24
POPSThe Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century Tesla is my greatest hero. Given the right management I believe he could have achieved his goal of delivering power wirelessly to the world for free. He tapped into the electromagnetic field we are a part of... like almost no other.
22
POPSAI Singularity: The Next Stage of Human Evolution? "Technology is heading here. It will predictably get to the point of making artificial intelligence," Yudkowsky said. "The mere fact that you cannot predict exactly when it will happen down to the day is no excuse for closing your eyes and refusing to think about it."
18
POPSThe future of Mind Control research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room—or in another building. And it’s not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that’s moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it’s seeing.” That kind of extension could lead to new spectrums of scale and force, not to mention new kinds of sensory input altogether. Instead of merely imagining that you’re grasping a nanotool with virtual fingers, you could learn to pilot it like a minuscule spaceship—only with your mind. And if that device had any sensors, you might be able to process the data as though it were a tiny camera.
17
POPS“What is Life?” Evolution of Robots is Causing Scientists to Question “Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,” she said. “The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don’t have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, what are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?”
14
POPSRobots Evolve And Learn How to Lie By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink. Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.”
14
POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
13
POPSU.S. Developing Robots to Carry Troops to safety. Absolutley wonderful. Everyday there is a technology story absolutley thrilling me. Along with its bear like looks it has a bear like name (Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR)) The BEAR can move on tracts, wheels or it can walk.
12
POPSNew Software Could Let Computers 'See' Like Humans Do Automatic identification would also provide a way to index pictures people download from digital cameras onto their computers, without having to go through and caption each one by hand. And ultimately it could lead to true machine vision, which could someday allow robots to make sense of the data coming from their cameras and figure out where they are. "The amount of information you need to identify most images is about 32 by 32." By contrast, even the small "thumbnail" images shown in a Google search are typically 100 by 100.
12
POPSEmotional robots in the spotlight The work is still well shy of an I Robot scenario with emotionally complex machines taking matters into their own hands, but the empathy empowering software being developed by Feelix Growing is a big step forward for robotics. See a short video on the website