Japan's push into AI-powered robotics is driven less by competitive ambition than by demographic arithmetic. The country's population declined for a 14th consecutive year in 2024, with working-age citizens comprising just 59.6% of the total population.
The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasn't a failure to get on board with the company's artificial intelligence plans. Plumb, his team's head of AI enablement, says he was so prolific in his use of Amazon's new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users.
The soaring valuations of AI companies aren't just a bet on better software. They're a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI's risks. As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing "free labor" at scale.