Denyse O'Leary
So what happened to Google Glass?
We are told that the “wetware” (humans) got in the way
Do children trust robots too much?
Maybe, but more study is needed, say researchers
Why Do We Think Money Is Real?
It is actually a constantly shifting network of agreements to trust othersIt is actually a constantly shifting network of agreements to trust others. Maria Bustillos, editor of Ethereum’s culturemag, Popula, asks us to think about just what money is before we make up our minds about Bitcoin.
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George Gilder: Life after Google Will Be Okay
People will take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man”In his new book, he calls the successor era he envisions the “cryptocosm,” referring to the private encryption of data, represented by technologies such as blockchain.
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Why machines can’t think as we do
As philosopher Michael Polanyi noted, much that we know is hard to codify or automate
Why Can’t Machines Learn Simple Tasks?
They can learn to play chess more easily than to walk
The New Politically Correct Chatbot Was Worse?
If you are a human being who talks to people for a living, don’t quit your job
A Wallet You Can’t Feel?
Will Bitcoin change the rituals around money?It’s tempting to assume that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will succeed because social media did. But digital doesn’t mean magic. Cryptocurrencies will work if the needs met are more significant to most people than the problems created are.
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Boy loses large hunk of brain
And is “doing just fine”
Claim: Yes, you can upload your brain
Fine print: They might have to kill you first
How to hack your unconscious mind
Assuming it exists
Better medicine through machine learning?
Data can be a dump or a gold mine
AI Has a (Wonderful) Plan for Your Life
Tech-savvy religion scholars play with reshaping societyThe team is pessimistic about getting politicians on side and hopes to persuade policy analysts to convince the politicians to adopt the policies their model suggests instead. Wildman predicts, “We’re going to get them in the end.”
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The driverless car: A bubble soon to burst?
Car expert says journalists too gullible about high techWhy do we constantly hear that driverless, autonomous vehicles will soon be sharing the road with us? Wolmar blames “gullible journalists who fail to look beyond the extravagant claims of the press releases pouring out of tech companies and auto manufacturers, hailing the imminence of major developments that never seem to materialise.”
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Attend your own funeral!
It’s easy if you upload your consciousness to the cloud, says futurist
Can free will even be an illusion?
Michael Egnor reiterates the freeing implications of quantum indeterminacyMany say so. For example, at Cosmos, senior artificial intelligence research scientist Alfredo Metere explains, … there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel). He asserts that today we know the universe to be chaotic. Because the cosmos is clearly chaotic, we can observe time-reversibility only locally, rather than globally. This in turn means that free will is an inevitable illusion for us humans, due to our subjective perception of the universe, rather than its innermost nature. Read More ›
Big Question: Can Big Data Read the Minds of Others?
And should Facebook scan your posts for suicidal thoughts? (It does.)Neurologist Robert Burton reflects at Aeon on the fact that mind reading does not really work. Most fashionable theories of mind, like the mirror neuron theory, have not really been much use: This is not to say that we have no idea of what goes on in another’s mind. The brain is a superb pattern-recogniser; we routinely correctly anticipate that others will feel grief at a funeral, joy at a child’s first birthday party, and anger when cut off on the freeway. We are right often enough to trust our belief that others generally will feel as we do. More. True, but the problem isn’t with recognizing what most people probably think; it’s with recognizing unusual but important patterns. How Read More ›
Robot Priests: And You Thought “Robotic Religion” Was Just a Pointed Criticism…?
You know, rote prayers, mindless gestures… Is that the way of the future for some?
Can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities?
Transhumanism is a curious blip in a science and technology culture in which it is otherwise axiomatic that humans are merely evolved animalsCheating death is a serious goal of some transhumanists. Futurist Ray Kurzweil (now a Google innovator) calls such a digital fate the Singularity, as in his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Published in 2006, it is still in the top ten in artificial intelligence and biotechnology. In 2017, he announced, 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created. It sounds rather like avoiding death by becoming something that isn’t actually alive. Read More ›