So what happened to Google Glass?
We are told that the “wetware” (humans) got in the wayIt bears repeating: A technology is adopted when it solves problems as identified by users rather than problems as identified by developers.
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Denyse O'Leary
Do children trust robots too much?
Maybe, but more study is needed, say researchersChildren could easily give in to peer pressure from other children to give an incorrect answer in place of a correct one. How much difference it makes that the pressure is supplied by a robot would surely depend on how the child is taught to see robots.
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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 automateHuman life is full of these challenges. Some knowledge simply cannot be conveyed—or understood or accepted—in a propositional form. For example, a nurse counselor may see clearly that her elderly post-operative patient would thrive better in a retirement home. But she cannot just tell him so.
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Why Can’t Machines Learn Simple Tasks?
They can learn to play chess more easily than to walkIf specifically human intelligence is related to consciousness, the robotics engineers might best leave consciousness out of their goals for their products and focus on more tangible ones.
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The New Politically Correct Chatbot Was Worse?
If you are a human being who talks to people for a living, don’t quit your jobWithin 16 hours, the Microsoft team had to shut down their chatbot Tay. With assistance from so many online sources, Tay’s ability to be nasty exceeded that of any individual human. And as for her replacement, Zo, who would never repeat those mistakes…
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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”When pundits talk glibly of creating artificial minds or claim that consciousness is an illusion, it might help to remember that few predicted cases like this could exist and few thought that high tech diagnostics would lead to their discovery.
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Claim: Yes, you can upload your brain
Fine print: They might have to kill you firstIn a recent piece, we looked at cognitive scientist Susan Schneider’s explanation as to why we couldn’t cheat death by uploading our minds to the internet. But some have made a career of marketing the idea
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How to hack your unconscious mind
Assuming it existsThose who tell us that we can learn to use our unconscious mind and those who tell us that it doesn’t exist both claim to speak for science. But this is no ordinary dispute. An ordinary dispute might be something like What killed the dinosaurs? Imagine instead a dispute between scientists who do and scientists who do not believe that dinosaurs have ever existed.
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Better medicine through machine learning?
Data can be a dump or a gold mineThe biggest problem today isn’t the sheer mass of data so much as the difficulty of determining what it is worth. The answer lies, unfortunately, in the undone studies and the unreported events. Machine learning will be a much greater help when those problems are addressed.
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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 futuristPresumably, in Ian Pearson’s future, the rich can attend their own funerals and alternate world funerals an indefinite number of times, each one numbering as many different people as he wants.
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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?How well robot priests adapt to a religious culture may depend in part on what the culture believes about the purpose of prayer. If what matters is chiefly the number of prayers iterated, the robot priest is an adaptation of the prayer wheel.
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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 animalsIt sounds rather like avoiding death by becoming something that isn’t actually alive. Some thoughts to consider before we hit the Enter key… 😉
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GIGO alert: AI can be racist and sexist, researchers complain
Can the bias problem be addressed? Yes, but usually after someone gets upset about a specific instance.From James Zou and Londa Ziebinger at Nature: When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become ‘he said’ or ‘he wrote’. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. Now where, we wonder, would a mathematical formula have learned that? Maybe it was listening to the wrong instructions back when it was just a tiny bit? Seriously, machine learning, we are told, depends on absorbing datasets of Read More ›