RESET

An ongoing effort to introduce computers to the human experience.

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Scientists are reading minds using brain imaging techniques.

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Adam Curtis's new series about how computers have not liberated us but distorted and simplified our view of the world around us. What do you think?

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POSSESSED HAND

A micro-controlled device that stimulates correct hand postions for enhanced musical performance.

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What would be the ideal ‘personality’ for a robotic vacuum cleaner? Via  Presurfer

[2020]

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Cyborg Receives Diploma, Steals Hearts, At College Graduation - UC Berkeley liberal arts student works with a team of student mechanical engineers to create an affordable exoskeleton which allows wheelchair users to gain the ability to walk.

via 2020

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Vintage 2001 ad for IBM

Via Kottke

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"Talking to Machines"

What can machines tell us about being human? This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.

Episode One of Season Ten

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Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine - (C.A.M.) 

A functional walking machine from 1969 who's only real flaw was that it's human operator would be exhausted trying to remember what leg was next in the sequence in about 15 minutes.

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Australian researchers are teaching a pair of robots to communicate linguistically like humans by inventing new spoken words, a lexicon that the roboticists can teach to other robots to generate an entirely new language.

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Researchers from Texas A&M University have created an inexpensive multi touch system made of infrared sensors that allows the user to draw and manipulate images in mid-air. It's called "ZeroTouch," and it allows for "zero-force, zero-thickness, completely transparent multi-touch sensing." While others strive to make thinner and more elegant touch-screens, are they missing the point? Is the future of touch surfaceless?

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[2020]

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2020:

Who will be reading your email after you die? LifeEnsured, a New York-based start-up currently running on a $150,000 angel investment, is betting that you’d like to be the one to decide. (via Early Adopter: LifeEnsured Helps the Digital Dead | AllThingsD)

This project reminds me of a slightly more psychedelic endeavor by the art collective etoy: MISSION ETERNITY. MISSION ETERNITY is a “metaphysical adventure,” exploring the relationship between death, identity, memory, and the digital space. As much about loss as it is about the conservation of information, MISSION ETERNITY attempts to digitally capture people in “M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES,” which are interactive portraits -- digital sarcophagi containing fragments of the life and soul of a person facing death. It’s etoy’s postulation that a person can be kept alive for eternity as a “infinite data particles” “forever circulat[ing] the global info sphere;” as we live our lives increasingly online, we can continue to live after death online. 

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Computer immediately takes responsibility for a terrorist plot.

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Failure Cascading Through the Cloud

Before we can start entrusting all of our files to the Cloud, we need to be certain that it's stable enough to hold onto them safely. Recent failures in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (incidentally: what a name) and the Sony Playstation network were jarring reminders of this.

It's not just individual systems that can fail," says Neil Conway, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, who works on a research project involving large-scale and complex computing platforms. "One failure event can have all of these cascading effects."

In the end, the word "Cloud" is an apt metaphor for what we're dealing with -- after all, Clouds move and dissipate with changes in the atmosphere.