Robotics Related Quotes

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.

I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

Surely, if we take on thinking partners––or, at the least, thinking servants––in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with them, and will relate to them more easily, if they are shaped like humans. It will be easier to be friends with human-shaped robots than with specialized machines of unrecognizable shape. And I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves.

complacent.26 When it comes to hiring, raising money, or even conserving energy, people aren’t rational robots. Where they stand in relation to others affects motivation.

How to start the journey? Start becoming more and more a witness. Whatever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred; they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing; the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you waste those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience and you missed it. The floor is clean now, but something that could have happened within you has not happened. If you had been aware, not only the floor but you would have felt a deep cleansing. Clean the floor full of awareness, luminous with awareness. Work or sit or walk, but one thing has to be a continuous thread: make more and more moments of your life luminous with awareness. Let the candle of awareness burn in each moment, in each act. The cumulative effect is what enlightenment is. The cumulative effect, all the moments together, all small candles together, become a great source of light.

I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say. The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. Darth Vader has not developed his humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you. Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions. ... [O]f course the Force moves from within. But the Force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke.

All laws and ideas are historical and relative, not absolute. They are relevant to their particular time and place

In the economic sphere too, the ability to hold a hammer or press a button is becoming less valuable than before. In the past, there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness, and to start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the last decades there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their value, because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Until today, high intelligence always went hand in hand with a developed consciousness. Only conscious beings could perform tasks that required a lot of intelligence, such as playing chess, driving cars, diagnosing diseases or identifying terrorists. However, we are now developing new types of non-conscious intelligence that can perform such tasks far better than humans. For all these tasks are based on pattern recognition, and non-conscious algorithms may soon excel human consciousness in recognising patterns. This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.

I do not see anything especially dystopian in offering some relatively unproductive people a minimum income as an incentive to leave the workforce. As long as the result is more opportunity and higher incomes for those who do want to work hard and advance their situation.

The main idea behind comparative advantage is that you should always be able to find a job, provided you specialize in the thing at which you are “least bad” relative to other people. By doing so, you offer others the chance to also specialize and thereby earn a higher income.

The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education.

You're so cynical," Tiny says, waving his hand at me. "I'm not cynical, Tiny," I answer. "I'm practical." "You're a robot," he says. Tiny thinks that I am incapable of what humans call emotion because I have not cried since my seventh birthday, when I saw the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven. I suppose I should have known from the title that it wouldn't end merrily, but in my defense, I was seven. Anyway, I haven't cried since then. I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.

The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.

Joscha: For me a very interesting discovery in the last year was the word spirit—because I realized that what “spirit” actually means: It’s an operating system for an autonomous robot. And when the word was invented, people needed this word, but they didn’t have robots that built themselves yet; the only autonomous robots that were known were people, animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and so on. And they all had spirits. And it makes sense to say that a plant is an operating system, right? If you pinch the plant in one area, then it’s going to have repercussions throughout the plant. Everything in the plant is in some sense connected into some global aesthetics, like in other organisms. An organism is not a collection of cells; it’s a function that tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing, like some morphogenetic field, it is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each other cell. Lex: Oh my god, so what you’re saying is the organism is a function that tells the cells what to do? And the function emerges from the interaction of the cells. Joscha: Yes. So it’s basically a description of what the plant is doing in terms of macro-states. And the macro-states, the physical implementation are too many of them to describe them, so the software that we use to describe what a plant is doing—this spirit of the plant—is the software, the operating system of the plant, right? This is a way in which we, the observers, make sense of the plant. The same is true for people, so people have spirits, which is their operating system in a way, right, and there’s aspects of that operating system that relate to how your body functions, and others how you socially interact, how you interact with yourself and so on. And we make models of that spirit and we think it’s a loaded term because it’s from a pre-scientific age, but it took the scientific age a long time to rediscover a term that is pretty much the same thing and I suspect that the differences that we still see between the old word and the new word are translation errors that over the centuries.

Imagine that you get in your car and begin driving at 5 miles per hour. You drive for a minute, accelerate to double your speed to 10 mph, drive for another minute, double your speed again, and so on. The really remarkable thing is not simply the fact of the doubling but the amount of ground you cover after the process has gone on for a while. In the first minute, you would travel about 440 feet. In the third minute at 20 mph, you’d cover 1,760 feet. In the fifth minute, speeding along at 80 mph, you would go well over a mile. To complete the sixth minute, you’d need a faster car—as well as a racetrack. Now think about how fast you would be traveling—and how much progress you would make in that final minute—if you doubled your speed twenty-seven times. That’s roughly the number of times computing power has doubled since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. The revolution now under way is happening not just because of the acceleration itself but because that acceleration has been going on for so long that the amount of progress we can now expect in any given year is potentially mind-boggling. The answer to the question about your speed in the car, by the way, is 671 million miles per hour. In that final, twenty-eighth minute, you would travel more than 11 million miles. Five minutes or so at that speed would get you to Mars. That, in a nutshell, is where information technology stands today, relative to when the first primitive integrated circuits started plodding along in the late 1950s.

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.

To counter all these biases, both in my readers, and in myself, I try to move my estimates in the following directions. I try to be less confident, to expect typical outcomes to be more ordinary, but also to expect more deviations from typical outcomes. I try to rely more on ordinary methods, sources, and assumptions, and also more on statistics or related systems and events. I expect bigger deviations from traditional images of the future, but also rely less on strange, exotic, unlikely-seeming, and hypothetical possibilities. Looking backward, future folk should see their world as changing less from their past than we might see looking forward. Seen up close and honestly, I expect the future usually to look like most places: mundane, uninspiring, and morally ambiguous, with grand hopes and justifications often masking lives of quiet desperation. Of course, lives of quiet desperation can still be worth living.

However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett's original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now 'competes' with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to 'resonate' with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world. The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins's writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.

You have a quote that I love. You say, ‘Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.’ But don’t we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life?” “Self-cherishing, that’s by nature,” he said (by which I assumed he meant it’s “natural”). “Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that actually is immense benefit to oneself.” A light went off in my head. “It seems like you’re saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?” “Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish, but be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.” This was an entirely new spin for me. Don’t be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of the ego. Yoked to self-interest, the compassion thing suddenly became something I could relate to—maybe even something I could do.

Cette qualité de la joie n’est-elle pas le fruit le plus précieux de la civilisation qui est nôtre ? Une tyrannie totalitaire pourrait nous satisfaire, elle aussi, dans nos besoins matériels. Mais nous ne sommes pas un bétail à l’engrais. La prospérité et le confort ne sauraient suffire à nous combler. Pour nous qui fûmes élevés dans le culte du respect de l’homme, pèsent lourd les simples rencontres qui se changent parfois en fêtes merveilleuses… Respect de l’homme ! Respect de l’homme !… Là est la pierre de touche ! Quand le Naziste respecte exclusivement qui lui ressemble, il ne respecte rien que soi-même ; il refuse les contradictions créatrices, ruine tout espoir d’ascension, et fonde pour mille ans, en place d’un homme, le robot d’une termitière. L’ordre pour l’ordre châtre l’homme de son pouvoir essentiel, qui est de transformer et le monde et soi-même. La vie crée l’ordre, mais l’ordre ne crée pas la vie. Il nous semble, à nous, bien au contraire, que notre ascension n’est pas achevée, que la vérité de demain se nourrit de l’erreur d’hier, et que les contradictions à surmonter sont le terreau même de notre croissance. Nous reconnaissons comme nôtres ceux mêmes qui diffèrent de nous. Mais quelle étrange parenté ! elle se fonde sur l’avenir, non sur le passé. Sur le but, non sur l’origine. Nous sommes l’un pour l’autre des pèlerins qui, le long de chemins divers, peinons vers le même rendez-vous. Mais voici qu’aujourd’hui le respect de l’homme, condition de notre ascension, est en péril. Les craquements du monde moderne nous ont engagés dans les ténèbres. Les problèmes sont incohérents, les solutions contradictoires. La vérité d’hier est morte, celle de demain est encore à bâtir. Aucune synthèse valable n’est entrevue, et chacun d’entre nous ne détient qu’une parcelle de la vérité. Faute d’évidence qui les impose, les religions politiques font appel à la violence. Et voici qu’à nous diviser sur les méthodes, nous risquons de ne plus reconnaître que nous nous hâtons vers le même but. Le voyageur qui franchit sa montagne dans la direction d’une étoile, s’il se laisse trop absorber par ses problèmes d’escalade, risque d’oublier quelle étoile le guide. S’il n’agit plus que pour agir, il n’ira nulle part. La chaisière de cathédrale, à se préoccuper trop âprement de la location de ses chaises, risque d’oublier qu’elle sert un dieu. Ainsi, à m’enfermer dans quelque passion partisane, je risque d’oublier qu’une politique n’a de sens qu’à condition d’être au service d’une évidence spirituelle. Nous avons goûté, aux heures de miracle, une certaine qualité des relations humaines : là est pour nous la vérité. Quelle que soit l’urgence de l’action, il nous est interdit d’oublier, faute de quoi cette action demeurera stérile, la vocation qui doit la commander. Nous voulons fonder le respect de l’homme. Pourquoi nous haïrions-nous à l’intérieur d’un même camp ? Aucun d’entre nous ne détient le monopole de la pureté d’intention. Je puis combattre, au nom de ma route, telle route qu’un autre a choisie. Je puis critiquer les démarches de sa raison. Les démarches de la raison sont incertaines. Mais je dois respecter cet homme, sur le plan de l’Esprit, s’il peine vers la même étoile. Respect de l’Homme ! Respect de l’Homme !… Si le respect de l’homme est fondé dans le cœur des hommes, les hommes finiront bien par fonder en retour le système social, politique ou économique qui consacrera ce respect. Une civilisation se fonde d’abord dans la substance. Elle est d’abord, dans l’homme, désir aveugle d’une certaine chaleur. L’homme ensuite, d’erreur en erreur, trouve le chemin qui conduit au feu.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

One possible benefit of new workforce trends is that people will have more leisure time than in the past. This can happen in one of two ways. Some people will not be needed in the new digital economy, so they will find other ways to construct meaning in their lives outside the workplace. Alternatively, even those who work may find themselves with time for other kinds of pursuits. Rather than most waking hours being spent on work-related tasks, the society of the future may have time for nonwork activities, including art, culture, music, sports, and theater.

Statistics about other copies of a team make it harder for team members to deceive themselves about their past performance or their chances for future performance. Such ems may become more like chess players today, where objective performance measures (i.e., their rating) force them to accept their current performance and abilities. This tends to make such players less happy, as they can't pretend to be better than they are. If this happiness effect reduced em productivity sufficiently, ems may adopt attitudes such as "never tell me the odds", often avoiding information about their relative chances of future success.

Society is against the heart, because the heart lives through love. And love cannot be controlled and conditioned. The heart is basically rebellious. The heart always lives in the moment. It never repeats the old. The heart always responds to the present moment. This is why society is against the heart. Society disciplines the head, because the head functionslike a machine. Machines are never rebellious. They simply follow orders. They are obedient. Hence the state, the church and the establishment, the status quo, are interested in the head. Our heart is the door to allow existence to guide us – instead of being directed by our own ideas, attitudes and preconceived expectations of how life should be. The heart creates inconvenience for society and for the established order. The heart is spontaneous and never repeats the old. The head lives in the past, which is why the head is traditional and conventional.  The heart relates to unconditional love and acceptance both for ourselves and for other people.  The heart relates to qualities such as empathy, joy, acceptance, trust, intuition, understanding, compassion, playfulness, healing, friendship, sincerity and a sense of oneness in love. Love is not an exclusive relationship with another person; love is the quality that arises when we are in contact with our inner being, with our authentic self, withthe meditative quality within, with the inner silence and emptiness. This inner emptiness is experienced by others and is expressed on the outside as love. This love is not addressed to a specific person; it is a presence that surrounds a person like a fragrance. Love is perfect as it is. Love is enough unto itself. Love has to be understood. Love is the flight of your consciousness to higher realms beyond the body. Love is the fragrance of a rising consciousness. Love is like the fragrance of a flower. The moment you are overflowing with joy, a longing arises to share it. This sharing is love. Love is not something that you can get from somebody else, who has not attained to a state of joy. Everybody is asking to be loved, and pretending to love. You cannot love, because you don't know what consciousness is. You don't know the truth; you don't know the experience of the divine.  You don't know what love is, because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. In this ignorance and blindness love does not grow. If you really want to know love, forget about love and remember meditation. Love is the defeat of all imposed rules and conditions. hence there is  a struggle between the individual who follows his heart and the collective who follows the imposed order. The individual who follows his heart has to be aware of this struggle, because he is moving towards the freedom of being himself. Being himself means that he is not going to be ruled by the collective, by the crowd. It means that now he will live according to his own heart, according to his own light. When he becomes independent, he will start feeling that he is  becoming one with the whole, one with the universal.  It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that we are not separated from life. We begin to understand that we are not small separate islands in a great ocean, but that life is one and that we all are small parts of the Whole. We begin to understand what is really important and meaningful in life. It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that life is about sharing, rather than hoarding. We begin to understand that life is about giving, rather than taking.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

The definition of teachers or gurus was unknown to everyone including the teachers in the campus. So the people present in the school campus weren’t teachers at all, he thought. They were just people supposed to act like robots and cram things related to the subjects in the brains of their students. A bit of general imparting of knowledge wasn’t allowed and was considered as impudence. With this brief recap of his past, the wandering mind of Mr. Patil came back to the present.

The definition of teachers or gurus was unknown to everyone including the teachers in the campus. So the people present in the school campus weren’t teachers at all, he thought. They were just people supposed to act like robots and cram things related to the subjects in the brains of their students. A bit of general imparting of knowledge wasn’t allowed and was considered as impudence. With this brief recap of his past, the wandering mind of Mr. Patil came back to the present.

A widely quoted study from the Oxford Martin School predicts that technology threatens to replace 47 percent of all US jobs within 20 years. One of Pew experts even foresees the advent of “robotic sex partners.’’ The world’s oldest profession may be no more. When all this happens, what, exactly, will people do? Half of those in the Pew report are relatively unconcerned, believing — as has happened in the past — that even as technology destroys jobs, it creates more new ones. But half are deeply worried, fearing burgeoning unemployment, a growing schism between the highly educated and everyone else, and potentially massive social dislocation. (The fact that Pew’s experts are evenly split also exposes one of the truths of prognostication: A coin flip might work just as well.) Much of this debate over more or fewer jobs misses a key element, one brought up by some of those surveyed by Pew: These are primarily political issues; what happens is up to us. If lower-skilled jobs are no more, the solution, quite obviously, is training and education. Moreover, the coming world of increasingly ubiquitous robotics has the potential for significant increases in productivity. Picture, for instance, an entirely automated farm, with self-replicating and self-repairing machines planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and delivering. Food wouldn’t be free, but it could become so cheap that, like water (Detroit excepted), it’s essentially available to everyone for an almost nominal cost. It’s a welfare state, of course, but at some point, with machines able to produce the basic necessities of life, why not? We’d have a world of less drudgery and more leisure. People would spend more time doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It might even cause us to rethink what it means to be human. Robots will allow us to use our “intelligence in new ways, freeing us up from menial tasks,’’ says Tiffany Shlain, host of AOL’s “The Future Starts Here.’’ Just as Lennon hoped and Star Trek predicted.

The consensus reality isn’t free from some shared illusions relative to the external reality, as we’ll elaborate on below: for example, cats, bats and robots also experience the same quantum randomness and relativistic time dilation.

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit. As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work (even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. Much like the number of managers in the developed world, which has grown over the last thirty years without making us a dime richer. On the contrary, studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative.15 In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission.16 Another recent poll revealed that as many as 37% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.17

Assemblages are composed of preexisting things that, when brought into relations with other preexisting things, open up different capacities not inherent in the original things but only come into existence in the relations established in the assemblage (Rabinow cited by Strathern 2014, p. 4)." What does it mean when human and nonhumans are 'assemblages', 'networks' or meshworks'? What does it mean when 'preexisting things, when brought into relations with preexisting things, open up different capacities not inherent in the original? To say that the original is continually emerging as original is an intriguing position. Is creativity really an outcome of endless assemblages of different things?

In many ways, our consciousness is a trainer. A large part of its function is to train the unconscious to do things that would be impossible if the unconscious were directed purely by instinct. Animals can never change their basic instinctual repertoire, which is why all animals belong to narrow evolutionary niches. Humans, by contrast, can train themselves to do almost anything. That’s because they are conscious. With consciousness, they can plan new activities entirely unknown to instinct. That’s why humans escaped from their original niche and became the masters of the earth, able to dominate the niches of all other species. Consciousness overcomes instinct. That’s the point of consciousness. If we couldn’t break from instinct, we would still be living in the trees, or in caves, and scarcely be any different from apes. Consciousness is the greatest power in the animal universe, because it can allow any animal that becomes conscious to transform its destiny. Only humans have. Why did Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) go extinct and Homo sapiens didn’t? Was it because the latter became conscious and the former didn’t? The latter were able to solve problems that the former could not. Leibniz said, “… it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God.” You cannot do systematic reasoning unless you have a mind space in which to conduct it. You need a space where you can deal with relations of ideas, truths of reason, universals, holism, coherence, pure logic, and so on.

The oscillation of 'in and out', 'rushing to and from', 'holding on and breaking away' is naturally profoundly disturbing and disruptive of all continuity in living, and at some point the anxiety aroused becomes so great that it cannot be sustained. It is then that a complete retreat from object relations is embarked on, and the person becomes overtly schizoid, emotionally inaccessible, cut off. This state of emotional apathy, of not suffering any feeling, excitement or enthusiasm, not experiencing either affection or anger, can be very successfully masked. If feeling is repressed, it is often possible to build up a kind of mechanized, robot personality. The ego that operates consciously becomes more a system than a person, a trained and disciplined instrument for 'doing the right and necessary thing' without any real feeling entering in.

When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a-kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles—but, of course, over time the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.

Moravec’s Paradox. Hans Moravec was a professor of mine at Carnegie Mellon University, and his work on artificial intelligence and robotics led him to a fundamental truth about combining the two: contrary to popular assumptions, it is relatively easy for AI to mimic the high-level intellectual or computational abilities of an adult, but it’s far harder to give a robot the perception and sensorimotor skills of a toddler. Algorithms can blow humans out of the water when it comes to making predictions based on data, but robots still can’t perform the cleaning duties of a hotel maid. In essence, AI is great at thinking, but robots are bad at moving their fingers.

NASA's working assumption until then had been that, hardcore space groupies apart, people would only feel an imaginative investment in space if astronauts were involved, acting as a kind of representative human presence and giving the onlookers somewhere to situate themselves in relation to what they were seeing. Astronauts warmed space up, in media terms. They made it consequential. They provided the marker of human intent without which (it was assumed) any location would be just a set of affectless co-ordinates out there in the vacuum. The unmanned science missions to the planets were for scientists only, not for the general public whose emotions swayed space budgets. But when Pathfinder bounced safely to rest in Ares Vallis, and the six-wheeled rover Sojourner trundled out onto the boulder-studded plain like a big, cute, self-propelling roller skay, NASA discovered it had a spontaneous hit on its hands. It turned out people were willing for a robot to act as their surrogate on another world, so long as they could feel intimately connected to what it was doing.

could write forever on the many dangers of ASI and the difficulty of reining in a superior intelligence. The arguments used in Infinity Born, such as perverse instantiation, are all real and have been used by prominent scientists (as have many other arguments that I didn’t include). For those of you interested in a very thorough, complex, and scholarly treatment of the subject matter, I would recommend the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) by Nick Bostrom, a Professor at Oxford. The book I found most useful in researching this novel is entitled, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the end of the Human Era (James Barrat, 2013). This described the “God in a box” experiment detailed in the novel, for example, and provided a fascinating, easy-to-read perspective on ASI, at least on the fear-mongering side of the debate. I’ve included a few quotes from this book that I thought were relevant to Infinity Born. Page 59—First, there are too many players in the AGI sweepstakes. Too many organizations in too many countries are working on AGI and AGI-related technology for them all to agree to mothball their projects until Friendly AI is created, or to include in their code a formal friendliness module, if one could be made. Page 61—But what if there is some kind of category shift once something becomes a thousand times smarter than we are, and we just can’t see it from here? For example, we share a lot of DNA with flatworms. But would we be invested in their goals and morals even if we discovered that many millions of years ago flatworms had created us, and given us their values? After we got over the initial surprise, wouldn’t we just do whatever we wanted? Page 86—Shall we build our robot replacement or not? On this, de Garis is clear. “Humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.

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Gene Patents Aren’t Benign and Never Will Be,” in which he claimed that people could die in the future from not being able to afford medical treatment as a result of medicines owned by patent holders of specific genes related to the genetic makeup of those persons. Former special counsel for President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson,

Bobby, things aren't binary out here. I mean, yes, there are some really good people and some really bad ones. But most are in between.

Top Skills Australia Wants for the Global Talent Visa The Global Talent Visa (subclass 858) is one of Australia’s most prestigious visa programs, designed to attract highly skilled professionals who can contribute to the country’s economy and innovation landscape. Australia is looking for exceptional talent across various sectors to support its economic growth, technological advancements, and cultural development. If you’re considering applying for the Global Talent Visa, understanding the skills in demand will help you position yourself as a strong candidate. In this blog, we’ll outline the top skills and sectors Australia prioritizes for the Global Talent Visa, and why these skills are so valuable to the country’s future development. 1. Technology and Digital Innovation Australia is rapidly embracing digital transformation across industries, and the technology sector is one of the highest priority areas for the Global Talent Visa. Skilled professionals in cutting-edge technologies are highly sought after to fuel innovation and help Australia stay competitive in the global economy. Key Tech Skills in Demand: Cybersecurity: With increasing cyber threats globally, Australia needs experts who can safeguard its digital infrastructure. Cybersecurity professionals with expertise in network security, data protection, and ethical hacking are in high demand. Software Development & Engineering: Australia’s digital economy thrives on skilled software engineers and developers. Professionals who are proficient in programming languages like Python, Java, and C++, or who specialize in areas such as cloud computing, DevOps, and systems architecture, are highly valued. Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are transforming industries ranging from healthcare to finance. Experts in AI algorithms, natural language processing, deep learning, and neural networks are in demand to help drive this technology forward. Blockchain & Cryptocurrency: Blockchain technology is revolutionizing sectors like finance, supply chains, and data security. Professionals with expertise in blockchain development, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency applications can play a key role in advancing Australia's digital economy. 2. Healthcare and Biotechnology Australia has a robust and expanding healthcare system, and the country is heavily investing in medical research and biotechnology to meet the needs of its aging population and to drive innovation in health outcomes. Professionals with advanced skills in biotechnology, medtech, and pharmaceuticals are crucial to this push. Key Healthcare & Bio Skills in Demand: Medical Research & Clinical Trials: Australia is home to a growing number of research institutions that focus on new treatments, vaccines, and therapies. Researchers and professionals with experience in clinical trials, molecular biology, and drug development can contribute to the ongoing advancement of Australia’s healthcare system. Biotechnology & Genomics: Experts in biotechnology, particularly those working in genomics, gene editing (e.g., CRISPR), and personalized medicine, are highly sought after. Australia is investing heavily in biotech innovation, especially for treatments related to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and genetic disorders. MedTech Innovation: Professionals developing the next generation of medical technologies—ranging from diagnostic tools and medical imaging to wearable health devices and robotic surgery systems—are in high demand. If you have experience in health tech commercialization, you could find significant opportunities in Australia.