Group items tagged

"As long as there have been humans, there have been dreams of super humans."

The accelerating rate of change in many fields of technology all manifest themselves in terms of human development, some of which can be accurately tracked within economic data.  Contrary to what the media may peddle and despite periodic setbacks, average human prosperity is rising at a rate faster than any other time in human history.  

I'd always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn't really know how. The original title of the talk was "The Robot-Readable World", but this didn't really sit right with me; it's one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

"The idea that AI must mimic the thinking process of humans has dropped away. "Creating artificial intelligences that are like humans is, at the end of the day, paving the cow paths," Mr. Saffo argues. "It's using the new technology to imitate some old thing.""

"The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner." Okay, the bots are not 'really' intelligent and language is much harder to crack. But still, it's a nice result, this  human thinks.  

"His team of doctors and engineers triggered headlines around the world last week by successfully operating to replace an elderly patient's diseased jawbone with a prosthetic generated by 3D printing. Now Prof. Jules Poukens says that could be just the start of a bionic revolution."

"Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is." Of course, it's all about AI and augmented reality, leading right up to our having an augmented brain. Which, in a sense, we have for so long already - at least since we invented writing. But okay, in many ways we're re-inventing writing.  You'll find the video at Computerworld. 

We humans are naturally inclined to fear the worst. Peter H. Diamandis tries to ignore that tendency and looks at the future. 

"The Eurobarometer poll shows that a surprising 70% of Europeans have a "fairly positive" or "very positive" view of robots. This is great news for human-robot relations." Fascinating. As the post explains, only 6 procent of Europeans ever used a robot. But then again, maybe it's about time to discuss robotics in society at large?