ITWales Slashdotted

Wow – ITWales got Slashdotted!
ITWales is a Swansea University company:
“ITWales is the industrial liaison unit of the Department of Computer Science, University of Wales Swansea. The Department is one of the most distinguished in the UK, with a growing reputation in research both nationally and internationally.”
The article is an interview with Ian Pearson, a futurologist with BT. It’s a provocative and futuristic read about robots and AI becoming commonplace within the next couple of decades. I’ve been trying to get Kim to buy a robot hoover, but she won’t go for it.
I like this statetment:
“When you touch something, it generates electrical signals in your nerves, which are essentially wires, and we look at it and think, “that’s basically IT” – it’s biological IT, so we need to talk to some biological companies to do that bit, but once we’ve got them in touch with electrical signals, it’s basically our domain.” I’ll bet groups could have long arguments about the similarities in reproducibility and reliability between IT and biological IT. Also the idea of tying a computer game like World of Warcraft directly into your senses (not a new idea, of course) pushes it even further towards its addictive moniker of World of Warcrack. A lot of his statements are deliberately provocative it seems, and many are based on a weak understanding of the problems (for our understanding of many areas of our biology is universally weak).