Would you like to help with some research into attitudes towards having robots as companions in future?
If so, there are some interesting questions to answer at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_FuieS3Ga3rZUuKZbgLnwtedLOADc67wpFxToOf7NHc/viewform?c=0&w=1
But please note that many of the questions are sexual in nature so the survey is only open to those over the age of 18.
The survey is completely anonymous: NO personal data is collected to identify participants
This year’s festive offering considers countable and non-countable infinities and follows (very) loosely from last year’s discussion of deterministic and non-determininstic optimisation
[Specially for Alex Irvine, who is either having trouble getting his head around infinite sets or still believes in Santa Claus: we’re not allowed to say which]
Father Christmas has a problem. The Intergalactic Department of Work and Pensions (IDWP) has threatened to cut his tax credits because he apparently only works one day a year. He’s tried to point out that he’s the head of a vast multinational organisation of elves and reindeer, who themselves work all year round, but that doesn’t wash with the IDWP boss, Ian ‘Dunkin’ Smiff, because his dad didn’t go to public school.
So, he’s been given extra work to do: a lot of extra work to do …
Professor Stephen Hawking provoked considerable debate recently by suggesting that we could have more to fear from the nature of capitalism in future than armies of intelligent robots. The response was immediate, robust, deeply personal and entirely predictable.
The basic premise of the discussion was Hawking noting that, if most of the work of a future society was performed by machines, then how we occupied ourselves instead was much more of a social, political, economic, ethical, demographic, etc. question than it was technological. The rebuttal was essentially:
So how much of this criticism was justified and how much of it was simply The Establishment closing ranks?
Turing's Radiator 