Good morning from the London newsroom of The New York Times. A few updates on the terrible stories from the weekend: Nick Reiner, a son of the director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, was charged with murdering his parents. His sister found their father’s body, and we have more details here. The 24-year-old suspect in the Bondi Beach attack woke from a coma. He was charged with murder and terrorism. And more than three days after the shooting at Brown University, investigators still don’t have a suspect or a motive. We’ll get to more news below. But I’d like to start today with the promise and peril of robots that look like humans.
Mr. RobotScientists and entrepreneurs are working tirelessly toward a strange goal: robots that look like us. Why, if we just want them to unburden our lives, do we need that? It’s a question for philosophers as much as for inventors. But you can see the market appeal. A robot vacuum cleaner can’t climb stairs to clean an upstairs room. A robot arm that loads boxes in a factory can’t make you a cocktail. You’d hate to arrive for a hair appointment and see that your colorist resembles a spider made of Legos and wire, even if its work is top-tier. Humanoid robots can already do some humanlike things, of course. They can dance and run. They can play household concierge. Some can almost load a dishwasher. But they’re clumsy right now. (You broke a glass!) They’re also hard to instruct. Think about that hair appointment. The work requires a lot of manual dexterity on the part of the stylist. But as Tim Fernholz reported recently, dexterity is difficult to teach. “Humans don’t have a language for gathering, storing and communicating data about touch, the way we do for language and imagery,” he wrote. “Our fingers’ remarkable sensing ability collects all kinds of information that we can’t easily translate for machines.” A crowded market
None of which has stopped China from trying to use the robots to drive economic growth. “Public and private investors spent over $5 billion this year on start-ups making humanoid robots” in China, my colleagues Meaghan Tobin and Xinyun Wu report today — “the same amount spent in the last five years combined.” They have advantages over their competitors in the West. With the backing of the government, they can draw on China’s gigantic manufacturers to fabricate top-quality parts. They can build a lot of robots. But those robots are not about to revolutionize your life, Meaghan and Xinyun write. For one thing, there are too many players — more than 150 Chinese companies are jockeying to lead the market. The Chinese government warned last month of a robot bubble, noting a lot of “highly repetitive products.” And while those products can act somewhat like humans and even perform a few basic tasks, they are not yet anything like skilled human workers. Humanoid robots don’t react well to unpredictable situations. That makes them dangerous. The pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks told Tim that he wouldn’t get within three feet of a humanoid bot. It’s not just that you can’t reason with a robot (yet). Let’s say one of them loses its balance — that’s a when, not an if, according to Brooks. The powerful machinery that can make that robot useful in the home, office or factory floor could suddenly turn into a scary liability: thrashing mechanical arms or legs, say, pounding into human flesh. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world.
Reiner Killings
Bondi Beach
More International News
Susie Wiles Interview
More Politics
Other Big Stories
I have a few friends who volunteer for small-town fire departments on Long Island, in New York. They work on teams to respond to structure and brush fires. They respond to car accidents and medical emergencies. A few years ago, a friend of mine was swept off a sandbar while fishing alone in the middle of the night and could not make it back to shore. He managed to use his cellphone to call for help. (Amazingly.) Volunteer firefighters took the department’s fireboat and found him drifting on the tide in pitch darkness, then pulled him to safety. There are a lot of volunteer firefighters — more than half a million across the United States. Some work with professional departments. But more than 80 percent of all fire departments in the United States are run either entirely or mostly by volunteers. And they operate on very slim budgets — largely funded by local taxes, fund-raising and the occasional grant. On Long Island, as in many places, that means boot drives, where firefighters stand in traffic in their gear, hoping passing drivers will offer a dollar or two to support the department. It means raising money with community chicken dinners. It means selling T-shirts at fairs. The money raised helps keep the lights on at the station house. My colleague Mike Baker recently talked to one department in northern Connecticut that has an annual budget of $132,000, which is barely enough to keep its aging vehicles operational and to train its unpaid staff. That department, along with many other volunteer departments across the country, recently confronted a new kind of emergency, Mike writes: The software system it used to track incidents was no longer going to work. Why? Because a private equity firm purchased the platform and planned to shut it down. The software it offered in return would raise the department’s costs from $795 a year to more than $5,000. When Norfolk found a cheaper alternative, the investors bought that brand, too. Mike wrote a smart article about how fire chiefs around the country are now scrambling to manage their software options and rocketing costs as companies flush with venture capital race to take control of the market, not just for software that tracks incidents, but also for schedules, inspections and more. “We don’t have a big tax base,” an assistant fire chief in Norfolk told him. “We have to watch our pennies.”
A new American project could unite the nation under one American identity, Vivek Ramaswamy writes. Here is a column by Bret Stephens on Trump’s manners. The Times Sale starts now: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
Favorites from Slick Rick: The pioneering rapper, who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his song “La-Di-Da-Di,” recorded with Doug E. Fresh, recently told The Times about his 10 favorite things, among them James Brown’s drum tracks, English breakfast tea, his iPhone, barbecue pizza and Clarks Original Wallabee hightops. Wine with dinner? Researchers keep changing their mind about how much alcohol is safe. They now say a small amount may improve your heart health. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was Times readers’ stories of the best gifts they ever received. A passionate intellectual life: Norman Podhoretz, a onetime liberal stalwart who became a neoconservative force as the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, died at 95.
13— That is the number of elephants killed for their ivory since July 2024 along a stretch of highway that runs through a Malaysian rainforest. Five of the animals were beheaded.
New teams? Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said the league would decide in 2026 |
