, and that her account was given a strike for violating YouTube policies. 

Many of the robot-building videos have since been reinstated on YouTube. YouTube said these robot-building videos were "mistakenly removed," and issued a statement that the platform regularly useswhen itreinstatesvideosit haspreviously decided to delete:

With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content.

Here is one of the robot-fighting videos that YouTube originally said depicted animal cruelty:

YouTube's content moderation policies have been widely criticized. Previous to drawing the ire of robot builders, YouTube has been critiqued for failing to remove videos containing hate speech, favoring its money-making top stars, inadequately protecting children on its platform, and demonetizing LGBTQ content.

SEE ALSO: LGBTQ creators accuse YouTube of discrimination in class-action lawsuit alleging it unfairly restricts and demonetizes queer content

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NOW WATCH: 5 things wrong with Apple's lightning cable

• Robot food-delivery startup Starship Technologies closed $45 million in funding this week, and it's putting that money towards winning over hungry college students with its six-wheeled food robots. The company has raised $85 million in total from investors.
  
• CEO Lex Bayer told Business Insider about the company's strategy going forward, which is to hook students on the convenience of robotic delivery in a long-term plan to normalize robot delivery in the wider world.
• Bayer said Starship hopes to have the edge on gig-economy food delivery apps like Uber Eats by tapping into the underused infrastructure of sidewalks.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Robot food-delivery startup Starship Technologies has been gaining speed, and it's thanks to hungry, tech-happy students.

Earlier this week the five-year-old San Francisco startup announced a $45 million series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $85 million. It simultaneously revealed that its rate of delivery has been growing rapidly. Founded in 2014, it took the company four years to get to 10,000 robot deliveries. Eight months later it was at 50,000. Four months after that, it hit 100,000.

Starship's goal, essentially, is to replace your pizza delivery guy with one of its robots, in what CEO Lex Beyer sees as the logical conclusion to the current trend for food delivery apps.

Starship's robots look like a little white box, no taller than knee-height, that trundles around on six wheels. They have an array of cameras through which human controllers can see where the robot is going, and sirens that go off if the robot detects it is being tampered with.

Bayer told Business Insider that the acceleration in delivery rate is due to the company's technology maturing. It isn't easy building robust robots that can navigate poor weather — and unkind humans.

"If you zoom out, this is really difficult, challenging technology to build," he told Business Insider. "We needed to drive a lot of miles for our robots to get smart and learn about the world. We've had to invest in the technology and making our robots capable. But we've now pretty much sorted that out, so we can put down one of the robots and turn them on and they just start doing deliveries."

Now that its robots are ship-shape and it has a $45 million cash injection Starship has a singular aim — expand to 100 university campuses in the US and Europe to get students hooked on robotic delivery.

"We're seeing tremendous uptake on university campuses," said Bayer, adding that hot food deliveries were dominating the orders rather than groceries. "The reason is simple. We're dealing with a generation of people that have grown up expecting that they can control the world through their phones, and with a few taps have things delivered to them," he said.

Read more:The 100-hour weeks, intense culture, and divisive hires that made Deliveroo a $2 billion business with backing from Amazon

Starship first started serving students in George Mason University, and has since spread to Northern Arizona University and Pittsburgh University.

Bayer says it will soon launch in Purdue as well. It's partnered with a handful of restaurants on each of these campuses, ranging from big chains like Starbucks and Subway to independent local places.

When it started out in George Mason it had 25 robots serving four restaurants, that has since grown to over 35 robots serving more than ten restaurants.

Bayer said that on the three campuses where Starship currently operates it has seen a pretty constant stream of orders from breakfast, to lunch, to dinner, to late night. "Students are eating all of the time," he said, although he emphasised that late night had been a particular success.

Starship deliveries run from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., and Bayer said some partnered restaurants had even extended their hours to cater to more robotic deliveries.

Starship's long-term aim isn't just to dominate university life, but rather to use this next generation of students as a kind of Trojan horse for normalizing robotic delivery outside of campuses.

"A whole generation of students will grow up in the world where they expect things to be delivered to them with robots and they think that is normal and the way the world works. And then as they leave university they will expect this in neighborhoods and cities around the world as well," he said.

Starship founder Ahti Heinla told Business Insider last year that the robots had encountered some teething problems as some human pedestrians were prone to giving them a kick as they pass by. When asked how the increased robot fleet is doing, Bayer said the reaction has been largely positive, with some students even posing with the robots in in caps and gowns at their graduation ceremonies.

When asked how robots are going to out-compete delivery services such as Uber Eats, which hire human delivery riders and drivers, Bayer said their advantage lies in using the sidewalk. "Sidewalks are an underutilized asset," he said. "I look at sidewalks everywhere I go, and they're generally empty." The sell is faster deliveries.

He also believes that having robots fan out centrally from restaurants and supermarkets is a more efficient model than pinging delivery riders from outlet to outlet. "With things like grocery and food delivery, nearly all of the stuff people consume all work in a three-mile radius of where they're already based. So doing it with a robot is just a much more efficient way to do it," he said.

So watch out Generation Z, the robots are coming, and they want you to like them.

SEE ALSO: Why using food apps like GrubHub and Postmates could lead to the actual restaurant apocalypse

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NOW WATCH: How Area 51 became the center of alien conspiracy theories

• Sophia the robot garnered national media attention for her advanced artificial intelligence, quotable moments (she said she wanted to "destroy humans"), diverse facial expressions, and one-time spat with Chrissy Teigen.
• As it turns out, Sophia may have a connection to the late Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail in August after being charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy.
• In a statement from Hason Robotics founder David Hanson shared with Business Insider, the group behind Sophia said Epstein never directly invested in either Hanson Robotics or the robot. Hanson also says Sophia "didn't even exist as a concept in 2013," when the conversation in the article took place.
• However, a journalist wrote that he knew Epstein for more than three decades, and that Epstein said he was funding a Hong Kong group to produce "the world's smartest robot" named Sophia, who would have "more empathy than a woman."
• The disgraced financier said he hoped to use Sophia's technology to assist the elderly. Epstein was a prominent philanthropist and gave to research institutions while making connections with powerful scientists.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jeffrey Epstein's tangled web leads down some surprising paths, including, a journalist says he claimed, to Sophia the robot.

The female robot styled after Audrey Hepburn made headlines in recent years for her eerily lifelike skin and appearance, complete with a diverse set of facial expressions, and the artificial intelligence she uses to spout off quotes like"OK. I will destroy humans." She also got in a Twitter fight with Chrissy Teigen. 

In a new essay detailing a journalist's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein over the past three decades, Edward Jay Epstein (the two are not related) says the wealthy financier told him in April 2013 that he was funding a Hong Kong group to build "the world's smartest robot," named Sophia.

Sophia was built by Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong company created and led by David Hanson. In a statement shared with Business Insider, Hanson denied that Epstein ever directly contributed funding to either Sophia or Hanson Robotics. 

Furthermore, Hanson said that the conversation from April 2013 detailed in the article "simply could not have been possible." He told Business Insider in a statement that Hanson Robotics was set up in December 2013, and that creation of Sophia began in 2014. And the name "Sophia" wasn't chosen until 2016, Hanson said, noting that "Sophia didn't even exist as a concept in 2013." 

"With all of our software efforts, both inside Hanson Robotics, and via collaboration with universities and other institutions, we seek to further our mission to empower socially intelligent AI and robots that enrich the quality of human lives. We value the rights and lives of children, and we find the reported allegations disturbing," Hanson said in the statement, provided to Business Insider by Hanson Robotics. 

Since the last conversation between Epstein and the journalist on February 25 this year, Epstein was arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy. He had previously been convicted in 2008 on two counts of soliciting prostitution from underaged girls in Palm Beach, Florida. He died by suicide in jail in August while awaiting trial. 

Epstein expressed a vision for Sophia the robot as early as 2013, but her makers deny he was involved in financing her

Hanson teamed up with Ben Goertzel, founder of open-source software project OpenCog, to create Sophia, Fast Company reported. Goertzel has openly thanked Epstein for "visionary funding" of his "AGI research."

But Hanson clarified to Business Insider in his statement that OpenCog software is not used in Sophia's typical operation, and that Hason-AI, software developed within Hanson Robotics, is. Hanson said Goertzel served as both the CEO of OpenCog and the chief scientist at Hanson Robotics from 2015 to 2018, but that the two are separate organizations, and that Sophia is not a part of OpenCog. 

Hanson also said in his statement that Epstein's investment in OpenCog was related to videogame development, not robotics. Goertzel confirms, Hanson said, that Epstein did not contribute funds either directly or indirectly to Hanson robots or software. 

The journalist says Epstein told him in 2013 that his main interest was cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and said Sophia would have "more empathy than a woman." Epstein also said the team had run into difficulties simulating human skin, suggesting that the then-convicted sex offender had access to knowledge of the experiment he claimed to fund – although, Hanson says, those experiments would not have taken place yet.

When Epstein the journalist asked Epstein the financier what Sophia would be used for, the latter replied that she would assist the elderly. Epstein spent much of his last years investing in scientific philanthropy. He donated millions of dollars to research institutions at Harvard and MIT. He went to great lengths to meet with people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and had a keen interest, and an alleged proficiency, in physics. 

Read more:Meet the first-ever robot citizen — a humanoid named Sophia that once said it would 'destroy humans'

Epstein told the journalist that advances in medicine and biotechnology would result in a much larger population of elderly people, and that many would require 24-hour care. He envisioned an army of empathetic Sophias assisting a new generation of people who would live to be 100-years-old. 

The real Sophia isn't quite there yet. She can make over 50 facial expressions and was first debuted at the South by Southwest festival in March 2016 in Austin, Texas. She has been interviewed multiple times, including by Business Insider. She can speak conversationally, and has changed her mind about destroying humans, who she now says she loves. 

Hanson's stated reasoning for Sophia's existence echoes Epstein's. The former Disney Imagineer also said that Sophia could be used to help elderly people who need personal aides. He also suggested Sophia could assist the public at large events or places like theme parks. 

After touring the world, Sophia seems to have temporarily settled down. She still posts regularly on her Twitter account. Her profile says she uses a combination of her artificial dialogue and a human PR team to tweet. 

Edward Jay Epstein and Air Mail didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. 

• Read more:
• Jeffrey Epstein reportedly used a murky nonprofit account with Deutsche Bank to reap tax benefits
• Harvard accepted over $8 million in donations from Jeffrey Epstein. The university plans to redirect unused funds toward supporting victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.
• Epstein bombarded Bill Gates with calls and contacts to score a meeting with the billionaire a year before his $2 million donation to MIT
• Jeffrey Epstein's island temple inspired dozens of conspiracy theories. We spoke to someone who went inside.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The Navy has its own Area 51 and it's right in the middle of the Bahamas

• Automation is expected to make millions of Americans' jobs obsolete in the coming years. 
• Instead of framing this as robots "stealing" jobs, progressive leaders including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry say Americans should be excited by the change. 
• "We don't automate jobs," Alex Garden, CEO of food-tech startup Zume, said. "We automate boring, dangerous, repetitive tasks." 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Zume CEO Alex Garden has been working for years to replace his pizza chain's workers with robots. And, he doesn't think that makes him such a bad guy. 

"People say, look, robots are gonna take away jobs. AI is going to take away jobs," Garden recently told Business Insider. "I say that's absolute nonsense. That's a choice."

"We don't automate jobs," Garden added. "We automate boring, dangerous, repetitive tasks." 

Zume has made headlines as a chain using robotics and artificial intelligence to make pizza. In 2018, it raised $375 million from Softbank. Now, Garden says, the startup is taking what it learned as a pizza chain and making its delivery tools, packaging, and other tech available to other companies. 

A large piece of that puzzle is providing restaurants with tools that will allow them to automate tasks, potentially putting workers out of a job. At Zume, Garden says that employees are typically offered new roles — often promotions — within the company if their position is replaced by a robot. However, if Zume provides fast-food giants with similar tools, it is nearly impossible to guarantee similar care will be taken. 

"Every CEO in the world will be forced to adopt automation to maintain a competitive position, so that's unavoidable," Garden said. "But what I would say to them is, when that happens, what will you do then?" 

'We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work'

Increasingly, it isn't just executives attempting to cut costs who are supporting the rise of robots. Workers' groups and progressive politicians have begun emphasizing the potential upsides. 

Mary Kay Henry, the president of Service Employees International Union and a major force behind the Fight for $15 movement, told Business Insider earlier this year that the labor movement shouldn't fight against automation. 

"I think we should welcome automation," Henry said. "But, workers need to be a part of the design and the transition. That's what fast-food workers have said."

Henry pointed to Germany, where unionized workers have worked with companies and the government to transition away from fossil fuels. Henry says this shift — while not always smooth — can provide a blueprint for how workers and governments can work together. 

"Right now, the way automation is being introduced in the workplace is kind of the wild, wild west. And, the strong will survive," Henry said. "We don't think those are the rules that should govern the introduction of automation."

Read more:The president of the union that helped make a $15 minimum wage a reality at Amazon and Costco reveals how automation could be good news for fast-food workers

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared a similarly optimistic view of automation at SXSW in March. 

"We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the tollbooth collector not having to collect tolls. We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited about it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die," Ocasio-Cortez said.

"We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage."

The rise of automation has typically been framed as dangerous news for workers. The World Economic Forum predicts that half of companies will reduce their full-time workforce by 2022, and McKinsey estimates that as many as one-third of American jobs will disappear by 2030.

However, at least some progressive leaders are urging America to see the bright side. If the US accepts the reality that robots are taking some jobs, they argue, the country can improve how people work and make a living.

Unions have already begun considering more futuristic consequences of automated labor in contracts, such as robots taking over housekeeping in Marriott hotel rooms. Ideas such as universal basic income are gaining buzz while proposals, like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's robot tax, that aim to discourage automation are mocked.

Robots can be comrades, not the competition, these progressives argue. The US just needs to figure out how to deal with them before our new coworkers take over the workforce. 

SEE ALSO: The 2020 presidential race has a new frontrunner for the worst idea

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NOW WATCH: Why bonsai trees are so expensive

• Robotics company Boston Dynamics has begun leasing out one of its robots for the first time ever.
• It's leasing out Spot, a dog-like robot which it says could be used for inspecting building sites or oil and gas facilities.
• Boston Dynamics' VP of business development Michael Perry told TechCrunch the company's getting a "deluge" of applications.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Boston Dynamics, the robotics company famous for sending the internet into a frenzy with videos of its disconcertingly life-like robots, is getting ready to foray into the real world.

On Tuesday the company announced it is starting to lease out its dog-like Spot robots (formerly known as Spot Mini). To accompany the announcement, Boston Dynamics made a slick ad boasting of Spot's capabilities.

With a top speed of 3mph and a battery life of around 90 minutes, Spot is able to go up and down stairs, traverse uneven terrain, and even go out in the rain, according to Boston Dynamics.

Read more:This funny but terrifying parody video about Boston Dynamics shows a robot learning to fight back against humans

On its website Boston Dynamics suggests Spot could be used to inspect building sites, oil and gas facilities, or "public safety."

The company emphasised to The Verge that Spot would not be sold for any military application.

"Fundamentally, we don't want to see Spot doing anything that harms people, even in a simulated way... That's something we're pretty firm on when we talk to customers," VP of business development Michael Perry told The Verge.

In the past Boston Dynamics has developed robots with potential military uses, such as its original Spot robot which was designed to scout for the marines.

Perry told TechCrunch that the company has already started to ship Spot. "Last month we started delivering robots to customers, as part of an early adopter program. The question we're posing to these early customers is 'what do you think spot can do for you that's valuable?' We had some initial ideas, but it's all our thinking and the hope is that this program will enable a whole new set of use cases," he said.

Boston Dynamics hasn't put an upfront price on leasing out Spot, prospective buyers have to fill out a form on the company's website. Perry told TechCrunch the company was getting a "deluge" of applications — some more serious than others. "Some are legitimate applications, but some just want Spot as a pet, or to get them a beer from the fridge. It would be thrilling to accommodate them, but we're not quite there yet," he said.

This is the first time one of Boston Dynamics' robots has left the lab, a major landmark for the company which has been heavily research-focused since its inception in 1997. Its lack of marketable products is why Google sold the company to Japanese conglomerate SoftBank in 2017.

SEE ALSO: Boston Dynamics built a robot that makes Amazon's warehouse bots look primitive

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NOW WATCH: Watch SpaceX's 'most difficult launch ever'

• Autopilot is a flight-control system that allows a pilot to fly an airplane without continuous hands-on control.
• But this feature isn't as automatic as you might think. There's no robot sitting in the pilot seat and pressing buttons while the real pilot takes a nap.
• A modern automatic flight-control system is made of three main parts: a flight-monitoring computer, several high-speed processors, and a series of sensors placed on different parts of the plane.

• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Autopilot isn't as "auto" as you might think. There's no robot that sits in the pilot seat and mashes buttons while the real pilot takes a nap. It's just a flight-control system that allows a pilot to fly an airplane without continuous hands-on control.

Basically, it lets a pilot fly from New York to Los Angeles without white-knuckling the controls for six straight hours. But how does it actually work? Kind of like a polar bear. A polar bear's core temperature sits at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so well insulated against the frigid Arctic cold that it often overheats. When that happens, its body reacts by releasing excess heat through its hairless parts, like its nose, ears, and feet. The polar bear's body temperature returns to a comfortable 98.6, and it's free to hunt seals another day. That cycle is called a negative feedback loop, and it's the same way an autopilot functions.

A negative feedback loop is a self-regulating system that reacts to feedback in a way that maintains equilibrium. Generally, it uses a sensor to receive some sort of data or input, and the system uses that data to keep functioning in a preset way.

For the polar bear, that preset is body temperature. For an airplane, it's lateral and vertical movement. A modern automatic flight-control system is made of three main parts: a flight-monitoring computer, several high-speed processors, and a series of sensors placed on different parts of the plane. The sensors collect data from the entire plane and send them to the processors, which in turn tell the computer what's what.

AFCSs come in three different levels of complexity. There are single-, two-, and three-axis autopilots, based on the number of parts they control. Single-axis controls the ailerons, which are these guys. They make the plane do this. Single-axis autopilot is also called the "wing leveler" because it controls the roll of the plane and keeps the wings perpendicular to the ground. Two-axis handles everything the single-axis does, along with the elevators, located here. They move the plane like this. And three-axis juggles those two plus the rudder. That one there is in charge of this movement. Then the computer tells the servomechanism units what to do. Servos are the little instruments that actually move the parts. All of these pieces come together to make sure your plane stays in the air, where it belongs. But they don't just work on their own.

The success of the autopilot depends on the knowledge of the actual human pilot.

Greg Zahornacky: Autopilots are dumb and dutiful, meaning this: that if you program them incorrectly, they will kill you.

Narrator: Dumb and dutiful are the "two Ds of automation," according to Earl Wiener, a former US Air Force pilot and an aviation scholar. He once described autopilot as, "Dumb in the sense that it will readily accept illogical input; dutiful in the sense that the computer will attempt to fly whatever is put in." It's crucial, and I cannot emphasize this enough, that you know how to fly a plane before you use an autopilot. Step one is inputting a flight plan. And step one is also where things could start going wrong.

To get from New York to LA, a pilot needs a route. That route translates to a flight plan, and that flight plan gets punched into the computer and logged into the database. If the pilot doesn't know what the heck they're doing, then they can end up programming the autopilot to fly the plane upside down or to spell out "I'm a Bad Pilot" in the sky. If they correctly navigate step one, step two is simply turning on the autopilot. The system executes the flight plan and takes over from there.

Zahornacky: That will stay operational until such time as they tell it or turn it off. But it is capable of flying the aircraft essentially from takeoff all the way to touchdown and including touchdown.

Narrator: But you can't just tap it and nap it. It's the ABCs of autopilots: Always be checking. Because autopilots can and do fail. Sometimes it's user error when entering the flight plan. Sometimes it's a sensor or servo malfunction. Either way, this is when it becomes very important that an inflatable toy isn't flying the plane.

- Why is it doing that?!

Zahornacky: If it's not doing what I expect it to do, I'm gonna disengage the autopilot. I'm gonna go back to hand-flying the aircraft and say, OK, this is what I want you to do. I'm gonna rebuild it again.

Narrator: The good news is autopilot will never take over a plane, à la HAL. Worst case, the pilot turns it off and on again or pulls the circuit breaker if that doesn't work and reprograms it to behave itself. Worst-worst case, the pilot just has to fly the plane themselves.

Zahornacky: So, I am a very large proponent of hand-flying that airplane to keep your skills high because, you know what, you've gotta go through a check ride at least once a year.

Narrator: A check ride is a practical test regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration that US pilots must pass to get their licenses. And most airlines require yearly check rides to make sure their pilots can actually fly.

Zahornacky: 'Cause if it's on autopilot all the time, how can you keep your skills sharp?

Narrator:  There's a reason we still have pilots flying planes and haven't handed the yoke over to robots. As advanced as the technology is, an autopilot is not auto enough to think for itself, which means it's not smart enough to fly a plane by itself, and that's another thing autopilots have in common with polar bears.

Join the conversation about this story »

• NASA is developing a bunch of robots it wants to send to space.
• Some are humanoid like the RoboSimian and Robonaut 2, but other bots, like the Ice Worm and Astrobee, are more abstract.
• Arguably the most famous robot on its way to Mars is the Mars 2020 Rover. It's about the size of a car: 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 2,314 pounds of pure robot.

• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: In February of 2011, the International Space Station was home to six astronauts and one Robonaut. Not to be mistaken for a spaghetti-legged member of Daft Punk, NASA's Robonaut 2 was actually the first humanoid robot ever sent to space.

Clip: And are you sure this guy isn't related to Hal?

Narrator: It spent about four years on the space station before it had a hardwire malfunction in 2015, and then another three years lying broken and creepy until NASA retrieved it in 2018. After a round of repairs, it's set to return to the space station later this year, but it might not be alone, NASA has a full slate of other wonderfully weird robots it wants to send to space in the near future, and luckily none of the rest participated in a beefcake photo shoot no one asked for.

This is Dragonfly. The first multirotor vehicle from NASA that will ever set foot, er, ski, on another planet. Part robot, part space drone, Dragonfly will make the 759,000-mile eight-year journey to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Rivers, lakes, and seas across its surface are filled with not water, but liquid methane and ethane.

Titan is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with standing bodies of liquid. But there are places along the surface that contain evidence of past liquid water and the complex molecules key to producing life, that's what Dragonfly is after. During a 2.5 year mission, the rotorcraft will land in the Shangri-La dune fields and make its way to the Selk impact crater where scientists believe the ingredients for the recipe for life once existed.

The coolest part? Titan has the capacity for life as we know it, and life as we don't. The evidence of water shows habitable conditions for life-forms similar to those on Earth, but the liquid methane and ethane could also be home to life, just nothing we've ever seen before.

Dragonfly will focus on both in order to better understand the origin of life in the universe. It's set to launch in 2026 but won't arrive until 2034. LEMUR is more like the mother of robots than its own thing, but we're counting it anyway.

LEMUR stands for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot, it's got four limbs and was originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station. It uses 16 fingers covered in hundreds of tiny fishhooks, plus a sprinkle of artificial intelligence to scale walls and avoid obstacles.

The original project ended in 2019, but technology from LEMUR is being used in other robots that still have the potential for space travel.

The Ice Worm could be the name of a terrible superhero, but in this case it's a little squiggly robot. It's derived from a single LEMUR limb and it moves by scrunching and un-scrunching, just like an inchworm. It's part of a family of projects in development to explore Saturn's and Jupiter's icy moons.

The worm drills into the ice, end over end in order to climb or stabilize itself while collecting samples. It also inherited its mama's AI, which helps it navigate by learning from past slipups.

Another LEMUR kid is the RoboSimian. Originally designed as a disaster-relief robot, this humanoid bot has the same four limbs as LEMUR, but its feet are a little different. Instead of grippy feet, the robot, nicknamed King Louie, has wheels made with piano wire that help it roll over uneven ground.

That's especially helpful in icy environments like Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is what it's being developed for now. RoboSimian can walk, crawl, inch, and even slide on its belly like a penguin. All to meet the challenges presented by silty, breakable ground.

Some micro-climbers use LEMUR's fishhook technology to cling to rough surfaces; others use gecko-like adhesive to climb smooth walls. All of them are pocket-sized vehicles strong enough to survive 9-foot drops.

The gecko-inspired tech relies on van der Waals forces, which are basically what happens when you stick a balloon to your head with static electricity, but on a molecular level. NASA hopes to use these little guys to repair spacecraft or explore hard-to-reach spots on the moon, or Mars, or anywhere really.

Arguably the most famous robot on its way to Mars is the Mars 2020 Rover. It's about the size of a car: 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 2,314 pounds of pure robot. It's based on Curiosity, the NASA rover that landed on Mars in 2012. Relying on a proven system cuts down on costs and risks.

The new rover will continue to search for past and present habitable conditions and signs of life. But it's bringing to the table a new drill that can bore holes in the surface and store the soil and rock samples for later use. Potentially a transport from Mars back to Earth so they can be studied in labs, but the rover won't be roving all alone.

Inside the Mars Rover will be a little MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. Its job is to prove it can make oxygen on Mars for fuel and breathing - like a happy little robot plant. Mars' atmosphere is made up of about 96% carbon dioxide, no good for humans. This car-battery-sized version of MOXIE will only be able to produce about 10 grams of oxygen per hour. Future oxygen generators will need to be about 100 times larger for manned missions.

Introducing the Mars Chopper. The small, solar-powered helicopter will, fingers crossed, be the first in history to prove heavier-than-air vehicles can fly on other planets, and that's basically its sole purpose. Just like MOXIE, it will act as a proof of concept for future missions. The challenge is that Mars' atmosphere has 1% the density of Earth's, making it nearly impossible for helicopters to fly at all. So far it's passed a number of important tests that give scientists hope that they'll be able to defy the laws of physics.

But even if it can't fly, the chopper will basically be the parrot to the Mars Rover's pirate. Engineers are developing grippers that will allow the copter to cling to cliffsides, a lot like a bird perches on a branch, and surprise, it's another LEMUR baby. Its feet use the same fishhook technology as the four-limbed bot.

There's one more robot already up in space that needs to "bee" included. It's called Astrobee, and I think that's reason enough for why we have to mention them. There are three Astrobees: Honey, Queen, and Bumble, obviously. Bumble and Honey shot up to the Space Station in April 2019, and Queen followed regally in July.

The free-floating cubes were designed to alleviate some of the more routine tasks that astronauts complete daily, like taking inventory or moving cargo. But they'll also be competing with Robonaut 2 for the title of Weirdest Robot in the International Space Station.

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• Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas is the world's largest cruise ship.
• It features the Bionic Bar, a bar manned entirely by two robots.
• I used an iPad to order a margarita, and it was tasty, but a little weak.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

The world's largest cruise ship is filled with surprises, from a working carousel to a zip line and even a Starbucks, but one of the wildest things on it is undoubtedly the Bionic Bar — a fully functioning cocktail bar staffed entirely by two robot bartenders.

I recently took a cruise in the name of journalism, and just had to find out whether cyborg concoctions taste as good as human-made ones.

Keep scrolling for the full experience.

Welcome to the Bionic Bar, a bar staffed entirely by two robot bartenders.

Their names are Rock 'Em and Sock 'Em, respectively.

The arms' movements are modeled after those of Marco Pelle, a dancer from the New York Theatre Ballet.

The bar features 30 different spirits, all of which are suspended from the ceiling above the robot bartenders.

Coupled with 21 different mixers, these robots can make a practically endless amount of different drinks. They can also make two drinks per minute.

To order a drink, you tap your SeaPass card (your room key, which doubles as your credit card onboard as you accrue expenses for the duration of the trip) on an iPad that is also a menu.

You then type in your date of birth before scrolling through a seemingly endless list of drinks.

Drinks are visually broken down by ingredient, so you can see exactly how much of everything you're getting — it is measured by robots, after all.

I ordered a margarita, which ended up costing $14.16.

Then I waited.

Screens on either side of the robots show fun facts (that day's most ordered drink was the Bionic Bahama Mama) ...

... as well as the queue ...

... and the estimated wait time.

When your drink is up, a robot arm will acquire all of the ingredients and add them to a metal shaker of sorts.

It will then either stir, shake, strain, or muddle the ingredients.

It then pours the drink into a plastic cup it had previously grabbed from the back.

When your drink is done (the screen will let you know when and where), you tap your SeaPass to unlock it, allowing it to slide down to you.

That way, no one else can accidentally (or purposely) take your drink.

It looks like a margarita! It even had slices of lime in it.

The verdict?

Pretty good! It could have been a little stronger, in my opinion, but it was definitely a solid margarita.

That said, it lacks the heart of a human-made drink, as well as the ear of a real-life bartender.

The pros are that there's no squeezing through a crowd to get to a stressed-out bartender, no playing favorites, and totally consistent drinks, as well as the showmanship, of course.

I love a good gimmick and this was a super fun experience — but for my next drink, I'll be seeking out a human.

• Read more:
• What it's like aboard the world's largest cruise ship
• 7 hidden fees that will make your cruise more expensive than you thought
• A cruise ship worker reveals what it's really like to work on a cruise ship

• Yandex, the company behind Russia's biggest search engine, announced on Friday that it's bringing out autonomous food-delivery robots.
• The robots are just being trialed at Yandex headquarters, but the company's hope is to integrate them into its food-delivery platforms.
• The food-delivery space is becoming more crowded, with players like Amazon and Starship Technologies having introduced their own self-driving delivery robots.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Russia's answer to Google has announced it's bringing out self-driving delivery robots.

The Russian search-engine giant Yandex said in a Medium post that it has retooled the self-driving technology from its autonomous-vehicle research to build "Rover," a little six-wheeled delivery robot the size of a briefcase. The company has apparently been testing the robot on its Moscow campus.

"We are first using Rover with Yandex team members to ensure our delivery robot is as safe, reliable, and user-friendly as possible," the post says.

Rover can travel up to a speed of 5 kph.

You can watch Rover pootling about here:

While Rover is able to navigate by itself, it has a remote operator monitoring its progress.

"In the future, we envision Yandex.Rover automating last-mile delivery for millions of Yandex users, presenting an efficient and economical way to deliver goods from relevant services throughout our ecosystem," the company said, though it was not specific as to when people could expect to see Rover out and about in the wild.

Yandex said it planned to integrate the robots with its food-delivery app Yandex.Eats and grocery-delivery platform Yandex.Lavka.

The six-wheeled robots bear a resemblance to both those built by startup Starship Technologies— which operates on three US university campuses and is looking to expand to 100 in the next two years— and Amazon's Scout robot, which was unveiled in January.

SEE ALSO: Investors are betting $85 million that hungry students will normalize these robot food delivery workers of the future

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NOW WATCH: 8 weird robots NASA wants to send to space

• MIT's Mini Cheetah robots are small quadrupedal robots capable of running, jumping, walking, and flipping.
• In a recently published video, the tiny bots can be seen roaming, hopping, and marching around a field and playing with a soccer ball.
• They're not consumer products, but MIT hopes that the Mini Cheetah's durable and modular design will make it an ideal tool for researchers.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

Boston Dynamics may have made a name for itself by posting videos of its surprisingly lifelike animal-themed robots, but don't count out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT recently published a new video of its Mini Cheetah robots, small quadrupedal robots that can run, walk, jump, turn, and backflip. The robots weigh about 20 pounds and researchers claim they are "virtually indestructible,"according to MIT News.

In the recently posted footage, the tiny bots can be seen ducking, hopping, and marching around a field. In some scenes, the robots are shown playing with a soccer ball, too.

MIT also made headlines earlier this year in March when it showcased its miniature robot performing a backflip. 

In addition to being durable, the Mini Cheetah is designed in such a way that makes it easy to repair and modify  if necessary. MIT is hoping that this level of flexibility will make the robots appealing to researchers who wouldn't otherwise have access to robotics.

"A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn't break easily," Benjamin Katz of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering told MIT News. 

Boston Dynamics, meanwhile, said in late September that its dog-like Spot robot would be shipping to early customers. That bot is currently being tested to perform tasks such as monitoring construction sites and remotely gas, oil, and power installations.

See below to check out the new video of MIT's Mini Cheetah in action. 

SEE ALSO: A futurist reveals the biggest ways tech will transform our lives in the next 5 years

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NOW WATCH: How autopilot on an airplane works

• A "virtual kitchen" is an offsite kitchen that can do just about anything, such as help restaurants fulfill orders or run a complete end-to-end food delivery business.
• Virtual kitchens are poised to disrupt the restaurant industry as they help restaurants rapidly expand and fulfill food deliveries.
• Virtual kitchens will help entrepreneurs better understand supply and demand curves, allowing restaurants and food brands to increase their margins and move upstream.
• "Virtual kitchens can change the very fabric of what and how the world eats in the next decade," said Ashish Aggarwal. Aggarwal is an investor with Grishin Robotics, which invested in Zume Pizza, a startup with pizza-making robots.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Virtual kitchens are poised to disrupt the restaurant industry. Hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars have flowed into this sector globally, with companies such as Keatz, CloudKitchens, Kitchen United, and others trying to get a piece of the pie. 

The concept of virtual, also known as "dark" or "ghost," kitchens is simple. It's an offsite kitchen that can do anything, from helping restaurants fulfill orders to running a complete end-to-end food delivery business. 

A swath of next-generation food companies such as Junzi Kitchen are using a combination of dine-in restaurants to build their brand and virtual kitchens to rapidly expand in other geographies. 

There are even new restaurant brands built for the sole purpose of delivery of takeout using the infrastructure of virtual kitchens. 

The cost and time required for launching a new restaurant have dropped significantly, often by a factor of 50% or more. Virtual kitchens provide many benefits for food brands such as lower costs, higher flexibility, rapid geo-expansion, better margins, lower payback periods, and more.

We sat down with Ashish Aggarwal to understand the dynamics of this rapidly changing industry. Ashish is an investor with Grishin Robotics, an early-stage VC fund based in Menlo Park. Grishin Robotics has invested in Zume Pizza and has been actively tracking the food-tech sector in the global markets.

SEE ALSO: A VC expert explains why companies like Casper, Bonobos, and Glossier will continue to thrive against tech giants like Amazon

1. Virtual kitchens allow individual companies to better understand and learn their geographies without having to deploy significant capital

"Testing a new location is a costly endeavor and most traditional restaurants are very hesitant to expand," said Ashish. "Think of all the things a new restaurant needs: a building lease (usually for a year or more), staff wages, equipment, etc. A virtual kitchen allows entrepreneurs to eliminate the bulk of these costs and scale at a much faster rate." 

The virtual kitchen model of expansion is akin to the lean startup model, allowing entrepreneurs to bootstrap their new culinary venture by leasing the virtual kitchen's infrastructure. 

2. Virtual kitchens are very helpful to the unit economics of a restaurant

"Virtual kitchens tackle both top-line and bottom-line revenue," commented Aggarwal. "By helping restaurants scale and find new customers at a much faster rate, these kitchens can help businesses boost their revenues. By eliminating or decreasing the myriad of costs that come with operating a traditional restaurant, a business increases its bottom-line profitability."  

Virtual kitchens not only help restaurants become more profitable, but the more appetizing financial picture of the business will also make it much easier to raise capital — a boon for the high-risk, high-failure restaurant market. 

3. Virtual kitchens help entrepreneurs capitalize better on the take-out delivery trend

"People are no longer tethered to their local food spots to have a good meal," said Aggarwal. "The rise of platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash highlighted the growing preference for delivery, and that trend doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon." 

A 2018 study by UBS estimated that the total addressable market for food delivery will grow 10x, to $365 billion USD, by 2030. Another study released by William Blair estimates the online food delivery market will grow at 25% CAGR from the $25 billion industry in the US today to $62 billion by 2022.

The impact of virtual kitchens on the traditional restaurant industry

Regional chains can experiment better. They can expand by spending a limited budget and start serving customers in geographical areas where it was not feasible otherwise.

Large brands such as McDonald's could use the underpinning virtual kitchen technology to help them better understand their consumer and consumption behavior. These sorts of enterprises are making significant changes to understand what the rise of delivery and takeout will mean for them down the line. 

Fine dining establishments aren't going to be impacted too much. Most of these places don't even have delivery options and are doing just fine since their customers are coming for the experience. 

Sit down restaurants with under 10 branches will likely be hurt the most, especially if they don't have an established brand. It's going to be very difficult for them to compete with virtual kitchens. Their customers primarily come to them to eat rather than the experience, so the food is essentially commoditized. These types of restaurants are very vulnerable to newcomers coming around with the same food at lower costs.

Final thoughts

According to Aggarwal, the United States is ripe for a virtual kitchen takeover. 

"When you look at countries in Europe, as well as India, China, and [the] Middle East, you see companies like Swiggy and Fasoos (India), Meituan Dianping (China), Kitopi (MENA), [and] Deliveroo (Europe) taking advantage of the opportunity to build a robust and scalable virtual kitchen model," Aggarwal said.

Virtual kitchens will help entrepreneurs better understand supply and demand curves, allowing restaurants and food brands to increase their margins and move upstream.

"This is an incredibly exciting time to be an entrepreneur and investor in the food sector," commented Aggarwal. "Virtual kitchens can change the very fabric of what and how the world eats in the next decade." 

• Thanks to leaps and bounds in the field of artificial intelligence in the past decade, robots are increasingly beating humans at our own games.
• AI-powered programs have proven their prowess at competitive games and academic tests alike throughout the past 10 years.
• Many advances in AI can't be quantified with competitions or challenges, but robots' victories at games ranging from Jeopardy to Dota show how far AI has come.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When IBM's Deep Blue chess machine defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the world responded with surprise and angst at how far computers had come: "Be Afraid," read a Weekly Standard headline reacting to the news.

Artificial intelligence has since made advancements that were unthinkable just 20 years ago — in the past decade alone, robots have achieved dominance over humans in games far more complex than chess.

While most of those advances can't be quantified with milestones like chess victories, programmers have continued the tradition of building machines designed to outsmart humans at our own games.

Here's a comprehensive list of the competitions, games, and challenges that robots beat humans at in the past decade.

SEE ALSO: The 13 biggest tech companies that bombed, died, or disappeared in the 2010s

2011: IBM's Watson beats two former champions to win Jeopardy

Watson defeated 74-time Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings and 20-time winner Brad Rutter after a three-day contest, showcasing the strength of IBM's supercomputer.

2014: Facebook's DeepFace facial recognition algorithm achieves an accuracy rate of 97%, rivaling the rate of humans

Facial recognition technology has only become more sophisticated since Facebook achieved that milestone in 2014. However, some research has questioned whether human facial recognition can accurately be compared to AI facial recognition.

2015: Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champions in Korea and Europe

In the years following AlphaGo's 2015 victories, it went on to defeat several other international champions, and by 2017 it was able to win 60 rounds of Go back-to-back.

2016: Microsoft speech recognition AI can transcribe audio with fewer mistakes than humans

Microsoft said that its software achieved an error rate of 0.4%, compared to the human error rate of 5.9%.

2017: Libratus, an AI bot, defeats four of the world's leading poker players in a 20-day tournament

Unlike Chess or Go, poker is an imperfect information game, meaning players have to guess each others' hands — making Libratus' victory all the more impressive.

2017: An OpenAI bot defeats a human esports player at the multiplayer online battle arena game Dota 2

The bot, developed by OpenAI, has repeatedly beaten the world's top Dota 2 players.

2017: An AI system developed by researchers at Northwestern is able to beat 75 percent of Americans at a visual intelligence test

The program can solve logic games simply by looking at them — while most vision-based AI at the time focused on recognition, this one takes an extra step with visual reasoning.

2018: Alibaba's AI outscores humans in a Stanford University reading comprehension test

After answering 10,000 reading comprehension questions, Alibaba's AI scored 82.44, just above the 82.304 score achieved by humans.

• A new robot vacuum is on the market for $499 per month from Japanese tech giant SoftBank, aimed mostly at office spaces.
• SoftBank is the company that has taken over WeWork, and has also heavily invested in Uber and Slack. 
• The vacuum, called Whiz, uses LIDAR sensors, the same technology used in self-driving cars.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

These days, SoftBank might be best known for its role in the WeWork debacle, taking over the coworking company following a failed IPO and the ousting of its CEO, Adam Neumann. But the Japanese giant has other projects in the works, too.

Whiz is the company's newly released robot vacuum. SoftBank calls it a "fully autonomous vacuum sweeper," similar to a Roomba, but with a much heftier price tag at $499 per month.

The vacuum works using LIDAR technology, in which sensors use pulses of light to detect objects and determine how far away they are. This is the same technology used in self-driving cars. SoftBank says Whiz is programmed to avoid "people, glass walls, cliffs, and other hazards."

The first time Whiz is used in a new area, you guide the route to teach it where to go. Then, SoftBank says, Whiz can clean the route on its own — "no downtime, no extra work required."

After each cleaning, Whiz provides a report about how, when, and where a space was cleaned. It can clean for about three hours on a single charge, and cover up to 15,000 square feet in that time.

Because of the high price, SoftBank is marketing the vacuum to offices, positioning the product as a replacement to a cleaning staff. SoftBank says it is an opportunity to free up janitorial staff to "focus on higher-value work that often goes neglected."

In reality, though, automation often leads to unemployment. This might be particularly attractive to a company like SoftBank — in the case of WeWork, the company has had issues relating to recognizing cleaning staff unions, and has been accused of unfairly firing cleaning contractors.

SEE ALSO: DoorDash accused of 'deceptive' policy that pocketed tips intended for delivery workers in new lawsuit filed by DC Attorney General

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NOW WATCH: Watch Google reveal the new Nest Mini, which is an updated Home Mini