Posts tagged "opinion"

• How Will Adding Intelligence to Everyday Things Change Your World? →

  

  On a global level, we are adding connected intelligence to both machines and objects using chips, micro sensors, and both wired and wireless networks to create a rapidly growing “Internet of things” sharing real-time data, performing diagnostics, and even making remote repairs. Many jobs will be created as we add intelligent connected sensors to bridges, roads, buildings, homes, and much more. By 2020, there will be well over a billion machines talking to each other and performing tasks without human intervention.

  IoT research opinion future devices smart devices
  3 weeks ago reblog like 22 notes
• Noel Sharkey - BBC Radio Interview →

  

  Robots probably won’t take over the world, but they probably will be given ever greater responsibility. Already, robots care for the elderly in Japan, and drones have dropped bombs on Afghanistan. Professor Noel Sharkey fell in love with artificial intelligence in the 1980s, celebrated when he programmed his first robot to move in a straight line down the corridor and , for many years, judged robot wars on TV. Now, he thinks AI is a dangerous dream. Jim al-Khalili hears how Noel left school at 15 to become an electrician’s apprentice and amateur rock musician before graduating as a Doctor of Psychology and world authority on robots, studying both their strengths and their limitations.

  interview BBC robots robotics future opinion
  3 weeks ago reblog like 7 notes
• Cloning woolly mammoths: it’s the ecology, stupid →

  

  As an ecologist of ice age giants, I long ago came to terms with the fact that I will never look my study organisms in the eye. I will never observe black-bear-sized beavers through binoculars in their natural habitats, build experimental exclosures to test the effects of mastodons on plants, or even observe a giant ground sloth in a zoo.

  cloning opinion research science future
  2 months ago reblog like 10 notes
• Transhumanism and Money →

  

  Money is at the very center of how human beings communicate with one another in complex societies and yet it is almost completely ignored in all private k-12 education in the united states and most nations. Money isn’t economics, Money is human behaviour, it is group and individual psychology.Particularly now, as the world body of nations and central banks escalate currency wars(and trade wars), more people are turning their attention to money.

  transhumanism money opinion future singularity
  2 months ago reblog like 23 notes
• Could more than one singularity happen at the same time? →

  

  James Miller has an interesting looking new book out, Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World. I haven’t had a chance to pick up the book yet, but I did listen to a very engaging conversation about the book at Surprisingly Free.Miller is a true believer in the Singularity, the idea that at some point, from the next quarter century to the end of the 21st, our civilization will give rise to a greater than human intelligence which will rapidly bootstrap to a yet higher order of intelligence in such a way that we are unable to see past this event horizon in historical time.

  opinion future futurist singularity
  4 months ago reblog like 18 notes
• Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs →

  

  Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?

  It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

  robots science future research opinion
  4 months ago reblog like 28 notes
• The Fallacy of Dumb Superintelligence →

  

  This is what a New Yorker article has to say on the subject of “Moral Machines”: “An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us all to an intravenous dopamine drip.”

  I have been fighting this persistent but logically bankrupt meme since my first encounter with it in the H community back in 2005. But in spite of all my efforts …. there it is again. Apparently still not dead.

  AI media future opinion
  5 months ago reblog like 11 notes
• Completing the Social Business Transformation: A Manifesto →

  smarterplanet:

  Ray Kurzweil’s analysis in the “Singularity is Near” predicts that technology capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Long periods of preparation and solving many small problems set the stage for the ability to combine those smaller solutions together and solve bigger problems. Moore’s Law is used as the canonical case, but my favorite example is the rate of progress in mapping the Human Genome, which followed this pattern.

  What has become known as Social Business is now at the elbow of such a curve, in my opinion. From basic telephony, to email, to centralized forms of collaboration such as forums, wikis, and blogs, we have come to an integrated suite of capabilities served up to us through Jive Software, Lotus Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, and in many other products.

  It is possible to see these suites as the end of the road, as the culmination of a set of capabilities into a product category that will last for 30 or 40 years like ERP or CRM. I reject that view and instead assert that the culmination of Social Business will instead be a new paradigm that changes how knowledge is captured, how processes are designed, how applications are created, and how work gets done. Consider the rest of this article a manifesto for completing this transformation.

  Source smarterplanet
  singularity opinion future
  7 months ago reblog like 25 notes
• Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots →

  

  Most discussions of “robot rights” play out in a seemingly distant, science-fictional future. While skeptics roll their eyes, advocates argue that technology will advance to the point where robots deserve moral consideration because they are “just like us,” sometimes referencing the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner depicts a world where androids have human-like emotions and develop human-like relationships to the point of being indistinguishable from people. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel on which the film is based, contains a small, significant difference in storyline. In the book, the main character falls in love with an android that only pretends to requite his feelings. Even though he is fully aware of this fact, he maintains the one-directional emotional bond. The novel touches on a notably different, yet plausible, reality: humans’ moral consideration of robots may depend more on our own feelings than on any inherent qualities built into robots.

  robots legal opinion law rights robotics future
  8 months ago reblog like 10 notes
• Technology & the Future of Violence →

  

  You walk into your shower and find a spider. You are not an arachnologist. You do, however, know that one of the following options is possible:

  The spider is real and harmless. The spider is real and venomous.

  Your next-door neighbor, who dislikes your noisy dog, has turned her personal surveillance spider (purchased from “Drones ‘R Us” for $49.95) loose and is monitoring it on her iPhone from her seat at a sports bar downtown. The pictures of you, undressed, are now being relayed on several screens during the break of an NFL game, to the mirth of the entire neighborhood.

  future violence war opinion think tank
  9 months ago reblog like 7 notes
• As freak weather becomes the norm, we need to adapt →

  

  It has been yet another week of extraordinary weather. Torrential rainfall caused chaos across the UK. A record-breaking heatwave drifted across the US, broken by freak thunderstorms that left a trail of destruction from Chicago to Washington DC. Meanwhile, in India and Bangladesh more than 100 people were killed and half a million fled when the monsoon arrived with a vengeance.

  weather storms future opinion
  10 months ago reblog like 5 notes
• Transhumanism’s Dark Side: Tittle’s Regulation, Prisco’s “Progress” and Scaruffi’s Austerity →

  

  EET’s latest offerings highlight the politically pernicious elements of transhumanism and Singularity movement. P. Tittle promotes licensing for parents as a logical expansion of the state’s prerogative to control everything, Giulio Prisco contemplates Terran aggression against Cosmists, and piero scaruffi chides the Greeks for their “lavish lifestyle” and lack of nuclear power.

  singularity transhumanism future opinion
  11 months ago reblog like 6 notes
• What Happened to Cyberpunk? →

  

  Cyberpunk, in the popular consciousness, conjures a glut of dissociated images: Blade Runner’s slummy urban landscape, hackers in sunglasses, Japanese cyborgs, grubby tech, digital intoxication, Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic. But it began as an insanely niche subculture within science fiction, one which articulated young writerly distaste for the historically utopian optimism of the medium and, in turn, provided an aesthetic reference point for burgeoning hacker culture, before metastasizing into a full-on cultural trend.

  cyberpunk science fiction future opinion
  11 months ago reblog like 58 notes
• 8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future →

  Wired’s Epicenter Blog asked 8 visionary futurists how they go about predicting the future. 

  future futurist opinion
  1 year ago reblog like 6 notes
• The 22nd Century at First Light: Envisioning Life in the Year 2100 →

  When imagining the changes we may see by the turn of the next century, we might no longer find it very useful to look back to changes occurring in the same amount of time in the past. Eighty-eight years ago, in 1924, movies were silent, and the Great Depression was an inconceivable wild card. But change is accelerating exponentially, as The Singularity Is Near author Ray Kurzweil has argued, and the next 88 years could see the equivalent of the last 10,000 years worth of change.

  future futurist opinion
  1 year ago reblog like 8 notes