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, …
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 …
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 (partial) digitization of the analog educational system
When, in the year 2016, in a society the question of whether (and how) “religious education will be taught in schools” emerges as a very significant challenge, then this society …
the quantum future is near (and it will turn many things upside down…)
with a satellite as a starting point…(…that will conduct quantum experiments in space) The emergence of increasingly extreme innovative technological applications has long become a tedious cliché in the electronic …
short history of computers
Every modern computer is, in essence, supposed to be a physical implementation of an ideal machine, the universal Turing machine that can compute any computable function. Extremely simple in conception, …
the bleeding materiality of “immaterial” capitalism
The belief that in this glossy era of technology and innovation, production has changed form and become immaterial, is dominant in the minds of first-world citizens. Equally dominant is the …
knowledge accelerator
It could be the plot of a futuristic movie. Yet it is an idea for the organized devaluation of (also) intellectual labor. Not “sector by sector,” but as a general …
the fourth example(;): the mechanical mediation of scientific thought
The term “Paradigm,” along with its companion “Paradigm Shift,” since first appearing in Thomas Kuhn’s classic book on the structure of scientific revolutions, has undergone not only the expected criticism, …
“free” as in “free software”: a small tribute to free software
When it comes to the consumption and use of electronic products/goods, one can often observe phenomena of fandom among their users/consumers. The battle over which is the best mobile phone …
the worker-machine: governance, mechanics, ideology
Cybernetics and mechanical engineering …Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, are searching from different starting points, in the twilight of academia, for answers to the question: what is it that …
4th industrial revolution, work in progress: don’t miss it!!!
The term 4th industrial revolution should not have been unfamiliar to specialists. But the recent gathering of the world’s “lords” in the Swiss Davos (after their invitees: the Greek prime …