This is the third year in a row that I’m participating in the sexual futurism conference called Arse Elektronika. You can come out to the Thursday night opening ceremonies at the Roxie Theater to see a lot of crazy, awesome entertainment, including me talking about gay porn mashups from Japan. And I’m also giving a paper on Saturday at 3 PM on the future of romantic love (yes, it has a future). Check out the full Saturday schedule (venue is PariSoMa), which includes appearances from luminaries like R.U. Sirius, Violet Blue, and Kyle Machulis, here. Hope to see you there!

Last week I published an article in the Washington Post about how artificial intelligence might emerge from an unexpected place. Here’s the way the article starts:

If machines ever become sentient, science fiction movies have conditioned us to expect one thing: Our new mechanical masters will try to take over the world and destroy us all. But the reality of artificial intelligence is a lot weirder than even the machines vs. humanity “Matrix” movies suggest. When AI finally emerges, it will be a lot more like an erudite video store clerk than a superpowered killer.

If you’ve ever bought something at Amazon.com or rented a movie from Netflix, you’ve interacted with a software program that owes its existence to over half a century of research into artificial intelligence. That program composes sentences such as: “Because you enjoyed the movie ‘Godzilla,’ we think you would enjoy ‘Ultraman.’ ” It’s called a “recommender system,” and it’s designed to learn about you and your fellow humans by gathering data about you and drawing conclusions from it; eventually, it will know more about what you like than you do.

Read the whole article at Washington Post.