KMO welcomes Michael Anissimov, media director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and keeper of the Accelerating Future blog to the C-Realm to dispel some wholly-headed notions about robots, artificial intelligence, and the possible consequences of their emergence from the space of possibilities into the world of our visceral experience. Topics include the uncomfortable similarity of Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns to Terence McKenna's Time Wave Zero, the very contingent nature of human morality, and the need to build "friendliness" into our Mind Children to prevent them from morphing into our Vile Offspring.

Music by Yon

In his "Long Crisis" timeline, Jamais Cascio predicts:

2023: China demands U.S. repay debts; U.S. defaults; U.S.-China "Cold Shoulder" period begins
India, Pakistan exchange gunfire
India first to use fully autonomous military robots in warfare

Is that a realistic time frame? According to this piece by Noel Sharkey, we seem to be on target:

The deployment of the first armed battlefield robots in Iraq is the latest step on a dangerous path - we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill. Already, South Korea and Israel are deploying armed robot border guards and China, Singapore and the UK are among those making increasing use of military robots. The biggest player yet is the US: robots are integral to its $230bn future combat systems project, a massive plan to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, under the sea and on land. Congress has set a goal of having one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Over 4,000 robots are serving in Iraq at present, others in Afghanistan. And now they are armed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/18/comment.military

KMO welcomes Lane Adamson, editor of Robots Beyond, an anthology of unusual robot stories, to the C-Realm Podcast. Using Lane’s robot story patterned after The Grapes of Wrath as a backdrop, they examine the themes of robot religion and possible robot revolution as well as the role of the robot in popular culture and how the development of artificial intelligence might play out counter to our media-induced expectations.




Music by Indole Ring

The first mp3 that I uploaded to PodOMatic was corrupted somehow. I uploaded a slightly re-edited version on Thursday afternoon.

Podcasters, reach a wider audience by uploading samples of your material to Vocalo.org.