Can we be friends with robots? Research says yes Philosophy of friendship The roboticsphilosopher John Danahersets a very high bar for what friendship means. His starting point is the “true” friendship first described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, which saw an ideal friendship as premised on mutual goodwill, admiration, and shared values. In these terms, friendship is about a partnership of equals. Building a robot that can satisfy Aristotle’s criteria is a substantial technical challenge and is some considerable way off – as Danaher himself admits....

Do you have free will? Can you make your own decisions? Or are you more like an automaton, just moving as required by your constituent parts? Probably, like most people, you feel you have something called free will. Your decisions are not predetermined; you could do otherwise. Yet scientists can tell you that you are made up of atoms and molecules and that they are governed by the laws of physics....

I don’t want this to be my Jerry Maguire moment but to be honest, I’m sick of hearing the words ‘digital transformation.’ What does it even mean anymore? It’s such a hyped-up term, overused by a market saturated with evangelists spouting conceptual nonsense, amplifying its enigma-like existence (and profiting handsomely from it). It normally starts with the C-Suite coming back from a strategy week, a Silicon Valley trip, or a CMO change — in tow is a strategic imperative on doing something better ‘digitally....

Can we really trust the Cloud with our data? People can be phished, cloud can’t One of the advantages of cloud storage is the lack of human interaction and interference. When cloud data is hacked, the majority of the time, it’s down to human error. Kaspersky Lab publishedresearchin 2019, which found that 89% of SMBs and 91% of enterprises have experienced a data breach on their public cloud due to a social engineering attack....

IBM’s AI research division has released a 14-million-sample dataset to develop machine learning models that can help in programming tasks. Called Project CodeNet, the dataset takes its name after ImageNet, the famous repository of labeled photos that triggered a revolution in computer vision anddeep learning. While there’s a scant chance that machine learning models built on the CodeNet dataset will make human programmers redundant, there’s reason to be hopeful that they will make developers more productive....