Meet Roboy, “one of the most advanced humanoid robots,” say researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich.
Their 15 project partners and over 40 engineers and scientists are constructing Roboy as a tendon-driven robot modeled on human beings (robots usually have their motors in their joints, giving them that “robot” break-dance look), so it will move almost as elegantly as a… read more
There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens
That’s the argument at the core of a new just-posted TED talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig (video below).
“He shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a
Global growth from the current industrial revolution (computers, the web, mobile phones) is slowing — especially in advanced-technology economies, and long-term economic growth may grind to a halt, Robert J. Gordon, Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, has argued.
Now economist Paul Krugman counters in The New York Times that we are moving toward a… read more
Ray Kurzweil’s next book — How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed* — will be published Nov. 13, Viking announced today. It can now be pre-ordered.
In the book, Kurzweil explores the most important science project since the human genome: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.
Ray Kurzweil confirmed today that he will be joining Google to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining Google as Director of Engineering this Monday, December 17,” said Kurzweil.
“I’ve been interested in technology, and machine learning in particular, for a long time: when I was 14, I designed software that wrote original music,… read more
On October 15 and 16, DARPA outlined its plans for Plan X to more than 350 software engineers, cyber researchers, and human-machine interface experts and solicited their feedback, in preparation for anticipated release in the next month of the program’s Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), to be posted to www.fbo.gov.
DARPA‘s Plan X program,. the first of its kind, will attempt to create revolutionary technologies for… read more
At a robotics industry event organized by business blog Xconomy in Menlo Park last week, people working on better industrial robots claimed their robotics technology will actually boost the U.S. economy and create more jobs, even if some jobs do disappear forever, MIT Technology Review reports.
“We’re replacing jobs that people don’t want to do and really shouldn’t be doing,” said Aldo Zini, whose company… read more
Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create. We will need to develop a “Third Way” based on community rather than the Market or the State to adapt to this reality, novelist and economic commentator Charles Hugh Smith writes on Business Insider.
“The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music.… read more
It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that — in slow motion — is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century, says Wired maverick Kevin Kelley.
Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent… read more
In their 2011 book, Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argued that “technological progress is accelerating innovation even as it leaves many types of workers behind,” says Rice University professor of computational engineering Moshe Y. Vardi in The Atlantic.
“While the loss of millions of jobs over the past… read more
The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists.
In 1992, the Harvard-based political scientist Samuel Huntington suggested that future conflicts would be driven largely by cultural differences. He went on to map out a new world order in which the people of the world are divided into nine culturally distinct civilizations.
His argument was that future… read more
An Iranian warplane opened fire on an unarmed U.S. military drone conducting surveillance near Iranian airspace Nov. 1, the Pentagon said Thursday, the first such incident over the Persian Gulf and one that is all but certain to draw attention to Washington’s use of unmanned aircraft, The Washington Post reports.
The MQ-1 Predator drone returned to its base unscathed, even as the… read more
Whatever kind of reality you think you’re living in, you’re probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing, speculates New Scientist in a special issue on What is reality?
“Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing,” says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. “It’s suggestive that you will… read more
Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation and the world’s most prominent advocate of anti-aging research, argues that it makes no sense to spend the vast majority of our medical resources on trying to combat the diseases of aging without tackling aging itself, writes ethicist Peter Singer on Project Syndicate.
De Grey believes that even modest progress in this area over the coming decade could… read more