In July 2011, Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, published a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague of his, Peter Norvig, …
At a glance
Would it ever cross your mind that something as commonplace as “I’m looking for my keys—where the hell did I leave them?” could become the subject of “scientific research”? No. …
genetic cut-and-paste: the great deception
Think of a cinematic film. You identify a specific sequence of frames that you want to replace. If you have a film reel, you go and cut the celluloid, and …
Big ball!
Online shopping for products in a marketplace with over 10 million stores, free messages, calls and video calls, file sharing (even large multimedia files), social networking for both personal and …
the internet of things has a small dirty secret
A year ago, when I started the Internet of Shit account on Twitter, I did it as a personal joke: I was hearing a lot about smart devices connected to …
Make way!
Autonomous cars? Yes! Autonomous trucks? Yes! (Read a related comment in b&g issue 3). Autonomous flying machines? Yes! Autonomous ships? Autonomous tankers, cargo, Ro-Ro or warships? Not yet, but it …
Turing’s test: notes on a genealogy of “intelligence”
putting consciousness on the anatomical table If one takes stock of the declarations of scientists (and their funders), the last terra incognita that the techno-scientific spirit is called upon to …
far-right misinformation
When the far right tries to “expose” the “system’s conspiracies” and spews racism. According to the text, the photo is staged, the “refugees” (in quotation marks) are plants and have …
don’t believe the hype: social media and black propaganda
What is communicated are commands and… those who give them also say what they mean. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988 Here, to “speak” you must …
Robocop
We will one day remember that the first robot-police officers appeared in 2016 at the edge of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, in Dubai. We will remember that they were launched …
Sewing automata
Can a robotic machine (or a team of such machines) sew clothes? Anyone who has even an amateur relationship with sewing knows that fabrics have lots of whims. Sometimes two …
The metaphysics of cyber-warfare
This is “the bad guy” Sauron, from “the lord of the rings”. ProjectSauron is what the well-known Russian malware fighting company Kaspersky Labs named a new discovery of theirs (almost …