Google Robots
Google's parent Alphabet unveiled a new "moonshot" project to develop software for robotics which could be used in a wide range of industries.
The new unit, dubbed Intrinsic, will "become an independent Alphabet company," and seek industrial partners to advance their work helping to make everything from solar panels to cars, the new unit's chief, Wendy Tan-White, said in a blog post.
"Intrinsic is working to unlock the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics for millions more businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers," she said.
"We're developing software tools designed to make industrial robots ... easier to use, less costly and more flexible, so that more people can use them to make new products, businesses and services."
Intrinsic emerged from Alphabet X, the so-called "moonshot" project that launched self-driving car division Waymo and life sciences group Verily.
"We are currently looking for partners in the automotive, electronics, and health care industries who are already using industrial robotics and want to learn together," said Tan-White, who founded the website-building platform Moonfruit.
Intrinsic also may help "support a shift towards a more sustainable and equitable way" of manufacturing by facilitating low-cost production, she said.
"Currently just 10 countries manufacture 70 percent of the world's goods," she said. "This means most things are made far away from their end consumers, which drives global transport emissions, and many countries and businesses miss out on economic opportunities."
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.