Category: Posthaven

“Those supporting the negative income tax recognize that the importance of work is not just the income derived from it, but also the anchor that it affords us both socially and psychologically. Work provides a sense of purpose as well as a way to earn social status. The places we work give us both the opportunity for socializing as well as the structure that many of us need to feel productive and happy.”

The Future of Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Joi Ito's Web
https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/06/14/the-future-of-w-1.html
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“The major powers are developing autonomous missiles and drones that will hunt ships, subs, and tanks, and piecing together highly automated battle networks that will confront each other and have the capability of operating without human control””

Why Should We Ban Autonomous Weapons? To Survive
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/why-should-we-ban-autonomous-weapons-to-survive
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“At first, when the machines take over the economy, Bill is stoked. He wakes up late every morning, smokes some 22nd century weed and then watches TV. Eventually, he gets bored. His degree in accounting has become worthless, because there is nothing he could do that couldn’t be done better by a machine. Bill plugs his brain into a virtual world, becomes obsessed with killing dragons and winning digital gold, and dies shriveled and alone as a level 900 paladin.”

What If the Robot Utopia Leads to an Existential Crisis for Humans?
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-if-the-robot-utopia-leads-to-an-existential-crisis-for-humans
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“Safe interruptibility can be useful to take control of a robot that is misbehaving and may lead to irreversible consequences, or to take it out of a delicate situation, or even to temporarily use it to achieve a task it did not learn to perform or would not normally receive rewards for this.””

Google developing ‘kill switch’ to stop robot uprising against humans
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/08/google-developing-kill-switch-to-stop-robot-uprising-against-hum/
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“When you think of the millions of lives that could be saved and improved by access to basic healthcare and education, it makes the idea of fearing the further advancement of artificial intelligence seem myopic. The fact of the matter is that any developments in a robot revolution are going to look quite differently depending on where you happen to live in this world.”

Only the privileged fear a robot revolution
https://social.techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/only-the-privileged-fear-a-robot-revolution/
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“Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.”

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/
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“It’s not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It’s not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago, when conditions were different.”

Ray Kurzweil: The world isn’t getting worse — our information is getting better
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/ray-kurzweil-world-isnt-getting-worse-information-getting-better/
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“The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.

So let’s recap:

People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues”

Facebook is eating the world
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php
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“All reason tells us that the great issues of our time have little respect for national borders. The leave side has attempted to turn “expert” into a term of abuse, but one does not need the IMF, the Bank of England or any special knowledge to grasp that these border-busting issues range from corporate power, migration and tax evasion to weapons proliferation, epidemics and climate change. Not one of them can be properly tackled at the level of the nation state”

The Guardian view on the EU referendum: keep connected and inclusive, not angry and isolated | Editorial
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/20/the-guardian-view-on-the-eu-referendum-keep-connected-and-inclusive-not-angry-and-isolated
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“Here is my brutal truth to the great minds of Tesla and Google: You don’t have the assets or human power to create a driverless society on your own. The software algorithms required for driverless cars will never be complete and will involve constant maintenance; therefore, you will need to move to an open data and open source community in order to achieve the goal of the driverless society.”

An open letter to Tesla and Google on driverless cars
https://social.techcrunch.com/2016/06/01/an-open-letter-to-tesla-and-google-on-driverless-cars/
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“The A.I. community keeps climbing one mountain after another, and as it gets to the top of each mountain, it sees ahead still more mountains,” said Ed Felten, a computer scientist who is a deputy chief technology officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.”

Artificial Intelligence Is Far From Matching Humans, Panel Says
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/technology/artificial-intelligence-is-far-from-matching-humans-panel-says.html
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“Do today’s rapid advances in artificial intelligence and automation portend a future in which robots and software greatly reduce the need for human workers?”

Gerd adds: dead-certain 

Who Will Own the Robots?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538401/who-will-own-the-robots/
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“Our faces may reveal a lot more about us than we expect. (Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
An Israeli start-up says it can take one look at a person’s face and realize character traits that are undetectable to the human eye.

Faception said it’s already signed a contract with a homeland security agency to help identify terrorists. The company said its technology also can be used to identify everything from great poker players to extroverts, pedophiles, geniuses and white collar-criminals.

“We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other,” said Faception chief executive Shai Gilboa. “Our personality is determined by our DNA and reflected in our face. It’s a kind of signal.””

Terrorist or pedophile? This start-up says it can out secrets by analyzing faces
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/24/terrorist-or-pedophile-this-start-up-says-it-can-out-secrets-by-analyzing-faces/
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“In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.”

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/
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“There will be very real disruption,” he says. “Jobs will be taken away and those people need to be taken care of. People have floated the idea of universal basic income, of negative income tax, of training programs. We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.””

AI2 CEO Oren Etzioni envisions an artificial intelligence ‘utopia’ - GeekWire
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/ai2-ceo-oren-etzioni-envisions-artificial-intelligence-utopia/
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“A third of people will post on Facebook and other social media after they die

In 10 years time, Facebook won’t just be Facebook, it will be a virtual reality system, and personal avatars will continue to post after a person is dead - and even keep wandering around VR worlds mimicking the person.

Companies like ETER9, Terasem and Lifenaut will provide the type of software where people can download themselves and the amount they want to contribute to social media, giving family members and loved ones still alive a sense that the deceased is still present in their lives.”

Five Science and Technology Predictions for the Next 10 Years
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/5-transhumanism-predictio_1_b_9825660.html
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My comment as image ... Below 

“Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. Gartner, a technology research firm, ramps that estimate up and predicts that one third of all jobs will be eliminated by 2025, while University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say a grand total of 47 percent of US jobs will be automated by 2033. Worried that your job is on the chopping block? You’re probably right.”

You Can’t Talk About Robots Without Talking About Basic Income
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/you-cant-talk-about-robots-without-talking-about-basic-income
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“Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are among 8,600 people who have signed an open letter about the potential dangers of AI. The letter describes the need for safeguards to ensure that AI is positive rather than neutral in respect to purpose, but it also calls for the maximization of the societal benefit of AI. In short, it calls for social responsibility.”

You Can’t Talk About Robots Without Talking About Basic Income
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/you-cant-talk-about-robots-without-talking-about-basic-income
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“AI becomes invisible by passing the Turing test, or its more relevant variants. An intelligent system that manages to simulate human-level communication, and cognitive as well as emotional abilities, can become indistinguishable from humans and, thus, the “artificiality” of its intelligence becomes imperceptible for us.”

The next AI is no AI
https://social.techcrunch.com/2016/05/07/the-next-ai-is-no-ai/
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“In AI there were these two schools of thought that were competing and butting heads politically and financially. There’s the school of thought that is top-down, logic, programming, and search approach, and then there is the machine learning approach.

The machine learning approach says, “Forget about programming robots, forget about programming AI, you just make it learn, and it will figure out everything on its own from data.” The other school of thought says, “We sit down, write algorithms, and program the robot to do what it needs to do.””

The Last Frontiers of AI: Can Scientists Design Creativity and Self-Awareness?
https://singularityhub.com/2016/04/20/the-last-frontiers-of-ai-can-scientists-design-creativity-and-self-awareness/
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