5 Tips to Getting the Most Out of Your Robotic Workforce. So you’ve made the leap to automating part or all of your workforce with robotic employees or “roploys.” Congratulations, you are at the forefront of the robotics movement and are leading the charge forward towards a new era of workplace operations and productivity. However,…
Author: shananigans
Reality Reprogramming and the Cognitive Operating System
Is reality truly as we perceive it? Or is our perceived world nothing but a vision of reality skewed by evolution to optimize our survival – even at the detriment of the truth? Are we looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, or, more extremely, through a filter that morphs our senses so greatly that…
IoT Inside of Me
Would you eat an IoT device if your airline told you to? Sure, we already put some fairly questionable things inside of our bodies on airplanes whenever we peel back the plastic wrap on those in-flight meals, but how much do you really trust your airline? British Airways (BA) made some buzz this past week…
Half Man, Half Machine, All Centaur
A robot is going to steal your job. AI is only a handful of years away from being smarter than you. The bot uprising is coming to enslave or kill us all. Deep learning is creating code that we can’t understand. The great digital divide is coming. Maybe. Or maybe there is another path forward….
Posthumous AI and the Digital Confessional
Many people are stuck with their eyes fixed on the AI horizon and the believed-to-be-inevitable singularity when humans transcend their physical form into a world of digital bliss. Regardless of which side of the singularity debate you fall on, there are many stepping-stones ahead of this extreme that warrant recognition and discussion not in five…
The Culture of Innovation
This story about some of the most innovative organizational cultures in history was originally published in MISC Magazine as a two-part series (part 1 here and part 2 here). History is rife with examples of breakthroughs and innovative leaps. However, if we look to the past 150 years, we begin to notice a clustering of…
Talking to Yourself: Deconstructing Chatbots
Scanning is a tool used in foresight to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioral changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. To uncover the types of signals that give way to true breakthroughs, our goal must not simply be breadth of exploration, but also depth of analysis if…
Robotic UX is Playing God
And I, for one, am both wildly excited and extremely terrified. This isn’t simply because of my twisted delusions of supernatural infallibility, or the fact that I still daydream about taking over the world with an army of mechanized minions. Nay, I’m interested in experience design for robots because it gives us the opportunity to…
More Human than Human: We are Already Cyborgs
This article was written in 2015 for MISC Magazine, and I still only consistently wear 1 piece of technology (hint: it was invented by Elizabeth Miller in the 1800s). Never has the question, “what does it mean to be human?” been more relevant than right now. Cyborgs, embeddables, and androids, oh my – yet granted…
Dear Manufacturing, Do it Yourself: Industry 4.0 and Self-Assembling Machines
There is a lot of excitement around Industry 4.0. For those of you thinking we’re just making up buzz terms (you may not be wrong), Industry 4.0 is viewed as the next revolution in manufacturing beyond automation. It’s where IoT, big data analysis, cloud connectivity, and cyber-physical systems – or, as I like to call…
Biobotics: The Automation of Life
This article was written in 2014 for MISC magazine, but not that much has changed yet. When most people hear the term “robot,” they picture a mass of lumbering metal powered by batteries, motors, electrical wires, and circuit boards. However, recent advancements have forced me to rethink my own definition of a field I’ve been…
Parlor Games and Asian Rooms: The AI Debate
Today I want to write a bit about the two sides of the artificial intelligence debate. The bulk of this piece – save some fun thoughts at the end – is going to be nothing new to those in the know, but there’s a lot of important prerequisite here that, since most of you aren’t…
Sexbots and Terminators: Exploring Gender in AI
Article written with Victoria Scrubb and originally appeared in MISC magazine. We’re playing God again. Every day it seems that videos, articles, or images emerge of humanity’s latest triumph in the robotics world and, with each subsequent release, we inch closer and closer to looking at ourselves through a digital mirror. Our ability to push…
Internet of Weapons: Connecting to Save Lives
Munich, Orlando, Paris, Fort Myers, Hesston, Dallas, San Bernardino, Newtown, Oslo… the list reads like a failure of modern society. And at the center of all of these tragedies lies a single, simple word: guns. Few topics raise such controversy or debate and, while I definitely have my opinions on the matter, I also accept…
Robicide: The Inevitability of Robots Killing People
In the past month, three individuals have been killed by robots in drastically different circumstances. While the loss of human life is always tragic, I don’t decry these moments with fear mongering about the dangers of robotics, or the folly of man’s experiments with playing God. I look at all of these situations as news…
Artificial Desire: Love & Lust in Robotics
I wrote this article about a year ago for MISC Magazine and really want more people to read it… just don’t tell my mom about it. A cursory search of the mighty internet will reveal that I am far from the first person to write about this topic. In fact, in addition to countless books,…
Electronic Persons: The Humanization of Robots
Article originally appeared on ideacouture.com While everyone’s eyes were on the Brexit vote and staggering economic implications this week, my mind was drifting to another crucial development within the EU. A draft European Parliament motion was recently put forward to begin to classify robots as “electronic persons.” In a response to the proliferation of robotics…
Why Big Data has Yet to Revolutionize Healthcare
Article originally appeared in MISC Magazine. Everyone is claiming that we stand at the precipice of one of the greatest shifts the health world has ever seen. Big data is going to change everything: How we diagnose, how we treat, how we monitor, how we live, and how we die. Yet while optimism abounds within…
Let’s Get Phygital: IoT = IRL + URL
Around two years ago, I worked on a project on the future of play for a toy company (yes, this is my actual job). Leading into that project, I recall really pushing a hypothesis I had been playing with about the concept of “phygital.” At the time, I was reading a lot of Sterling (and…
The Internet of Flesh
I recently reposted an article I wrote a couple of years back about the concept of Biobotics: biologically-based automated machines. At the time of writing, I was thinking a lot about the denial of metal and electronics as the only building blocks for the robotic world. The concept made perfect sense; so many of our…
Valley Groupthink and the Tech Bubble v2.0
Another week and another round of layoffs in the Valley. Yahoo drops nearly 300 people. Toshiba says goodbye to about 50. 70 disappeared from the ranks of Autodesk. These all add to the growing number of over 3000 layoffs in the first four months of 2016 in the Valley – and that doesn’t even include…
Death to Process
This article originally appeared in MISC Magazine. I feel like I’ve written this article countless times. Still, apparently people keep being entertained and who knows – maybe I’m delusional and feel like I’m stuck in a perpetual loop but am actually evolving my thinking a little bit each time. Alas, as always, I digress. Here we…
Artificial Innovation: Teaching Computers to Speculate
When most people discuss robotics and artificial intelligence, the discussion of tasks and capabilities tends to lean towards the mundane. How can we teach robots to assemble parts? What kind of a recommendation engine can we build for movie watchers? How can we automate basic household tasks? However, as our understanding of deep learning algorithms…
The Internet of Paperweights: Keeping IoT Alive
Alphabet, Google’s parent holding company, recently announced that one of the smart thermostat companies they acquired, Revolv (not Nest), would be closing up shop and shutting down their servers on May 15, effectively rendering the Revolv to be nothing more than an ugly, overpriced piece of technologized wall-art. Though this news broke at the start…