Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Signs of a Future Robot Takeover

This is the Taranis, a stealthy drone aircraft from British Aerospace with intercontinental range and an "autonomous artificial intelligence system." You can tell just by looking at the thing that it is a threat to continued human rule of the planet. And consider the name: Taranis was a "merciless" Celtic god of thunder who was propitiated with human sacrifices. "At his altars they tremble," wrote the Roman poet Lucan. He was probably one of the gods for whom captives were burned in wicker cages.

Very bad omens. Very bad.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035233/interview-with-a-robot.html?ex=1294200000&en=2eb7abb3c9442dff&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=VI-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M157-ROS-0710-PH&WT.mc_ev=click

(I don't know how to put a clickable link in a comment, but if you copy and paste this url into your browser, it's definitely worth it.)

Unknown said...

The point of the above is that robots may not be quite ready to take over yet, but somehow my witty introduction got lost when I posted this. I confess I'm still quite clumsy with this interface.

Perhaps we should conclude that humans aren't in control either.

John said...

When you can operate intercontinental bombers, who needs to give interviews?