Freakishly realistic telemarketing robots are denying they're robots

This is how it starts, people. First we get our chatbots to sound and act realistic — and then we get them to convince everyone they're actually human. Listen to this crazy conversation between Time's Michael Scherer and a telemarketing robot who refuses to admit her true artificial nature.

Recently, Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer received a phone call from an apparently bright and engaging woman asking him if he wanted a deal on his health insurance. But he soon got the feeling something wasn't quite right.

After asking the telemarketer point blank if she was a real person or a computer-operated robot, she chuckled charmingly and insisted she was real. Looking to press the issue, Scherer asked her a series of questions, which she promptly failed. Such as, "What vegetable is found in tomato soup?" To which she responded by saying she didn't understand the question. When asked what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained of a bad connection (ah, the oldest trick in the book).

Here, listen for yourself:

i09

It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

"It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?” My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice."

MIT Technology Review

Future of organs? Synthetic tissue built with 3-D printer

Scientists have built a 3-D printer that creates material resembling human tissues. The novel substance, a deceptively simple network of water droplets coated in lipids, could one day be used to deliver drugs to the body -- or perhaps even to replace damaged tissue in living organs.
The creation, described in the journal Science, consists of lipid bilayers separating droplets of water -- rather like cell membranes, whose double layers allow the body’s cells to mesh with their watery environments while still protecting their contents.
“The great thing about these droplets is that they use pretty much exclusively biological materials,” said study co-author and University of Oxford researcher Gabriel Villar, making them ideal for medical uses.

Los Angeles Times

The Holy Cosmos: The New Religion of Space Exploration

Think about how you feel when you see the Earth from space or the Apollo astronauts walking on the moon. These images are achievements of science, sure, but they also have a religious feel to them; they tug at something deeper than engineering, something sublime. When viewed as a whole, space exploration has a lot in common with religion. It offers us a salvation narrative, for instance, whereby we put our faith in technology in order to be delivered to new worlds. Its priests, figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson, extoll its virtues in what sound like sermons. In its iconography, astronauts are like saints that ascend into heaven and extraterrestrials are like gods---benevolent, kind, wise, capable of manipulating space and time.

This idea of seeing space exploration as a religion has a long history, dating back to the Russians of the early twentieth century, many of whom self-identified as "Cosmists." From there it migrated to German rocket scientists like Werner von Braun, who took his ideas about space travel to America after the Second World War. Americans were slow to warm to space exploration. They saw it as a fantasy, but that changed as Americans began to regard technology with a new reverence in the postwar period. Today Americans are the most fervent Cosmists on the planet, even if manned space exploration seems to have stalled for the time being.

Albert Harrison, a professor of psychology at U.C. Davis, has been working on the psychology of space exploration since the 1970's, when he did research for NASA about the psychological effects of long-term space travel. Harrison was kind enough to send me a chapter of his forthcoming book about Cosmism, and the complex psychological motivations that underlie space exploration. What follows is our conversation about the past, present and future of space exploration as a religious quest.

The Atlantic

H&M Puts Real Model Heads On Fake Bodies

The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and "completely virtual," the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then "dresses" it by drawing on its clothes, and digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models' faces won't be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we'll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn't looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can't say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn't racially diverse.

Jezebel

Too Much Information Makes You Make Bad Choices

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

Newsweek

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."

Ken Jennings, contestant on Jeopardy! famous for winning 74 games in a row, borrowing a line from The Simpsons to congratulate his computer opponent, Watson, for handily winning a three-day competition.


New York Times

Carnivorous Clock

NPR

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots

Sputnik Moment?

"This is our generation's Sputnik Moment," President Obama said during Tuesday's State of the Union.

...

So I couldn't help wondering: Could we ever have a Sputnik moment?

Frontiers? We live on them. In 1969, things were still analog. You didn't have to discard your devices after a few months because Steve Jobs had decided that light purple was the new purple. Now, if something is lasting, we look down on it. "The only thing that lasts these days are dead armadillos and those seasonal breads in the glass case at Starbucks," we point out. Ephemeral is the new permanent. We have the collective memory -- and persistent desire to mate with anything in sight -- of Viagra-addled mayflies.

This comes with many boons. Thanks to our insistence on living on the bubble of the present moment, our world is rife with unnatural wonders - iPhones, iPads, Clouds, memes, videos of cats in Japan stuffing themselves into boxes. When I have a sore throat, I can go online and describe my symptoms, and strangers from across the globe (or the part of the globe that follows me on Twitter, at any rate) can suggest that I drink blueberry syrup and hot toddies! This is the stuff!

Everyone admits that the world has shrunk. But this shrinkage has also closed the window for Sputnik moments.

Washington Post

Technology Loop

Your BlackBerry or Your Wife

When you're out to dinner, does your BlackBerry occupy a seat at the table? Does your spouse ever check email before saying "good morning" to the kids? Does your son sleep with his laptop?

It may be time for a technology cleanse.

Like an extreme diet that cuts out all processed foods for a short period of time with the promise of lasting good health, a technology cleanse means you unplug for a short time with longer-term benefits for your relationships.

But be warned: As with any other diet, it isn't easy.

The Wall Street Journal

U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

NY Times

Only in Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends

Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.

It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.

Wired

Nadia

Nadia is a camera designed by Andrew Kupresanin that, instead of a viewfinder, features an artificial-intelligence judger of aesthetic. Originally found on Today and Tomorrow.

Nadia from Andrew Kupresanin on Vimeo.

Can digital I-Doser sounds mimic the effect of drugs?

For decades, parents, doctors and school administrators have worried about the dangers of drugs. In the digital age, they've got a new arena for concern: Sound waves that, some say, affect the brain like a drug -- and cost only 99 cents on iTunes and Amazon.com .

Many scientific experts say they're unfamiliar with ``digital drugs'' -- sometimes sold under the brand name I-Dosers -- and doubt whether sound patterns could have the same effect as chemical drugs. But some parents -- and at least one Oklahoma school system -- worry that downloading these sounds could be a teen's first step toward physical drugs.

As proof, they point to YouTube, where hundreds of videos -- some of teen ``users'' getting ``high'' -- have been posted. On the I-Doser Facebook page, users recommend tracks with comments such as, ``Last night I did `peyote' and `alter-x' and they really worked.'' The I-Doser free software is the second most downloaded program in the science category on CNET.com , with 6,500 downloads in a single recent week.

Miami Herald

Gene data for all 'within a decade'

Genetic information will be available to most people in the developed world within 10 years, allowing better treatment and safer prescription of drugs.

Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, believes mass genome sequencing of individuals would soon be possible at a cost of less than $1,000 per person.

Telegraph

The Eyes Have It

An excellent article about the erosion of privacy and its profound social, and spiritual, implications.

"The private life is dead in the new Russia," said a Red Army officer in the film of Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago." There were many scarifying things in that great movie, but that was the scariest, the dry proclamation that the intimate experience of being alive would now be subordinate to the state. An odd thing is that when privacy is done away with, people don't become more authentic, they become less so. What replaces what used not to be said is something that must be said and is usually a lie.

When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as, actually, children of God. We also lose trust, not only in each other but in our institutions, which we come to fear. People who now have no faith in the security of their medical and financial records, for instance, will have even less faith in their government. If progressives were sensitive to this, they'd have more power. They always think the answer is a new Internet Privacy Act. But everyone else thinks that's just a new system to hack.

At technology conferences now they say, "Get over it." Privacy is gone, get with the new world. But I'm not sure technologically focused people can be sensitive to the implications of their instructions.

Peggy Noonan, WSJ

Thanks, Andrea.

How to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Carmen of the Spheres

Transforming orbital data into phase minimalism.

Greg Fox takes orbital frequencies of the (at the time) nine planets, transposes them into octaves audible by the human ear, and then sets them to music by applying the same data to the duration of the notes. The result is an empirically-based representation of the real music of the spheres.



Greg Fox
Carmen of the Spheres on Archive.org

The Little Black Piezoelectric Dress

On a Wednesday night in February, one week after fashion’s biggest names descended on New York for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, techy designer Diana Eng’s models were strutting a different kind of stuff: the Twinkle Dress, for example. As a striking brunette model slinked by, her flirty frock, embroidered with LEDs, conductive silverized thread, and microphones, lit up in response to tunes from a quartet playing homemade digital instruments. Off the runway, the dress’s microphones can pick up sounds from the wearer’s voice: when she speaks, she lights up in true diva style.
Although labs around the world have been creating wearable computers for more than a decade, and spacesuits and military uniforms are technologically versatile, you probably won’t find them on the cover of Vogue anytime soon. But Eng is one of several up-and-coming technophiles who take fashion as seriously as technology. Her delicate silk chiffons stand apart from the hardware that makes up most of our gadgetry, yet they enable the wearer to make technology a working part of her wardrobe.

The Atlantic