Marry a robot?

An artificial intelligence researcher predicts that robotics will make such dramatic advances in the coming years that humans will be marrying robots by the year 2050. Robots will become so human-like — having intelligent conversations, displaying emotions and responding to human emotions — that they’ll be very much like a new race of people, said David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher whose book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” will be released on Nov. 6. Read more..

Makes me think about Alan Turing and the AI test – test for machine intelligence. There is a good website maintained by the author (Andrew Hodges) who wrote Alan Turing: The Enigma. For those of my blog readers that don’t have a computer science background, it is really interesting reading! This guy was quite brilliant!

MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial

Exciting or what!! Almost war against Facebook!

“MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners.” Read more….

And what is OpenSocial? Zen has given a nice description in her blog. I have taken an extract… “OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.”

Plaxo

An old work colleague of mine from Novell in Sweden sent me a ‘connect to Plaxo‘. Well I’d never heard of them before, seemed something similar to Linked-in, but in fact was much more than this. Their product connects up address books, links into your social networks too. I haven’t tested it yet, but found this video advertising their methods that is quite fun… take a look.

Linden tightening up on registration process

Interesting, Linden Labs have made some changes to the registration process…….I didn’t notice this before, have any of my readers that are SL residents notice this clause before?

2.4 Account registrations are limited per unique person. Transfers of accounts are generally not permitted. Linden Lab may require you to submit an indication of unique identity in the account registration process; e.g. credit card or other payment information, or SMS message code…..etc…