This paper explores the emotional, ethical and practical dimensions of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into personal and professional workflows, focusing on the concept of feeling guilty as a 'c(ai)borg' - a human augmented by AI. Inspired by Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, the study explores how AI challenges traditional notions of creativity, originality and intellectual labour. Using an autoethnographic approach, the authors reflect on their year-long experiences with AI tools, revealing a transition from initial guilt and reluctance to empowerment through skill-building and transparency. Key findings highlight the importance of basic academic skills, advanced AI literacy and honest engagement with AI results. The c(ai)borg vision advocates for a future where AI is openly embraced as a collaborative partner, fostering innovation and equity while addressing issues of access and agency. By reframing guilt as growth, the paper calls for a thoughtful and inclusive approach to AI integration.

Captain Picard: "How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?" At least, I've never known anyone who did." With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are introduced to one of their most formidable enemies: the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose minds are linked to a collective "hive mind" through sophisticated technology. The collective expands their civilization through a process of mental and physical "assimilation": They find new intelligent beings, like humans, implant them with Borg technology, and integrate them into the hive mind, erasing their previous identities. Individual Borg are not conscious in the way humans are, and they have no sense of individuality. The hive mind is a dictator, an unquestioned voice that commands each individual. The Borg nature is split in two, an executive called the collective and a follower called the drone. For the humans living in the Star Trek universe, the prospect of assimilation is terrifying. When asked why humans resist assimilation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge says, "For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying." In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that "good and evil are...READ MORE For many humans living in the real world, the fictional Borg are similarly unsettling.

Anita Borg, a computer scientist who devoted much of her career to the advancement of women in computer science, died on Sunday at her mother's home in Sonoma, Calif. The cause was brain cancer, said her husband, Winfried Wilcke. Although highly respected as a computer scientist, Dr. Borg made her biggest mark as a champion and mentor of women in what has traditionally been a man's field. Through the several programs she founded, she became virtually synonymous with involving women in the emerging science. In 1987, after returning from a technical conference where she was one of only a handful of women present, Dr. Borg started Systers, an electronic mailing list on technical subjects exclusively for women who are engineers.

Google's latest bombshell of a research project is a smart contact lens diabetics can use to read blood sugar levels through the tears in their eyes. Thanks to a tiny microchip, Google says, the lens can provide a new glucose reading as often as once a second. Some have pointed out that the project follows in the footsteps of rival Microsoft, but this is merely another reason to applaud Google, a company with a knack for bringing research into the real world that we'll likely never see from Microsoft. The lens Google unveiled on Thursday seems to draw heavily, if not directly, from work done by Microsoft. As TechCrunch notes, one of the Googlers behind the project, Babak Parvis, once collaborated with the Redmond software giant on a lens the company fashioned for tracking blood sugar without needles.

Milind Tambe and class co-designer Emma Bowring, with some exercise materiels "Science fiction is the spice," says Tambe. Students in a new class offered by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will be writing computer code for Isaac Asimov's disobedient robot Speedy, and for the sinister many-bodied Star Trek menace, the Borg. Milind Tambe, an associate professor of computer science, will be using science fiction as problem sets in a class on artificial intelligence for undergraduate programmers beginning in the fall, 2006 semester. "Computer science is catching up with the ideas in these stories," says Tambe. "We are using science fiction as the spice for the main dish of teaching an important new area of our discipline." While a number of universities use science fiction to introduce concepts in physics and other fields, Tambe believes his course is the first of its kind in computer science.

A few years ago Manu Saadia, a longtime Star Trek fan, went looking for a book about the economics of Star Trek. When he couldn't find one, he decided to write his own. The result, Trekonomics, has drawn praise from economists such as Brad DeLong and Joshua Gans. Saadia says that Star Trek is one of the few science fiction universes that grapple with the idea that money may someday become obsolete. "It's made clear and emphasized several times in the course of the show that the Federation does not have money," Saadia says in Episode 205 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Flow is a psychological state that is reported to improve people’s performance. Flow can emerge when the person’s skills and the challenges of their activity match. This paper applies this concept to artificial intelligence agents. We equip a decision-making agent with a metacontrol policy that guides the agent to activities where the agent’s skills match the activity difficulty. Consequently, we expect the agent’s performance to improve. We implement and evaluate this approach in the role-playing game of Angband.