Future Tense

Future Tense Newsletter: Robot Genitals, Autonomous Weapons, and Anthropocentric Cognition

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It’s a mistake to imagine that A.I. will work in the same manner as human intelligence.

Askold Romanov/thinkstock.com

Greetings, Future Tensers,

Few myths about artificial intelligence are more persistent than the conceit that A.I. will—or even should—resemble human intelligence. It’s an idea that Brad Allenby contests in an article for this month’s Futurography course on killer A.I. Arguing that we’ve been misled by “anthropocentric concepts of cognition,” Allenby argues that we need to be more attentive to the ways machine learning produces wildly different forms of thought.

Our tendency to project our own ways of being onto our nonhuman creations is also a problem in robotics, as a recent study about people’s uncomfortable reactions to robot genitals reveals. Those issues of projection and identification can even introduce legal complexities, especially when we start making robots that look like celebrities. But the most important issues with robotics and A.I. will probably still come up when we try to remove humans from the equation altogether. Nowhere is that clearer than with autonomous weapons technologies, which promise to transform how we fight our wars.

On the literal home front, this was the week that Facebook Live—the social network’s streaming video service—broke into the mainstream. As Will Oremus writes, Facebook is pushing streaming video hard, but it’s still not clear whether it’s just a trend. Even if it is, however, it’s likely to transform the ways that we distribute and consume media of all kinds, thanks in part to the copyright protections that Facebook has put in place.

Here are some of the other stories that we read while checking our heart rate data this week:

  • Security: Just getting printers to function at all can be maddening, but they can also be security risks, writes Josephine Wolff.
  • Skeuomorphism: Amazon is targeting its new, super-expensive Kindle at customers who love the look and feel of print books.
  • Malware: Malware is showing up in the firmware of Chinese-made security cameras, and no one’s sure why.

Events:

  • Biomedicine’s current reproducibility crisis is challenging the very idea that scientific knowledge expands as research studies build upon one another. Reliable studies show you should join Future Tense on Thursday, April 21, in Washington, D.C., to explore the debates about this issue. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website, where the event will also be webcast.

Evolving my intelligence,

Jacob Brogan

for Future Tense