SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ars Technica has a longer piece on how to build automated systems:
Depictions of the future in books and film are usually influenced by what's going on at the time, reflecting social malaise, impending armageddon, or economic anxieties. The robots in classic sci-fi usually resembled humans, as most authors assumed they would eventually assist us in the same tasks humans did.
Instead, however, today we find artificial intelligence doing some of our thinking for us, but it's more often solving problems that don't need intervention from self-contained humanoid robots. The promise of autonomous robots that matched our abilities has given way to a more specific focus on tasks that are fulfilled by armies of smaller bots controlled by machine learning and algorithms running in the cloud. Their scope is more complex, but a lot less dramatic than, say, Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot, or the replicants from Blade Runner.
Not so long ago Ars Technica looked at the uses of robotics in retail and the range of different approaches, from wheeling shelves around giant Amazon warehouses, to Domino's forthcoming airborne pizza drones. The response to that story was very positive, so we decided that we would follow up with another piece that dives even deeper into the world of automation. The first story focused on what is being done with automation; now we're going to look at how you build an automated system.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 17 2017, @11:15PM
There is an easy way to build a Skynet without having to have all those expensive buildings and well-educated white-collar employees.
Get a community college computer lab and pay Black Lives Matter and those who sympathize with them to sit down at a terminal and chat with ELIZA for a couple hours. Pay them 5 bucks each and tell them its an experiment in social justice, and that they are communicating directly with social justice activists throughout the world who are curious. Pipe the outputs from their chats into a database, apply machine-learning to that database.
Upload that machine-learning into all robots, and bam! You have your flaming cities and civilized humans running for cover! Hah, puny humans.
The Irony of all this is that, in the Terminator movie, the guy who got the ball rolling on Skynet was a Black man.