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Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing system, exhibited phenomenal capabilities while competing on the television quiz show Jeopardy! in February 2011. The grand debut and triumph at Jeopardy! drew the world’s attention to Watson, which achieved a milestone in artificial intelligence (AI) while denoting a new era in computing – a cognitive era. Six years later, Watson today seems to be everywhere, revolutionizing diverse industries while building IBM’s cognitive future.

Cognitive Computing Explained

The future of technology is radically different from the systems that have dominated the global IT industry for decades. New generation technologies are broadly grouped together using the terms AI and cognitive technologies. At IBM, these advanced techs are referred to as cognitive and defined as “systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally.”

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Google announced that it will be turning to machine learning to help it identify objectionable content, which caused over 250 brands to freeze their ad spend with YouTube and Google display.

In a statement provided to Business Insider, Google said the new tools will “help enforce our revised policies and identify content that may be objectionable to advertisers.”

Google said it would also be offering brand safety reporting by working with third party partners, like Integral Ad Science and comScore.

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Bosch and the car manufacturer behind Mercedes, Daimler, have announced they are joining forces “to advance the development of fully automated and driverless driving”.

The two companies are to enter into a development agreement that they say will bring fully automated driving to urban roads by “the beginning of the next decade”.

To do this the two companies will develop software and algorithms that lead to an autonomous driving system.

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Erika Ilves is an entrepreneur who does not let herself be limited by the size of planet Earth while there is a whole universe out there. ‘For now, we are developing and training our mining robots on Earth. But in less than a decade they will underpin mining operations on the Moon and beyond,’ she claims.

2008 Disney-Pixar animation WALL-E takes us to planet Earth in 2805, abandoned by people and covered in heaps of trash. There is only one cute robot left whose job is cleaning up the planet. In real life, we do not have to wait another 800 years to see this happen. Robots like this already exist. And if we treat our resources more reasonably, the picture might not turn out be as gloomy as depicted in the movie.

‘Personally, I do not believe we will be running out of resources any time soon. We have plenty of resources on Earth to last us a few centuries,’ says Erika Ilves, cofounder of OffWorld, a company that is developing a new robotic work force to enable the settlement of the solar system. But Erika would not want to be among the first humans to set foot on Mars. Before moving people to other planets, it might be wiser to send robots out there.

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Science-fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Nowhere is that more true than in the tech world, where it’s easy to think that innovations, products and services available to us are ubiquitous, even when their distribution is, in fact, very limited.

Many of the innovations that we take for granted are simply not available elsewhere.

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This is a fair enough article, though I believe I’m more Libertarian than it paints me. I think a lot of people forget or simply don’t know my book The Transhumanist Wager (how I started my futurist career back in 2009) is known by many as transhumanist libertarian manifesto. Also, ideas from my past political campaign do not always correspond to my current gubernatorial run:

Like many libertarians, I was initially excited when Zoltan Istvan announced his candidacy for Governor of California.

Istvan is the founder of the Transhumanist Party and author of “The Transhumanist Wager,” which is considered a manifesto on transhumanist philosophy. The basic premise of transhumanism is that the next step in human evolution will be to improve our bodies and expand our lifespan with radical technology, eventually leading towards immortality. While he still needs to obtain the nomination, having someone announce their intents this early gave me hope that maybe the party would have a shot at making an impact in the California mid-terms.

As I learned about his transhumanist ideas, I became increasingly hopeful that his views on radical science and medical technology would be able to appeal to the far-left base of California and introduce a wider range of people to libertarianism. However, after doing some research I’m not so sure Istvan is the best candidate to represent the Libertarian party.

Continue reading “Is Zoltan Istvan a Libertarian?” | >