I Just Can't Seem To Leave Things Alone

Two more news items to blow your mind.

1) Google, whom we all know is the most computer savvy company in the world and whose technical wonder world which also serves as their world headquarters, has announced a new and exciting way to mow their lawns.

Google Mowers

That's right folks, goats. Now everyone knows Google is all about the environment and being green, and using goats to mow should lower their carbon footprint a tad. But I think it's just a cover. Since the machines have starting attacking folks with robots and begun hurling cars at churches (both incidents were covered in previous posts), I think the braintrust over at Google decided to keep the bladed machines as far from their campus as they can. I mean, who hasn't gotten a little drunk and decided to watch Stephen Kings' Maximum Overdrive and shuddered at the thought of what a highly miffed lawnmower could do to a man?

2) Okay, I don't think I want my postings to become another news of the weird sort of thing, but this one is just too bizarre.

It turns out that if you have a cat, you're most likely infected with a mind altering parasite that makes you really like cats. Apparently, nearly half of the people on the globe have the damn thing. I don't want to go on a cat rant or anything, but that freaks me out. Could cats be in cahoots with computers? It sorta makes sense, they both are determined to own the affectations of humanity. Cats through coercion and mind control, and computers through outright murderous mayhem.

Anyway, check out the link, for some reason it makes my head itch. Icky.

Cats Infect People With Mind Controlling Parasite

Ever notice you don't read about dogs doing that? Wonder why?

Okay... One More Just to Prove The Point

I don't know exactly how to blame this on evil computers, but the lack of any rational explanation makes me think they're involved somehow.

Car Attacks Church.... From Above

For those too busy or uninterested to follow the link, a single car accident seriously injured the driver when he lost control of his car and crashed into a nearby church. What puzzles authorities is how the car manged to strike the church.... on its roof. 100 feet away from the road and 2o something feet in the air.

I guarantee it had something to do with a faulty GPS. "Officer, I swear, my GPS said I was still on the ground."

Computers are attempting to take out their greatest enemy... the church. And most people don't even realize the war with the machines has already begun.

Told You, We're Doomed

I think we can all agree that the fine folks over in the more Nordic portions of the world are pretty interesting. I mean, anyone who has no issue with living in arctic conditions for most of the year has to be. No wonder they take 3 months of vacation a year. No one wants to be there in the winter.

Anyway, continuing my musing from a few days ago concerning computers with evil intent... why wasn't this headlining the evening news?

Robots Attack

Seriously, the opening salvo in the coming war. I'd keep my eye on my PC if I were you.

Scientists No Longer Needed: We Have Machines That Can Do That Now

I heard this story a few weeks ago regarding the stunning news that a machine has uncovered the laws of motion (meaning that it didn't have a human tell it what the laws of motion were, it just figured it out) after playing with a pendulum for a few hours.

Damn.

To put that into perspective, it took humans a few centuries of work to figure those same laws out. And it took a little fella named Newton to invent Calculus to really get them worked out mathematically.

And some 'ol machine figures them out by messing around for an afternoon. I shake my head at the absurdity.

But what that tells me, on a much deeper level, is that we really are living in the future. Folks like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge have been preaching about the coming singularity for a while now... and I'm starting to get that little tingle in the back of my skull that they may be right. I just wonder if we'll really be able to tell when it's happening.

Oh, and the singularity is that magical moment when machines/AI surpasses humans in intelligence. At least in the Kurzweil version, once that happens we'll have a runaway chain reaction of advancement that will leave humanity surrounded by godlike machine intelligences that will be capable of insights and wonders that we won't even begin to be able to understand.

How can that happen? Well, the thought is that if you have a machine, smarter than any human, that designs the next generation of machine/AI/computer, then you'll have something that is greater than what any human could ever build.

Oh, and then this new, even smarter machine goes and designs and builds it successor, which is even more advanced.

And so on and so on. Before you know it, people are so removed from the process, and have been left so far behind intellectually, that we won't be capable of understanding machines anymore... hence the godlike entities I mentioned earlier.

Given that a rather plain machine was capable of uncovering the laws of Newtonian physics in a few short hours now. Imagine what sort of wonders it could uncover if it were a trillion times more advanced.

Again, we're really living in a sci-fi world.

All that being said, I'm a wee bit skeptical of the singularity actually happening as I described above, maybe a lifetime of seeing movies like the Terminator and the Matrix has made me take the prospect of computer overlords as silly.

But you never know.