Tag Archives: AI

AI & 25 Million LEGO Bricks

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One LEGO’s most brilliant features is that it is almost endlessly reusable. Sure if it ends up in landfill it’ll take four thousand years to degrade (and even then only into microplastics), but if it’s passed on, it could be played with for four thousand years too.

That reuse-ability means that old LEGO has value, which is probably why The LEGO Company continually proliferate the number of piece types, so there’s always more LEGO to buy.

It also means it’s worth sorting a few hundred old unused LEGO bricks, because its reuse is worth something. But what if you have 25 million pieces?

Well in an old mill in Lancashire, England, WeBuyBricks and their ‘Wallace and Gromit’-esque ‘Brick-O-Matic’ have so far sorted 25 million LEGO bricks (plus all the other crap that inevitably gets mixed in with them) for reuse.

Using cameras and AI, the company’s ‘Brick-O-Matic’ can identify two LEGO pieces a second, using jets of air to sort them by category and even reconstitute them into sets for sale.

WeBuyBricks currently have over 10 tons of bricks waiting to be sorted, and at the time of writing you can buy a literal ton of LEGO for £6,499. Which would take some explaining to family members.

You can check out WeBuyBricks’ inventory or sell your own unused pieces via the link above, whilst we award them 1,000 TLCB Points for not only enabling the reuse of an astonishing amount of LEGO (and an old mill), but also for finding something genuinely useful for AI to do.

Now where’s our box of old jumbled Space and Pirates?….

TLCB x AI

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Here at The Lego Car Blog we try to do things differently. Often worse, but differently nonetheless. Thus today we’re going to address the rise of the machines, and the two letters that – if countless sci-fi films prove correct – will probably spell the end of us all. A. I.

Now deployed in every job application, university essay, and best man’s speech, AI has changed (or imminently will) pretty much everything. Cancer screening, vaccine creation, and disaster response are immeasurably more powerful thanks to artificial intelligence, whilst music, movies, and voice work can be produced without artists, and photographic/video evidence now means nothing.

On balance, for all the potential good it can do, we think that AI is probably going to harm society more than help it, and so – mirroring our approach to social media – we have decided not to use it here at The Lego Car Blog. Correspondingly all our content will continue to be written only by human beings, and thus all the mistakes you spot are our own. We will also endeavour to ensure that no AI-generated creations are featured, with our Submission Guidelines updated to reflect this policy (although this may prove tricky to administer once AI can nail it).

Until then however, The Lego Car Blog will proudly be an AI-free site, both in word and image. Unless the robots in charge in the future deem this post evidence of resistance, in which case AI wrote it.

Image credit.