Should You Be Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence?

“What happens to life when AI is everywhere? It promises to dissolve into the background, like the best technology does, automating tasks and maybe telling us a quip or two along the way. But at least now you can throw your phone into a lake. AI won’t offer that kind of escape; it will just be waiting for you when you get home.”

‘What Was Needed Was Not More Communism But More Public-Spirited Pigs’ – When Editor T.S. Eliot Rejected ‘Animal Farm’

“We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane – and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. … On the other hand, we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

British Library Opens Its 20th-Century Lit Website With 300 Never-Before-Seen Documents

Among the goodies now on view: “Virginia Woolf’s manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway and an early travel notebook in which she begins to explore her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique; George Orwell’s notebook in which he lists ideas for what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, including ‘newspeak’, ‘doublethink’ and ‘two minutes of hate’; [and] a letter from TS Eliot declining to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”

Researchers Are Teaching Robots To ‘Feel Pain’ With An Artificial Nervous System

The researchers … are developing a system that would allow a robot to ‘be able to detect and classify unforeseen physical states and disturbances, rate the potential damage they may cause to it and initiate appropriate countermeasures, ie reflexes’, they explained. Just as human neurons transmit pain, the artificial ones will pass on information that can be classified by the robot as either light, moderate or severe pain.”

Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.26.16

The Tosca effect
Implausible things in opera staging, things any TV show gets right, things that can mar even opera productions that, overall, are quite good — that was the subject of my previous post. This weakens us, … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-05-26

Speaking of Politics: ‘A Study in Depravity’
Pamphleteering in England goes back nearly 300 years, represented most famously by such 18th-century polemecists as Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, and in America by the British-born Thomas Paine. Even the poet John Milton was … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-05-26

An Analytical Cornucopia, Wanted or Not
Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least seventeen keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but two of them … read more
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2016-05-26

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