Robot cars get green light

Driverless cars can be licensed in Nevada

Google's driverless cars will hit the road sooner than even I expected. I thought it would take years to get regulatory approval for them anywhere! (Apparently regulations are the main reason we still don't have flying cars.)

Nice to see a bureaucracy actually getting out of the way of progress, and not just using that as an excuse to cut corporate taxes so the rich get richer. Maybe there's hope for this world after all!

GPGPU in the brain: neuroscientist-approved transhumanism

I haven't been able to find a single neuroscientist publicly agree with Ray Kurzweil that either neuroscience-based AI or brain-computer interfaces are likely to progress far enough this century to lead to a singularity.

Given all this cause for pessimism, and the weight of scientific consensus apparently behind it, I was pleased to read that a prominent neuroscientist -- especially one who's been an outspoken critic of both Ray Kurzweil and IBM's artificial-brain projects -- had recently predicted a transhuman revolution. I was even more pleased when I realized the source of that revolution was analogous to a computing technology I'm studying for my master's thesis: general-purpose computation on graphics-processing units (GPGPU).