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There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names:

* Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as Roomba or industrial robots or automated call-center systems or dictation programs.
* Robo habilis: Rosie the housemaid robot level intelligence, able to handle service level jobs in the real world but not a rocket scientist.

BEST SECTORS FOR HOLIDAY HIRING

Retail: Only a portion of the retail jobs available are at the cash register or on the sales floor. There are a wide array of opportunities in back-office positions, including shipping, receiving, warehousing, accounting, information technology and security. There are also countless job opportunities in areas related to the support of retail, such as transportation, marketing, consumer product manufacturing, etc.

A new paper argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, switching to nuclear or geothermal power, and even sequestering carbon in the earth won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change. Greenhouse gases are less a threat to stable climate than is the excess heat produced when fuel is burned to create energy, say Swedish researchers Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet.

Quick question: where does this URL go to?

http://tinyurl.com/ya8p9vg

How about this one?

http://bit.ly/DkXOW

Would you have guessed that the first goes to a Computerworld article about business-appropriate avatars, and the second goes to the previous post on Open the Future?

New Fast Company essay is now up: Head in the Clouds looks at cloud computing in light of Amazon's nuking of purchased Kindle copies of 1984 and Animal Farm.:

Okay, managed to put together a collection of the scenes I'm in from the July 14 "That's Impossible" episode.

In a previous post we highlighted the plight of the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – see post). We see the recent events in the Baltic States as the European example of the Icarus Effect – economies that have flown high and which have now hit the ground with a hard landing. As this has happened, there has been a political price to pay, and we now need to address what that price might be.

Keeping with the July/ August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, there is an interesting article by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. on ‘The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets’, which is more appropriately subtitled ‘The Eroding Foundations of American Power’. In many ways, this develops the thinking touched upon in the past two posts. First, we asked the question ‘When Is China not China’ to start to think about the expansion of Chinese territorial limits (see post).