Pew: Drones, eugenics worry public

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A majority of Americans believe that future changes in technology will generally improve people's lives. But a survey of 1,001 adults by the Pew Research Center also found lots of public anxiety about the rise of personal drones, genetically altering children, and the idea of relying on robots to care for the elderly.

Pew partnered with the Smithsonian magazine on the survey, which asked people to speculate on how science and technology might evolve, and how they would feel about specific changes, ranging from the creation of customized human organs to driver-less cars and manned space colonies.

Almost 60 percent of those surveyed said that the advance of technology will "mostly better" people's lives. But the overall tone of people's thoughts was one of caution and concern.

The Pew survey says:

At the moment, there also isn't a lot of love for driver-less cars, a technology that has been maturing quickly. Half of the respondents said that they would not take a ride in such a vehicle. Pew adds that 72 percent of those surveyed would undergo a brain implant to improve their memory and mental capacity and 78 percent wouldn't eat meat grown in a lab.

NASA engineers have explored the idea of manned space colonies.

The survey further found that 64 percent of the public doesn't believe that manned space colonies will be developed over the next half century, and 77 percent said that humans will not develop the ability to control the weather.

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Pew: Drones, eugenics worry public

Open-source "intelligent" beehives developed to tackle Colony Collapse Disorder

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Bee colonies are in decline worldwide. As Gizmag reported previously, this is a growing problem, and a number of theories and solutions are being explored. A team of eco-technologists from Europe and the US has come together to engineer a collaborative response to the problem, an open-source hive that can help house, track and understand the cycles movements of these vital members of the eco-system.

The open-source beehive project was launched on Indiegogo last month and has managed to generate more than twice its original funding goal.

Backers can opt to download the plans to create two different styles of hives via CNC fabrication (the different hive models can be "printed" using a single standard sheet of plywood in about 30 minutes), or choose a pre-fabricated flat-pack hive.

Assuming all goes without a hitch, delivery is estimated to start as early as this month. Once assembled, the open-source beehive is meant to provide a "low-stress environment that allows bees to thrive."

Despite its relatively simple design, this "intelligent" beehive also includes sensors that track the temperature, humidity, movements and even the mood of the bees. The information will be used to assess the health and behavior of the colony. As it is collected, the data can be streamed via an open-source sensory kit, called the Smart Citizen kit, to an online open-data platform, which also tracks geo-location. In areas where no Wi-Fi is available, this information for individual hives can also be stored on an SD card and transmitted at a later date.

The team behind the open-source beehive includes members from FabLab Brussels, FabLab Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris and participants from Denver, Colorado. It is hoped that by encouraging the public to download and erect these bee-friendly hives and by feeding the information to the open-data platform, a recovery in bee colonies can be encouraged and some of the questions around declining populations can start to be answered. The makers contrast their small, low-stress hives with large industrial farms that have been created to maximize crop production for commercial sale.

The two models available for download are a Top-Bar hive and another based on the Warr hive. The Warr is also called "the peoples hive" and its simple design is made up of a vertical stack of modules that can be added to as the bee population increases. The open-source team adapted the classic Warr model for simple CNC prefabrication using Rhino software. The Warr hive allows for the addition of units from the bottom, rather than at the top, with a maximum of five units per hive.

Honeybees are essential to food production through pollination of crops. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a condition in which all or most of the adult bees in a hive die inexplicably. It 's estimated that the US lost 31 percent of its bee population last year due to CCD, and other countries report similar statistics. Solving the mystery of CCD is key to protecting and maintaining food sources.

For the people behind the Open Source Beehive project, it is also about protecting the bees themselves. "Imagine a global network of hives all feeding into an open-source database of insights into honeybee health," says team member Jonathan Minchin. "We could be generating valuable crowd-sourced data to influence policy change. Its really quite exciting."

The video below shows the CNC fabrication of an open-source top-bar hive, carried out to Rimsky-Korsakovs classic bee-inspired composition.

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Open-source "intelligent" beehives developed to tackle Colony Collapse Disorder

Cyborg glasses let you fake a good mood

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Hirotaka Osawa wearing AgencyGlass. Screenshot by CNET

What happens when you have a job where you have to constantly look happy even when you're not? Nurses, doctors, teachers, retail salespeople, waiters, baristas, flight attendants, and others in the service industry can't afford to appear angry or annoyed when serving the public.

Cyborg technology has ensured our ability to improve both physical labor with robotics and brain labor with computers, so why not emotional labor -- in which politeness toward the public is just as important as the task itself.

Hirotaka Osawa, from Tsukuba University in Japan, wants to ensure that we all look friendly and approachable with his emotional labor-saving device -- AgencyGlass.

"I developed a robotic device called AgencyGlass to extend our social skills and to decrease our emotional labor," Osawa explained in his video "Wearable Eyes Turn You Into Emotional Cyborg."

What looks like a high-tech version of googly-eye glasses is actually a wearable device that displays digital eyeballs on lenses that follow people around the room and gives the user an appearance of politeness.

AgencyGlass has quite a few animated options. The digital eyeballs blink when nodding your head. Tilt your head back, and the eyeballs look up to simulate a thoughtful expression. The device is run by a microcomputer with Bluetooth, a microphone, gyrometer, accelerometer, a battery, and OLED displays.

An external camera, which can be worn in a shirt pocket, detects people looking at you as they walk by so your digital eyes can respond accordingly, giving the illusion that you're returning their gaze.

Dark lenses in the AgencyGlass hide the users' real eyes but don't obstruct their normal vision, so they can go about their normal activities such as reading and walking. More importantly, they can sneak in a quick nap while attending meetings.

Whether or not your co-workers, bosses, and customers will take the device seriously has yet to be determined. But if people can gladly turn into Google Glassholes, why not wear something that makes us look like we care what others have to say?

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Cyborg glasses let you fake a good mood

Hilarious Artificial Intelligence Rant (From Joe Rogan Experience #487 – David Seaman) – Video

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Hilarious Artificial Intelligence Rant (From Joe Rogan Experience #487 - David Seaman)
Joe creates a fucked up, insightful and hilarious scenario regarding artificial intelligence with David Seaman and Brian Redban. Joe Rogan Experience episode...

By: Keifer Adkins

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Hilarious Artificial Intelligence Rant (From Joe Rogan Experience #487 - David Seaman) - Video

Our 10 Favorite Killer A.I.s in Movies

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There was a time when the notion of a computer capable of not just running programs, but modeling human intelligence was purely a feature of outlandish science fiction. But recent years have shown that an artificial intelligence isnt just a figment of sci-fi imagination, but to many, an inevitable discovery. Its even the main subject (and threat) of the Johnny Depp-led Transcendence.

Whether its skepticism, fear, or simply the need for villains that has turned the notion of A.I. into a great and terrible thing, blockbuster films have relied on the idea of an inhuman, unfeeling, artificial brain for their conflicts. The trend of killer movie A.I.s doesnt show any signs of stopping, so weve decided to narrow the roster down to a list of our favorites. It should go without saying thatspoilers lie ahead.

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Now that were all on the same page, read on for our list:

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D.J. Carusos Eagle Eye begins with a common enough premise: what seems like a massive frame-job and conspiracy surrounding Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) takes a twist when hes contacted by a mysterious woman (the uncredited voice of Julianne Moore) offering him a way out. The woman is soon revealed to be a government-created supercomputer, dubbed the Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst ARIIA for short. Using autonomous aircraft, automated traffic and surveillance systems across the United States, ARIIA moves her pawns human and otherwise into place for a truly sinister attack.

ARIIAs desire to eliminate the President of the United States and the rest of the Executive branch is par for the course in political thrillers, but her justification for the attack under the Constitution and Patriot Act are something new. The filmmakers werent going for any meaningful political statement, but its a nice change from the usual kill humans justification.

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Our 10 Favorite Killer A.I.s in Movies

Review: 'Transcendence' rises above the sci-fi genre

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Though its plot and premise are pure science fiction, "Transcendence" goes pleasingly against the genre grain.

A story of the possible perils and pleasures of artificial intelligence that stars Johnny Depp, "Transcendence's" ideas are at least as involving as its images, if not more so. And as written by Jack Paglen and directed by Wally Pfister, this film is intent on not limiting itself to simplistic questions of pure good and evil.

As "Transcendence's" narrative of the battle between pro and anti-technology forces unfolds, justice is done to the complicated factors at play here. Determining with certainty whom the heroes and villains of this narrative are is not so easily done.

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Though Pfister is well-known as Christopher Nolan's longtime cinematographer (nominated for four Oscars, a winner for "Inception"), both he and screenwriter Paglen are first-timers in their respective chairs, and there are times when that shows. "Transcendence's" exposition is not always sharp, emotional connections (with the exception of Depp's outstanding costar, Rebecca Hall) are not its strength, and it does not make memorable use of its Imax format.

But because the underlying ideas are involving, those problems fade from view, leaving us with an ambitious and provocative piece of work that is intriguingly balanced between being a warning and a celebration.

Certainly the boon-or-bane question of artificial intelligence has been a movie staple at least since the days of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's "2001." (In fact, a purely negative example of some of this film's ideas appears in the current "Captain America: Winter Soldier.")

"Transcendence" begins in the near future, maybe as close as tomorrow. Narrator Max Waters (an excellent Paul Bettany) walks through the streets of a Berkeley patrolled by armed soldiers. The city - and every other city, we soon learn is in the grip of some kind of worldwide power blackout.

Max walks to a classic wood shingle Berkeley house, now in ruins but once the home of Dr. Will Caster (Depp) and his wife, Evelyn (Hall). Max knew them better than anyone, he says, and he is prepared to vouch for the fact that they wanted nothing but the best for humanity.

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Review: 'Transcendence' rises above the sci-fi genre

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Transcendence'

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There is a tradition of excellent cinematic explorations of artificial intelligence from Alphaville to 2001 to The Matrix. However, Transcendence belongs to that subgenre of usually terrible films about the Internet.

Johnny Depp plays Will Caster, a computer scientist who is on the verge of a series of breakthroughs that would permit sentient brain functions to be uploaded into a computer, creating a human form of artificial intelligence. Hes a bit of a self-parody purporting to be publicity shy, but posing for a Wired magazine cover that he repeatedly is called upon to autograph.

His work has drawn the attention of a neo-Luddite terrorist network who believe that true artificial intelligence will make human civilization obsolete or even subservient to computer overlords.

Will is shot at point-blank range in a coordinated terrorist attack. However, thanks to some shockingly poor marksmanship, Will is only grazed in the assault.

But it turns out that the shooter has hedged against this possibility with the use of a polonium-laced bullet, and a wasting radiation sickness soon follows. Will has a few months, therefore, to lay the groundwork necessary to upload his consciousness with the help of his devoted wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his best friend and colleague Max (Paul Bettany).

Once Will is uploaded and online, he moves quickly to squeeze money out of the stock market to provide Evelyn with funds to build a remote, solar-powered cloud computing facility deep in the desert badlands of the American West.

He lords over his creation as a ubiquitous and unsleeping image, projected like Big Brother onto thousands of high-definition monitors.

There, freed from almost all restraint, Wills intelligence expands to create computerized tools to take over and network human minds, repair bodies with nanotechnology, and even grow human tissue from scratch. Some mad scientists reanimate brains, others reformat them its just a question of technology.

Word leaks out about the restorative powers of Wills researches, and his underground lair becomes a kind of Lourdes for pilgrims seeking his healing touch. (The religious overtones are kind of tacked on, but unmistakable.)

At the same time, he also draws the attention of the authorities, including Joseph Tagger, a government scientist played by Morgan Freeman. Tagger takes charge of a surprisingly low-key effort to take down the looming global threat posed by Wills computer incarnation.

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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Transcendence'