Archive for AI/robotics

Terry Gilliam’s Air Canada

Being who I am, I tend to portray my futures in the spirit of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four or Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. Sometimes, though, reality turns out more like Gilliam’s Brazil: just as grim, but hysterically so. Take my short story “Collateral”: a tale that (among other things) asks about culpability for decisions […]

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The Only Question You Need to Ask ChatGPT.

No, it’s nothing to do with “Alberta brewery’s first AI-designed beer“. Although I’m not ruling out the possibility that maybe it should be. Regular visitors already know my overall perspective on this whole Chatbot/AGI thing. Recent events, while entertaining, haven’t changed my opinion all that much. (Although it’s nice to see an uptick of people […]

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The Jovian Duck: LaMDA and the Mirror Test

 You all must know about this Google LaMDA thing by now. At least, if you don’t, you must have been living at the bottom of Great Bear Lake without an Internet connection. Certainly enough of you have poked me about it over the past week or so. Maybe you think that’s where I’ve been. For […]

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Smarter Than TED.

(A Nowa Fantastyka remix) If you’ve been following along on the ‘crawl for any length of time, you  may remember that a few months back, a guy from Lawrence Livermore trained a neural net on Blindsight and told it to start a sequel. The results were— disquieting. The AI wrote a lot like I did: […]

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Meta2

“Get used to disappointment.” —The Dread Pirate Roberts First, the PSA: Yeah, Freeze-Frame has evidently made the finals for the Campbell. Given its cohabitation with nine other worthy finalists, I’m not holding my breath. Realistically, I expect FFR will not win the Campbell a full day before it doesn’t win the Locus. On the plus […]

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The Return of the Slow-Wave Trader

Excerpts from dinnertime conversation with a retired investment banker: Angela Merkel emerges from a meeting with Donald Trump. “Yes,” she says in answer to a reporter’s question, “we had a provocative but productive discussion.” She rolls her eyes. The market soars on hearing the good news. It soars because once again, after a brief hiatus […]

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Pursuant to Last Post’s Comment Thread about Machine Suffering…

… as chance would have it, here’s an excerpt from a list of interview questions I’m currently working through from ActuSF in France: You raise the question of artificial intelligence, with the “intelligent frosts”, and quote in appendix both the works of Masuo Aizawa and Charles Thorpe on neuronal networks. Do you believe that in […]

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Head Cheese Gone Wild

I was plenty pleased when little porridges of cultured neurons took their first baby steps towards running flight simulators or operating robots in the lab; I was downright smug when folks noticed that I’d got there first. Now, though, researchers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology are planning on putting head cheeses in […]

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Cybersnot

Inspired by the synergy of my own stuffed, crusty, raw red nose and the long-awaited return of Battlestar Galactica (and if you haven’t seen the season premiere yet, what are you wasting time here for? Get onto BitTorrent and start downloading right fucking now, do you hear me?), I am reminded of this little tech […]

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Our Souls in a New Machine

A couple of items hit me within the same 24-hour period this week: a little humanoid robot that performs interpretive dance numbers based on the brainwave and REM patterns of sleeping humans, and a noncorporeal digital artiste that builds paintings inspired by phrases we meat puppets offer up to it. I’ve seen human paintings and […]

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