Category Archives: The Singularity

Holy Synthetic Balls

Schrubbe and I are the only ones that I know of who are legitimately concerned about the robot problem and AI, but this story kind of points to the rapid-growth potential for scientific advancement in this area.

Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years

Humankind is going to continue pushing the envelope of science for good or ill for as long as we’re around. We just have to hope and pray that the ethics and philosophy that surround these unimaginable developments keep pace.

Operation: Annihilate!

More substantive post to come later in the day, but check out what those zany Canucks are doing with computers and checkers. Most interesting excerpt to me: What we’ve done is show that you can take nontrivial problems, very large problems, and you can do the same kind of reasoning with perfection. There is no error in the Chinook result. … Every decision point is 100 percent.

Yes, I had a friend named HAL a few years back that made a similar assertion. Now just combine Chinook with a taser-wielding robo-cop, and you will get a perfect enforcement machine that KNOWS the correct decision, 100% of the time, is to Kill All Humans.