I open my novella Gu, which is not about virtual reality, with a bunch of people complaining because they’ve been asked to be physically present at a presentation and they don’t understand why. Seems like a reasonable future.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
NBC hosted a press event entirely in virtual reality for their new series Halcyon.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
3D printing is bringing us close to recreating the most difficult to recreate organ.
Originally shared by Writers Write
‘Better antagonists create better protagonists. Our novels revolve around these characters. Without strong adversaries, our heroes have nobody to test them. Great antagonists force them to learn about their weaknesses and to realise their strengths.’
#writingadvice
Originally shared by Gregor J. Rothfuss
for the first time, a bacterium has made a silicon – carbon bond, opening up vast possibilities.
Originally shared by Traci Loudin
How algorithms could help us detect and limit the spread of fake news stories like these fake maps.
https://medium.com/@timoreilly/how-i-detect-fake-news-ebe455d9d4a7#.8rmbhhqs0
Originally shared by HACKADAY
Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Even though we know that something isn’t “magic”, it’s nice to see how close we can get. [Dofl] and his friends, big fans of the magic in Harry Potter,…
http://hackaday.com/2016/11/26/a-smart-wand-for-all-us-muggles
Via Sarah Rios. Opinion piece. Interesting.
Speaking for myself, going back to work after six months (I was laid off at the end of May) has been good for me, and not just economically; it means I have a larger mission in the context of a larger group of people than was the case when I was at home writing novels, and it gets me out of the house and makes me sit at a properly adjusted desk instead of lying on the couch damaging my bad shoulder.
Still, all of those benefits would be achievable without a job, if my economic security was assured, and in part they’re beneficial because the work I’m doing is mentally challenging and obviously useful. If I had to do more routine, less meaningful work in order to simply survive, I would resent it deeply.
Originally shared by Panah Rad
What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?
interesting read
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem
Cultured meat is something that a lot of people are working on. (It’s parallel to much better funded medical research on growing new organs, so a breakthrough in one field is likely to help the other.)
“Fake news” (and, even more so, misleading or slanted news) can be difficult to identify, even for a human. There are some promising advances in using AI to weed out the most egregious examples, but we’re still some distance from a full solution.
Story prompt: a “soft botnet” consisting of millions of new mobile internet users in developing countries is spreading fake news for hire. How do the heroes use AI and other techniques to foil them?
http://qz.com/843110/can-artificial-intelligence-solve-facebooks-fake-news-problem/
Wasn’t there an issue a while back where one of the camera companies designed their product in such a way that it only did a good job of photographing white faces – since that’s what it was tested on?
Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt
Machined Prejudice
Technology bias can amplify the worst of human nature. How do we keep it out of artificial intelligence?
We’re now seeing more and more cases of institutional and individual human bias creeping into search engines, social media and other technological systems. How this bias infiltrates our tools in is an old story, of course, but we’re starting to see new types of bias that say a lot about the way we build and use artificial intelligence.
Technology bias is a problem that few of us think much about, but which has the potential to be incredibly important as more and more of our economy — and society — come under the control of artificially intelligent systems.
#technology #bias #MachineLearning #culture