Robots zijn de nieuwe angstgegner. Zullen zij mensen – de meerderheid er van althans – overbodig maken?

Er zijn diverse redenen er in ieder geval niet gerust op te zijn. Zoals in het geval van de heer Mark Zuckerberg, di zijn klantjes beschouwt als ‘suckers’.

 

Het plaatje zal apocrief zijn, de uitspraak is dat niet. Mark Zuckerberg is in ieder geval niet te vertrouwen:

Mark Zuckerberg and his paediatrician wife Priscilla Chan have sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a goal of curing all disease within a generation.

A less publicised component of that US$5 billion programme includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands. One recent project is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate and disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time. –Business Insider

Nou, daar sta je dan met je tablet en je FB-account:

“Our device is able to monitor the primate’s brain while it’s providing the therapy so you know exactly what’s happening,” said study co-author Rikky Muller – a professor of computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley, and a Biohub investigator.

The applications of brain-machine interfaces are far-reaching: while some researchers focus on using them to help assist people with spinal cord injuries or other illnesses that affect movement, others aim to see them transform how everyone interacts with laptops and smartphones. Both a division at Facebook formerly called Building 8 as well as an Elon Musk-founded company called Neuralink have said they are working on the latter.

Muller said her research at the Biohub is walled off from the other work on brain-computer interfaces being done at Facebook. –Business Insider

Maar wees gerust, het is alleen maar om u te helpen:

“I believe this device opens up possibilities for new types of treatments,” said Muller, whose work on the brain-machine interface is just one part of a larger set of projects under the CZ Biohub program.

Biohub co-president Joe DeRisi said the goal of the initiative is to help bolster the research being conducted by local scientists, and “push boundaries” when it comes to building important medical devices which would not otherwise exist.

“We want people to do the thing that’s crazy, the thing that other people wouldn’t try,” says DeRisi.

Have they tried giving monkeys instant, remote control erections?

Maar als het gaat over robotisering is er meer om u zorgen over te maken:

How much of the internet and digital environment many now live their lives entirely engulfed in is completely fake? A disturbing report in New York Magazine lays out some key facts, beginning with the following astounding trend:

For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Als robots het werk doen voor die paar gelukkigen die hun eigenaren zijn, bent u echt niet langer nodig. Nergens voor. Natuurlijk zullen politici hopen als laatste door deze krokodil te worden verslonden. Maar in hoeverre u die vertrouwen kunt weet u al een paar jaar.