This art-meets-robot has the grueling task of standing on one foot all day long while other robots get to bend to their heart’s content. It balances on that single point by adjusting its center of gravity with six pendulum-like appendages.

Here’s how OneSocialWeb bills itself:

The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

The project was built based on other standardization initiatives aiming to open up the web: activitystrea.ms, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, OpenID … you name it.

Sounds like a dream if you’re into the whole ‘open’ thing and not happy with how Facebook and other social networks are evolving, right? So why has it been flying under the radar so much?

Maybe their timing just wasn’t right – Diaspora got introduced to the masses by the NYT at a time when a lot of spotlights are turned to Facebook and its privacy policies – or maybe it’s the fact that OneSocialWeb isn’t an initiative of four geeky college students but the Vodafone Group Research and Development (which acts as a double-edged sword).

OpenSocialWeb is currently developing beta versions of a Web client, an Android application, and more. We’ll see how far they can take this – the service and protocol is expected to be ‘consumer ready’ by late Summer.

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

Kurzweil: The trend so far is that communications technology is moving closer to us rather than forcing humans to become more like the classical notion of a machine. When I was a student at MIT, you did have to be an engineer to use the computer, and I had to use my bicycle to get to the one computer on campus. Today, I have a computer on my belt, and I am able to access virtually all human knowledge with a few keystrokes. And, already, 5 billion people have these mobile devices in their pockets. The technologies that succeed in the marketplace are the ones that meet our basic human needs to communicate and socialize. 

Within 20 years, computers will match human intelligence and pass the "Turing test," in which they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. But this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us and displace us. We will use these machines as we have always used our tools -- to extend our own reach.

I have to say I didn't find anything "shocking".. But I'm guessing they just had to put something sensationalist in the article title. Because, you know.. He's Ray fcking Kurzweil..

Kasparov himself reminded me of the match in an article he published in the February 11 issue of the New York Review of Books . It's ostensibly a review of the book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind , by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, but much more interesting for me were Kasparov's insights on the interplay between people and computers around the game of chess. He's a formidably intelligent person (duh) who has thought deeply about the implications of the computerization of his profession. He's also a fine writer, so the piece is a delight to read. And it contains lessons for playing the game of business better.

Here's what the article boils down to:

I didn't think that smart process design - in this case, a process for determining the "best" chess move - could overcome both cognitive and computational deficits. But it did, even in this domain where brains and calculations would appear to be the only things that matter. As Kasparov writes of this amazing result, "Weak human machine better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human machine inferior process." I think that's my new motto.

Also mentioned in the article, and definitely worth learning about, is the Moravec's paradox .