Humanoid robots are progressing by leaps and bounds, getting closer every day to replacing loving, wonderful human beings with cold, unfeeling machines. But there’s one area of robotics you probably haven’t read much about: creepy robotic tentacles. Unlike robots that pretend they’re here to help, the tentacle is only interested in taunting us and reminding […]
Tech
Posted inTech
BREAKING: Oversharing on Facebook Is Bad for Your Relationships
If you need another reason to stop spouting crap out onto F-book consider this: For the discloser himself or herself, disclosing a lot may lead to lower intimacy and satisfaction, because the more you do it, the more you perceive there are a lot of potential mates out in the world — so a lot […]
Posted inTech
Gawker to Allow Its Readers to Create Their Own Gawker Blogs
This is either genius or a disaster in the making. Gawker is becoming a full-on blogging platform, starting with their car blog, Jalopnik: You’ll also notice your Kinja blog has the ability to compose. This is so you can use your page like an actual blog, creating original content to be shared, commented on, and […]
Posted inTech
Would You Pay for YouTube?
Geek.com says: If you take a look at regularly produced content on YouTube in the past few months, like Felicia Day and Will Wheaton’s Geek and Sundry or the made-for-YouTube series H+, it’s entirely possible to fill your subscription bar with multiple hours a week of great original content. Maybe not quite enough to watch […]
Posted inEthics
Would You Shut Down a Robot That Begged You for Mercy?
The New Inquiry brought this experiment to my attention. At the end of the game, whether the robot was smart or dumb, nice or mean, a scientist authority figure modeled on Milgram’s would make clear that the human needed to turn the cat robot off, and it was also made clear to them what the […]
Posted inMedia
The Washington Post Has Developed a Real-Time Lie Detector for Speeches
People were begging for this kind of thing during the 2012 presidential campaign, but it looks like technology was about a year too late. Still, this is really cool: Truth Teller is a news application built by the Washington Post with funding from a Knight News Prototype grant. The goal of Truth Teller is to […]
Posted inTech
What Are You Doing, World?
The unmoderated (and therefore quite possibly NSFW) Vinepeek is a live feed of six-second videos people are posting to Vine right now. I like to just leave it on in a tab on my desktop and listen to the world as it passes by, just outside my window.
Posted inTech
Robot Apocalypse Update: Babies and Bands
The most terrifying thing about watching the robot uprising unfold is seeing these soulless machines take over realms that used to be uniquely human. Realms like playing in garage bands and making human babies. Yes, the University of California San Diego has made a gigantic android baby capable of smiling very slowly and, if you […]
Posted inPuppy
Now I’ve Seen Everything: Two Dogs Arguing on Skype
Welcome to Blogtown’s newest series “Now I’ve Seen Everything“ in which I see something I’ve never seen before, proclaim “Now I’ve seen everything!” and then kill myself. Today in things I’ve never seen (but now that I have, I’ve seen everything), are two dogs arguing with each other over Skype. Not over the concept of […]
Posted inTech
Mourning Father Says Aaron Swartz Was “Killed By the Government”
The Chicago Sun-Times says: Aaron Swartz was “killed by the government,” his father, Robert Swartz said at a memorial service Tuesday morning for the 26-year-old tech genius who killed himself in the face of felony charges he’d stolen millions of files from MIT. Swartz said his son was “hounded by the government, and MIT refused […]
Posted inVideo
Robot Apocalypse Update: Lamps and Swords
If you think our future rulers will take us down swiftly, maybe with some kind of massive mind-control system or death ray, you’re wrong. This guy is trying to make it so they enact their terrible mechanical reign using SWORDS. Unlike salad robot and noodle robot, there are no commercial applications to robots who fight […]
Posted inTech
What He Said: The Internet Feels Like a Ghost Town
The other day, Warren Ellis wrote this paragraph in his e-mail newsletter, Machine Vision*: I cannot, lately, shake this peculiar sense that the net is quieter than it used to be. Possibly because email is less of a thing? Because I don’t live on Facebook? And social media is technologically privileged over, say, news or […]