“The self-service checkout lines that are springing up everywhere are the first sign of the trend. | The problem, of course, is that all of these robots will eliminate a huge portion of the jobs currently held by human beings. For example, there are 3.5 million jobs in the fast food industry alone. Many of…
“Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA….|hink of DNA as software, and enzymes as hardware. Put them together in a test tube. The way in which these molecules undergo chemical reactions with…
This article will whip your head around a couple of times… take it slowly, and don’t stop until you get to the Looney Tunes references. “To mainstream researchers, Loebner is a self-aggrandizing fool and his contest is hokum: at best irrelevant and at worst a public disservice that encourages bad science….. [T]he closer one looks…
“When humans use a personal computer, we enter into the computer’s world. If it can’t do something, or if it crashes, too bad; we have to deal. But a robot enters into our world. If floors are uneven, if legs get in the way, if lighting conditions change, the robot has to deal.” George Musser‘s…
Women in Bangladesh who fold their saris filter out more of the disease-carrying organisms that cause cholera than the women who filter through unfolded cloths, or who don’t filter at all. While folding saris to make eight layers filters out almost all of the harmful organisms, this method means that women gathering water had to…
“Virtually every encyclopedia or textbook etymology of the word ‘robot’ mentions the play R.U.R. Although the immediate worldwide success of the play immediately popularized the word (supplanting the earlier ‘automaton’), it was actually not Karel Capek but his brother Josef, also a respected Czech writer, who coined the word. The Czech word robota means ‘drudgery’…
"After posting his father’s poem — a bitter reflection on the state of Egyptian society and culture after Egypt was defeated in the 1967 war against Israel — Shohdy was arrested in November 2001." Sergey Kuznetsov —Father’s Poem, Son’s Conviction (Wired)