"If I meet someone, my smartphone should know if we are meeting for the first time by close observation. If I introduce myself and shake hands, our phones should then automatically exchange information. No need for antiquated business cards. If my TV knows there is someone else in the room with me, it could suggest content to watch, either by recognizing me visually, or by talking directly to my iPhone to learn the shows we both like on Facebook or Twitter. The movie I’m watching will automatically pause when I need to go to the bathroom. The TV will just turn on and off when I sit down or stand up." READ MORE

“As we’re almost done with creating its key operating system, we are now working on refining its details to make it look more friendly to inmates.” READ MORE

This isn't actually Friday web-trolling: this is an important commentary on the age of information-ordering by algorithm: "You could call the telephone the progenitor of the modern age, the technology that made the concept of sharing information instantaneously across vast distances possible. Before the telephone, that was called magic. And now, it's the bronze medalist to fictionalized account of a women's prison." Yes, Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video out-ranks results for the actual, you know, telephone. Those were simpler times! I refer of course to March, 2010, when the Lady released "Telephone." Also the present/future is a little scary when you stare at it too long. READ MORE

Today the brave and wasteful decades of the American space program as we have known it come crunching to a halt. From its beginnings as wildly adventurous jaunts to its ghastly end as porters and bellboys to the International Space Station, 30 years and 135 space shuttle missions later, we are officially Done With Space Shuttling. We'll always have our little laboratory on the Station, and corporations are happy to do our transit for us, but space is now for the Europeans, the Japanese and the Russian nerd heartthrobs—goodbye, pencil-necked cutie Sergei Volkov, you second-generation cosmonaut! Now our machines are going to go to some asteroid and to the atmosphere of Jupiter and, most interestingly, our newest machine, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, which will orbit the equator and listen for black holes, and then later to triage with the other space machines to rise up and destroy us. FROM SPACE.

This is actually not a bad idea at all. Californian robot-making company Adept Technology has programmed their top-of-the-line Quattro robot to play the iPhone app video game 1to50, a speed test in which the player finds and touches the numbers 1 to 50 arranged randomly on the screen pad. To no one's surprise, the robot quickly set a new record with a time of 6.67 seconds (besting the current human record of 7.85.) Distracting the robots with iPhone video games might give us enough of a window to make a run for it. Here's a video with a wider-angle view, so you can see the whole robot machine. (Don't bother trying to get his attention, though.) READ MORE

I sleep till afternoon these days, trying to get as much rest as I can to save up my energy for the coming of the killer machines. There will be no time to sleep then. With their spinning blade hands and little electric mouths chasing us up and down the Brooklyn waterfront. Manhattan will be Machinetown entirely by then (when I say "by then" I mean by August or so). That's why Manhattan is almost completely ATMs. Killer Machines Eat Money. And Crap out Human Heads. Our only hope is that God will dispatch an angel brigade to help us fight them. It's all in my screenplay. Pregnant Natalie Portman will play all the Brutal Machines. And God is Queen Latifah. READ MORE