Politics
General thoughts about politics in our world.
A friend in a formerly communist country explained to me how things were in the communist days. Many members of her family had been in prison because they were priests. There was only one TV channel. On this channel, there was only one hour of TV per day: The speech of the dictator. On the birthday of the dictator, the people had to celebrate and pretend they were happy and loved the dictator, while in reality they were unhappy, afraid, and hated him. They proved this later when they killed the dictator...
Everybody seems to ignore it, but we have now given terrorists a very bad signal: Because of the attacks in Spain, the Partido Popular has lost the elections. This must be the highest achievement possible for a terrorist organization: Causing a regime change. Why do we go on giving these encouraging signals to terrorists? Furthermore, why is this attack considered so much more important than for example the earthquake in Iran, where 200 times more people were killed? This attention is part of the...
Acceptance of technology To understand how new technologies will change our life, we must first consider how new technologies get accepted. I am no expert at this, and what i write here is not based on any type of scientific research, but this is a necessary step to continue this discussion. It is striking that certain new technologies, such as cell phones and DVD players, get accepted easily, while others, such as personal computers, have to struggle for decades before getting a place in daily life....
Since George W. Bush was elected President of the United States (or was he elected?), the rest of the world perceives the US as a rogue state. Today the US, a country that possesses weapons of mass desctruction (unlike other countries such as, say, Iraq), lead by a president who was not democratically elected, is considered an unreliable country, that doesn't wish to honor international treaties and conventions. The US is considered a threat to world piece. Today the world feels that the unreliable...
In his book "Flesh and Machines", Rodney A. Brooks, the father of modern Artificial Intelligence and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, claims that we are about to be simultaneously hit by two technological revolutions that together will fundamentally change our nature and the way we live. The first, the robotics revolution, will unleash intelligent autonomous robots into our everyday lives, changing our society and the ways we interact with machines. The...