Last updated October 31, 2017 at 4:39 pm

Humanity Needs Sneaky Robots

Take a moment to let the fact that being a robo-ethicist is a job sink in. Okay? Okay. A team of robo-ethicists from California Polytechnic State University recently argued that rather than unflappably honest and straightforward robots, ultimately we will want artificial intelligence to deceive us. We’re going to be interacting with robots in a service and a social capacity, and they’ll become functional members of our communities. Even though ‘deception’ is most often used as a pejorative, it has a social function. Think about white lies, or under-promising and over-delivering. They argue that we’ll want robots that can, if not feel human emotions, at least recognise and respond to them appropriately.

The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science

Science is rarely a solo act. Yet the Nobel Prizes for science continue to award individuals. If you’re lucky, a prize is split up amongst a maximum of three individuals. This was recently the case with the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics which was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barrish for their discovery of gravitational waves. Yet, hundreds of scientists were attributed as contributors in the landmark research paper.

The fact that the Nobel Prize 2017 committee refuses to make group awards is causing increasingly frequent problems and giving a misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done.” astrophysicist Martin Rees.

The Nobel Prizes for Science reiterates and amplifies an inaccurate and unfair representation of the scientific community demographic.

Interestingly the Peace Prize can be awarded to entire teams and organisations.

“Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its important contributors,” writes Ed Yong in his article.

Crush of the Week: Lady Gaga

Check out her Netflix documentary and find out more about her recently diagnosed health condition fibromyalgia.

In every episode of Switched On, Kelly and Casey discuss, debate, and analyse trending topics where the social, cultural, and political meet the scientific.