12,569 research outputs found
AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs
This report is the latest in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center's Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (The Web at 25).The report covers experts' views about advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and their impact on jobs and employment
Human-agent collectives
We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. Peopleâs activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented
Code, space and everyday life
In this paper we examine the role of code (software) in the spatial formation of
collective life. Taking the view that human life and coded technology are folded into
one another, we theorise space as ontogenesis. Space, we posit, is constantly being
bought into being through a process of transduction â the constant making anew of a
domain in reiterative and transformative practices - as an incomplete solution to a
relational problem. The relational problem we examine is the ongoing encounter
between individuals and environment where the solution, to a greater or lesser extent,
is code. Code, we posit, is diversely embedded in collectives as coded objects, coded
infrastructure, coded processes and coded assemblages. These objects, infrastructure,
processes and assemblages possess technicity, that is, unfolding or evolutive power to
make things happen; the ability to mediate, supplement, augment, monitor, regulate,
operate, facilitate, produce collective life. We contend that when the technicity of
code is operationalised it transduces one of three forms of hybrid spatial formations:
code/space, coded space and backgrounded coded space. These formations are
contingent, relational, extensible and scaleless, often stretched out across networks of
greater or shorter length. We demonstrate the coded transduction of space through
three vignettes â each a day in the life of three people living in London, UK, tracing
the technical mediation of their interactions, transactions and mobilities. We then
discuss how code becomes the relational solution to five different classes of problems
â domestic living, travelling, working, communicating, and consuming
Towards virtual communities on the Web: Actors and audience
We report about ongoing research in a virtual
reality environment where visitors can interact with
agents that help them to obtain information, to perform
certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order
to get some tasks done. Our environment models a
theatre in our hometown. We discuss attempts to let this
environment evolve into a theatre community where we
do not only have goal-directed visitors, but also visitors
that that are not sure whether they want to buy or just
want information or visitors who just want to look
around. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multiagent
environment to realize our goals. Since our environment
models a theatre it is also interesting to investigate
the roles of performers and audience in this environment.
For that reason we discuss capabilities and personalities of agents. Some notes on the historical development of networked communities are included
City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things
Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a
significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart
city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from
diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten
different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework.
We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our
sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different
sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The
major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed
Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201
Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism
Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropoceneâof which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recentâour epoch has transfixed the ânatural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become âanoetic,â made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuzeâs description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stieglerâs framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms âdeep digitality.â Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualizationâwhich I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrializationâthe drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total dataficationâs laminated process of âbecoming-mnemotechnical,â and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the âcybernetic brain.â Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinkingâs gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)
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