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]
We all are familiar with mediocrity. It’s everywhere and growing rapidly. Here are seven reasons that are contributing to the alarming rise of mediocrity.
Whether you’re a Twitter power user or a nervous neophyte, there are some words you’ve just got to know in order to interact on Twitter. We’ve compiled the essential Twitter dictionary so you can tweet with confidence, @mention frequently, and sift through your followers and friends without getting them mixed up.
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.
Jeremiah Owyang posits on the development for the future of the social web…
Read the rest here »
Well worth watching…twice:
Science has shown that human beings prefer routine roughly 12 times more than they do change. The more pressure we’re under, the more we seek to surround ourselves with familiar rituals and protocols to maintain an ongoing (if slightly spurious) peace of mind. This holds true for business leaders and managers, as well as consumers. Which helps explain why in the wake of the recession, such stalwart, time-tested toys such as LEGO, the Rubik’s Cube and even Barbie continued boasting brisk sales. In shaky or uncertain environments, we slide by default into the proven, the tried and true.
Yet paradoxically, there’s no better time than in the midst of routine to disrupt business as usual by coming up with an apparently wild idea that thumbs its nose at every entrenched wisdom your company holds dear. Along the way, you might stumble across a random slogan that transforms your industry’s future.
The time constraints on today’s executives are more numerous than ever before. Between the economic downturn, ever-changing industry regulations, fast-moving information and simple day-to-day management tasks, corporate executives are trapped in the virtual jail cell that is today’s business climate. The unintended result of executive “information-imprisonment” is a workplace where they may have little insight into employee morale, culture, and general goings-on during the workday. Blinded by the reflection of their own to-do-lists, executives are turning to consumer social networks to stay connected to the people that execute on daily tasks inside their organizations.
Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.
Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format. I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?
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