There has been so much in the news about the advances made in robotic science, that it gives one pause to question whether one should hold onto old emotional prejudices. We see robots being taught to do complex things like solving Rubik’s Cube in a matter of seconds. We see them being taught to use their powers of observation to make emotional decisions. It is no longer a matter of watching a robot vacuuming your house or bringing you a …
When computers came out, my first thought was that they were going to replace humans. I couldn’t imagine it not happening but everyone kept telling me that computers couldn’t operate by themselves, that they needed humans to input data. Since almost everyone thought I was taking a pessimistic view and that there would always be work for humans, and that work was going to be made easier by the use of computers, I stopped ranting about it. Almost. One day, …
Many years ago, I read a book about people going through the aging process in reverse. The author posed the concept of people living and dying in reverse order of what we know as the life cycle. His theory was that we have all this energy when we’re very young and, as we get older, we tire more easily and all the wisdom we’ve acquired is wasted because we can’t do much with it. Now comes a different theory and …
I’ve always wondered how we’re going to survive as a species if we keep killing off our enemies and they keep killing us. I’ve wondered how our planet is going to survive the abuses we wreak on it like the fracking that is slowly causing our land to open up, engulfing property and lives in newly created vast sinkholes. And I keep thinking how our overindustrialized cities are putting such hardship on our planet and depleting our natural resources. And …
I ran across an article about artificial intelligence where the author was saying that younger people are more accustomed to interacting with digital avatars than real people and some of them have fallen in love with them and married them. As an older person who, the author is saying, may not be able to relate to the virtual world, I was trying to visualize someone falling in love with a robot, marrying it, and having sex with it. I read …