LA Times: “Robot developers learn perils of new media.” “EATR, for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, is a robotic ground vehicle that Finkelstein’s small company is designing with U.S. Defense Department funding; it can sustain itself on long missions by foraging for twigs, leaves and other kinds of vegetation. But wild speculation on the Internet this month was that Finkelstein’s Robotic Technology Inc. and a partner were building flesh-eating robots for the Pentagon.”

Mashable: “How to Deal With Social Networking Overload.” Four tips from WSJ columnist and bloggerAlexandra Levit.

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in a wider technology context. We have a narrow definition that both (a) enables us to qualify — with extreme focus — what is Web 2.0 and what is not, and (b) discourages us from looking at the advances in the supporting, enabling technology. That limits our ability as professionals not only to describe what is happening today, but to predict what’s next. Recent though modest advances in AI — from voice recognition to pattern recognition — are powering all sorts of interesting applications, pointing to a future that is as much about machine power as people power.

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in a wider social context. In two very good articles in The New York Times, Matt Richtel recently made the case that distracted driving — resulting from our dependence on mobile handsets — may be as serious as drunk driving. The coverage perhaps marked the first time that a mainstream publication made a well-heard (emphasis on well-heard) public safety alarm on a Web 2.0 issue. But this is just one of many public policy issues that get scant attention in the “attention economy.”

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in closer personal context. In another book from the pre Web 2.0 era, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves argued that the relationships we form with devices are strikingly and disturbingly similar to the relationships we have with human beings. Nass, an HCI expert based at Stanford, is perhaps sitting in a place — between man and machine — where extreme focus might pay off big. For as much as we have become aware that the machine is becoming more like man, we are blissfully unaware of how much man is becoming more like machine. We’re seeing more and more research – not much, however, surfacing to mainstream consciousness — that our device addictions are taxing our neural anatomy, limiting our ability to perform, limiting our ability to relate to others. So, in the end, what has been cut off from our vision is not only the coming of smarter, more useful social machines (the title of a 2005 MIT Technology Review cover story about smart devices), but the extent to which we have become social machines as well.

I’ll be looking into each of these areas. Would love to hear from anyone with supporting or contradictory insight and research.

New York Times (John Markoff) writes that scientists “worry machines may outsmart man.” Mentions Singularity University (TCG client).

CNET (Eric Franklin), reporting from the TED Global Conference, writes that Henry Makram of the Blue Brain Project “revealed that he and his team in Switzerland are aiming to build a functioning, artificial human brain within the next 10 years.”