The three schools of Singularitarianism | Futurismic

I like the fact that this article explains that the notion of the Singularity too often just gets lumped into whatever Kurzweil has been saying lately, which is not necessarily representative of a consensus among futurists. This is probably why you get jokes from people like Warren Ellis such as this one: "The Singularity is wanking for people who want an Invisible Space Daddy but are afraid of Richard Dawkins."

That being said, I wish the article had taken the time to actually delve into the different perspectives on the possibility of the Singularity, rather than just focusing on the expectations of one particular individual who disagrees with Kurzweil.

Wolfram|Alpha

16 May 2009·107 words·1 min

Articles databases future science wolframalpha

Quite simply, I think this is one of the greatest advances in library science and computing in recent memory. This isn’t just a toy or a search engine, this is a knowledge processor that makes any factual data in its system instantly computable.

Warren Ellis: 'We're living in the last days of the Roman empire'

15 April 2009·199 words·1 min

Articles culture future publishing

Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange.

Japan child robot mimicks infant learning

7 April 2009·146 words·1 min

Articles apocalypse future robots

Via grinding.be: Scientists at Osaka University in Japan have created a robot that learns in a similar manner to human infants. CB2 (Child-robot with Biometric body), uses it processor, eye cameras and touch sensors to learn from it’s designers similar to the way a child learns from its parents.

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