“The alien landscapes of Pluto and its moons dazzled scientists and nonscientists alike this year. More than eight decades after its discovery, Pluto became much more than a nondescript point of light. It’s a dynamic, complex world unlike any other orbiting the sun.”
Hollywood has long warned about the dangers of artificially intelligent robots. Now the Pentagon is thinking about future autonomous armies, and the possibility that it’s falling behind Russia and China in the race for weaponized artificial intelligence (AI).
In the various incarnations of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a sentient robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android serves on the starship Heart of Gold. Because he is never assigned tasks that challenge his massive intellect, Marvin is horribly depressed, always quite bored, and a burden to the humans and aliens around him. But he does write nice lullabies.
While Marvin is a fictional robot, Scholar and Author David Gunkel predicts that sentient robots will soon be a fact of life and that mankind needs to start thinking about how we’ll treat such machines, at present and in the future.
For Gunkel, the question is about moral standing and how we decide if something does or does not have moral standing. As an example, Gunkel notes our children have moral standing, while a rock or our smartphone may not have moral consideration. From there, he said, the question becomes, where and how do we draw the line to decide who is inside and who is outside the moral community?
“Traditionally, the qualities for moral standing are things like rationality, sentience (and) the ability to use languages. Every entity that has these properties generally falls into the community of moral subjects,” Gunkel said. “The problem, over time, is that these properties have changed. They have not been consistent.”
Robot doctors, virtual reality vacations and smart toothbrushes. These are just a few of the things the world can expect to see in the not-so-distant future, says Stanford and Duke researcher and lecturer Vivek Wadhwa.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 300 people in Palm Beach in December at billionaire Jeff Greene’s “Closing the Gap” conference, which addressed the growing divide between the wealthy and poor and how the rise of machines might kill white-collar jobs, Wadhwa sketched a sci-fi vision for the future that he says will soon be a reality thanks to rapid technological innovation.
“The future is going to be happening much, much faster than anyone ever imagined,” said Wadhwa, explaining that tech growth has been exponential — meaning as technology advances it does so with increasing speed.
Ignoring “shallow work” makes one appear lazy or distanced, but its the trait that enables great creatives to do work that matters.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PDS4oOd4EQY
“Inhuman: The Next & Final Phase of Man is Here” is not fiction or a mockudrama but a new investigative documentary from Defender Films and Raiders News Productions.
Inhuman travels the globe to unveil for the first time how breakthrough advances in science, technology and philosophy—including cybernetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, machine intelligence and synthetic biology are poised to create mind-boggling game changes to everything we have known until now about Homo sapiens.
Continue reading “UAT Tech – Official Blog of the University of Advancing Technology” »
Before each Computerphile interview we asked guests and regular contributors about their first computer.
Professor Uwe Aickelin: Missing Data: https://youtu.be/oCQbC818KKU
Professor Ross Anderson: Chip & PIN Fraud: https://youtu.be/Ks0SOn8hjG8
Continue reading “What Was Your 1st Computer? — Computerphile” »
It can crawl through snow. It can crawl through fire. And it can survive getting run over by a car. This is the “robot squid” NASA could use to explore gas giants: http://cnnmon.ie/1MdX2MG
Faraday Future has announced a $1 billion investment in North Las Vegas for a new factory, will employ 4,500 people.
On January 4, 2016, Faraday Future will unveil a concept car.
The future of mobility is closer than you think. Come back here to watch the live unveiling.
