“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” written and read by poet Richard Brautigan. A video by Devon O’Hare, with clips from Adam Curtis and Koyaanisqatsi. Music by Phillip Glass. Read the poem here.
Related:
“Can Robots Evolve Into Machines of Loving Grace?” Meghan O’Gieblyn, Wired
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IBM released a video for its AI-assisted e-tongue” Hypertaste technology, that can quickly identify liquids you should not drink. The portable device can transfer data to a mobile app in about a minute, determining water quality or if alcohol is counterfeit. It can’t do blind tastings at your wine cellar yet, but maybe they’ll introduce Hypertaste to Watson.
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Elon Musk must feel sorry for those exploited, underpaid Uber drivers. He wants to replace them with self-driving robot taxis. By next year.
“I feel very confident predicting 1 million autonomous robo-taxis for Tesla next year. Not in all jurisdictions because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere, but I’m confident we will have regulatory approval at least somewhere, literally next year.”
— “Elon Musk says Tesla will have 1 million autonomous taxis on the road by next year,” Michael Burke, The Hill
More:
“Elon Musk thinks Tesla can build 1M ‘robotaxis’ in the next year,” Cale Guthre Weissman, Fast Company
“Tesla’s 2020 self-driving car promise sounds too good to be true because it is,” Emily Stewart, Recode
Update:
“Tesla’s long-shot robotaxi plan,” Joann Muller, Axios
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China’s largest news network has replaced HR with AI. In November, state-run Xinhua News Agency demoed a software-based TV news anchorman.
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“The world’s largest retailer is rolling out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots in some of its stores in the U.S. by the end of the January, it said in a joint statement with Brain Corp., which makes the machines. The autonomous janitors can clean floors on their own even when customers are around, according to the San Diego-based startup.”
–“Robot Janitors Are Coming to Mop Floors at a Walmart Near You,” Pavel Alpeyev, Bloomberg
That means Walmart will retrain its janitors as cashiers and open more checkout lines, right? Ha.
When machines become conscious, will we need to grant them rights? A video by by Kurzgesagt (German for “in a nutshell”).
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Happy Labor Day.
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” — John Maynard Keynes, 1930
“Today we’re living in those years to come, and it’s hard to go a week without some story about how all the jobs will soon belong to artificial intelligence or machine learning or however else we’re describing the automatons. Keynes was right to see it coming, but he didn’t exactly nail the implications.” — Malcolm Harris, 2017
More:
“A Jobless Future Everyone Can Love,” Malcolm Harris, Pacific Standard
“AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Pieria
“Jobs aren’t the solution to America’s problems—they’re the cause,” James Livingston, Quartz
“A robot tax rises from American center of tech industry,” Janie Har, Associated Press
“What the Industrial Revolution really tells us about the future of automation and work,” Moshe Y. Vardi, The Conversation
“Work In The Digital Society,” Social Europe
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“Daddy’s Car,” composed by artificial intelligence in the style of The Beatles, with lyrics and arrangement by Benoît Carré.
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The Mattel corporation has introduced the Hello Barbie ™ interactive doll that not only talks, it listens. And records your kid’s conversation with her. And connects to Wi-Fi so her recordings can be analyzed by the ToyTalk ™ voice-recognition software, and the information shared with parents or … who knows. What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, say Matt Jakubowski of LookingGlass Cyber Solutions and Andrew Browne of Lavasoft’s malware lab. Like Wi-Fi baby monitors, the dolls can be hacked by 3rd parties, and we’re not talking about Barbie’s Princess Tea Parties here, but persons of bad intent. ToyTalk says that’s not so, that Barbie’s software cannot be hacked. Frankly, we will reserve judgement until we can ask Hello Barbie ™ about this in person.
“Artificial intelligence and autonomous robots should be encouraged to become religious, a US reverend has said.
Reverend Christopher Benek, associate pastor of Providence Presbyterian Church in Florida, believes advanced forms of artificial intelligence should be welcomed into the Christian faith.
‘I don’t see Christ’s redemption limited to human beings,’ Benek said in an interview with the futurist Zoltan Istvan. ‘It’s redemption to all of creation, even AI.’
‘If AI is autonomous, then we should encourage it to participate in Christ’s redemptive purposes in the world.'”
— “Florida pastor plans to convert robots to Christianity,” Anthony Cuthbertson, International Business Times
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