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Algorithms are allowing advertisers to better target us with books we’re likely to like. Macy Halford wonders if one day these mind-readers will equal advice from real-life friends.rn

The Hybrid Reality Institute recently announced Data, a robot actor and celebrity, has joined the Institute as a Fellow, making it the highest ranking non-human entity to join a think tank. 

n nMemo to self: the singularity is here. The following description of the Blade Runner Generation in the Times Online (U.K.) sounds a lot like Ray Kurzweil’s singularity: “For the […]

Marc Goodman tells Big Think that in the future “the virtual agents of good and evil will do battle in cyberspace–making this a very interesting field to be in!”

Yesterday I got the e-mail below. I watched the video trailer and made my contribution this morning. Crazy high school robots battling it out for engineering supremacy? How can you […]

The idea of a coming Singularity refers to a point in time of radical exponential progress, beyond which our minds can’t imagine—the technological counterpart to an event horizon in a black hole.

Technology is eating jobs—and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well. Is your job an endangered species?

I don’t know if this is such an appropriate post for Sunday morning. A study from Northwestern shows that people who regularly attend religious services are 50% more likely to become […]

Turkle rightly asserts that such familial association is what we will all come to have with machines, and that children are the only ones who understand it right from the start. Children recognize the powerful magnetism of robots that are programmed to respond to human affection (by purring, chatting, batting eye lashes and so forth). Some of them say that they would like to give a robot as a companion to their grandparents, but worry that the grandparents might prefer the robot to them in the long run.

UPDATE: Contest Deadline is Friday, March 11th at 8 a.m. EST and the Five Winners will be Announced Next Week – Stay Tuned! Imagine, if you can, the world in the […]

Robots started out conceptually as automaton-servants but instead of creating a modern-day butler, much robotics research today focuses on creating emotional machines.

For anyone interested in learning “what’s next,” Paul Saffo’s keynote address at the World Innovation Forum in New York City earlier this week presented a number of tantalizing previews. According […]

Using very little energy, a 62,000-mile-high space elevators could carry travelers out of earth’s gravity well and up to a spaceship dock. It could be tomorrow morning’s commute.

Just how well computers are able to understand language nuance–what researchers call the “Paris Hilton” problem–will determine how far A.I. has come. 

Criminal Implications of Implantable Medical Devices Since the dawn of the 1970′s television action show the Six Million Dollar Man, the public has been fascinated by bionics and the integration […]

MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology after herself experiencing what was like a schoolgirl crush on a human-looking machine.

If Social Media is the breakthrough development of Web 2.0, what is next in search for Web 3.0 and beyond? Peter Diamandis speculates on the evolution of search in the […]

The situation at Fukushima has stabilized—if your conception of stable is hanging off a cliff by your fingernails. 

Gerry Beimler, who is Manager of Leadership Development Programs for the Chicago Public Schools Office of eLearning and one of our School Technology Leadership graduate certificate students, forwarded me this […]

Pundits aren’t solely to blame for the vitriol. They’re just giving us what we want. To change our discourse we have to be masters, not slaves, to the cycle.rnrn

n In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman riffs on American economic competitiveness and the state of our nation’s educational system. Friedman suggests that companies are […]

Solar power, driven by exponentially-increasing nanotechnology, will satisfy the entire world’s energy needs in 16 years. 

No one has a crystal ball, but some predictions that I made in recent years are coming into sharp focus with every scientific advance. For starters, every year, more organs […]

Postman & Weingartner (1968, p. 23) noted: Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old […]

Search is no longer the simple act of typing words into a text box. New user interfaces and mobile devices are expanding the web into all aspects of daily life, […]

After months of delays and preparation, the oldest remaining shuttlein the fleet–Discovery, finally made its way from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the KSC to the launch pad. At 4:53 […]

And not just a map: also a timeline, a literary checklist and a historiography

Is the search industry locked in a race to the bottom or are conditions ripe for a breakthrough? This question will take center stage at a gathering in San Francisco on February 1, to be webcast on BigThink.com.  

IBM’s Watson computer, though a marvel of computing power, cannot answer questions that involve the common sense of a child.