The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word “robot” is old, Colin Allen, co-author of the book Moral Machines, suggests in New York Times Opinionator.
Microsoft have unveiled their vision of the future in a slick tube imaginatively titled Productivity Future Vision (2011). While the video showcases Microsoft “innovations” [rather than an actual vision of the future] some of the the comments are timeless, ensuring this glitzy promo will be talked about for all the wrong reasons…
- “I never asked for this.”
- “Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
- “OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
- “I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
- “Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
- “How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
- “That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
- “Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”
Do leave a comment of your own, won’t you?
[No video? watch it on YouTube]
In Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world the New Scientist cites a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study, opening with this:
“AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.”
Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world’s information at our fingertips.
IBM have announced the development of a cognitive computing chip. This new technology is designed to transcend the current limitations of supercomputers, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, more closely replicating complex brain function. For what, I don’t know.
I was surprised that the news created quite a stir in me until I reflected on my own simple being. After all, I am primitive psycho-neuro-physical mechanism given to emotional outbursts and flights of fancy, not the stuff that tomorrows IBMers will be made of, or personal computers for that matter.
I have been tracking the recent London riots with some interest. Having spent the first half of my life in London, keeping up with the comings and goings there seems like the right thing to do.
Particularly under circumstances such as these, when old haunts are seen being blitzed again, I take leisurely strolls down memory lane preferring my own sentimental journey to the path of degradation which has led to the present day blighting of Blighty.
Is the social web a thing of the past?
Like a good book you can’t put down, here is a tube in the same category: Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee presenting at The Paley Center For Media.
Roger McNamee shares a number of compelling arguments that invite us to think about the social web not in terms of where we think we are, but in terms of where irresistible change is taking us.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the idea that all possible alternate histories of the universe actually exist. At every point in time, the universe splits into a multitude of existences in which every possible outcome of each quantum process actually happens.
So in this universe you are sitting in front of your computer reading this story, in another you are reading a different story, in yet another you are about to be run over by a truck. In many, you don’t exist at all.
This implies that there are an infinite number of universes, or at least a very large number of them.
That’s weird but it is a small price to pay, say quantum physicists, for the sanity the many worlds interpretation brings to the otherwise crazy notion of quantum mechanics. The reason many physicists love the many worlds idea is that it explains away all the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
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Jeremiah Owyang posits on the development for the future of the social web…
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