One of the most impressive complex cognitive processes is the ability to learn and creatively use language. It’s those processes that continue to set humans apart from even the most advanced machines. However, a team of scientists has now created an artificial system of neurons that is capable of learning words, phrases and syntax with no prior programming, thereby sustaining a dialog using processes that resemble mental actions.
Douglas Coupland: I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture — by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data — and I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner. I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing an app to do so and I’m calling it Wonkr — which somehow seems appropriate for a politically geared app. I dropped the “e” to make it feel more appy.
Continue reading… “Data is the future of machine intelligence”
The body is a machine.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is cofounder and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and to him the body is a machine. Just as a restored classic car can celebrate its hundredth birthday in peak condition, in the future, we’ll maintain our bodies’ cellular components to stave off the diseases of old age and live longer, healthier lives.
Continue reading… “Can the body be maintained indefinitely?”
Technological unemployment
Futurist Thomas Frey has predicted more than two billion jobs will disappear by 2030 as a result of automation. Statements such as these strike fear into an already turbulent job market, but there are many who believe we should take solace in history. In their book, Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain how the recent panic brought on by ‘technological unemployment’ – a term originally coined by John Maynard Keynes – is nothing new.
Continue reading… “The rise of ‘technological unemployment’”
Merging man and machine.
Many future followers predict the pace of technological progression in genetics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will become so fast that humans will undergo radical evolution by around mid-century. Advances that provide a forever youthful and healthy state of being could be realized.
Continue reading… “Singularity: When man and machine merge to achieve immortality”
Behold the Enigma machine!
Franklin Heath, a UK security consultancy, offers plans for printing and assembling your own papercraft Enigma machine, approximately like the ones that Alan Turing and the Polish cryptographers and co broke at Bletchley Park. Now all we need are papercraft bombes, and a papercraft Collosus, and several thousand papercraft young women to work on code intercepts through the night…
Continue reading… “HOWTO make a papercraft Enigma machine”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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