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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Ava | ||
| A piece of learning software. |
Anton has an unusual job; he provides input for an endlessly curious artificial intelligence used, as far as he can tell, to make inventories of the most obscure objects imaginable.
| Antar had met children who were like that: Why? What? When? Where? How? But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/Iie systems it was something else - something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. .. She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen… Once she'd wrung the last meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into horizonless limbo of her memory. |
| Technovelgy from The Calcutta Chromosome,
by Amitav Ghosh. Published by Avon Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Many people spend their time as servants to automated machines (like factory workers); how would you feel if asked to be a tutor for machines? Especially given the fact that once you had poured in everything that you knew, that teaching could be duplicated in seconds for as often as it was needed? Every moment you taught, you were bringing yourself closer to obsolescence.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Calcutta Chromosome
More Ideas
and Technology by Amitav Ghosh
Tech news articles related to The Calcutta Chromosome
Tech news articles related to works by Amitav Ghosh
Ava-related
news articles:
- Amazon Mechanical Turk - Humans Help Slow Computers
- Smart Goggles Identify, Remember What You See
- Kinect@home Needs Your Help Identifying Objects
- AI Trainers: Assisting Artificial Intelligences
- SCiO Scanner Wants You To Be Spock
- Venezuelans Teaching Your Self-Driving Car
- AI4Mars Wants Your Help Driving On Mars
| Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo |
| Bespoke Environment Music From AIs |
| Steve Jobs: 'Capture The Next Aristotle - With AI' |
| BMind Smart Mirror from Baracoda |
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Timeline
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'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
