Memories From The Future

Watch more than the first 30 seconds, because you’ll think this is clearly a fake until you realize that those camera movements are simply not possible in real life. Later on they show avatars, lightning and embedding of all ther media like pics and movies etc. just with a click on the wall. Dusan Writer asks: What IS this?? UPDATE: Techcrunch: “little is known about LivePlace, other than that the WHOIS lists the domain’s owner as Brad Greenspan, one of the co-founders of MySpace. Note: It appears that in the 20 minutes since Techcrunch spoke to Greenspan about this post, someone was told to take LivePlace down (apparently nobody was supposed to find it).

Plymouth University researchers will build two robots using hardware and software allowing them to interact with humans and each other to exchange learned information like humans. They are equipped with cameras, speakers,  microphones and tracking devices in order to learn about nonverbal communication (gestures, pointing) and the meaning of words just like childrens would. The goal of the project is to teach concepts to robots including the meaning of words and enable them later to teach each other. The robots will then use the Internet as a medium to interact and are no longer limited by the slow real world to do “show and tell” teaching. Nice!

While I am all in favor of the studies showing the value of not overthinking a decision (because your brain knows better), I can’t subscribe to the “humans don’t have a free will” conclusion. The thesis that humans may don’t have a free will seems to engage people continiously to date. I am not a neuroscientist (although I studied Psychology for a time) and this might be a very stupid statement but I am going to make it anyway: whenever I read about the experiment which showed that our brain knows about 10 seconds before we consciously know what we are going to decide (and thus concluding that we don’t really have a free will), I think the subjects just thought that was the moment they claimed it was (when they chose to push a button). They just didn’t recall it correctly because it wasn’t conscious. The brain did (no surprise here, nothing “eerie” about it). Which is why I trust my gut (=brain) whenever making complex decisions after looking at the facts but I don’t trust anybody who thinks that his brain imaging technique and push-button experiments tell us anything about free will. Then again, I have a pretty good relationship with my brain since it’s me.