What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to evergreater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the ‘singularity’. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article ‘Spe...

Humans draw on their stereotypic beliefs to make assumptions about others. Even though prior research has shown that individuals respond socially to media, there is little evidence with regards to learners stereotyping and categorizing pedagogical agents. This study investigated whether learners stereotype a pedagogical agent as being knowledgeable or not knowledgeable and how this acuity influ...

We consider the future dynamics of a transient phantom dominated phase of the universe in LQC and in the RS braneworld, which both have a non-standard Friedmann equation. We find that for a certain class of potentials, the Hubble parameter oscillates with simple harmonic motion in the LQC case and therefore avoids any future singularity. For more general potentials we find that damping effects ...

Humans often alter their behavior depending on the opponent’s group membership, with positive (e.g., support of same-group members) or negative (e.g., stereotyping, oppression, genocide) consequences. An influential model developed by Hammond and Axelrod highlighted the emergence of macro-level “ethnocentric cooperation” from the aggregation of micro-level interactions based on arbitrary tags s...

Humans have the fascinating capacity to understand, and anticipate the actions of other humans in the same space, without requiring verbal communication. This ”intention reading” capacity is underpinned by a common motor-repertoire that is shared by all humans, and afforded by a subtle coordination of eye-head-arm movements that encodes the cues and signals that will ultimately be deciphered by...

Humans navigate crowded spaces such as a university campus by following common sense rules based on social etiquette. In this paper, we argue that in order to enable the design of new target tracking or trajectory forecasting methods that can take full advantage of these rules, we need to have access to better data in the first place. To that end, we contribute a new large-scale dataset that co...

We discuss, in this paper, the design of a life-like agent interface that considers the social aspects in human-agent interaction. The underlying hypothesis of the design is that human social behaviors toward life-like agents are on a par with those toward humans. Humans tend to sympathize with and follow other humans based on their affiliation needs. Therefore, it should be with life-like agen...

Humans have the ability to mentally travel forward and back in time. They can retrieve vivid memories of past events (episodic memories) and can imagine the future (planning). Although it has been suggested that this is a uniquely human ability, the evidence for subjective time travel in humans is typically based on verbal report and elaboration. Such evidence cannot be obtained from animals. H...

Humans evolved in populations structured in groups that extended beyond the nuclear family. Individuals interacted with each other within these groups and there was limited migration and sometimes conflicts between these groups. Suppose that during this evolution, individuals transmitted their behaviors or preferences to their (genetic or cultural) offspring, and that material outcomes resultin...

During man’s relatively brief existence on this planet, he has relied on the bounty of its flora and fauna for his existence. He has harvested wildlife for food, clothing, shelter, medicines, beasts of burden, pets, and companionship. Over most of this period, this harvesting and exploitation had little impact on those resources. Human population was very low, and most animal and plant populati...