Robots  

Brian David Johnson, a futurist at Intel, has shown off 'Jimmy' at this year's Maker Faire. Jimmy is said to be a robot for the 21st Century. His artificial intelligence will be open source as is the design and the technical description for 3D printing his parts.

Intel's resident futurist Brian David Johnson has shown off 'Jimmy' at this year's Maker Faire. Jimmy is said to be a robot for the 21st Century.   Jimmy's artificial intelligence will be open source as is the design and the technical description for 3D printing his parts.

Johnson, has been toying with the idea of the future’s robots for more than a decade at Intel. According to the futurist,these robots are going to be infinitely programmable, and very personal for each creator.

“We can come to see these robots as an extension of ourselves, and that these are platforms to create as many of them as we can,” Johnson said at the recent Intel Developer Forum. “Our motto is that every robot has a name.”

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Johnson described Jimmy in a new free e-book, which has a manifesto for what a 21st Century Robot should be. Jimmy is as programmable as a smartphone. Johnson wrote the book with all of the open source files for printing the robot as a 3D object.

The book represents what Johnson described in his book, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, and has been carried over into Intel's Tomorrow Project.

“It’s there and ready to use,” David Johnson said. “We are creating new ways of interacting with robots.”

Johnson said the robot will be available to buy for less than $1,000 in the coming months, and he is trying to get the whole cost under $500.  The goal is ambitious, to make robots more personal.

“There is no line between robots and our humanity," Johnson said. “Everything we make has a little bit of us in it. As we begin to see these robots as extensions of ourselves and allow them to go off and interact with other people and other robots. We can begin to think of these robots as extensions of ourselves.”

Johnson wants to hold robot Maker Faires around the country, sharing the design with people via robot kits. Jimmy will have a companion robot, Paul, that Jimmy can talk with.




SOURCE  Venture Beat

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 Singularity  

Futurist David Wood presents a broad outline of the technological convergence that will lead up to the Singularity, and how the next three to 40 years will see us enter an increasingly Hybrid Age.

David Wood is the lead organiser of London Futurists, and has been chairing public meetings in London on futurist, singularitarian, and transhumanist themes for many years.

In the talk above, Wood outlines how the development of exponential technologies may lead to the Singularity.  Importantly, Wood considers the Singularity to be a technology convergence of multiple, complimentary fields.

In the next three to forty years, Wood suggests that we will be increasingly a part of the Hybrid Age.  The concept, taken in part from Parag and Ayesha Khanna, co-directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute, represents a new sociotechnical era that is unfolding as technologies merge with each other and humans merge with technology -- both at the same time.

"The Hybrid Age is an age where biology and technology are increasingly mixed," says Wood. "We will use technological skills in biological situations and we will use biological skills in technological situations."  The Hybrid Age therefore presents enormous risk, combined with enormous opportunity he comments.

Image Source: David Wood

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Wood’s professional background includes nearly 25 years immersed in cutting edge mobile technology – envisioning, architecting, implementing and avidly using smart mobile devices. He spent ten years as software architect with UK-based PDA pioneer Psion, followed by ten years serving as co-founder and Executive VP at smartphone OS specialist Symbian. As principal of Delta Wisdom, Wood works with leading companies who are concerned about the dramatic impact of rapidly changing technology on human individuals and communities, and provides advice on opportunities to apply technology in new solutions to deep-rooted problems.

In November 2005, Wood received an honorary Doctorate in Science (D.Sc.) from the University of Westminster, “in recognition of services to the smartphone industry”. In 2010 he featured in the world’s first Augmented Reality CV.


SOURCE  David Wood

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