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]
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.
Jeremiah Owyang posits on the development for the future of the social web…
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Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
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