Chronicling Robots Since 2011
The brain is an electric organ, and its 86 billion neurons communicate via pulses of electricity. When a voltage change causes one neuron to “fire,” it releases chemicals that trigger voltage changes in connected neurons. The brain’s every operation, from automatic functions like maintaining a heartbeat to cognitive processes such as making sense of these words … Read more
This past Monday, I accompanied my 18-year-old daughter to her road test. While there, I began reflecting on the amount of emphasis we put on developing good judgement. It struck me that, as we transition into an autonomous driving future, we need to question what we are doing to prepare our machines, and ourselves, for this inevitability. To determine the best … Read more
On March 28, 1931, a small subsidiary of Boeing, United Air Lines, announced that it completed the first transcontinental passenger flight in 27 hours. This ushered in the golden age of commercial American aviation, which lasted over 40 years. Autonomous aviation was birthed in 1849 by an Austrian attack on Italy with unmanned explosive-ladened balloons. Today’s drones are born from … Read more
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” rings as a warning to mankind when we yield too much power to machines. HAL, the tyrannical computer in Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was cleverly a one letter shift from I.B.M. Recently released letters from Kubrick reveal his fear of the computing giant… Fast forward fifty years, … Read more