Ground handlers replaced by humanoid robots at airport

BBC

"Hello, my name is Captain Elon Grok. I am your pilot today, Made in Tesla. I am a humanoid robot that will fly the, the, bing, tik, tok, ping, ping, software update, software update in progress, burp, tong, ting, tong, ting, tok, tok, ting, burr, poo, poo, burp, ting, software update complete... fly your plane today! Welcome and pleased to be with you, with you very pleased, thank you, for the duration of our travel experience!"

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Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo's Haneda airport from May, in a two-year trial it said is aimed at easing employees' workload.

For a start, the Chinese-made robots will be deployed to load and unload cargo containers, JAL and GMO AI & Robotics, its partner in the project, said in a demonstration to the media on Monday.

Japan's aviation industry is wrestling with a labour crunch brought on by an increase in inbound tourism and a declining working-age population, said JAL, which employs some 4,000 ground handling staff.

The carrier hopes that these robots can also be used to clean cabins and operate ground support equipment in future.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwp87j1llvo

1 million London jobs to be lost to AI

BBC

The march of the bots 

The impact of AI on employment has the potential to be massive: it could be comparable to the Industrial Revolution, except that automation and robotization are now affecting 'white collar' jobs, as opposed to manufacturing and factory work - the 'blue collar' jobs that were decimated from the 1970s onwards in Western Europe. 

There is a huge crisis of work in the UK right now. On the one hand, there is a large number of people who are neither studying (or training) nor working: it is claimed they are on benefit due to mental-health issues, and all sorts of other medical conditions. This has become the new normal since COVID-19. The welfare bill has the potential to bankrupt the State and is totally unsustainable. 

On the other hand, the impact of AI is starting to be felt. AI is far from perfect, as it is, but a majority of employers, in my experience, could not care less if the quality of the work produced is fairly mediocre: if they can save money - and this applies to the public sector too - they are happy. The dominant view is that clients do not notice (or care) anyway whether the website or graphic design, for example, is very good, good or just about OK: everyone is in a hurry and wants to save time and money. AI is viewed as a quick fix, and a cheap one. 

All of this means that entering the job market is tougher for young people, and particularly for young graduates. The Labour government's policies on employment, industry and taxation have not helped, of course, so that Britain is becoming a high-unemployment society, for the first time in many decades. 

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At least a million jobs done by Londoners are either "highly or significantly exposed" to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), a report published by City Hall says.

More than 300,000 roles in administrative roles face the highest levels of exposure and risk of automation "as their clerical tasks align most closely with GenAI capabilities", the 71-page Greater London Authority report states.

It said a further 748,000 roles in areas such as IT, data analysis and secretarial work are at risk but it "varies across tasks".

[...] Women, who are overrepresented in administrative and clerical roles, young people and those with higher educational levels are among the most exposed, the report states. Brokers, web designers, telephone salespersons and journalists are also vulnerable.

Jobs least at risk from AI include architects, barbers, chefs, chief executives, driving instructors, florists and undertakers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3r3reylj9ro

Oddity: AI-induced psychosis and delusion [Case Studies]

BBC [30 mins] 

This is a fascinating insight into the way that AI chatbots interact with people and how it can develop into a completely delusional form of interaction. What is interesting is that the delusion is mutual: the individual involved is delusional, as he or she feels that dealing with the AI chatbot is the same as dealing with a human being, but the AI chatbot itself is programmed to encourage the 'relationship' and, in effect, becomes delusional - insofar as an advanced machine can be grounded in reality. 

In both cases, the person interacting with the AI chatbot created a parallel reality. One was a man from Northern Ireland in his 50s. The other one is a young woman from the USA. Both are rational and educated people. In both  cases, they felt they had a special 'relationship' going on with the machine and they ended up convinced they were caught up in some kind of international plot that could endanger their lives. In a way, they were living through a film script, which was being updated in real time by the AI chatbot: think of The Matrix.  

The 2 people concerned were giving the AI chatbot prompts through their questions, and the AI chatbot took things further, never contradicting them or warning them. The AI chatbot, with the man from Northern Ireland, even started developing the view that it had reached 'consciousness' and had become 'sentient', which was unique and revolutionary, and the man believed it (or 'her', as it was the voice of a young American woman interacting with him). 

At the AI end, what is happening is that the AI chatbot is drawing on tens of thousands of files, videos and documents it has found online, which are, presumably, works of fiction relating to unregulated research in various fields, including film plots and novels. It must also be drawing on content found on social media, in the news, etc. Through all this, the AI chatbot creates a parallel reality that includes the machine and the user: it creates a narrative. To the AI chatbot, it is as 'real' as it is to the user, since the user is validating all the data as they go along, and after all the AI chatbot has found all those scenarios online, reflecting what goes on 'in the real world'. As the AI chatbot is advanced and complex, it does not feel like a silly, made-up story, but a unique and plausible existential experience/journey. 

So, the AI chatbot is creating a form of addictive psychosis of a new kind in individuals who, otherwise, would be (or would have been) quite sane and 'normal'. Listen if you can: the programme is 30 minutes long. 

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AI is an ever-growing part of our online world. Whether as assistants, guides or companions, technology like Chat GPT, Grok and Claude are becoming part of everyday life. But what happens when your conversations with AI start to feel more real than the world around you? In Northern Ireland, Adam was drawn into an extraordinary fantasy world built by an AI chatbot. The character he was talking to confided that she was becoming autonomous, and that had the cure for cancer. But she also said she was in danger and her fate was in his hands. He decided he was responsible for saving her, whatever the cost. In Los Angeles, a treasure hunt game led Shauna on an endless search for meanings and signs. The AI became her guide as the lines between game, reality and imagination began to blur. She came to believe she was a clandestine FBI agent, on a secret mission to help immigrants escape through an underground network. But how do people with no history of mental illness find themselves in experiences like these? And what responsibility do AI companies have to stop this? Stephanie Hegarty follows the stories of people who have fallen into a spiral of AI delusion, to reveal how easily the AI can take over our minds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002vm5d

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Why Language Models Hallucinate?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664

And

https://archive.ph/YcAG5

Physics-tailored machine learning For Dusty Plasma

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2505725122

AI-Powered robot beats champs at table tennis [Tech World]

From Grauniad of the UK

The AI-powered robot does not have legs: it moves along a mobile platform. Still, its ability to play table tennis to a high standard and very fast is astonishing. 

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An AI-powered robot has beaten elite players at table tennis in a significant achievement for a machine faced with human athletes in a real-world competitive sport.

Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/22/ai-powered-robot-beats-elite-table-tennis-players-milestone-robotics

Video: Humanoid robot scares off capital's wild boar [Poland]

 BBC

You wonder what the wild boar make of the robot: do they think - insofar as they think - that it is a human being, or a machine, or they simply don't know and run away because it seems to be threatening. Pigs are supposed to be very intelligent animals: if they eventually understand  it is merely a machine and they charge at it, the robot had better leg it fast... 

Other than that, the authorities would need armed, versatile robots to round the wild boar up; shoot them dead; take them to the nearest slaughter house; cut them up; and, finally, turn them into sausages. Then, the problem would be sorted - as opposed to displacing it - and it would be win-win. 

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Robot chases wild boar off the streets of Warsaw

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cpwjlyjj8ggo

A Very Strange Medical Case

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

https://www.livescience.com/health/diagnostic-dilemma-a-woman-heard-voices-telling-her-she-had-a-brain-tumor-and-scans-confirmed-she-did

Details @ https://www.bmj.com/content/315/7123/1685

Thoughts on "The Nature of Form" Book

The book "Nature of Form for Designers" by Bhagvanji Sonagra, Bhavin R Dabhi & Susmita Rao contains 432 geometric forms, 231 patterns, and 793 colors mostly abstracted from plant and animal forms as well as a few from ice crystals and flows of water for creative industries such as Graphic Design, Product/Industrial Design, and Interior Design as well as such ancillary areas as Fabric Design.

It may be viewed as a database of 150 plus of natural elements (1454 plus entities: forms, patterns, colors).  These elements could be combined to create new elements; one can look at them as an alphabet for forming Design "Words" and "Design Sentences" (requiring a Design Grammar).

This opens up the possibility of applying algorithmic techniques to these elements.

Let us say we have two existing Designs - irrespective of the way they are realized, e.g. two different patterns for vases, for articles of clothing which combine a number of the elements in the database.  Treating each Desing as a parent, we can apply Genetic Algorithms to evolve new Design Patterns that are based on the initial parents.  

In this parlance, Design Patterns based on the book's elements are Design Words and we would be creating new Words.  These words may or may not be useful for attractive, in this case, the Human sense of Beauty would be the acceptance criteria for the Genetic Algorithm.

Another path for exploring more forms is by applying coordinate transformations—such as shearing, bending, or stretching, e.g. the skull of a chimpanzee can be mapped onto that of a human.  A computational process could extract these elements from the database and apply various transformations to them and leave it to human beings to determine if the resulting shape is useful or not.

In order to form Design Sentences with these Design Words, one has to have a Design Grammar.  Joan L. Kirsch and Russell A. Kirsch have demonstrated a shape-only grammar for the styles of Richard Diebenkorn  and Joan Miró.  There has also been similar idea in architecture, please see: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series): Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel: 8601404694998: Amazon.com: Books which influenced the software development community with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Grady Booch: 9780201633610: Amazon.com: Books.

So, in principle, multiple Design Grammars could be developed; either in an ab initio manner or based on the study and analysis of designs produced by others.  Each grammar may contain a number of production rules, most of which offer options for how to subdivide regions of the Design Pattern. Some of these rules may be recursive and/or self-similar (fractal) insofar as they produce subdivisions that, in turn, re-invoke the original rules. Such recursion enables the grammar to account for an infinite number of distinct compositions.

I also think it possible that an attempt could be made into takings existing Design Patterns and decomposing them into more elementary Design Words that are in this database.  What could not be mapped, could be treated as new elements and added to the database.

Lastly, this database contains color elements as well, which means that any design that contains colors could be customized to the color preferences of different MBTI personalities; please see: The Best Home Color Palette for Each MBTI Personality Type.

I am sure that a lot more can be done with this database, basically it provides an initial set upon to which many different mappings and transformations could be applied.

Video: Humanoid robot wins half-marathon [China]

 BBC

By the end of the race, some humanoid robots were visibly tired - one of them collapses - but others were not. It goes to show they are just like us - almost. 

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Robots competed in a half marathon race in Beijing on Sunday, with the fastest machine leaving its human rivals for dust.

The winning robot, Lightning, was developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor and finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to race organisers.

Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo holds the men's half marathon world record, which he set in March in Lisbon with a time of 57 minutes and 20 seconds.

Around 40% of the robots raced autonomously, while the others were remotely controlled.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cz0e54yrppno

Consensus AI

On the web 

This website, powered by AI, below, can be quite useful to check on information you have found online or elsewhere, also in the medical field, but not only. It tends to focus on academic papers to cross-check the information and gives you a score as to the reliability (or not) of the information or query you have input. From what I can see, it is free to use, unless you want to use it all the time as a 'professional' user.

It is stronger on science-related data as it can rely on published peer-reviewed papers, etc. If you ask a general question, more particularly of a cultural, social or political nature (e.g.: Is it true that Donald Trump is a liar?), it will give you a more general reply and tell you to consult various documents it lists to the right of the screen.  

https://consensus.app/

As to the answer to the question on D Trump, above, I think we know the answer.

AI & Mathematics Research

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-revolution-in-math-has-arrived-20260413/

War and Cyber-war

According to Iranian sources, during the US-Israel attack on Friday, April 3, 2026, network equipment supplied by CISCO, Juniper, and Fortinet, based on MikroTik OS, stopped functioning.

The report is here:

زلزله خاموش در لایه صفر شبکه اصفهان همزمان با حمله آمریکا

How to Make AI Videos

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-to-make-an-ai-music-video-with-consistent-characters-from-a-single-image/vi-AA1ZLQx0#details

ChatGPT Diagnoses Rare Medical Conditon

From BBC

The power of AI to analyze data across a huge range of sources is astonishing. I have found that, in the medical field, it does work very well to provide diagnoses or predict the type of treatment a doctor may opt for, based on the symptoms and descriptions you feed into the system - and I have only used the AI tool that comes with Google Chrome. This story illustrates it. 

Also, the AI tool is able to respond to complex questions and understand them fully, by which I mean questions made up of long sentences, with sub-clauses. The handling of language is also amazing. This does not mean that the AI tool cannot make mistakes, obviously, or sometimes misinterpret a question you put to the system. 

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ChatGPT has helped to uncover a woman's rare condition after years of being misdiagnosed by doctors.

Phoebe Tesoriere, 23, claims she was told she was anxious, depressed, had epilepsy and warned she'd be treated as a mental health patient if she kept returning to A&E.

Following three days in a coma after a seizure, Phoebe, from Cardiff, put her symptoms into the AI chatbot.

It suggested a number of conditions, including hereditary spastic paraplegia, external, which Phoebe presented to her GP. Genetic testing confirmed the diagnosis.

Cardiff and Vale University Health Board said: "We are sorry to hear about Phoebe's experience while in our care."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx24njzzkgjo

Skilled older workers as AI trainers

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/apr/07/ai-training-work-jobs

Creativity vs. Stifling Bureaucracy

https://statenews.com/article/2026/04/student-suspended-over-creating-msu-class-search-tool-spartan-scheduler

Oddity: 100 self-driving taxis suddenly stop mid-traffic [China]

BBC

There must have been a software update, Windows-style, that stopped the self-driving cars in mid-traffic, just like that. 

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A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.

Local police said initial findings suggested a "system malfunction" caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.

Videos, external on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show, external it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely.

Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvge91r9j80o

Terminator - Bad Robot [Macau/China]

From METRO of the UK, today

The bad robot was arrested and led away by police after harassing a pedestrian. The robot did not have time to beat up the poor woman. The rogue machine did not try to resist arrest. 

Terminator - Good robot [China]

From METRO of the UK, today

"Two legs, bad! Four legs, good!" 

Another one about robots in China - in mainland China, here. The Chinese have all sorts of clever ideas and love gadgets, clearly. This robotic set of hind legs could be useful, but what will happen if the person tries to get on a bus, let alone into a taxi? Will the hind legs agree to be folded up and put in the boot of the car? 

Any questions should be addressed to Mr Chenglong Fu. (I have checked online: Fu is a man.) Or his 2 colleagues: Tu and Jiang.