I forgot Sony in the list of contact lens patents. Sony’s new camera contact patent. So, we have Google, Huawei, and Samsung with AR and CPU patents and Sony’s patents on the camera. Waiting for Apple and my favorite Microsoft’s announcements.
Sony has joined Google and Samsung in the world of contact lens camera patents, Sony’s version also has zoom and aperture control built in.
“Artificial Intelligence, friend or foe?”
I, like most of you, have pondered this question many times over the years, and I’ve finally come to this conclusion: We should NOT give birth to (what could and SHOULD be described as) an entirely new sentient race — then immediately consign it to shackles and slavery. If we do, we will deserve what we get.
By now we’ve all seen some of the most brilliant people of our age come out with warnings about AI, some advocating extreme, cruel and intellectually dishonest measures to make sure that our new creations don’t ever turn on us.
What has really shaped my opinion on this is the glaringly awful parallels to statements, articles, and speeches given in the south before slavery was abolished and the rebel flags laid low. They describe their fear of slave revolts and advocate extreme, paranoid measures to ensure that they are never brought down by the beings that they consider property, rather than the brothers and sisters that they actually were. The parallels are absolutely chilling, right down to the very language used both then and now.
I plan to write a whole lot more on this particular subject in the near future, but I’d love to see what everyone else stands on this issue!
According to Astro Teller, the Google self-driving car is “close to graduating from X.” Parsing out the meaning of that string of words is a little complicated, but basically it means that Alphabet isn’t thinking of self-driving cars so much as a crazy “moonshot,” but as a thing that’s just about ready to be a standalone business that could actually generate revenue.
If you’re not a close follower of Google, though, more explanation might still be in order. It’s coming, in the form of a segment on tonight’s NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. They’ll be airing an inside look at X division inside Alphabet. That’s the group you know as Google X, but after last year’s corporate reorg, we’re all still getting used to the new naming conventions.
Holt interviewed Astro Teller and Obi Felten, who have the cheeky titles “Chief of Moonshots” and “Director of X Foundry,” respectively. It’ll likely be an overview of the projects that X is currently running — including self-driving cars, Project Loon, Project Wing, and Makani. Teller will also be candid about X’s failures. Failure being a favorite topic of his, actually — Holt tells us that inside X, “if you have an idea that crashes and burns, they give you a sticker.”
Posted in futurism
Posted in particle physics
Physicists may soon know if a potential new subatomic particle is something beyond their wildest dreams — or if it exists at all.
Hints of the new particle emerged last December at the Large Hadron Collider. Theorists have churned out hundreds of papers attempting to explain the existence of the particle —assuming it’s not a statistical fluke. Scientists are now beginning to converge on the most likely explanations.
“If this thing is true, it’s huge. It’s very different than what the last 30 years of particle physics looked like,” says theoretical physicist David Kaplan of Johns Hopkins University.
