Day: March 10, 2011

Posted in Articles and Links

During Climate Hearing, Markey Asks If Anti-Science GOP Will Repeal

Posted on by Marjorie Kaye Noble

Gravity, Heliocentrism, Relativity

With sardonic humor, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) mocked today’s markup of legislation to overturn the scientific finding that fossil fuel pollution is causing dangerous climate change. Markey, who championed climate legislation that passed the House of Representatives in 2009, protested the energy subcommittee’s consideration of the Upton-Inhofe bill to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on climate pollution, including its endangerment finding:

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Watch it:

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/10/markey-flat-earthers/

Posted in Articles and Links

Love and Sex with Robots: The Next Step of the Relationship between Man and Machine?

Posted on by Marjorie Kaye Noble

Back in 2007, computer chess programming guru David Levy wrote a provocative book about robot–human relations entitled Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. In it he made a number of bold predictions regarding future relations between humans and machines, the most surprising of which being that we would fall in love with robots.

Fast forward 4 years (and almost 3 Moore’s Law cycles) and it seems as though his predictions are no nearer coming true than they were when he made them. David Hanson’s skin has gotten more realistic and more people know about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s real looking androids, but many important developments stand in the way of our considering robots something we could one day fall in love with.

So what’s standing in the way of our moving more quickly toward robots as companions?

In an interview with Levy earlier this year, Dr. Kim Solez inquires into what obstacles there are in creating the robots envisioned in Love and Sex with Robots.

Perhaps surprising, Levy doesn’t think there are any real psychological obstacles in the way of our making robots our romantic companions. In fact, he thinks, “It’s almost entirely a question of investment.”

He explains:

“Up until now, most of the interest in robot-human relations has come from Japan and it’s well known that the Japanese government is facing a massive social problem in coming decades because of the percentage of its population that will at an age where they will need a lot of care and there simply won’t be enough people to provide that care.  And so the Japanese governments decided some years ago that the answer lay in developing robots, ‘carer robots’ to look after the elderly. I think that this is the main effort in the world in this direction and I’m sure that it will come to fruition because the problem faced by the Japanese government certainly won’t go away and their desire to implement the solution is really firm.”

For the rest of the article, here’s the link:

http://singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com/love-and-sex-with-robots-the-next-step-of-the-relationship-between-man-and-machine/