Text Size
- Home
-
News
Advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, other ACM resources, and from around the Web.
- Blogs
- Opinion
-
Browse by Subject
Recent articles from Communications organized into categories that encompass the broad scope of computing.
-
Magazine Archive
-
Careers
Jump-start your career with information on trends, opportunities and jobs – in both industry and academia.
- ACM Resources
-
Subscribe
Receive the benefits of ACM membership with a subscription to its flagship publication, Communications of the ACM.
This Article
ACM News
Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
![[article image]](/system/assets/0000/3146/061410.nytimes.singularity.large.jpg?1276527655&1276527654 "Singularity")
Bruno Mallert
On a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.
While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.
The BrinBot was hardly something out of "Star Trek." It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity--a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
From The New York Times
View Full Article
Post a comment...
Tools For Readers
Related ACM Resources
Conferences:
- SPAA 2012: 24th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures - June 25 – 27, 2012; Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Courses:
- Network+ Certification Fourth Edition (Part 2): Network Connectivity and Implementation - In this course, you will identify and describe the foundational networking theories, terminology, and technologies used in modern PC-based computer networks. You will also learn …
About Communications |
Join ACM 
|
Renew |
Subscribe |
Sign In |
For Authors |
For Advertisers |
Privacy |
Site Map |
Help |
Contact Us |
Mobile Site
Copyright © 2012 by the ACM. All rights reserved.