All posts tagged: Collar

This New Health-Tracking Pet Collar Is Like a Smartwatch for Dogs and Cats

This New Health-Tracking Pet Collar Is Like a Smartwatch for Dogs and Cats

Published by skeptic

Our pets can’t speak up and tell us how they’re feeling, or why and where they are hiding. Tractive, an Austria- and Seattle-based tech company that creates GPS tracking devices for pets, announced on Wednesday two new smart collars that, according to the press release, “will redefine pet care for millions of families.” Is your pet stressed, breathing unusually or scratching too much? Much like the basic health-tracking features you can find on a smartwatch, the collars — the Cat 6 Mini ($79) and Dog 6 XL ($89) — are designed to track this behavior and communicate the issues to help maintain your dog or cat’s quality of life. “Pets can’t tell us when something is wrong, but their bodies can,” Michael Hurnaus, CEO and founder of Tractive, said in a statement. “With cutting-edge sensors on every tracker, learnings from millions of pets and AI-powered insights, we’re turning one of the world’s largest pet data platforms into clear, simple information so pet parents can act sooner and care even better.” When it comes to tracking collars, …

If AI Causes an Office Job Wipeout, It’ll Cause Huge Problems for Blue Collar Work Too

If AI Causes an Office Job Wipeout, It’ll Cause Huge Problems for Blue Collar Work Too

Published by José Betancourt

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Blue collar workers may be enjoying a certain degree of schadenfreude at seeing the panic over tech, finance, and other white collar workers potentially losing their jobs to AI. But mass job destruction would end up being bad for virtually everyone who actually has to work for a living, not just overpaid office drones. That’s according to one of the authors of a new report from Citrini Research that recently sent quivers of fear through the stock market for imagining a mass unemployment scenario caused by AI. “Let’s say in our scenario, we talk about five percent of folks might get fired in a couple of years,” coauthor Alap Shah, CEO of Littlebird.ai, said on the podcast, as quoted by Business Insider. “Those five percent, if there aren’t white collar jobs for them to relocate into, then they’re going to have to move into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force.” “And so that puts pressure on the entire labor market, not just the white …

Virtually All White Collar Tasks Will Be Automated Within a Year and a Half

Virtually All White Collar Tasks Will Be Automated Within a Year and a Half

Published by José Betancourt

Congratulations, office workers. Most of what you do at your cozy desk jobs will soon be automated with AI, according to the extremely questionable projections of Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. That’s because AI models, as Suleyman claims in an interview with the Financial Times published Wednesday, are on the verge of achieving “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks.” “So white collar work where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” Suleyman said. Suleyman’s bold assertion comes amid renewed anxiety over AI’s potential to disrupt the job market. The release of Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork AI agent helped spark a broad stock market selloff last week, as investors feared that it could automate tasks like legal work, something that also jeopardized the bottom line of large software companies who make a killing off of providing the specialized programs to complete …

Trade Unions Alarmed by Robots Designed to Do Blue Collar Work

Trade Unions Alarmed by Robots Designed to Do Blue Collar Work

Published by José Betancourt

Photo by Tang Yanjun/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images When past generations imagined the best version of the future, it was one of leisure. Advertisements, cartoonists, and pulp novelists dared us to dream of a world where the spoils of industrial development were shared with all: robot butlers, transit by pneumatic tube, and more familiar tropes. These developments, it seemed, would make our lives more convenient, more secure, and — dare we say — more abundant. Now in 2026, it’s clear that even the most modest utopian fantasies have been stolen by the wealthy. The rich have luxurious self-driving cars while the rest of us suffer with crumbling public transit. The rich treat housing as an asset, while the rest of us navigate algorithms meant to maximize rent extraction. The rich have elite private schools, while the rest of us content ourselves to teacher shortages and glitchy AI tutors. Going forward, the disparity is likely to widen. Having established their giddy desire to automate white collar jobs, tech moguls are increasingly turning their attention toward …

Collar Cams Offer a Bear’s Eye View Into the Lives of Grizzlies on Alaska’s Desolate North Slope

Collar Cams Offer a Bear’s Eye View Into the Lives of Grizzlies on Alaska’s Desolate North Slope

Published by Sam Flores

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The life of one of the most remote grizzly bear populations in the world is being documented by the animals themselves, with collar cameras that provide a rare glimpse of how they survive on Alaska’s rugged and desolate North Slope. Twelve of the 200 or so grizzlies that roam the frigid, treeless terrain near the Arctic Ocean have been outfitted with the cameras as part of a research project by Washington State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The videos they record — many partially obscured by the undersides of whiskery muzzles — show the bears playing or fighting with companions, gnawing on a caribou, snarfing up berries, napping on a beach, and swimming in a pond looking for fish. Packing on the pounds for winter The bears hibernate about eight months of the year. “They really have a really short window to obtain enough food resources to pack on enough fat to survive that period,” said Washington State doctoral student Ellery Vincent, who is leading the project …