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we need to pause to consider how much trust we want to place in robots, how human we want them to be, and when we ought to turn them off.
The piece mapped out how our acceptance and empathy with inanimate objects – from stuffed animals to puppets to industrial robots – increases as their appearance becomes more human-like.
A team of researchers in the United States designed a study to determine whether more people would trust a self-driving car if it had anthropomorphic features.
‘Technology advances blur the line between human and non-human,’
blurring this line even further could increase users’ willingness to trust technology in place of humans.’
We have a tendency to anthropomorphize technology because people are inclined to trust other things that look and sound like them.
We will need to understand how it makes decisions and how robust its decision-making process really is.’
The machine tells the doctor, ‘There’s a 90 per cent chance this patient has liver cancer.’ It is critical the doctors know the degree of certainty, how sure the machine is, and what it is basing its decisions on. ‘Can a system tell us, “I haven’t seen these cases before, so I am not really sure?” ’ asks Cave. ‘It needs to be able to describe its thinking process to us if we are to trust its decision-making process.’
The Andersons realized that to develop ethical robots, they first had to map out how humans make ethical decisions.
utilitarianism. That ethical theory states that the best action is one that maximizes human well-being (which the philosophers call ‘utility’ – hence the name).
‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,’
What happens when, say, an elderly patient is in pain, shouting at Nao to give her medication that has not been prescribed? What happens when Nao can’t get hold of the doctor or a nurse? The rules set by the Andersons don’t work for these scenarios because they are set within a very narrow set of boundaries.
‘It requires the robot not only to consider action outcomes by themselves but also to contemplate the intentions of the humans giving the instructions.’
‘We need systems that communicate to us their limits, but the other half of that relationship is we need to be ready to hear that,’
‘We will need to develop a very sophisticated sense of exactly what role this machine is fulfilling and where its abilities end, where we humans have to take over.’ This will be extremely challenging because our natural tendency is to become over-reliant on machines.
Money can be anything – paper, coins, shells, beads or stone – as long as people have faith in its value.
the Yapese could store value, pay for things and have a unit of account – the three primary functions of money.
is estimated that 70 per cent of the transactions on the bitcoin network are going through just four Chinese companies, mining powerhouses.
A distributed public ledger offers the possibility of a reliable record for any asset transfer – whether it’s currencies, a contract, stock, equity or bond, deeds, property title, the rights of a song, even your identity.
It’s why the blockchain is likely to disrupt industries like law, banking, real estate, media and intellectual property – industries that typically involve layers of complex processes and lots of ‘middlemen’ to handle matters of trust.
about 1,400 transactions per block, that is processed and added to the blockchain roughly every ten minutes.
Visa handles more than 1,700 transactions per second in America alone.
The first bucket is based on being able to transfer any kind of asset – from shares to concert tickets – in a fast and transparent way on the blockchain. For example, Colu, a Tel Aviv-based start-up founded in 2014, has developed a mechanism to inject every bitcoin with a ‘dye’ that adds extra data to transactions.
The second bucket of applications uses the blockchain to track the supply chain of products,
people pay $200 billion a year for drugs, from Viagra to diet pills to flu medicine, that are not what they say they are.
Instead, smart contracts are written in code, with preprogrammed clauses that automatically execute themselves following a set of instructions that work on a principle of ‘If this happens, then do this. If that happens, then do that
If certain people can reverse transactions, doesn’t that mean they, not code, are in charge of the system? And if you bend or change the rules once, what happens next time it fails or doesn’t suit you? It’s rather like the government
The fundamental change occurred in 2014 when the bitcoin network released something called an op return function,’ she says. ‘Basically, it enables you to trade a coin and to hash on to the coin a piece of data.
Some £45 billion is lost annually in the United States and Europe on insurance fraud alone, and an estimated 65 per cent of fraudulent claims go undetected.
the Dubai government announced its ambitious plans to go paperless and move all documents on to the blockchain by 2020.
what if the risk of the loans could be sold?
A bank assesses the credit score of an individual or business and decides whether to lend money. The blockchain could become the source to check the creditworthiness of any potential borrower, thereby facilitating more and more peer-to-peer financing.
Goldman Sachs has recently filed a patent for its own cryptocurrency, its own version of bitcoin, called SETLcoin which processes foreign-exchange transactions.
‘Free markets can succeed for all if business works with the people, not just sells to them,’
We want power handed back to the people, but what if it’s handed to the wrong people? Or only some of the people? Or, worse still, only a few of the wrong people?
