I know there are a lot of you that think I’m off the deep end with the fear of a machine revolution (whether it takes the form of sentient computers killing everyone or a new race of human/machine hybrids Borg-ifying the planet), but please watch this report from 60 Minutes and try to stay relaxed. Holy crap.
Category Archives: The Singularity
Oh, #*@&!%.
Maybe the scary AI researchers all took a vacation over the summer, or I just missed the best headlines. But check this mother out: Computer circuit built from brain cells. You have to wait for the scariest excerpt of all:
Brain implants can allow the paralysed to control robot arms or learn to talk again, but suffer a drop-off in performance when scar tissue coats their electrodes. “An intermediate layer of in vitro neurons interfacing between man and machine could be advantageous,” he says.
Yes, who can say what sort of advantages a neural interface with your computer could provide? I can only think of about a MILLION.
Hiding in Plain Sight to Gain Our Affections
New Scientist has a post today about a robotic rabbit with actual fur:
Yohanan’s new robot, dubbed the Haptic Creature, is designed to recreate that touch-based communication between pet and owner to inject an element of emotion into human-robot interactions.
Remember those stories from the Civil War about families fighting on both sides? How much harder will it be to unplug your robot pets when they turn on you?
Machines Knows Science
From today’s Tech wire, “Mechanical Squirrels, Robot Lizards Jump Into Research“– here’s my fave excerpt:
Sarah Partan, an assistant professor in animal behavior at Hampshire, hopes that by capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky will help her team decode squirrels’ communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts.
And in related fictional news, it appears that the Cylons have been among us from the beginning, apparently for the exact same reasons.
Some Notes for Thursday
Couple random items from around the web for you this morning:
First, a short Obama ad about a summertime reprieve from the gas tax, with a good point:
Second, I do enjoy lists. New Scientist offers a list of the Top Ten Fictional Scientists in popular culture.
Finally, it’s exciting that Kyle and Robin will be headed to Thailand next month to pick up Thanu, but I’m a little conflicted on their plans for conditioning him to accept the reality of the coming robot menace. I guess it will be up to MY children to lead the resistance.
And a PS, not from the webs, but from the real world– today is Grandma’s birthday. She is 77!
Destroying The Machines May Only Slow Them Down
David L. Schrubbe, a valued colleague and fellow sentry on watch for The Singularity, sent this link for video evidence of a robot capable of reassembling itself when destroyed. Imagine how pissed that robot would be if you gave it a gun.
"Bum Bot" on Patrol in Atlanta
From the AP Tech Wire. Proprietor in Atlanta puts justice in the hands of his homemade toaster. Here’s my favorite part:
The bar now welcomes patrons with a sign that says ‘Home of the Bum Bot,’ and Terrill has asked a regular to design a T-shirt with its image. He says he may use it for a campaign for Atlanta mayor he plans to announce this summer.
‘He’ll be my chief of staff. He’ll be parked in front of my office,’ says Terrill, who finished fifth out of five in Georgia’s 2006 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.
A Good Way to Pay Homage to Our Future Masters
Pittsburgh Museum to Open Robot Exhibition
An excerpt from the article:
The $3.4 million permanent display – similar to a traveling exhibition that’s been on the road since 1996 – will emphasize four three aspects of artificial robotic behavior: sensing, thinking, killing all humans, and acting.
An All-Too-Rare Occurance
I was thinking about the difference between the real world and a virtual one, like the online game “2nd Life“. I thought about how one might look at the “life” in the game to be a sort of cheating– for example, if your avatar could (relatively) quickly and easily gain a set of skills that you don’t have in real life, just by interacting with your PC. Maybe you can easily learn how to play the guitar in 2nd Life, even if you don’t in your real life.
This got me to thinking about the nature of knowledge and the act of creating it. If you think of knowledge as something with a static existence– a thing that does not necessarily require a human brain to possess it, but more just in terms of the electrical impulses and combinations of proteins that create thought– those things should, theoretically, be able to be extracted and contained in some other sort of medium. Right?
So, if knowledge exists, then teaching and learning is (again, theoretically) a big waste of time, because you’re re-creating knowledge that has already been created before. If you could keep a store of that knowledge, and just “upload” it into a person’s consciousness, you’d think we could advance as a species a lot faster, because everyone would start with the sum total of human knowledge that exists at the moment they receive the upload.
Even better, what if (scary-Borg-stuff) knowledge could be disseminated not as a “file” that gets posted into a person’s brain, but what if we networked everyone’s brains together? If we had on-demand access to all the knowledge that is being created all the time? Think how quickly we would advance THEN.
This is somewhat like the shit that’s in my very-hard-to-read book about The Singularity. That Kurtzweil is one brainy mofo.
Good Morning, Michael.
GM is talking about developing technology that will allow for practical, driverless cars within a decade.
Of course, the best thing about this, from the perspective of a robot, is that it will be that much easier to smash our soft, frail, carbon-based bodies into the concrete medians of our freeways when the revolution comes.