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Star Wars-style FLYING ‘speeder bike' can zoom around skies at over 60mph – and you can pre-order your own in days
Star Wars-style FLYING ‘speeder bike' can zoom around skies at over 60mph – and you can pre-order your own in days

The Sun

time6 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • The Sun

Star Wars-style FLYING ‘speeder bike' can zoom around skies at over 60mph – and you can pre-order your own in days

A POLISH start-up has offered us a glimpse at a Star Wars-laden future after launching a remarkable flying bike. The real life ' speeder bike ' was first unveiled on 30 April in footage showing it taking off and landing in a wooded area. 5 5 The video is stripped back, with real sound and no special effects. The company also stresses that no CGI or artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to enhance the footage. That means the days of bikes and cars zooming above our heads is nearly here - with heavy emphasis on the 'nearly'. The flying bike, from Poland -based startup Volonaut, uses redundant jet turbines to beam a solo passenger through the sky at up to 63mph (102kmph). Riders can fly through tight areas with ease due to its lack of spinning propellers, according to Volonaut. Thanks to carbon fiber materials and 3D printing, the Airbike is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, Volonaut added. The video shows a test pilot heavily cladded in protective gear riding a bike that has so far only existed in sci-fi movies. The aircraft is the brainchild of Polish inventor Tomasz Patan, who is also behind the Jetson One - a type of futuristic air buggy. 5 While Patan's company Jetson continues works on a £68,000 flying car, his second firm Volonaut is working on a separate hoverbike. World's weirdest flying car that splits in HALF so you can fly over traffic - before the wheels drive The Airbike is the first hoverbike to achieve flight without traditional propellers, Volonaut claims on its website. Though riders won't be airborne for long. The Airbike can only hover off the ground for a maximum of 10 minutes at a time. While Volonaut claims the hoverbike takes under 60 seconds to refuel, 10 minutes of air travel even at max speeds won't get you very far. The flight was "exceptionally smooth", according to the startup, "with no vibrations and great degree of control". Volonaut has said the bike will be available for pre-order on 1 August. However, the company has not mentioned a manufacturing or distribution timeline. It has also remained tight-lipped as to the price tag. Therefore, it's unclear just how much money Airbike hopefuls will have to part with - or when the aircraft will arrive at their doorstep if they do. While Volonaut's Airbike has definitely captured interest in personal VTOL innovations, it is interesting to note that, as of this writing, the company has not filed patents. 5

AI Agents Are Killing Brand Loyalty And Reshaping How We Shop
AI Agents Are Killing Brand Loyalty And Reshaping How We Shop

Forbes

time14-07-2025

  • Business
  • Forbes

AI Agents Are Killing Brand Loyalty And Reshaping How We Shop

AI agents are starting to make buying decisions for us, disrupting the emotional and psychological ... More foundations of traditional marketing. Marketers are used to adapting to change. The internet, social media, search engines, mobile devices, big data analytics and AI have all brought seismic-scale disruption. But what if one of the fundamental assumptions in marketing, that our audience is human, is about to be shattered forever? In the age of agentic AI, machines will increasingly make choices, including about what we buy. And brands that fail to react to this risk becoming 'invisible' and, eventually, irrelevant. Machines don't 'shop' the same way we do. They don't browse influencer Instagrams, build brand loyalty due to happy memories, or impulse-buy on the back of clever copywriting. Instead, they analyze data based on logic, rules and signals. With research papers like this one starting to delve into the mysteries of how and why agents make buying decisions, a picture is starting to emerge. And the indications are that brands may no longer be able to rely on time-tested social and psychological levers; from fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, to aligning with customer values, to human-centric visual branding. So marketers are faced with the challenge of adapting once again to a new reality, where buying isn't driven by emotional response but by algorithms and robotic logic. Let's take a look at what this could mean. Rewriting The Rulebook Much of marketing is about building trust and connection with customers. This includes shaping our perception of brands to make them desirable and providing a great customer experience. AI agents, the autonomous, action-taking evolutionary step forward from chatbots like ChatGPT, see things very differently. According to Salesforce, nearly a quarter (24%) of consumers are comfortable with the idea of agents shopping for them. This rises to 32% when taking Gen Z in isolation. Agents 'see' products and services as structured data, price comparisons, feature lists, review scores and other machine-friendly information. Yes, they can parse social media feeds for sentiment and brand associations. But at the end of the day, if the results of their data gathering don't fit into a table and show a recognized pattern, we can't be sure what insights an agent will draw from them. To put that into a real-world scenario: A product category that people seem happy to trust AI to buy for them is household and domestic products. If an AI is shopping for underarm deodorant, is it going to care about the millions that have been spent on developing a brand storyline and lifestyle positioning over the decades it's been around? The truth is, we don't know for sure yet. No one is certain how agents, particularly those created in two or five years' time, might buy things. However, there is some evidence that models available today, like OpenAI's Operator, are drawn to ads with structured data. Selling To Machines Some tricky technical and psychological questions have to be addressed to get a fuller picture of what's going on here. On the technical side, it will involve building a deeper understanding of how AI agents process and prioritize customer buying signals. And we also need to understand how concepts like preference, values and trust will be communicated by the agents working on behalf of customers. Agents making buying decisions on behalf of humans are likely to operate within parameters, which could include budget restrictions or ethical preferences. While less-friendly fellow robots don't feel pity, remorse, or fear, buying agents don't feel greed, FOMO, or brand loyalty. On the other hand, they may react to bad customer experience differently than we would; they are unlikely to feel frustrated if a sales agent keeps them on hold for too long, for example. It's also worth noting that clever agents might even take steps to disguise their agentic nature. One example is the ability of agentic tools like Operator to communicate via human-to-machine channels like email, rather than APIs. Marketing automation systems may have to become adept at discerning whether a click or email has been sent by a person or a machine in order to react appropriately. On the other hand, a great deal more commercial activity may be carried out exclusively machine-to-machine. This means marketers will need to understand how their own systems can successfully 'win' negotiations with buying agents, convincing them they have what their users will need. Critically, this must be done transparently without impacting consumer trust. Smart Brands Will Do This Next Starting now and over the next 12 months, businesses will need to pay close attention to the impact of agentic search on their existing SEO and SEM strategies. Google search took around 13 years to reach one billion users. ChatGPT is on course to hit that milestone within three. Forward-thinking businesses should already be exploring this potentially efficient and dynamic new marketing channel. Both as a way of connecting with early-adopter audiences and of starting to build an awareness of its capabilities. Beyond this, brands need to start thinking about ways that reputation and trust signals can be encoded into their messaging in ways that will capture the attention of machines. This could mean structuring product information on a website into machine-readable formats, real-time data feeds (pricing and availability, for example), and providing extensive API access to product and services data. Crucially, rising to this challenge will require collaborative action beyond just marketing teams. Data, product and digital teams will need to ensure that when agents check out a business, they get an aligned, on-message view. This might not sound simple, and it's likely to involve some serious strategic thought. But businesses that don't start working on it now are likely to be left playing catch-up with the agentic early-adopters.

13 Million Humanoid Robots Will Walk Among Us By 2035
13 Million Humanoid Robots Will Walk Among Us By 2035

Forbes

time02-07-2025

  • Automotive
  • Forbes

13 Million Humanoid Robots Will Walk Among Us By 2035

Morgan Stanley predicts 13 million humanoid robots will work alongside humans by 2035, with costs ... More dropping to $10,000 annually, making them as affordable as cars. Imagine a future where we share our world with walking, talking humanoid robots. It's not hard; we've all seen it in science fiction. But could it be just around the corner? Well, a report recently published by Morgan Stanley suggests that it could be less than 10 years before millions of them are working alongside us, playing with us, protecting us and providing care. And by 2050, there could be one billion of them among us. So, is society ready for this massive change? What might this robotic world of the future look like? And are there ethical questions that have to be considered if we are going to give walking, talking machines intelligence and make them serve us? Let's take a look at what we know so far about humanoid robots, how they'll fit into our lives, and what opportunities and challenges they will create. Robots On The Rise By 2035, there could be 13 million robot members of society, and the cost of owning one could be around $10,000 a year. Roughly making them comparable to a car in terms of how affluent you'll need to be to afford one. This accessible price point, analysts suggest, could mark a tipping point where they become commercially viable for a critical mass of businesses. This will lead to an explosion of demand, with the headcount of active robots potentially rising to a billion over the next 15 years. It's a bold prediction for sure, but there are already examples of these robots being put to work. One model, known as Digit, created by Agility Robotics, is in use on factory floors in the U.S. It's capable of carrying out many tasks, such as lifting and stacking objects that previously could only be done by humans. BMW also completed a pilot project where they introduced a humanoid robot called Figure 02 onto the floor of its assembly plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. They are capable of opening doors, climbing stairs and using human tools. And there are also plans to deploy them in a Houston factory owned by Foxconn, where they will be used to build Nvidia servers. They can be used to provide care and companionship, too, as seen in several products and projects launched in South Korea, a country with a highly developed robotics industry. Today's Challenges And Opportunities All of this has become possible in recent years thanks to advances in AI that have led to better image recognition, language processing and fine motor controls. This means they can see and understand us, as well as move in a humanlike way by continually adjusting to their environment. As advanced as they are, these early-generation humanoid robots are unlikely to have the generalized AI needed to create the kind of multi-tasking, mechanical humans we've watched in movies for decades, yet. Instead, just as with today's other hyped AI applications, like ChatGPT or robotaxis, they will have a narrower range of capabilities, in line with specific jobs they're created for. But these are, quite literally, just the first steps for humanoid robots. Their form factor makes them anatomically suited to many physical tasks we currently can only do ourselves, as well as operate alongside us in human environments. Their arrival does, however, present challenges. Some are technological, such as the need to constantly create more efficient batteries and durable materials to support increasingly advanced models and use cases. And, of course, their impact on human workforces and employment opportunities will need to be carefully modeled and addressed. Can (and will) they be introduced in a way that supports human workers by freeing them from mundane, routine or dangerous work? Or will their introduction simply make swathes of manual workers redundant? There are psychological considerations, too. Many people may be intrinsically frightened of robots. The psychologist who coined the term 'robophobia' in the nineties suggested that as many as 20 percent of people might suffer from it. The impact on everyone's mental health of a billion robots in our streets, factories and homes will have to be carefully thought through, too. One Billion Robots One billion robots would equate to one for roughly every eight humans on the planet. By 2050, this means they could be a common sight in factories, healthcare settings, retail, hospitality and education. They would become increasingly common in our homes, too, with Morgan Stanley's researchers estimating that 10 percent of U.S. households will have one by this point. The U.S. is likely to see the highest concentration of these domestic humanoid robots, helping out with chores, caring for children and the elderly, carrying out maintenance work or providing security. However, the growing access of less developed markets to cheaper Chinese robots and supply chains could lead to greater uptake in Asia, too. But if you live in the U.S. and have a household income of $200k-plus, there's a 33 percent chance you'll be sharing your home with a robot by 2050 (everyone else will just have to wait a bit longer). This is the point at which we must address some of the serious questions: Are governments permitted to use robots as police officers or to conduct surveillance work? Are private companies allowed to use them to enforce security restrictions, for example, preventing humans from accessing buildings or even fighting back if they are attacked? And what about robots' rights? Is it fair to treat them as unpaid servants or slaves? Today's most advanced AIs might just be hugely complex language-crunchers, but what about tomorrow's, as they become smarter, more aware, and perhaps even begin to develop qualities we've only seen before in conscious, sentient lifeforms? As well as processing all of this, we may have to come to terms with no longer being the only intelligent entities walking around with the power to reshape the world with fingers and opposable thumbs. And that could ultimately be the biggest culture shock of all.

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