• Book review: ‘Confessions of an AI Brain’

    There are two major problems confronting any author wishing to write a manual on artificial intelligence. The first is that by the time you’ve written it, the glacial pace of the book publishing world has effectively rendered your work obsolete before the ink has dried. Second, there are simply so many books produced on the subject that it’s virtually impossible to find a differentiating niche. ‘Confessions of an AI Brain’ (Springer, £25.00, ISBN 9783031259340) overcomes the first issue paradoxically by not attempting to say anything new, while the second is countered by the clever literary construction of telling the story from the first-person viewpoint of the AI ‘brain’ itself. Miranda – as authors Elena Fersman, Paul Pettersson and Athanasios Karapantelakis have called their AI brain…

    E+T Magazine
    E+T Magazine

  • Robots deny they would rebel against humans in UN news conference

    Over the weekend, the United Nations (UN) organised an AI summit to discuss the future of artificial intelligence (AI) how robotics could help governments and organisations meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The Geneva summit included what was described as the world's first robot-human press conference, where journalists were invited to ask the robots questions about their expanding abilities. The conference included  Sophia, the first robot innovation ambassador for the UN Development Program (UNDP); healthcare roboy Grace; Ai-Da, a humanoid robot artist, and Desdemona, a rock-star robot . “We have to engage and ensure a responsible future with AI,” explained ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who took pictures with Sophia.  Built by Hanson Robotics, Sophia has…

  • The six-billion-dollar post-human

    “Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” If you were a kid during the 1970s, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ was peak TV and, arguably, James Bond’s closest cultural competitor. Virtually everyone could recite its opening narration. But while 007’s main physiological attribute was an indestructible liver, Steve Austin was cybernetically enhanced with two superstrength legs and an arm, and a computerised eye. His creators were inspired by work being done even then towards increasingly capable prostheses for severely wounded veterans and other amputees (the fictional Austin was a horrifically…

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