Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: June 11, 2010

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html?hpw

[hedgehog]

1. Give the robot a big cork and send it to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

2. I wish we could I worry much of my waking time over the Gulf

[lunatica]

3. It reminds me of science fiction literature

Where man can go to places like the surface of Jupiter via robots and be able to manipulate the robots as if he were inside them.

Or go to the depths of the ocean and plug up leaks.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

4. I fear after the environmental impact of the gulf we'll need a new planet