Underclassmen on this campus are woefully ill-informed on the art of conversing with a senior. Consider this a public service announcement to get our relations back on track: Stop your unceasing questions about my plans for the future. They aren’t thoughtful, only depressing. That pained look that spreads across my face every time you ask? It’s not for comedic effect. And though whittling away my days crafting glib criticisms of government instead of looking for a job may find me homeless next year, I’m comforted by knowing that I won’t be in jail. Because in Thailand, critical dilettantes who insult the king end up behind bars, not merely unemployed.
Sez a physicist: We’re living in a giant hologram
Take a look around you, at the walls and the ground and your computer. They’re not real. We’re all living in a giant hologram. Or at least, that’s the wacky theory of physicist Craig Hogan, the director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics.
If the experimental results of some German scientists are as he suspects, “then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram,” he told New Scientist.
A hologram is an image on a two-dimensional surface that, because of some science things, looks like a three-dimensional image when you look at it from different angles. In practice — as seen on driver’s licenses and credit cards — they’re not that impressive. But messing with space-time, suggesting that our world is two-dimensional, that we’re living in something not quite like what we think we perceive? Now that just sounds like insanity.
This possibility was unearthed by scientists zooming in really close on space-time (read the New Scientist piece if you care to understand, because this econ major certainly harbors no delusions of understanding physics) and discovering that it becomes grainy at that magnification (or so they suspect, they can’t really look at the universe that close). “Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,” Hogan said, which doesn’t clear anything up but sounds pretty cool.
Knowing this information has not practical use if phrases like black holes, event horizon, and “boundary of the universe” don’t make regular appearances in your lexicon.
When robots are deserving of human rights
Accusing someone of having the emotional capacity and depth of a robot may no longer be the terse put-down it once was. Because it turns out that leaving those fragile human emotion things just for humans is no longer cosmopolitan, and the really progressive among us are beginning to think seriously about whether we’ll one day need to give human-rights-like protection to robots that act a lot like humans.
The problem of robots acting eerily like humans reached an apex of absurdity with the introduction of Elmo Live, a new Tickle Me Elmo that has managed to climb to ever higher levels of creepiness. His lips move when he’s telling stories, he dances, and when he finds himself in the hands not of children, but of adults with access to lighter fluid and a source of fire, the following happens:
It’s certainly a chilling site, watching Elmo laughing in glee as he’s burning. Is he burning to death? Is this act somehow so despicable that Elmo — or more realistically, some more complex robot decades from now — is deserving of protection? These are questions some otherwise sane seeming people are asking.
“And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?” writes Daniel Roth in Wired.
Biology already mocks us by having our brains “assign human-like qualities to anything that somewhat resembles us.” A Universal Declaration of Robot Rights may thus end up being a not-that-unlikely evolution as we worry not about robots getting wise and killing humans, but about humans becoming too human and protecting robots.