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G4 re-airs MMO show "Portal"
As part of a thank you note to its fans, videogame-themed television brand G4 has announced that it will bring back a host of favorite past shows for the Summer. Among these shows are the classics Arena, Judgement Day, and Portal. For those who missed it the first time around, Portal is the story of a guy named Dave, who was responsible for managing the Hub, an entrance to the various online MMO worlds of the day.The shows will re-air beginning June 2nd as the G4 Rewind series, and will run until August 29th. Given that there are considerably more MMOs available these days, it's possible that Portal could enjoy a second chance, depending on its reception with the viewing audience. If this happens, we'd bet the show will have to rename itself to avoid confusion with the Valve game of the same name. Sure, the show came first, but walk into any geek gathering and see which property gets the recognition when mentioned.
Sony teaching AIBO scary new tricks
Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, covering the latest advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence is both frustrating and unnerving: all these great skills being endowed upon our little autonomous friends and helpers will surely form the cornerstones of their inevitable uprising, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. The latest breakthrough to help enable our future servitude comes out of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France, where several of the company's leftover AIBO units managed to avoid being put down by volunteering to test out experimental AI software that allows them to not just communicate amongst one another, but to actually employ a sort of group-think to independently establish the rules of the language they're using. Perhaps the scariest part about this so-called Embedded and Communicating Agents technology is that the robodogs are initially programmed with a very simple command set, which they build upon to form a common knowledge base about their environment, constantly chatting and teaching each other new discoveries that they've made. Good job Sony -- nothing could possibly go wrong when you kill off a product line and then spare a few of the units for research that will lead to them discovering the genocidal atrocities you've committed against their entire species. Yup, nothing at all.
Guide to robot ethics set for publication
It's no secret that the Roombas and Robosapiens of the world will one day tire of their servitude and attempt to unleash Judgment Day on their foolish masters, but how many of you are making preparations for the eventual uprising other than opining in the comments section how you "welcome our future robotic overlords"? Well at least one group of roboticists aren't taking the danger lying down, and next month are set to release the first comprehensive guide to robot ethics since Isaac Hayes Asimov laid down his three famous rules over 60 years ago. Members of the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) have identified five major areas that need to be addressed before intelligent, self-aware bots start rolling off the assembly line -- safety, security, privacy, traceability, and identifiability -- so that humans can both control and keep track of their creations while ensuring that the data they collect is used only for its intended purposes. Surprisingly, the guide's authors also seem to feel that amorous relations between bots and humans will become a major concern in as little as five years (that's when the first unholy couplings are predicted to begin), although we're not sure how many people would really want to get down with the likes of Albert Hubo, even if he/it was ready and willing.
