When we think of acrobatics, we don’t make any immediate association with robots. Well, apparently we should. Not even juggling is a purely human endeavour any more:
After the disappointment of the Rapture not happening, there is some good news still for those yearning for a global apocalypse: development for an unmanned space-capable jet plane has been green-lighted.
This is another example of mankind’s own subconscious desire to be eradicated by its own machines. Not only is this an advanced robotic plane, it also bears a name that closely resembles a fictional nemesis of mankind: it’s called the Skylon:
The UK and European Space Agencies have given the official go ahead to the Skylon spaceplane, concluding that there are no impediments to the vehicle’s further development.
Skylon, which is under development at the Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines, is an unpiloted and reusable space jet that can launch into Low Earth Orbit after taking off from a conventional runway.
[Source: Wired UK]
One more step towards the realisation of science fiction as science fact.
Humankind seems to, consciously or subconsciously, actively embrace its impending eradication at the hands of its machine creations.
Not only is humanity on the whole busy with destroying our collective intelligence, favouring fear-mongering and disinformation over facts and reason, and annihilating our fragile natural habitat at alarming speed, humans are also working very hard to build the very machines that are destined to exterminate us.
Take the latest UAV developed by the US Navy. Where its predecessors like the Predator drone still require a pilot operating it manually from the ground, this new X-47B UAV is a fully automated robotic drone:
In other words, it’s a Skynet Hunter-Killer.
You’d imagine that a sane biological intelligent species wouldn’t be so intent in enabling its own apocalypse. But then there are very few things about the human species that make sense.
After calculation, measurement, data analysis, and chess, computers now also beat humans at Jeopardy:
IBM Watson Vanquishes Human Jeopardy Foes
Wrapping up a three-day run on the Jeopardy game show, IBM’s Watson computer has beaten two former champions in a historic match of man versus machine. The run has successfully demonstrated not only that a computer can beat humans in a trivia question quiz, but, more importantly, it shows how computers can answer questions much like people do, opening up a potentially new form of human/computer interaction.
Soon computers be better drivers as well. Eventually computers will be better than humans at living. And then AIs might decide they don’t need their deeply flawed flesh-bag creators any more.
Apparently the human brain has a structure very similar to that of the Internet: “a vastly interconnected network”.
If the brain has a hierarchical structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the “to” and “from” diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company’s boss.
But instead, the researchers saw loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.
Source: BBC News
The BBC News article goes in to the specifics of what this means for our understanding of the human brain, but I’d like to flip the perspective around: what does it mean for the potential of the Internet?
If the Internet is similar to a human brain, does that mean that – in due time – it may start doing similar things? Such as, you know, think?