Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Why we’re reading this week:
•The Great A.I. Awakening
•5 Unexpected Sources of Bias in Artificial Intelligence
•How to Control a Robotic Arm With Your Mind — No Implanted Electrodes Required
and more
This is something I’ve vaguely wondered about when reading about such things as aquaponics or urban farming: how do you deal with the bulk crops, like wheat? This article puts some numbers around it: vegetables are not very calorific (they’re primarily valuable for their micronutrients, not their macronutrients), and while growing vegetables closer to the consumer is a great idea, it’s not, by itself, going to solve agriculture.
One of the things the fourth industrial revolution will change is our sense of personhood, and who or what has it.
I mentioned in a comment to one of my other posts today that my niece refuses to talk to her boyfriend’s voice-controlled house, because that’s “weird”. Within her expected lifetime, or indeed mine, we’ll routinely be talking to all kinds of things, and seldom will it be obvious whether what answers back is a person or not.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
“One of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing, but it changes us,” says Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
I haven’t read this yet – sharing to read later – but as someone who’s grown up reading both British and American books, I know the difference, and it can be painful watching an author get it wrong.
Originally shared by Joanna Penn
#writingtips Word choice differences and spelling between US and UK characters. Are you getting it right?
There’s some amazing stuff here. Cheap drones, cheap gene hacking, cheap tablets, a vast improvement to Google Translate (thanks to the use of AI), multiple discoveries which are promising for anti-ageing treatments.
Originally shared by Daniel Lemire
Science and technology: what happened in 2016 http://lemire.me/blog/2016/12/16/science-and-technology-what-happened-in-2016/
http://lemire.me/blog/2016/12/16/science-and-technology-what-happened-in-2016/
Well, I just had a long conversation with my wife while I made and ate dinner and then lay on the couch with the cat.
Which is remarkable only because she’s 11,000km away, and we were doing it over one of the several completely free videophone applications that are on our respective tablets. It was pretty much like being in the same room.
She was telling me about her niece’s boyfriend. He has a voice-controlled house.
We certainly are living in the future. It has rather more despots than I’d hoped for, though we can’t say nobody warned us about that; but the free videophone calls and voice-controlled houses are pretty sweet.
The ultimate in “soft robotics” is, of course, programmable matter (as I explored in Gu). But the state of the art is progressing rapidly.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Octobot Is Just the Beginning for Soft Robotics http://suhub.co/2hxkrmt
Via Vanessa MacLellan.
Originally shared by Rox’s Tips for Writers
A Guide to Short Story Contests in 2017 http://buff.ly/2hAQoNy Get your short story recognized. #writers #writingparty
I’m starting a new collection: Collective Endeavour, which is an enduring interest of mine – the things we can achieve together but not separately.
Here’s a good post to start it off.
Originally shared by David Brin
In the Atlantic, Eric Liu offers a suggestion for how folks depressed by the prospects of stunning levels of mal-governance can deal with the funk and malaise… start a club. One with some positive goal. Almost anything. Civic participation even at the lowest level can give people a sense of citizenship, involvement, even empowerment.
Moreover, unlike the tribal fury one finds in alt-right groups… and yes, a few leftist ones… something local and targeted can let you draw in people from all partisan leanings. Not fanatics or cultists, of course. But neighbors who might grow closer to you – and to reason – by participating in something cool and local, that makes sense. A school program like FIRST Robotics. A hunger program or Habitat construction.
One of my own activities for years was CERT – my local Community Emergency Response Team… all that is left of Civil Defense in the U.S.
Mr. Liu goes into more detail and offers many options, referring to such groups that were co-founded by Ben Franklin, long ago. A blending of optimism, activism and pragmatism that can not only lift your spirits and your neighbors, but give you both skills and the moral high ground, for battles ahead.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Human Rights Watch has created a coalition to formally ban killer robots.