Free African-America labourers were performed much of the work on the house that on Tuesday can see its first ever African-American president. What a nice irony it would be — He would move full-time into a city that once was a bustling city for slave trade and live in a house built by enslaved.

Despite his dismal economic record, and his failure to deliver on populist redistributive campaign promises, AhmadiNejad's hard-line conservative faction enters the elections in surprisingly good shape. The UN approved a third round of sanctions on Iran last week, but the evaporation of the US threat to take military action against Iran after the publication of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in December is widely viewed in Iran as vindication of his uncompromising stance on the issue. He has seen off his main rival on the nuclear front, Ali Larijani, and seems to enjoy more solid backing from Supreme Leader, who ultimately calls the shots.

Last week also, he made a historic visit to Iraq. The open and 'normal' style of the trip was in sharp contrast to the furtive and unannounced visits of US leaders, all no doubt designed to show that it is Iran which really counts in the Persian Gulf.

His work reminds me of "The Caves of Steel", from Asimov, where Elijah Baley, the human detective, and R. Daneel Olivaw his number 2 robot detective, introduce in 1954 the story of an human-robot relationship bearing a great likelihood to what Levy today proposes. In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners", he conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them. "It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."

"My forecast [says Levy] is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."

The ideas put forward in his thesis and his forthcoming book "Love and Sex with ROBOTS"** have generated plenty of debate and controversy recently in the AI community. Theoretically, being an android will be harder, better, smarter, faster and stronger than us, and I believe it is unlikely that humanity will win this evolutionary contest. However, regardless of all interesting questions fraught with ethical overtones that you may think of, the question we should be asking today is, with organic reproduction seemingly out of the way, how do we get as much humanity into these androids before it's too late?, and in this particular case, while the idea of an AI sophisticated enough to create a functional sex partner is possible, will the meaning of relationships over time turn into another lifestyle upgrade?... good stuff that kept me amused while going to University on a few mornings this last week or two.

Despite the fact progress is being made all around us towards this future, very few people find a cyborg future palatable. Our attitudes of defensive competitiveness currently force robots to conform to a harmless shape and substance (except for military robots but remember we are talking about consumer robots). That attitude disappears if we begin to identify with the android. People are still too complacent with the idea that we are -years away- from merging with our machine counterparts because they mistakenly believe that we have to understand a lot more about how the brain works to interface with it. They hold the false idea that we need to duplicate, or at least completely model brain function before we can work with it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take any real wetware type of story available on the Internet, where real scientists attempt to merge neurons with silicon, and the awesome neuroplasticity of the human brain becomes self-evident. Neurons by their very nature process signals and identify patterns and they don't care where the signals come from!

At any rate, on the more amusing side of things though, I began to feel that why spend many years developing what nature does infinitely better!?

*Androids: an automaton that resembles a human being, human-robot.
** For a full review of David Levy's book, check the 10 November edition of New Scientist magazine, or log in to New Scientist Article Preview here.

P.S. I might be lucky enough to see David Levy during this SGAI Conference and Forum for Research Students on Artificial Intelligence which is being held in the University of Cambridge on December 10 - 12.

What will happen to all that nuclear arsenal in such an unstable environment which is the biggest exporter of violent extremists in the region? Perhaps "some" are embarrassed to talk about it openly because they supported not only Pakistan's access to the nukes, but also its corrupt military government for years.

“Two things above all make a country prosperous. The development of its people &mdash the human capital — and a competitive advantage. If you do the first without the second then you end up educating people to move else where...”

Little information has surfaced thus far about Larijani's reasons and I believe the man named to replace Ali Larijani could present the West with a harder line in a long-running dispute over Tehran's atomic stance. Little is known about Jalili except that he is one of the new faces in the foreign ministry and has a promising diplomatic career. Observers believe that the new chief nuclear negotiator is expected to adopt the same line with Mr. Solana as his predecessor, but many question whether he will have the same charisma and diplomatic skills as Ali Larijani.

At any rate, Mr. Lijani is out now, and Mr. Solana, who is tasked with reporting back by mid-November to a consortium of nations including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States on Iran's willingness to forswear its uranium enrichment programme, is left with no one decent and charismatic to dance with at the present time!

* taken from a movie directed by Thomas Carter.

From Another Irani Online.

You may also read about Moon 2.0 in X-Prize Foundation PR and BBC News.

Now the European Commission is considering an EU-wide scheme. The proposals are truly massive: a standard e-invoice for use across all 27 member states, along with legislative changes to make sure different tax systems can be fitted together, and regulatory tweaks to encourage business to use the system.

As part of the i2010 strategy to boost Europe's economic competitiveness, the scheme may have much to recommend it. And the numbers are certainly enticing business could save as much as pounds 164bn per year, says the Commission.

But before we get carried away by the rhetoric, there are some serious questions to be answered.

But the biggest question of all is: why is this a matter for government?

Whatever the drawbacks of free market capitalism, it is at least reliably good at spotting where there is money to be made. If there is an annual windfall of Pounds 164bn at stake, why is the Commission the first to spot it? And why will businesses need regulatory incentives to persuade them to use it?

Perhaps it is just a question of Brussels removing out-dated legal obstacles. Perhaps now, 10 years on, the business world is ready for e-invoicing.

Just as long as the Commission is not being seduced by a bureaucrat's dream, conjured up in an office using a spreadsheet rather than the realities of how firms do business and what their requirements are.

The competitiveness of European business is vital to its future.
Castles in the air do more harm than good.

By: Sarah Arnott
Editor @ Computing