A human brain has 10,000,000,000 cells so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human. If the human population is 6,760,000,000 (2009) and the ant population is 1 quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1999). If my mathematics is correct the brain cell count of the ant population is nearly 4 times that…
The latest issue of Philosophy Now features a collection of articles on “machine morality”. The Challenge of Moral Machines Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are. Four Kinds of Ethical Robots James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral. How Machines Can Advance Ethics Susan Leigh Anderson and…
This hot off the press. Jerry Fodor, you may recall, reviewed Andy Clark’s latest work Supersizing the Mind in the London Review of Books. In the latest issue, Clark uses the Letters section to respond. As this is a general link I paste in Clark’s letter below. Letters Vol. 31 No. 6 · Cover…
Ray Kurzweil’s article from last year’s Scientific American special on robotics is reprinted again here.
Here is a nice collection of HD photographs of a plethora of robots from Boston.com. The diversity of uses is astonishing – from the banal to the exotic – they are ubiquitous. But let’s not get carried away and talk of consciousness.
Ron Chrisley has just been sent me a link to an article that features excerpts of an interview with him in the Australian science magazine Cosmos. The article “Dawn of the Robots” offers a nice overview of the conceptual problems faced by robotics and the state of the art – all wrapped up in the…
Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making. There’s an article in the Economist entitled “Decisions, decisions: What people can learn from how social…
I came across this pretty impressive video of Boston Dynamics’ BigDog robot. Click on image below to view.
If you’ve ever heard the term “extended mind” and thought it denoted some sort of hocus pocus, then this recording will set you straight. Zoe Drayson of Bristol University has recorded a superb overview of the notion and the ethical implications arising from it. Zoe’s motivation for coming to this multidisciplinary literature had resonance for…
manwithoutqualities 