AI Bear: Digest 2024-01-10
This time: line assembly in construction, ConTech fundings, necrobotics, AMR and nuclear outlook
Hello there!
Today’s menu
ConTech start-up news
Agorus - assembly line house building
Birdwatch - property maintenance mgmt for home owners
Bright Spaces - transforms 2D plans into 3D models with AI
Beyond construction:
AI delivers first success in medicine with antibiotics
First AI companions for your home
Necrobotics - scaring technology using dead animals
Outlook and personal thoughts
AI is the next major driver of the progress
World is finally getting back to nuclear
ConTech start-up news
Agorus from Californian raised $20m in Series A. They are kind of Ford in construction with latest flavor of VR and robotics, pre-building panelized houses in production line and by this massively increase construction speed on-site to days instead of months.
Birdwatch from US raised an undisclosed amount in seed stage. They provide one stop property maintenance and repairs for homeowners, real estate agents and investors with a concierge service.
Bright Spaces from UK raised €2m. They are developing a tool to transform 2D plans into 3D tours, to visualize how an office could look like.
Byggfakta from Sweden, construction software company, received a $1b buyout offer.
Beyond construction
Antibiotics done by AI
Antibiotics are magical in their ability to end infection, but if you use them too often, pathogens can learn how to ignore them. This is called antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, and it is a huge issue around the world—especially in Africa, which has the highest mortality rates from AMR © Bill Gates. He thinks that AI will be the main driver in this development, and we already see first results. MIT team with support of deep learning was able to deliver new medicine.
Necrobotics - is it scary?
Rice University engineers use spiders as "biological material" for a robotic gripper. How it works? Well, similar to ‘nature’. Researchers introduce air into the hydraulic system, causing the spider legs to stretch. Converted from a wolf spider, the gripper is able to lift 1.3 times its weight. Its flexible legs and hair-like structures, acting like glue, enable it to pick up objects with different shapes and surface structures. Team sees ethical point of the research a bit problematic: "The biotic raw material (i.e. the spider cadaver) was obtained by euthanising a wolf spider exposed to freezing temperature (approximately -4 °C) for 5 to 7 days. The researchers note that there are currently no clear guidelines in the literature for the ethical procurement and humane euthanasia of spiders.“ Not sure what your thoughts on this are, i’m a bit confused how scalable it is though.
Outlook and thoughts
AI as main driver for the progress
As human beings we always wanted to outsource tough jobs to robots, but reality is brutal here. Development needs investments, and this leads to ROI expectations. And we end up with robots substituting humans in actually the way around - in more well-paid and popular jobs, while some tough things are still done by humans. So I hear about marketing and reporting team massively reduced due to AI, same as happened once ago in accounting. Why would you have a team of copy-writers, if AI can do way cheaper and better in most cases? You just leave one to make decisions, but majority of the job is automated.
And even decision making will be substituted as soon as accuracy of AI will become better than human’s average - let’s say for taxi-drivers for starters.
And we need to be quite careful in the way of adopting the technology, as in addition to the progress boost, we’ll highly likely will also boost social stratification.
World is finally looking back to the real ‘green’ - tripling nuclear
I personally tend to be a bit skeptical around ‘green’ topic, as i am not personally convinced that electric vehicles etc. are good enough with solar and wind energy.
Around a month ago there was COP28, a global summit on climate change, which can become an important milestone in this journey. Nuclear for me personally is the only way of sustainable green energy today, but my feeling is that most countries were not focusing on it enough or at all (top-5 is US, France, China, Japan and Russia - with all the rest of Europe being ‘out’ of the race and focus more on decommissioning than developping).
But on the summit 20 nations agreed to triple their nuclear capacity by 2050. I am pretty sure it’s far far away from enough, but at least it’s a first step, as this type of technology is extremely complex though promising. More details here.
