Dearest students,
Let's warm up our brains
To reflect on intriguing issues
Brought up by savvy people
Who think of great virtues!
Choose one or all of the TED.COM videos
Build up your thoughts on the issue/s,
Discuss it/them in class,
And be ready to share it/them here with your virtual friends.
Opportunity to listen to, read about, speak about and write on
Important topics to us alike....beings in evolution...
To practice the English language and come to full fruition.
Hope to see you all here.
XOXOXO,
Flávia
At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal and her team are building robots with social intelligence that communicate and learn the same way people do.
The Future of Business is the MESH. -
Lisa Gansky is the author of "The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing," and the instigator behind the Mesh Directory (http://www.meshing.it/)
Are We Ready for Neo-Evolution?
Harvey Fineberg studies medical decisionmaking -- from how we roll out new medical technology, to how we cope with new illnesses and threatened epidemics.
Hello, everyone.
ResponderExcluirI'm Karina (lawyer) and this is my essay on video 3 - Are we ready for Neo-Evolution?
Hope to have your comments on this.
Best regards,
In the last century, Hitler intended to discriminate the idea that the Arian race was stronger than the other human “races”. This was not the first time in history that someone had tried to consider the differences between men as a national problem. Nowadays, the idea of neo-evolution emerges from scientific researches, with the proposal of conducting the natural process of evolution in the way that people desire.
Professor Harvey, the head of the neo-evolution process, made a university speech to convince the audience about the neo-evolution benefits. According to him, this new kind of evolution will allow people to select previously the genetic characteristics of their babies.
Hello, again.
ResponderExcluirThis is the sequence of my essay.
Wait for your comments.
Best regards,
Karina
(...) The possibility of selecting genetic characteristics, in fact, is a good key to medicine, because it will not be necessary to treat serious diseases - they will just not exist anymore. In this way, human race will decrease its mortality, and health problems will not cause the amount of suffering they do nowadays. This scenario reflects two thousand years of medical researches and will result in a brilliant future for humanity.
On the other hand, neo-evolution could be considered a new way of standardizing our multi-diversity characteristics, as some dictators did. Firstly, this neo-technology will be concentrated on who has enough money to pay some thousands dollars/Euros (and we are talking about a future with a lot of poverty). In addition, it is known that world society prefers blue eyes than brown eyes, or white people than black people (we are talking about prejudice). It means that who has money will probably prefer the same physical characteristics of people that nowadays have better social positions. Therefore, neo-evolution will be another instrument that will divide the human race according to physical characteristics, richness and opportunity.
In short, as everything in life, neo-evolution has its good side – of medical treatment – and its bad size – of prejudice – and its use will probably reflect on a more torn-apart society.
Hi, I'm Camila, a compliance specialist in a bank.
ResponderExcluirIn the segment where I work, the. virtual services are getting more and more real.
Itaú, for instance, has an account that operates only virtually. This product is in accordance with what Lisa Gansky said, because nowadays people prefer to spend less time and to use technological tools.
Therefore, I think this tendency will last longer, and the banks are prepared to handle with this new scenario.
On the whole, for the banks, I believe that the brick-and-mortar business costs will be lower than the higher and higher virtual costs.
Do you agree with me?
Regards!
Hi, everyone.
ResponderExcluirI'm Vanessa (journalist at Telemedicine Dept).
Here is my essay on video 2.
Is the mesh the future of Brazil?
In European and American cities, there is a sharing concept for cars, houses and other uses. This way of life is coming to Brazil. But will it work here?
There are many reasons for the mesh principle to work in the biggest cities of the world. According to Lisa Gansky, a specialist in this theme, population growth, recession, climate change and technology are undoubtedly the effect of an increase in demand to "mesh "services.
In Brazil, we have the same issues, conversely we live in a underdeveloped country. It means that executives and other people with enough money can take the chance to use these services. In contrast, the majority doesn`t have the opportunity to that, because of the higher priced services.
To sum up, the mesh is here and it is good. On the other hand, we need not to forget to improve the low-income people with basic and technological services to increase all the opportunities to them.
Hi, there.
ResponderExcluirThis is Diogo (media communication for Telemedicine).
Here is my essay on the 1st TED video.
Hope to see your views on the matter too.
Robotics Interaction with humans
The weird dreams of Isaac Asimov are finally coming true with the 21th century robotics researches. Science fiction stories are no longer so fictional as we may believe. New studies on Robotics are trying little by little to build robots with social intelligence to interact with humans, just the same way the Russian biochemist imagined in his famous story, I, Robot, more than sixty years ago. The time has passed but the question remains: Is it good or is it bad?
In a recent lecture, Cynthia Breazeal, a MIT student of artificial intelligence, talked about her fascination with robots and how she has been studying the subject for the past 15 years. She showed some successful examples of robots interacting with humans and technology helping humans to interact with each other. The greater one was a kind of videogame, which makes the kids move around the room and even work on a real object to “send it back to the screen”. Not even Asimov would think of this. The next experiment was some kind of teleconference system with arms and a little body which reacts to the speaker’s emotion reproducing this in an android interface. Somehow she talked of this as a breakthrough to the human social relations, where a grandmother in Taiwan may put kids to sleep in New York by reading fairytale stories to them.
But things may not be so great as they look. I have a cousin living in Australia, while her family stays in Brazil. Last year, her sister had a child and asked her to be godmother to the kid, which she accepted at once. The baptism took place right after the kid´s first year and, during that time, my cousin (the godmother) interacted with the child through electronic devices, such as Skype, MSN, videos and so on. When they finally met in person, the one-year-old child showed some kind of mind confusion. Of course she recognized “Aunt Izabel”, as everybody was telling her, but not the way she remembered. The point here is technology helped them to interact in a way that a young kid is not already able to understand. Who was aunt Izabel, the computer with a cybernetic voice or the real woman talking to her?
Considering all this, I believe technology and artificial intelligence are really utopia in the end. A robot or a computer will always need a programming made by a human being. We can add numbers, possibilities and much more, but it will always be a mirror to someone´s mind. I want a smart car that saves fuel and energy, but I really don´t want my kids to have a robot as a best friend. Technology should work for us and not the opposite. In general way this is what Isaac Assimov was telling us and what people seem not to understand. When Cynthia Breazeal says that the film Star Wars inspired her, I wonder if 2001: A Space Odyssey would have done this job. But this is subject to another essay.
Hello, everyone.
ResponderExcluirI'm Maíra (journalist for Telemedicine Dept). Here is my essay on video 1. Hope you enjoy it.
See you.
Robots interaction with humans.
“Good morning, sir. Today the average weather will be 20 degrees Celsius and it is going to rain in the afternoon”. No. It is not your secretary. Actually, it is Papero, a small robot created in 2000 by NEC. Similar to R2D2, from Star Wars movies, this robot is here to change human computer interface (BCI). Systems with voice recognition, smart houses and devices are starting to be part of our daily lives. The main idea is to not waste time sitting in front of a computer, turning it on, searching for news. In order to make life easy, we can have some mobile and intelligent devices. What we have to think about from now on are the limits of how much intelligence we are giving them, and how much attached to them we are going to be.
Robots can be amazing machines - and, why not, creatures. It all depends on their beauty, behaviour and intelligence. People in technology fairs are always mesmerized by intelligent devices which answer to a human order. The tendency is to eliminate manual work: instead of pressing a button, you can order some action to a smart house or robot, as if it was your personal human employee. New technologies of artificial intelligence give you option of inserting data and of letting the machine take some small decisions for you, based on your behaviour. What we have to be aware of is that we can create too much dependence on these devices. It is like computers. Some time ago, we did not need them. Nowadays, almost nobody can live without one.
In addition to data inserting in machines, we have to have in mind that giving devices too much intelligence can take away our autonomy. In a 2006 fiction video of a future pizza order, the American Civil Liberties Union (Aclu), which had made the animation, gives some insight of how artificial intelligence can control our lives. A man was going to order a “two meat pizza” when the computer attendant projects a warning that this man may have some health problems if he consumes that pizza flavor. Then, by persuasion, the costumer agrees to have a healthier pizza. After that, the computer checks where the man is, his last order and his bank account statement to decide the payment terms. So, basically, a machine decided what the costumer must eat and the way he would pay for the service. In the video, the man had two choices: order or give up ordering. Giving too much data and intelligence to a machine may let it control humans in some way. Intelligent devices can help us have a good life, but can not substitute for our ability to decide.
Machines are not able to feel. Humans, on the other hand, are. And our ability to feel is so big that we usually have feelings for things. Some of us have an obsession for cars, and take more care of their car than of their own families. We are too much used to reversing values, giving more importance to non-humans (dogs, plants, computer) than to humans. Cute faces, soft voices and a lovely behaviour may make us too attached to robots. The problems is that we are already too much attached to things, and a robot could be another tool of breaking human relations.
In conclusion, robots can be really helpful. They would change the way we connect with things, so that we would not need to sit in front of a computer to read news, the robot would tell us. The machine would be our personal secretary with a good advantage: it will not judge us the way humans do. However, we might be prepared to put some limits in the amount of data we insert and how much attached to them we will be. A robot can not interfere in human decisions because decisions are based on emotions, and machines are reason per se. And this can also prevent us from being controlled by them. Therefore, I propose to have robots as long as we see them as machines and not as humans.
Hello, I'm Luis, an engineer and this is my first time on a blog.
ResponderExcluirI will comment on a Robotics.
I think that each new technology should be used in the best way. In life, everything has two sides and, if we choose the good one, our improvement is certain.
This idea serves to technology too. When used to do good is a fantastic tool, as to the learning process, remote surgery, remote communication with people, to make friends, and many others.
I think robots will be present in our lives in the near future, making all this get better and, who knows, much more, like to hang around with friends, drink a beer in a pub, eat a pizza,...
Hey, there!
ResponderExcluirThis is Helena (Communication for Telemedicine Dept.)
Here is my essay on the 1st video and my first participation on the blog. I study together with Diogo and Maíra.
See you around.
Robots interacting with humans
Technology is here globally to make everything jump to a step into the future. In twenty years from now, things as we know today, will be an antique. People had their first television in the thirties, and now everybody has an iPhone to search the internet and communicate whenever they feel like it. When you think about science and technology, the researchers are always trying to innovate and invent something to make life more modern and easier to avoid boring chores. As an example, in the movie “Honey I Shrank the Kids”, the character of Rick Moranis is an inventor, a scientist of “new technology”, who is always trying to invent things to help people feel more comfortable. And actually in various scenes the inventions help. Now, are robots capable of thinking and executing tasks the same way as a human being can do?
Computers can execute most of the statistical and mathematical chores that a human would have to think and calculate just to find the result. Therefore, in that case, it helps and it is even better and faster than a human. However, does a computer understand that a certain level of thinking and calculating is difficult for us? Computers don´t think if the calculus is right or wrong, they just objectively find it.
Humans, on the other hand, think objectively, but sometimes we put aside reason and “go a little bit with the feeling”. We make mistakes, and we say that it is a part of being a human, we learn according to our experiences. Imagine if the world was populated by human beings that think about results and don´t consider the emotional side of humanity. It would be boring, wouldn´t it?
The MIT scientist Cinthia Breazeal comments on her lecture that the robots, which they are building to interact with humans “as a human”, are like children. For example, the “Gizmo” robot learned that the Cookie Monster was bad because he wanted to steal his cookies. But, the point is they have to be programmed for that.
Therefore, in the end, humanism is something that can never be achieved, because it´s something natural, it can´t be programmed. Computers may execute chores and other things much faster than humans, but humans are complicated and naturally born, we weren´t built.
Hello Everybody!
ResponderExcluirMy name's Mari and I'm a webdesigner at Telemedicine Dept.
I'll comment on Robotics.
The idea of having robots helping us in our daily tasks fascinates me so much, mainly because we can have someone to do our work without complaining about the amount of service that we can give him.
I can not even imagine how long all this can happen, but watching Cynthia Breazel's video I saw that some ideas already been mainly in videogame consoles. Wii, for example, can create avatars and physical activity program to measure how much calories were lost in each activity, but it's something where the interaction is done through a videogame, I hardly like to turn it on. What I wonder is if we have a robot to our side, working as a personal trainer who encourages us to do the exercises.
I also agree when she says that humans tend to treat robots like people. It's so common people talking with pets, plants and other objects that they would normally talk to a robot, as if it were a member of our family.
All this is very interesting and over time all this would be amazing to catch on.