Today’s quote is via the German newspaper, Spiegel Online, and concerns the recent alarming reports of the destruction of German (and American) bee populations. In it, they refer to Albert Einstein as saying:
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.
Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.
Kurt Vonnegut, born November 11, 1922 and died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007. If you don’t know who he is, read his book Slaughterhouse Five.
Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons.
Here’s an interesting hypothesis that I came across recently, reading through an article in the latest edition of the IEEE Spectrum about digitally animated faces. It’s called the “Uncanny Valley” effect, formulated by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and it basically says that, as a robot becomes more human-like in appearance, the more humans are likely to empathise with it. However, this effect reaches a point where empathy is reversed, and humans are likely to be repulsed instead. This, too, is then reversed and replaced with positive empathy once more as the appearance of the robot becomes even closer to that of a human being.