How do we search for alien life if it’s nothing like the life that we know? At TEDxUIUC Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life — self-replicating computer programs — to find a signature, a ‘biomarker,’ that is free of our preconceptions of what life is.

Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren’t a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.

The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. “An empire of robots,” the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?