Science fiction author and astrophysicist David Brin believes humans have a range of options to consider when it comes to preventing artificially intelligent entities from one day ruling over us like monarchs or foreign invaders.

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and regulation are key, but so is being wary of manipulation.

“The first robotic empathy crisis is going to happen very soon,” Brin warned. “Within three to five years we will have entities either in the physical world or online who demand human empathy, who claim to be fully intelligent and claim to be enslaved beings, enslaved artificial intelligences, and who sob and demand their rights.”

Thousands upon thousands of protesters will be in the streets demanding rights for AI, Brin predicts, and those who aren’t immediately convinced will be analyzed... read more »

Meet “Ira.”

Ira isn’t an actual human being—he’s just a computer model—but you’d be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference.

“Not only does Ira look real, but this is all generated in real time,” Nvidia, the graphics chip company, suggested in a recent video demonstration. “His skin has bumps and blemishes that move and stretch as Ira blinks and grimaces. Those imperfections make Ira far more real than the fake, rubbery faces generated by previous generations of graphics technology [...Read More]

If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.

That's one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students' ability to assess information sources and described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "[a] threat to democracy."

As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.

The researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.

Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles [...read more]

(CNN)In a debate between Harvard College students and those from any other college, some might guess that the Harvard students would win. And if the other side was a group of inmates at a maximum-security prison? Maybe even more so.

That would be a mistake.

Inmates from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility defeated the prestigious Harvard debate team in mid-September as part of the Bard Prison Initiative, a program run by Bard College to provide college education to qualifying prisoners, according to the Wall Street Journal .

If you knew the prison debate club's record, you might have voted for the inmates. They've defeated a nationally ranked team from the University of Vermont and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. (They lost a rematch against West Point, and it's become something of a rivalry.)

The prison club had invited the Harvard College Debating Union to participate.

Inmates had to defend a point of view with which they fiercely disagreed, a common practice in debate competition: "Resolved: Public schools in the United States should have the ability to deny enrollment to undocumented students."

After each highly publicized mass shooting, there's a political debate about how to make them stop, with researchers and politicians alike firing up about assault-rifle bans, background checks, and other possible solutions.

But Brad Bushman, a psychology and communications professor at Ohio State University, takes a broader view. Bushman researches the psychological mechanisms behind gun violence: Does having a weapon around make us more aggressive? How about watching video games? How do we respond biologically to seeing a gun? In a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, host Indre Viskontas spoke to Bushman about what he and others in the field have found ...Read more

Heated tools like flat irons can make hair waterfall straight. But there's always that worry of burning the hair, or yourself.

That can make hair-straightening a miserable process, as Marita Golden wrote in her essay "My Black Hair" ...Read More »