25 January 2021 marked one hundred years since the première of Czech sci-fi writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The short work anticipated subsequent books on the subject, as well as cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic films like The Terminator and Alien: Covenant. Rossum’s universal robots were conceived as human helpers, but after a while…
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” — Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out…
In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols: We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well. So, if you feel…
The focus of US policing is shifting from enforcement to prevention as mass incarceration falls out of favor. ‘Pre-crime’ detection is the hot new thing, accomplished through analysis of behavior and…facial features? Researchers at the University of Harrisburg announced earlier this week that they had developed AI software capable of predicting – with 80 percent…
As explained in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, the personal computer was in large part a product of the “computer liberation” movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s. More specifically, those trends were in turn an outgrowth of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program that popularized drug use for “mind-expanding”…
The truth about artificial intelligence (AI) and the process of machine learning (algorithms which learn on their own rather than perform tasks based on human programming) is somewhat less spectacular than depicted in Hollywood movies. Yet the impact of advanced information technology on modern warfare will be significant nonetheless. Already, machine learning is allowing automation…
