Consider the question “Can Machines think”?

Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. Brian Christian write in The Atlantic about his own quest to beat the machines, where discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.We forget how impressive we are. Computers are reminding us.

As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience—spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting—and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are.

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Source: The Atlantic

Your blood and the level of a hormone in your spit could reveal if you’re on the point of burnout, according to research undertaken by Dr. Sonia Lupien and Robert-Paul Juster of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital and the University of Montreal. In addition to professional and personal suffering, burnout puts distressed workers at further risk of physical and psychological problems if ignored. This is significant, as burnout, clinical depression, or anxiety related to the workplace affects at least 10% of North Americans and Europeans, according to estimates prepared by the International Labor Organization. [continue reading…]

On a particular visit to Canada from the UK my mum declared me to have low moral standards! Gosh what had I done you may well ask? Before you let your imaginations run wild, she actually was in despair that I allowed my children’s bedrooms to accumulate mess and clutter!
Not what a good girl like me had been brought up to encourage!

Ma I think you confused low morality with ‘less than high standards of tidyiness’ oops mea culpa!

However like most people if asked whether I’d steal, like most I would say no. Would I try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves which in my case is hampered by being a very bad swimmer! Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? [continue reading…]