Rise of the Machines

A Dronestagram Family Portrait It is difficult to describe a drone strike accurately. On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering

Robots + spies!

Drones are coming to American airspace. Whether used in agribusiness to monitor farms by landscape architects to design properties by law enforcement…

Dominos Drone

A futuristic technology hasn’t really arrived until someone files a lawsuit against it. And in that case, the robot surgeon is here. Welcome to the future.

Companies are analyzing more data to guide how they hire, recruit, and promote their employees.

At our universities we will take the people who are the faculty leaders in research or in teaching. We are not going to ask them to give the same lectures over and over each year from their curriculum cards, finding themselves confronted with another roomful of people and asking themselves, “What was it I said last year?” This is a routine which deadens the faculty member. We are going to select, instead, the people who are authorities on various subjects — the people who are most respected by others within their respective departments and fields. They will give their basic lecture course just once to a group of human beings, including both the experts in their own subject and bright children and adults without special training in their field. These lectures will be recorded as Southern Illinois University did my last lecture series of 52 hours in October 1960. They will make moving-picture footage of the lectures as well as hi-fi tape recordings. Then professors and their faculty associates will listen to the recordings time and again.

—R. Buckminster Fuller. “Education Automation.” (1961)

At Smithsonian, Jimmy Stamp posted a brief history of bird automata. And yes, I know that Bubo from Clash of the Titans, above, isn’t real. But… Bubo! Clash of the Titans! From Smithsonian: The earliest example (of an avian automaton) dates to 350 B.C.E. More