Kalman Filter — an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, containing statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimates of unknown variables that tend to be more precise than those based on a single measurement alone.
Interview with Bruce Sterling — Singapore is like a science fictional society without the fiction. Dubai is like a science fictional society without the science. […] Robots just don’t want to live. They’re inventions, not creatures; they don’t have any appetites or enthusiasms. I don’t think they’d maintain themselves very long without our relentlessly pushing them uphill against their own lifeless entropy. They’re just not entities in the same sense that we are entities; they don’t have much skin in our game. They don’t care and they can’t be bothered. We don’t yet understand how and why we ourselves care and bother, so we’d be hard put to install that capacity inside our robot vacuum cleaners.
Japan’s Robot Revolution — Fugitt said Japan’s weakness was in application and deployment of its advanced technologies. “The Japanese expect other countries and people to appreciate their technology, but they’re inwardly focused. If it doesn’t make sense to them, they typically don’t do it,” he said, citing the example of Japanese advanced wheelchairs having 100 kilogram weight limits. […] South Korea could be a threat [to Japan’s lead in robotics] if the chaebol opened up [and shared technologies], but I don’t see it happening. The U.S. will come in and disrupt things; they’ll cause chaos in a particular market and then run away.
A World Without Work (The Atlantic) — In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “If men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.” […] Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated. Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5% of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications.
