Rafe Brena, PhD

Published in Predict

·3 days ago

Did Really Google’s AI Become Sentient?

There is a dire need for Critical Thinking education — You probably read recently that Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google’s LaMDA project, announced that the AI chatbot “became sentient.” Lemoine had text exchanges with the experimental AI like the following: Collaborator: What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience? LaMDA: The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware…

Artificial Intelligence

4 min read

Published in Checkmate

·Jun 16

Working Careers Are Becoming “fluid”: 4 Ways to Deal with It

I got an Engineering degree; then, I worked for about 30 years and then retired. That was the professional playbook of the 20th century, but things are on the brink of changing. Beware: trying to build a career in this century with the XXth mindset is a big mistake that…

Work

5 min read

Published in Predict

·Jun 10

The Hardest Thing About Self-Driving is Not Driving

Humans are tricky. My father (probably like yours) taught me to drive a car. But who teaches a robot car? You may answer “programmers, of course”, but it’s not that simple. After some years of practice, we humans feel that driving it’s kind of done by itself, to the point…

Self Driving

4 min read

Published in Predict

·May 28

Can Robots Have a Sense of Humor?

Cracking jokes is not the same as digging them. I’ve been working around AI for 30 years and haven’t yet seen an AI system able to explain what is funny about a given joke. I’m not talking about pre-programmed answers, like the ones you can find in Siri: if you…

Robotics

4 min read

Published in The Urbanist

·Apr 26

Self-Driving Vehicles Will Become Common Outside of Cities Before Inside Them

Self-driving freight just makes more economic sense Dr. Raul Rojas, a researcher at the Free University of Berlin, came to Mexico City a few years ago (in 2016), and I interviewed him about this trip to his hometown. “We came here to test our autonomous car; German autobahns are just…

Self Driving Cars

4 min read

Self-driving will become common outside of cities before inside them

Apr 11

Is France’s 2-round election the best?

Each voting system has its advantages and drawbacks In France, they just had a first-round presidential election. The runoff is going to be a couple of weeks after the first round, and it will be only between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, who got the highest ballot percentages. The…

Elections

5 min read

Apr 7

The Big Disconnect from our Senses

…plus 3 very good books and one article recommendations We, humans, evolved for thousands of years somewhere in Africa and carried out a life that, in a literal way, depended on the use of our well-developed senses. Even if humans don’t have the eyes of a falcon or the ears…

Anxiety

6 min read

Published in Predict

·Apr 1

The 3 phases of the driverless cars takeover

Nothing will stop humans from bullying robot cars until the third phase kicks in. — For some years now, self-driving cars have been making more news headlines than actual trips in real cities. But I thought it would be useful to put this situation in perspective so that we can see where all of this is heading. The eventual widespread adoption of robot cars (I’ll…

Driverless Cars

7 min read

Dec 30, 2021

What if we chat with nothing but icons?

I know, I know, I’ve witnessed so many rants, particularly from people of the boomers’ generation, complaining about how the correct English language usage is being lost, not only because of so many abbreviations like “IRL,” “OMG,” and missing letters in text messages but also because of the use of…

Icons

4 min read

Jul 27, 2020

Will voice assistants be our next language teachers?

When I saw a couple of years ago the demo of Google Duplex, the beta version of Google Assistant, it was a truly jaw-dropping moment to me (and many others). Perhaps you remember the dialog: (phone rings) Hi how can I help you? “Hi, I’m calling to book a women’s…

Voice Assistant

5 min read