Category: ideas

“The truth is, we’re surrounded by robotics all the time. Your washing machine is a robot. Your dishwasher is a robot. You don’t need to have a very broad definition to draw that conclusion … Robotics will continue to be ubiquitous and fairly invisible. Systems will just be smarter and people will accept that. It’s occurring around us all the time now.”

“While ‘turning on the faucets’ may humanize a politician, there still seems to be a lingering threat behind such outbursts. Perhaps we prefer it as a performance more than as a real display of feelings – cynically planned outpourings rather than spontaneous displays of emotion. There is, after all, something at stake for us in these moments: we have something to fear in a politician’s tears. But what?”

Nigel Warburton: “I’m skeptical about this, as in my view philosophy is primarily the attempt to understand, and as such is an activity of enquiry.”
Jules Evans: “Personally, I’m not arguing that all philosophy is therapy, but rather that ancient Greeks and Romans viewed philosophy that way, as did many Indian philosophers.”

Geotagging gone wrong – or right? “‘Snoop Dogg checked into Bogata, Mures, by mistake — but you don’t have to!’ the homepage reads, calling the village ‘the best place for chillin’ in Romania.'”

“The last time the Diccionario was published, it contained more than 28,000 words of American origin — double the amount it contained in the previous edition.”

“Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence.”

“It is always tempting to say that this is not a good time for ideas. Though people hold them or dismiss them, promote them or disparage them, ideas often seem unstable. Often we think we are debating an idea only to discover that it no longer means what we thought it meant. We proclaim our affection for equality, autonomy, liberation, authenticity only to find that the meanings of those words and the concepts they name have changed into something unrecognizable.”

Yes, the defeat of a world-champion Go player by Google’s DeepMind computer was impressive, as was Watson’s triumph over Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!. Yet we’re still far from anything like HAL.

“[Researchers] played a total of 165 commonly heard natural sounds to ten subjects willing to be rolled into an fMRI machine to listen to the piped-in sounds. The sounds included a man speaking, a songbird, a car horn, a flushing toilet, and a dog barking. None sparked the same population of neurons as music.” (includes video)

“This year SXSW, as the festival is known, feels like a story of how the tech ethos has escaped the bounds of hardware and software. Tech is turning into a culture and a style, one that has spread into new foods and clothing, and all other kinds of nonelectronic goods. Tech has become a lifestyle brand.”