Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ Basically we’re looking at a race to see if the deterioration of material conditions inherent in capitalism leads to mass-scale revolution before the plutocrats have the technological and legal ability to roll out robot and drone security forces. ❖ We’re fed non-stop messaging that we’re inadequate unless…
My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has replaced passenger-seat navigators, maps, even traffic…
Humanity first heard the word “robot” a hundred years ago thanks to the Czech science fiction brothers Josef and Karel Capek, who in their play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) brought to life the idea of artificial people doing the work that humans didn’t want to do. The term itself is derived from the word “robota”,…
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…
India and Japan have vowed to strengthen their strategic ties by increasing cooperation in the defense, robotics and AI sectors in coming years in response to Chinese regional ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear plans. “You should expect to see increased bilateral cooperation between us to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and robotics,”Japanese State Minister for…
