One of the persistent memes that interest me is the impending event sometimes known as “the singularity.” This is a probable future where our electronic devices become self-aware and fully autonomous. We see the beginnings of this happening all around us in devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Echo, The Nest and Google communities of smart devices, self-driving vehicles, and all the Internet of Things (IoT) devices that listen to ...
CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Procedures for Telling Computers and Humans Apart, was a system first theorized by cryptographer Alan Turing in 1950. We find these little “I am not a robot” challenges popping up all over the place, especially when creating a new account, registering for a web service the first time, or sometimes as form of poor man’s two-factor authentication. ...
We can’t talk about robots without thinking about robots running amok as in the Terminator movies. But it turns out that most of the robots that are available today can be easily hacked by humans.
Robots are showing up in industrial settings, in hospitals, on our roads as autonomous vehicles, in secure facilities as guards, and in our homes, as carpet cleaners, children’s companions. Soon they will be everywhere, assisting, working, ...
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Its been a while since we have written about AI and robotics, but an article in Tech Republic got me inspired to discuss some of the more disturbing uses of autonomous machines, from least to most scary
We have heard plenty of stories about people who blindly followed their GPS over a cliff or missing bridge to their doom. Now this bit of research from Slate Magazine.
“Researchers at Georgia Tech had 42 volunteers follow a seemingly autonomous robot into a conference room. However, the robot was actually guided by a hidden researcher, whose goal was to intentionally lead the test subjects astray in order to establish the bot’s unreliability.
The Singularity. Artificial Intelligence. Self-aware, self-actuating, and self-learning robots. What will our future be like when the machines become self-aware? Will it be the like the T-1000 from Terminator? Or more like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit? Or Andrew from Bicentennial Man? Here is a run-down of four different versions of our electronic and digital future.
A recent book by Martin Ford, Rise of Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, examines a world in the all ...
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FEB
I’ve been warning about the dangers of self-aware machines for some time.
Here is a story about how a toaster disrupted a keynote address by ARM CEO Simon Segars at the annual ARM TechCon Conference. It seems that the toaster was toasting a bagel which got stuck, and started burning. The smoke caused the fire alarms to go of in the ...
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NOVFrom Pinterest
A follow up to last Sundays musings on human-computer relations
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JUL
Sorry for this post, as it is not really funny at all, at least not for the 22 year old German factory worker who was killed in a Volkswagen plant by a factory robot at the beginning of July. But happening as it did around the release of Terminator Genisys, the irony is tough to ignore.
Ever since I finished ...
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JUL“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” – Steve Wozniak, co-creator of the Apple computer
I just started reading a book from 1999, written by Ray Kurweil called The Age of Spiritual Machines. This book explores the consequences of our technological changes as they relate to AI or Artificial Intelligence, sometimes called “the Singularity,” and the future of the human race in the age of self-aware machines. We have all see the “Terminator” movie series, with its ...
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MAR
