5 Ways the Robots Won This Week
We hope you are prepared to welcome our new robotic overlords. And if you’re not, better get on that, stat. The robo-pocalypse may be coming sooner than any of us imagined.
Don’t believe it? Take a look at this week’s headlines.
What’s a seven-letter word for “jerk”?
As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a Scrabble-playing robot that’s long on vocabulary but short on good sportsmanship. Or sportsbotship. Called “the rudest Scrabble player ever,” Victor the Robot was created to see how artificially intelligent beings could interact in more natural ways with humans—and by “more natural” we mean like flaming a-holes. The good news? Victor isn’t always the victor. The bad: He’s an even worse loser.
Cube better watch out
At the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, England, a robot made from a Samsung Galaxy 4 smartphone and Lego Mindstorms components established a new world’s record for solving a 4×4×4 Rubik’s Cube. The Cubestormer 3 needed just 3.25 seconds to align the colors on each side of the cube, breaking the old record (held by its sibling, the Cubestormer 2) by more than two seconds.
The best time a puny human can muster? 5.5 seconds, by Mats Valk of the Netherlands. Time to pack it in, Mats. Maybe you’ll have better luck with Scrabble.
When you care enough to send the very bots
Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance at the recent TED2014 confab in Vancouver last Tuesday—well, kind of. The NSA’s favorite whistle-blowing fugitive appeared via a Beam telepresence robot that he controlled via his laptop from a secret hiding place deep in the bowels of Putingrad. Ed/Beam then had an animated (if somewhat two-dimensional) conversation with TED’s Chris Anderson. Will telepresence become the new way to travel? (It does beat flying coach.)
Is your boss a robot, or just well oiled?
Earlier this week, researchers at Oxford published a report predicting that nearly half of all U.S. workers will eventually be replaced by automatons. The top occupations in danger of being replaced by software: loan officers, receptionists, and paralegals. Those with relative job security include chiropractors, choreographers, and the clergy. At least some of us have a prayer of staying employed.
(Photo: PepperDigital)
All the algorithms that are fit to print
When Los Angeles woke up to a magnitude 4.7 earthquake last Monday, the L.A. Times had the news up on its website within moments. Was the story cranked out by some copy-desk crone on a caffeine jag? No, the author was Quakebot, an algorithm programmed to extract data from the U.S. Geological Survey and plug it into a story template. The Times uses a similar bot to crank about stories about homicides. Will bots replace reporters, too? Only when they learn how to show up for work with a hangover and complain about the food in the cafe.
Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
