This post originally appeared on the University of Cambridge ‘s Research News site: Researchers have observed the process of evolution by natural selection at work in robots, by constructing a ‘mother’ robot that can design, build and test its own ‘children’, and then use the results to improve the performance of the next generation, without […]
Archives for August 2015
The Robo Brain Project
The Robo Brain Project is a multi-university, open-source project to create a massive online knowledge-base which robots around the world can connect to in order to share what they have learned with each other — a kind of Wikipedia for robots. Ashutosh Saxena of Cornell University is the project lead. In this video he explains the […]
Machine Shop Economics: Part 2
In this post we’ll follow our aspiring capitalist, Mr. C, as he sets out to hire employees for his new machine shop. Our goal is to learn something of the true nature of the capitalist relations of production. According to modern economic theory Mr. C is going to have to pay his employees the going […]
China’s New Five-Year Plan: A $154 Billion Rise of the Robots
China’s Pearl River Delta (PDR), the largest urban area in the world in both size and population, has been called the “factory to the world.” (Link to an economic profile here). It is a megapolis linking nine major cities into one huge economic region. In 2013 it accounted for nearly 10% of China’s entire GDP, and employed […]
AAAI’s Twenty-Ninth Conference on Artificial Intelligence
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its twenty-ninth conference in January 2015 in Austin, Texas. Sponsors of this event included Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yahoo, Baidu, and Infosys, among others. The purpose of the conference was to “promote research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers […]
Machine Shop Economics: Part 1
I’ve worked in machine shops for most of my life so it’s natural that I would think of a machine shop as a simple model for understanding the inner workings of a capitalist economy. This model also lends itself well to an exposition of the role of technology in transforming our relations of production, and gives the lie […]