According to "'Terminator' self-assembling cube robots revealed by MIT," scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in California demonstrate their M-Blocks robots, which can flip, jump and assemble themselves into different shapes, project researching in their Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researhers believe if they continue developing this project, they can use a large number of M-Blocks robots to
adapt to whatever task or shape that they want and they can apply this kind of robot to construct self repairing buildings.
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At fist time i see the title of that article,I am excited and feel that it is so interesting. The World is going to have more wonderful innovations inspired by sci-fi movies. I think of many movies that have the same kind of idea that robot can re-assemble themselves. Robots in the movie "Transformers." They are so intelligent that they can transform their shape and appearance as they wants.
Wesa Goin' Underwater, Okiday?." The writer says that this small mounthpiece supply oxygen to help Jedi go underwater for two hours. I pridict that If this devices come to reality, people will totally forget the heavy weight oxygen tank.
Anyway, we can see many fictional piece of technoly that exist in real life. These technogy can change the way people act in various situation. GPS navigation technology is one of the best example. I rarely use map book after i knew Google map. Smart phone and touch screen technology are also change people habit and lifestyle.
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References
"'Terminator' self-assembling cube robots revealed by MIT", BBC News Technology, Retrieved October 4, 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24397880
"Jedi breathing device" Retrieved October 4, 2013 from http://starwars.com/explore/encyclopedia/technology/jedibreathingdevice/
I like Pop's title - it neatly states an idea I think is right, that science fiction and fantasy can fuel the imagination and lead to very real discoveries and technology. If earlier writers had not dreamed of flying, of submarines, or moon travel and the like, would we have those things today? Had people not fantasized about devices for instant communication, untied to wires, would mobiles be everywhere today?
ReplyDeleteI was also pleased to see Pop cite The Matrix films (italics for title of film). Although I didn't think the third as good as the second, which is not as brilliant as the first, they are all great entertainment, and the first especially raises some very interesting philosophical questions about reality, about what it is to be person, and about the nature of knowledge. I'm not going to discuss any of those slightly deep questions here, but I thought that the way these questions were woven smoothly into an action sci-fi film was one of the things that made it so great.
ReplyDeleteSadly, that was now so long ago, back in the last century, that when I mention it as an example of something, young students are apt to not know what I'm talking about, which reminds me that my years are mounting. So it was nice to see Pop referring to it.
I might take a break now and watch it again.
By the way, the main idea of The Matrix, that of brains in vat's hooked up to computers that are simulating everything is an old idea from philosophy. The first explicit use of brains in vats being run by computers as a useful example to clarify an issue is probably in Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974, p. 42 - 45), where he uses it to argue that simply worrying about pleasure and pain is not a solid foundation for ideas about moral right and wrong. He then used the same idea to explore questions about what and how we know in his 1981 book Philosophical Explanations, and this led to its more wide spread use by philosophers such as Hilary Putnam.
DeleteBut the idea, especially as a tool to explore the nature and possibility of knowledge, has a much older history, dating I think first to René Descartes' useful deceiving demon, and beyond that back to Plato and his famous cave. And of course, along the way other writers have made use of such ideas before the Wachowski brothers used it so underpin their brilliant trilogy of films, which I really am now going to watch again.
I think I've done my share of response writing for the day, at least for now. Perhaps Neo will suggest something else to respond to over the next couple of hours.
Reference
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
And fresh from watching again the first of The Matrix films last night, do we have any good reason to believe that the world we think we inhabit is not being generated by machines hooked up to our brains? Do we even need the brains? Could the whole thing be a computer simulation with us as interactive players?
DeleteAnd that sort of reminds of a much more recent film I watched this weekend, Gamer, starring Gerard Butler - fun, but perhaps not quite so deep as The Matrix.
Peter Thank you for you response. Nice to here that my article inspires you to watch that full of imagination movie again. Concept in the movie is quite hard to understand for me. I have seen many people try to interpret the philosophy from that movies.
DeleteBy the way, I remind the complicated movie Inception. It based on mind and consciousness theory
Thank you Pop. I also like Inception, which, as you say, also discusses some deep concepts in a fun, action packed story.
DeleteMaybe I'll watch it again this evening.