Archive for the ‘Rise of the machines’ Category

We of bounded rationality

I came across a fascinating article at the Communications of the ACM site about negotiation agents.

Complex accounting is routing strategy. It’s here to stay.

[updated : 2009-12-19]
The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.
The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with [...]

Festival of the Gynnies

I was doing some research on bots (specifically androids/gynoids) to help get me back into this short story I was writing. I love anything to do with bots, even if I have problems with some of the actual, real-life ones we’ve built so far (yeah i know – sorry, Fritz Lang’s golden gal and Terminator’s [...]

Not so fast, little internet…

Imagine that the ever-densifying network of devices that we know and love as the internet becomes sentient. Ish. Or aware or whatever:
Dangling upside down via an umbilicus to its humbler origins, and having its ass spanked by Lady The Phenomenon of Emergence herself, will the quasi-conscious intelligence that gulps down it’s first breath be a [...]

The corp and the customer (a clueful resistance)

I came across this old cluetrain manifesto today and it got me thinking.  Reading through their (read-only, therefore never-updated?) page, I came to the conclusion that while I could certainly get behind what they were saying, the article assumed that corporations (along with their marketing and sales departments) should /could evolve better ways of communicating [...]

time to break out the ‘ole tin foil

Sooner or later, everyone will have met their tin foil dude (I don’t know why, but it’s never a dudette)… a man convicted of the ‘truth’ that Big Brother is interfering with all our thoughts, and that we’d all better start wearing tin foil inside our hats.

People augmenting machines : WIRED article misses the point.

Nosing through @tmbchr’s post on the WIRED post about humans augmenting AI, I have only 2 things to say:
1) humans being a helpful extension sounds like a nice idea… especially as presented in the article, but
2) Those “helpful” tasks stand a high chance of being crappy, drudge-filled exercises of boredom.
Picking out ‘what’s beautiful’ from a [...]

Let ’stupid’ handle it…

[updated 2009-10-31]
Have you ever had a customer service experience that left you completely, breathlessly in awe at the stupidity of all that transpired? Did you have to listen to a lot of circular non-reasoning, or worse – have to stare down a representative who seemed strangely incapable of initiating anything useful? Well then my friend, [...]

Why Cylons are stupid.

[updated 2009-07-12]
I was watching this show the other day on the history of science fiction, and I realised how enchanted we are with this idea of robots / machines getting stronger and smarter than us and ultimately kicking our collective asses. Hah! not gonna happen, and I can prove it with a little armchair [...]