Posts in Future Tech

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Science mag warns: "Could the Net become self-aware?"

Dan Ackerman | May 05, 2009

"Excuse me, is Sarah Conner home?"
(Credit: Lego)

It sounds like an Astroturf campaign for the upcoming computers-gone-bad movie Terminator: Salvation, but in fact New Scientist magazine is being completely serious when it asks if the Internet itself could soon become "self-aware." The article explains:

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the Internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall, and transmit information.

Fortunately for anyone worrying about how to best serve our new robot overlords, the article points out that even if this does come to pass, it won't, "necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans," because consciousness can be described as, "a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources."
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The future of magic: Augmented reality?

Scott Stein | May 04, 2009

Now you see it, now it's augmented.
(Credit: Marco Tempest)

For decades, slightly cheesy sleight-of-hand artists around the world have promised that "you won't believe your eyes!" before demonstrating ageless moves handed down from generation to generation.

Now that an ever-accelerating cascade of eye-popping visual technology such as augmented reality has threatened to steal some of the magic dust from old-fashioned magicians, along comes a pasteboard prestidigitator who folds augmented reality into his own YouTube-ready routine.

Enter Marco Tempest, a renegade cardsharp and AR artist who assembled an open-source, real-time theater of the future for your entertainment, called Augmented Reality Magic 1.0.

Is this, ladies and gentlemen, magic of the future?
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