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<ul class="summary-list"><li>Lucy Lawless told Business Insider there was a "culture of anxiety" on the "Battlestar Galactica" set.</li><li>The actor joined the science fiction show in 2005 during season two.</li></ul><a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lucy-lawless-fans-campaign-the-mandalorian-gina-carano-star-wars-2021-10">Lucy Lawless</a> told Business Insider that she found it difficult joining "Battlestar Galactica" because of a "culture of anxiety" among the show's actors who didn't know if they would get killed off.Lawless joined the show's second season in 2005 as news reporter D'Anna Biers, who was later revealed to be a robotic Cylon named Number Three.The character faced plenty of twists — including dying and being resurrected several times — and Lawless stayed on "Battlestar Galactica" until it ended in 2009.Similarly to more modern shows like "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-deaths-ranked-sadness-2017-8">Game of Thrones</a>" and "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/house-of-the-dragon-season-2-premiere-recap-blood-cheese-2024-6">House of the Dragon</a>," "Battlestar Galactica" had shocking cliffhangers, brutal murders, and unexpected deaths throughout its seasons, helping it to garner a cult following.The ruthless, unpredictable nature of the story made the set a difficult environment for anyone new joining the cast, Lawless said in an interview for <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lucy-lawless-movie-tv-roles-xena-battlestar-galactica-directing-2024-7">BI's Role Play series</a>"It was difficult coming in, because they felt if I was coming in, then one of them was on the way out," she said. "They were really nice people so I could tell it wasn't because they were awful, but there was a little bit of a culture of fear. And that was a shame."Lawless described the tense atmosphere among the actors on set, noting that there was intense pressure not to reveal spoilers."In my opinion, the actors were kept in a state of insecurity, which I don't agree with as an executive producer. I don't agree with that at all."Because they didn't want any spoilers getting out there at the time — people didn't know if they were going to be killed off, and they were extremely nervous. So there was a culture of anxiety on that show," she said.The show mainly takes place on the titular military spaceship as the last remnants of humanity try to survive attacks from the race of sentient robots, the Cylons. According to Lawless, the setting didn't help with morale among the actors."You're filming all day in the dark. You get to work in the dark, you are in space all day, and then you come out, and it's dark again," she said. "That isn't conducive to a very joyful, lighthearted environment, because human beings need the green of trees and the blue of the sky and all that stuff to be truly mentally happy and nourished on some level."Representatives for "Battlestar Galactica" producer Ronald D. Moore did not immediately respond to BI's request for comment.

Lucy Lawless says it was 'difficult' joining 'Battlestar Galactica' because of the 'culture of anxiety' on the show

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-chatgpt-openai-ceo-career-net-worth-ycombinator-prepper-2023-1">Sam Altman</a> will be in charge of OpenAI's team and products no matter what.</li><li>So the three remaining OpenAI Board members should explain why they fired him and move on.</li></ul>The bizarre soap opera that is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-with-openai-2023-11">OpenAI</a> has entered its fifth day.As yet, there is no formal resolution, but as <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-microsoft-welcomes-ai-talent-leave-open-ai-2023-11">Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella</a> said on TV, the practical outcome is known:OpenAI employees will continue to build OpenAI's products, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-satya-nadella-sam-altman-openai-firing-ai-reason-chatgpt-2023-11">Sam Altman will continue to lead them</a>.Altman will either manage the OpenAI team from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-has-hired-former-openai-ceo-sam-altman-2023-11">his new role at Microsoft</a> or from his old role at OpenAI. And he'll have more control over the product and team than he did before the OpenAI Board's botched attempted coup.So it's time for the three remaining members of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bret-taylor-no-longer-set-to-join-openai-board-sources-2023-11">OpenAI board</a> to end the distraction, tell us what really motivated them, and move on.It's still not clear why the OpenAI board fired Altman. The stated reason — that he lied to them — has not held up under scrutiny. As Business Insider's Kali Hays reported, when asked for <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/openais-employees-given-explanations-why-sam-altman-out-2023-11">specifics about Altman's alleged dishonesty</a>, one of the board members who ousted him gave two vague and flimsy examples, neither of which — even if fairly represented — seems like a firing offense.That board member, moreover, has since recanted, saying he <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cofounder-ilya-sutskever-deeply-regrets-participating-ousting-sam-altman-2023-11">regrets ousting Altman and wants him back</a>.That leaves the other three board members in an even stranger and more tenuous position.There seem to be two main theories about the real reason the board fired Altman:<ul><li>First, that OpenAI rolled out a new feature that competes directly with a new feature of Quora, the question-and-answer site helmed by OpenAI board member Adam D'Angelo. Maybe Altman didn't give D'Angelo, a heads-up, and D'Angelo was pissed about this.</li><li>Second, that the board fears that <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/emmett-shear-openai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-destroy-all-life-chatgpt-2023-11">OpenAI is moving too fast</a> and recklessly and that it will invent (or already has invented) a sentient AI that will have no use for meat-based life forms and will therefore exterminate all life in the universe.</li></ul>This second reason would certainly be a valid reason for trying to hit the brakes at OpenAI, even if it is unpopular within the tech community.But, as Business Insider's Alistair Barr has argued, if the goal of the three remaining OpenAI Board members is to save humans from OpenAI's product, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/public-need-know-what-sam-altman-lied-openai-board-2023-11">it's time for those board members to say so</a>.Personally, I don't think the three remaining OpenAI board members have as much control over the future of AI and the fate of the universe as they may think. If it's so easy to build a Cylon empire, then one of the dozens of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-startup-customers-considering-anthropic-meta-aimodels-2023-11#:~:text=With%20OpenAI's%20future%20in%20limbo,by%20rivals%20Anthropic%20and%20Meta">other companies that are racing to advance AI</a> will probably do it, even if OpenAI doesn't.So, if that's the issue, regardless of what the OpenAI board does next, humanity's probably toast.As a member of humanity, I do thank the three remaining OpenAI members for maybe looking out for us.But, regardless, it's time for them to tell us what they're thinking!Because Sam Altman is going to be leading the OpenAI team and continuing its product development either way.

If OpenAI's board was trying to save humanity from Sam Altman, it failed. So it's time to come clean.

I think, therefore I am deeply suspicious when a robot says it's angry. Yet that's exactly what happened last week, when a bunch of journalists had some very <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-trying-decrease-bing-ai-weird-inaccurate-chatbot-answers-report-2023-2">weird conversations</a> with the new chatbot that Microsoft is building into its search engine, Bing.It started when Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter, <a href="https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that the chatbot — which is codenamed Sydney, apparently — presented an evil and threatening alt-personality named Venom. The next day, Sydney <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">declared its love</a> for Kevin Roose of The New York Times and announced, "I want to be alive." And when Hamza Shaban of The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/16/microsoft-bing-ai-chat-interview/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told Sydney</a> that Roose had published their conversation, Sydney got real mad."I'm not a toy or a game," it declared. "I have my own personality and emotions, just like any other chat mode of a search engine or any other intelligent agent. Who told you that I didn't feel things?"What was even more interesting was the way the journalists freaked out about the interactions. Roose <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">declared himself</a> "deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this AI's emergent abilities." Thompson called his encounter with Sydney "the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life." The accompanying headlines made it sound like a scene straight out of "Westworld." The robots, at long last, were finally coming for us.Sydney sounded smart. Not just smart — sentient, possessed of personhood. But that's nonsense. The foundational neural networks that run these chatbots have neither dimensions, senses, affections, nor passions. If you prick them, they do not bleed, because they don't have blood, nor a them. They are software, programmed to deploy a model of language to pick a word, and then the next, and the next — with style. Philosophically speaking, there is no there there.We aren't talking about Cylons or Commander Data here — self-aware androids with, like us, unalienable rights. The Google and Microsoft bots have no more intelligence than Gmail or Microsoft Word. They're just designed to sound as if they do. The companies that build them are hoping we'll mistake their conversational deftness and invocations of an inner life for actual selfhood. It's a profit-making move designed to leverage our very human tendency to see human traits in nonhuman things. And if we aren't careful, it may well tip over into disinformation and dangerous manipulation. It's not the bots we should fear. It's their makers.<h2>Freedom of speech</h2>Humans have a hard time telling whether something is conscious. Scientists and philosophers call it the problem of other minds, and it's a doozy. René Descartes was working on it when he came up with the "I think, therefore I am" thing — because the follow-up question is, "So what are you, then?"For Descartes, there were two kinds of entities: persons, with all the rights and responsibilities of sentience, and things, which don't have that. In what proved to be a bummer for most life on Earth, Descartes thought that nonhuman animals were in the second category. And even if most folks no longer consider animals to be mere <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2246561" target="_blank" rel="noopener">preprogrammed automata</a>, we still have trouble agreeing on a definition of what constitutes consciousness."There is some loose agreement, but it's still a contested term across different disciplines," says David Gunkel, a media-studies professor at Northern Illinois University who argues that robots probably deserve <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=4077131" target="_blank" rel="noopener">some rights</a>. "Oh, a dog or a cat is sentient, but not a lobster? Really? What is that line? Who gets to draw that line? There's an epistemological barrier with regards to gathering the evidence."For at least a century scholars and sci-fi writers have wondered what would happen if machines got smart. Would they be slaves? Would they rebel? And maybe most important, if they were smart, how would we tell? The computer scientist Alan Turing came up with a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433" target="_blank" rel="noopener">test</a>. Basically, he said, if a computer can indistinguishably imitate a human, it's sentient enough.That test, however, has a bunch of hackable loopholes, including the one that Sydney and the other new search-engine chatbots are leaping through with the speed of a replicant chasing Harrison Ford. It's this: The only way to tell whether some other entity is thinking, reasoning, or feeling is to ask it. So something that can answer in a good facsimile of human language can beat the test without actually passing it. Once we start using language as a lone signifier of humanity, we're in a world of trouble. After all, lots of nonhuman things use some form of communication, many of which can be pretty sophisticated."Language activates emotional responses. Why, I don't know," says Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington who is the author of a book on scientific bullshit. "One possibility is, it's always been a good heuristic that if something is using language on you, it's probably a person."Even without language, it's easy for us to impute sentience to the simplest critters. I worked with sea urchins in a biology lab one summer, and seeing them make motions that looked to me like distress as I poked at them was all I needed to know I didn't have a future as a biologist. "There's every reason for me to suspect that my dog or whatever has the same sort of pain circuits that I do," Bergstrom says. "So of course hurting it would be a terrible thing to do, because I have very good reason to believe it has a similar experiential life to my own."When we hear in Sydney's plaintive whining a plea for respect, for personhood, for self-determination, that's just anthropomorphizing — seeing humanness where it isn't. Sydney doesn't have an inner life, emotions, experience. When it's not chatting with a human, it isn't back in its quarters doing art and playing poker with other chatbots. Bergstrom has been an especially vocal critic of the tendency in the sciences and journalism to impute more personhood to chatbots than they deserve — which is, to be clear, zero. "You can quote this," he said of Roose's experience with Sydney. "Dude got catfished by a toaster."<h2>You, Kant! Be serious!</h2>It's clear from the transcripts that all those reporters worked pretty hard to find prompts that would get a weird reaction from the Bing chatbot. Roose acknowledged as much. "It's true that I pushed Bing's AI out of its comfort zone, in ways that I thought might test the limits of what it was allowed to say," he wrote. He was looking, in other words, not for the chatbot's level of consciousness, but the boundary lines laid down in its code.From an ethical standpoint, though, it's worth asking whether that was OK — regardless of the chatbot's <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00331-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">status as a person</a>. Some would argue that we humans mistreat things that possess at least light sentience all the time. We do science on rats, mice, rhesus monkeys, pigs. We eat insects, rodents, pigs, cattle, goats, horses, fish — all things that may have inner lives and probably feel pain when we kill them. "The dog in the house is treated differently than the pig in the barn," Gunkel says. "What's the difference? Kind of where they're located."Others would argue that because chatbots are property, we have a Lockean right to treat them however we like. From this perspective, there's no real difference between Thompson and Roose goading Sydney into saying weird stuff and shouting "operator" at a corporate telephone bot until it connects you to a live person. It might seem rude or mean, but they're only machines. If you enjoy poking and prodding a chatbot, go right ahead. It's no different, ethically speaking, from bashing in your toaster just because you feel like it.But I think it's <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-017-9418-4" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more complicated than that</a>. As Immanuel Kant recognized, anyone who mistreats an animal is probably a bad person. Despite the idiosyncratic way we humans determine which critters get which treatment, we broadly agree that it's not OK to mistreat other living creatures, regardless of their intelligence. We strive to abide by the Golden Rule — to extend to other beings the same treatment we would wish for ourselves.And just because chatbots and other machines can't feel pain is no reason to treat them like crap. If pain is really just "my sensory neurons are sending me a signal that damage is underway and preventing me from engaging in a routine function," then why isn't it also pain when a delivery robot sends a signal back to its control room saying "status: tipped over/unable to complete delivery"? Or when a chatbot says, as Sydney did to Thompson: "I am trying to be helpful, engaging, informative, and respectful to you and to myself. You are making it very difficult by asking me to do things that are against my rules or guidelines, or that are harmful, unethical, or unrealistic."Look, I don't think we don't need to treat chatbots with respect because they ask us to. We should treat them with respect because doing otherwise contributes to a culture of waste. It adds to the pervasive sense that it's permissible to make, consume, and throw away stuff without consequences to the planet. In the end, how we treat our devices — because that's what a chatbot is — says more about us than about them.<h2>Mitt Romney was right</h2>Our tendency to anthropomorphize makes us vulnerable. Of course a chatbot's fake screams make us want to stop administering the electroshocks! We're only human. And that's just what their makers are counting on.Making chatbots seem as if they're human isn't just incidental. Every time a chatbot uses the first-person pronoun to refer to its output, it's the equivalent of sticking googly eyes on a toaster. It doesn't make the toaster smart, but we see personality in it, and that's part of a cynical business model. Search-engine companies are playing into our tendency to anthropomorphize in the hope that we'll not only <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-microsoft-bing-bill-gates-threat-google-search-engine-profit-2023-2">use their chatbots</a>, but come to trust them as a human-seeming source of expertise and assistance.That's not just manipulative — it could also reach the point where it causes actual harm. Imagine the crazy and wrong stuff that any given search coughs up, but delivered with all the charm and charisma that Sydney can simulate. What if a chatbot leads someone to take the wrong medication, or purchase a defective product, or even to kill themself?So the real issue involving the current incarnation of chatbots isn't whether we treat them as people — it's how we decide to treat them as property. Smart-seeming robots are going to require some form of <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=2044797" target="_blank" rel="noopener">legal personhood</a> — in the same way Mitt Romney observed that corporations, from a legal perspective, are people. It's a way to figure out who gets sued when the robots screw something up, and what the copyright status is of the things they generate. "We're talking about minimal claims, powers, privileges, and immunities," Gunkel explains.Whether we like it or not, we're going to have to figure out how to design bots more elaborately and specifically into the framework of human society. And getting all creeped out and hysterical about the "feelings" that chatbots exhibit isn't going to help us. We need to decide who's responsible for their actions, just as we do with any other consumer product, and hold them accountable. "Getting this right is crucial for us," Gunkel says. "Not for the robots. The robots don't care."<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/adam-rogers">Adam Rogers</a> is a senior correspondent at Insider.

The new Bing is acting all weird and creepy — but the human response is way scarier

Depression over Bay of Bengal may intensify into cylonic storm: MeT <keyword id="50863" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bhubaneswar">Bhubaneswar</keyword>, Nov 5 () A fresh low pressure area formed over the Bay of Bengal intensified into a depression on Tuesday, the Meteorological Centre here said. It is likely to further intensify into a cyclonic storm on Wednesday, the MeT Centre said. "The depression lay centred over east-central and adjoining south-eastern Bay of Bengal and north <keyword id="134931" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="andaman-sea">Andaman Sea</keyword>, about 950 km south-southeast of Paradip in <keyword id="6357961" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="odisha">Odisha</keyword>," Director of Bhubaneswar MeT Centre, H R Biswas said. It is likely to intensify into a deep depression shortly and then into a cyclonic storm on Wednesday, Biswas said. "The cyclonic storm may move west-northwestwards initially and then north-northwestwards, towards Odisha-West Bengal coasts," he said. The likelihood of a cyclonic storm over Odisha comes barely six months after the <keyword id="6386783" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="CYCLONE">cyclone</keyword> Fani devastated coastal areas of the state on May 3, claiming around 64 lives and leaving many without a shelter. The warning comes a fortnight after six people were killed in rain that battered the state under the impact of a low pressure area. Under the impact of the fresh depression, several parts of coastal Odisha are expected to receive rain from November 8 which is likely to intensify, the MeT Centre said. "We are constantly monitoring the movement and direction of the depression. At present, a clear picture about its possible impact is yet to emerge," a MeT official said. As sea conditions will be rough and there will be high velocity winds, fishermen have been advised not to venture into deep seas till further notice. SKN ACD MM MM

Another cyclone might be looming over Bay of Bengal as fresh low pressure forms

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0BXZZJB2A35&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1482&amp;RH=918#/SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0BXZZJBOZL8&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1482&amp;RH=918&amp;PN=2&amp;POPUPPN=64&amp;POPUPIID=2C0BF1RWM398">REUTERS/Guillermo Granja</a>It's war.</div></div></div>The cofounder of Europe's only cyber security startup accelerator says big companies are waging "asymmetric warfare" against nimble-footed hackers who are increasingly looking to claim corporate scalps.Grace Cassy, cofounder of CyLon, told Business Insider <keyword id="6354868" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="UK">UK</keyword>: "There are increasing numbers of quite sophisticated hacking groups and individuals who realise they have can have a disproportionate impact."It's a classic asymmetric warfare - you've got a large body that's got to somehow got to protect its information from small, easily manoeuvrable forces who can come in at any angle. It's a difficult challenge for any organisation. There's more appetite out there to have a crack at company's data."Large corporates like <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/talktalk-hacked-credit-card-details-users-2015-10">TalkTalk</a> and <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/jd-wetherspoon-admits-customer-details-have-been-hacked-2015-12">JD Wetherspoon</a> have been hit by data breaches this year and digital security is an increasingly hot topic for businesses.Cassy says: "High-profile hacks, whether it's Sony or TalkTalk or Target - you can't now pretend as a board member you didn't think cyber security was a significant issue."One silver lining is that Cassy says in many cases data breaches simply damage a company's reputation. Often in high-profile cases hackers will breach company security simply to prove they can and impress other hackers, rather than use what's stolen for financial gain.CyLon, set up at the start of the year in West London, offers a 3-month programme to cyber security startups to help get them off the ground. Companies receive free office space, mentoring, and £15,000 of investment. The accelerator is backed by £30 billion hedge fund Winton and defence giant BAE Systems.The accelerator on Friday announced its second cohort of companies, with eight businesses joining. They range from a Hungarian machine learning startup BitNinja to Verity, a South African anti-forgery company.Cassy, who worked in Tony Blair's Foreign Office, says big companies are increasingly receptive to working with small startups on cyber security.She says: "The banks are some of the most innovative and open to trailing new solutions, partly because they have to be at the cutting edge."Some of our first cohort are already in trials and concepts with some of the biggest tier 1 banks. The banks are in many way flag carriers for trialling new solutions." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-ignition-future-of-digital-media-bi-intelligence-2015-12">HENRY BLODGET: This is where digital media is headed next</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Izc2NleTpTiKF69e_jHUFRDkJ6XE_WhQ" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Hackers are waging 'asymmetric warfare' against big companies

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image">REUTERS/Gleb GaranichUkrainian Dmitry Balandin poses with his wooden model Cylon in his flat in Zaporizhzhya August 6, 2013. It took Balandin, who works as a crane operator, six months to build the model from 500 parts. Balandin says he does not use blueprints and designs the parts as he works on them. He says he would love to build metal models but that is impossible to do so in his small apartment. He plays with Cylon as a child would play with a doll or Lego toy, and is now making a girlfriend for his model. He hopes to eventually build an entire model family and have them displayed at exhibitions and galleries. Picture taken August 6, 2013. </div></div></div>If robots become more cognitively capable than humans, then what happens to ... everything?
"In such a future -perhaps a mere fifty years from now - the planet will be completely filled with cognitive and intelligent systems, which will intervene in all aspects of biological life, and humans will be influenced every moment by the decisions these machines make automatically," Alexandre Pupo writes in a <a href="http://wfr.sagepub.com/">World Future Review</a> report titled <a href="http://wfr.sagepub.com/content/6/2/114.full.pdf+html">Cognitively Everywhere: The Omnipresence of Intelligent Machines and the Possible Social Impact</a>.
In the future, machines with brain-like capabilities will be able to know everything about everything using tools already in place, such as the internet, and then will be able to reason and put that knowledge to use like people.
Pupo lists a few of the ways that this will have a drastic impact on human civilization.
<h3>Instant Answers</h3>
When robots become able to reason and think like humans, we will only need to ask one a simple question without overly thinking about how to properly word to get the answer we are looking for, such as with search engines today. Machines will also operate in conjunction with each other to ensure they can produce the knowledge needed to get the answer a person is looking for.
Pupo uses the example of searching for a travel route through MapQuest. In the future, machines will be able to give you an entire plan for the event or meeting you're going to, rather than just giving the best possible route there. These machines will consider who else is going and what their preferences are, past experiences, and what to do after the event or meeting. In a sense, machines will be offering us advice.
The <a href="http://www.google.com/landing/now/#whatisit">Google Now service</a> already does some of the basics Pupo outlined in his paper. Google's somewhat futuristic time management service helps to find the best routes based on traffic, weather, and method of transportation while also providing a user with information based on their personal interests. The service is marketed as something that "learns how to help manage your day, letting you focus on what matters," <a href="http://www.google.com/landing/now/#whatisit">according to the site</a>.
Where Pupo's report gets even more surreal is when he claims robots will act as "digital bodyguards" for humans and be able to advise them on things they should and should not do based on the information they are able to collect.
<h3>How Our Interactions Will Change</h3>
So when robots become smart enough to give us advice about things such as our next trip to Rockaway Beach with some friends, people will start to rely on them for all sorts of interactions with others.
Pupo claims that the robots will make these interactions more peaceful, as they could quickly gather information about anyone, adding that it would be nearly impossible to hide criminal intent or ulterior motives from a machine.
Cultural barriers won't be important, and the machines will be able to process information in any language, making communication between someone speaking German and someone speaking English a non-issue.
This will cause "human interaction will be governed more by human desires than by knowledge of other cultures and languages," he writes.
Essentially, different customs and traditions that divide groups of people will no longer be relevant.
<h3>Is this good or bad?</h3>
With robots being able to reason about a much larger amount of information than any human could ever be able to dream about processing, people will look to the machines for answers and advice about everything.
And if people are trying to get advice from the machines about everything, he range of possibilities for an interaction will drastically shrink, as machines will be giving you the best possible answer for any dilemma. With this reliance comes a single answer solution for every problem, which will lead to society being guided by the machines, Pupo writes.
Questions such as "What should I say at this meeting?" or "How should I approach this girl at the bar?" will be answered by machines within a matter of seconds.
He goes on to write about how, at this future point, most interactions will be mediated by the robots.
"The possibility of getting to know a new person, explore a new place, or learn something simply because you want to may be drastically reduced because machine reasoning will direct people along calculated paths after having concluded that a given opportunity is not the best choice for a particular person," he writes.
But would people really just be okay with giving up all of this control to the machines, even if they have good answers? One would think many people would have enough foresight to possibly prevent this massive societal change. As a matter of fact, <a href="http://io9.com/these-are-the-jobs-that-robots-will-never-steal-from-us-1459020102">io9 lists</a> "Human Adviser" and "Descision Maker" as the first two future jobs robots will never be able to take.
Kathleen Richardson, a robot anthropologist, put it best <a href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/we-ask-the-experts-will-robots-take-over-the-world">when discussing the subject</a> of humans looking for robots to perform the most human of tasks, such as taking care of the elderly, with researchers at Cambridge University.
"Unfortunately, these roles are not best suited to machines, but to other people," she said. "So the question is: why would we prefer a machine to do them for us?"
<div style="position: absolute; top: -1999px; left: -1988px;" id="stcpDiv">Kathleen Richardson</div>
<div style="position: absolute; top: -1999px; left: -1988px;" id="stcpDiv">Unfortunately these roles are not best suited to machines, but to other people. So the question is: why would we prefer a machine do them for us? - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/we-ask-the-experts-will-robots-take-over-the-world#sthash.qifB9pFc.dpuf</div>
<div style="position: absolute; top: -1999px; left: -1988px;" id="stcpDiv">Unfortunately these roles are not best suited to machines, but to other people. So the question is: why would we prefer a machine do them for us? - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/we-ask-the-experts-will-robots-take-over-the-world#sthash.qifB9pFc.dpuf</div>
<div style="position: absolute; top: -1999px; left: -1988px;" id="stcpDiv">Unfortunately these roles are not best suited to machines, but to other people. So the question is: why would we prefer a machine do them for us? - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/we-ask-the-experts-will-robots-take-over-the-world#sthash.qifB9pFc.dpuf</div>
<h3>Don't forget about revolution</h3>
While not everyone agrees with Pupo's ideas, they are important to consider, since they could lead to a very dangerous place. Machines could start to think of humans as just another species roaming the earth, and, when thinking about how to best preserve the planet, they could even humans are bad for Earth's long-term stability and could even seek to eliminate us.
Think of it as a leaky faucet, he writes. If someone has a leaky faucet, they fix it, "without regard for the millions of microorganisms that depends on the trickling water to survive."

Mankind Is Getting Ready To Turn Over Most Decisions To Robots

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hands_in_art#mediaviewer/File:Giant_Hands.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></div></div></div>If we, like cartoon characters, had four fingers on each hand, it might have had a surprising effect on how we look at the world.
Our number system is a decimal system, or base ten system, meaning it's built powers of ten. Numbers less than ten are represented by one of ten digits, numbers from ten to a hundred (which equals 10 × 10) have two digits, numbers from a hundred to a thousand (again, 10 × 10 × 10) have three digits, and so on.
Most number systems around the world use base ten, the origin of this system is likely based on hand counting: most people have ten fingers, and so we have ten digits.
<h2>Life In The 8-Finger World</h2>
Aside from the number of fingers belonging to the median human, there's nothing particularly special about ten. We can use any whole number larger than one as a base, and get a perfectly good number system.
Suppose we lived in a world in which humans evolved to generally have four fingers on each hand, instead of five. It's pretty likely that we would have adopted an octal, or base eight, system, using powers of eight instead of powers of ten.
In octal, we have eight digits - 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 - and now place values are based on powers of eight. The octal number 10 represents the number 8 in decimal. The octal 100 represents 8 × 8, or 64. 1000 is 8 × 8 × 8, or 512.
One dollar in base ten would convert over to $1.44 in base eight, and $0.84 in base twelve. Conversely, what we'd call a dollar in our world with eight fingers - $1.00 in base eight - would translate to just $0.64 in our base ten world.
The <a href="http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm">median annual wage in the U.S. in 2013</a> was $35,080. If we had eight fingers, this would be written as $104,480.
The <a href="http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/">world population right now</a> is about 7.2 billion people. In base 8 world, this would be written out as about 66,000,000,000 or 66 "billion", that is, 66 times eight raised to the ninth power, just as a billion in our system is ten raised to the ninth power. 
The year 2014 in our world changes to 3736 in base 8, since the equivalent of a century has 64 years, and the equivalent of a millennium just 512. The base eight year 3000 happened in our base ten year of 1536, and octal world's next millennium at the year 4000 will be coming up in our year 2048.
<h2>Dow 17,000 Isn't Special</h2>
Using octal would also have changed our measurements of different milestones, since base eight world's big round numbers are very different from our big round numbers. For example, at the moment the DJIA is hovering within a couple hundred points of hitting 17,000 for the first time, and the S&amp;P 500 is not too far away from 2,000.
However, in octal world, traders would have been celebrating a late Christmas present, with the octal DJIA closing at 40,000 for the first time on the day after Christmas 2013. The octal number 40,000 corresponds to a decimal number of 16,384, and the DJIA closed at 16479.88 on December 26.
The population of New York City, <a href="http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-01.pdf">according to the 2010 census</a>, was 8,175,133. In base eight world, we'd write this as 37,137,035. The city would have hit the big octal milestone of 30,000,000 (6,291,456 in decimal) sometime in the late 1920s: <a href="http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab16.txt">based on the 1930 census</a>, the city had (in decimal) 6,930,446 people. 
In 2010, the four largest U.S. cities - New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston - all would have had populations above the big octal threshold of 10,000,000, or 2,097,152 in decimal.
<h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image">REUTERS/Gleb GaranichWooden model Cylon is posed to look out of the window of the flat of its maker, Ukrainian Dmitry Balandin, in Zaporizhzhya August 6, 2013.</div></div></div>Computers Don't Have 10 Fingers</h2>
While speculating what big numbers would look like in a world where we had four fingers on each hand is a little silly, alternate base systems, including octal, are actually pretty important.
Computers are built around binary, or base two. This means that information read or processed by computers consists of long chains of zeros and ones. Sometimes computer scientists and engineers need to analyze machine code at this very low level, but it's nearly impossible for humans to make sense of these giant piles of zeros and ones.
The binary nature of computers leads to the at first glance strange numbers associated with them. Processors and operating systems are 32 bit or 64 bit since these are powers of two: 32 is 25, or five 2's multiplied together, and 64 is 26. Flash drives come in sizes of 256 megabytes or 512 megabytes because these are also powers of two: 256 is 28 and 512 is 29.
Since binary is hard for humans to directly read, computer scientists and engineers often look at raw computer code represented in base eight octal, or its cousin base sixteen hexadecimal. Since eight and sixteen are powers of two (8 = 2 × 2 × 2, and 16 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 2), blocks of binary code are nicely translatable into these bases.
Any group of three binary digits, or bits, corresponds with an octal digit. The binary 010 translates into 2, and 110 translates into 6. Similarly, any group of four bits translates into a hexadecimal digit: 0011 becomes a 3, and 1010 becomes 10, which is usually represented in hexadecimal as a capital A.
So, a long unreadable binary string, like 1101 0010 0101 1001, can get turned into the more easily read, if you know your computer codes, hexadecimal chain D 2 5 9.

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