The topics:

• Astounding Science Facts:
  • Phil gave us one real headline, and several fake headlines from the now defunct Weekly World News. Can you tell the difference?

    Check out WWN's Bat Boy.

  • The galaxy is twice as thick as we thought. The interesting thing is that no new measurements were needed. These researchers were about to pull this information from existing data.

    This reminded Stephen of the DIKW breakdown of information.

• Last week Michael Darling pointed us to the article "The road to the future." One of the things the article predicted was self-driving cars.

  Phil and Stephen wondered whether self-driving cars would need to possess AGI. The rules of the road are pretty straight forward. Following those rules (stop at a stop sign or red light, etc.) wouldn't require Artificial General Intelligence. But there's a lot to driving beyond those simple rules. AGI wouldn't be necessary to have a self-driving car, but it wouldn't hurt.

  Stephen thinks that full autopilot for cars won't be offered in the United States until it can be demonstrated that these machines are safer than humans. It could be that this could be demonstrated with some driving situations (like driving on the Interstate outside of cities) before it could be demonstrated for other situations (like stop-and-go city driving).

• Armed robots:
  • The world has already had its first armed robot accident. 9 were killed and 14 wounded in South Africa.

  • University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey warns that terrorists could capture a US built SWORDS robot, reverse engineer it, and use it against us. Stephen is skeptical. He thinks its much more likely that terrorists will improvise a robot to carry an improvised explosive device. They could just duct tape an IED to a model RC car.

    A true robot arms race will require super powers.

  • Stephen wonders whether armed conflict will be more acceptable in the future. Today war costs "blood and treasure." If, in the future the cost is "treasure" only - because its robots fighting robots - will we fight more?

  • Will we fight more just because its cool? What if we're fighting Gundam mechas?

• There's already an AI "arms race" in the financial services industry. Cut throat hedge fund AI's might not be the best bet for "friendly AI." It's important that we have the right kind of Singularity.

• Which comes first, human regeneration of missing limbs, or the Luke Skywalker fully realistic fully usable prosthetic?

• Lastly, we talked about George Dyson's research of his father's work on the Orion project.

  Phil was surprised that the original idea was to launch the giant orion spacecraft with nuclear bombs from the surface of the earth. Although it would be politically impossible to do in the US today, they wondered if perhaps China might launch an Orion from Outer Mongolia to utterly eclipse the US space program.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Spirit Creek. The song is "That Lie Inside."

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