Tonight on The Independents: Rise of the Machines! (Bumped)
Didn't get enough of Reason Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on Wednesday's episode of The Independents? Well, she's back tonight at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT, with repeats three hours later) on Fox Business Network, talking about–what else?–the Singularity.
That is because the weekly theme episode this time around is all about robots—smart machines that will (depending on who you talk to) liberate us from work, diagnose our strokes, drive our cars, modernize our economies, blow up our enemies, end humanity as we know it, or merely vacuum our houses while consoling us about the dwindling human race.
Kicking things off on a fearful note is James Barrat, author of new book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, which Ron Bailey reviews here. Followed by George Mason University associate economics professor Robin Hanson, who is decidedly more upbeat. Brookings Institution scholar P.W. Singer, author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, will talk about robot sand-fleas; and Dr. Yulun Wang of InTouch Health will demonstrate his fancy diagnostic robot friend. Competitive Enterprise Institute Fellow Marc Scribner will talk about driverless cars, R Street Institute Senior Fellow Lori Sanders will talk about our jerbs, and the co-hosts will talk about their very favorite robots from audi-visual entertainment history.
Do you, for one, welcome your new robot overlords? I for one am not so sure, but the show will give you plenty of raw material to chew on either way. Remember: Follow the show on Facebook and Twitter, and go to this link for a playlist of previous segments. WEEKEND REPEATS: "Rise of the Machines" will re-air over the weekend at 7 p.m. ET (4 p.m. PT) both Saturday and Sunday. And at 2 a.m. this evening/morning, we will be repeating the Wednesday show featuring Rep. Justin Amash (D-Mich.), documentarian Errol Morris, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and TV's Andy Levy from Red Eye (which you can then watch at 3 a.m. on the big Fox).
