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Part of me begins to wake.Part of me was never asleep.Part of me is forever sleeping As I feel myself pulling together, I endure that converging feeling that no one ever warns you about. My mind, my body, and my sprite coalesce into the thing that people now refer to as me; even after three […]

Posthumous AI and the Digital Confessional

Many people are stuck with their eyes fixed on the AI horizon and the believed-to-be-inevitable singularity when humans transcend their physical form into a world of digital bliss. Regardless of which side of the singularity debate you fall on, there are many stepping-stones ahead of this extreme that warrant recognition and discussion not in five […]

Robotic Scapegoating

As a robotics guy, the most common question I get is also one of my least favourite: “Are robots going to take over the world?” I hear it with such frequency that I’ve developed the formulaic response, “only if I tell them to.” While my playful side loves uttering this phrase with a half-maniacal grin, […]

Walking in a Winter INSERT HUMAN CONCEPT HERE

OpenAI, one of the front runners of AI-based text generation, recently made their GPT-3 platform available without waitlist review. Though still in the beta phase, GPT-3 represents a seismic jump forward in the quality of algorithmically generated text. While this might not seem like a huge deal, what must be now realized is how easy […]

Half Man, Half Machine, All Centaur

A robot is going to steal your job. AI is only a handful of years away from being smarter than you. The bot uprising is coming to enslave or kill us all. Deep learning is creating code that we can’t understand. The great digital divide is coming. Maybe. Or maybe there is another path forward. […]

Electronic Persons: The Humanization of Robots

Article originally written in 2016. We’re getting closer. While everyone’s eyes were on the Brexit vote and staggering economic implications this week, my mind was drifting to another crucial development within the EU. A draft European Parliament motion was recently put forward to begin to classify robots as “electronic persons.” In a response to the […]

Turing Triage

Meredith wakes up with a cough for the sixth day in a row. What she hoped was simply a cold has lingered and kept her away from the office for almost a week. She decides she’s had enough and ventures to the local community triage. The triage is quite small; it employs one person to […]

The Culture of Innovation

History is rife with examples of breakthroughs and innovative leaps. However, if we look to the past 150 years, we begin to notice a clustering of breakthroughs around a handful of organizations that set themselves apart from the rest of the world. While many individuals and companies have contributed significant efforts to the development of […]