Saturday, November 29, 2008
bicentennial man
In class this week we read a story titled Bicentennial Man, I thought the story was very interesting because the robot in the story was very creative. The robot in that story was different from other robots because he was a free robot. I thought that was interesting because I thought if you were free you didnt have to obey orders coming from someone that didnt have authority. The robot obeyed the two young men who told him to take his cloths off. I didnt understand how could they consider a robot free even though he obeyed orders from teenagers.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Please Read for Tuesday
From last week's Guardian:
Will machines outsmart man?
Scientists believe the point of 'Singularity' – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans – is closer than we thought
Wendy M Grossman
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 5 2008 00.01 GMT
The Guardian, Thursday November 6 2008
larger | smaller
Ray Kurzweil at a conference — as a hologram. Photograph: Ed Murray/Corbis
They are looking for the hockey stick. Hockey sticks are the shape technology startups hope their sales graphs will assume: a modestly ascending blade, followed by a sudden turn to a near-vertical long handle. Those who assembled in San Jose in late October for the Singularity Summit are awaiting the point where machine intelligence surpasses that of humans and takes off near-vertically into recursive self-improvement.
The key, said Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the first reading machine and author of 2005's The Singularity Is Near, is exponential growth in computational power - "the law of accelerating returns". In his favourite example, at the human genome project's initial speed, sequencing the genome should have taken thousands of years, not the 15 scheduled. Seven years in, the genome was 1% sequenced. Exponential acceleration had the project finished on schedule. By analogy, enough doublings in processing power will close today's vast gap between machine and human intelligence.
This may be true. Or it may be an unfalsifiable matter of faith, which is why the singularity is sometimes satirically called "the Rapture for nerds". It makes assessing progress difficult. Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel, addressed a key issue at the summit: can Moore's law, which has the number of transistors packed on to a chip doubling every 18 months, stay in line with Kurzweil's graphs? The end has been predicted many times but, said Rattner, although particular chip technologies have reached their limits, a new paradigm has always continued the pace.
"In some sense - silicon gate CMOS - Moore's law ended last year," Rattner said. "One of the founding laws of accelerating returns ended. But there are a lot of smart people at Intel and they were able to reinvent the CMOS transistor using new materials." Intel is now looking beyond 2020 at photonics and quantum effects such as spin. "The arc of Moore's law brings the singularity ever closer."
Judgment day
Belief in an approaching singularity is not solely American. Peter Cochrane, the former head of BT's research labs, says for machines to outsmart humans it "depends on almost one factor alone - the number of networked sensors. Intelligence is more to do with sensory ability than memory and computing power." The internet, he adds, overtook the capacity of a single human brain in 2006. "I reckon we're looking at the 2020 timeframe for a significant machine intelligence to emerge." And, he said: "By 2030 it really should be game over."
Predictions like this flew at the summit. Imagine when a human-scale brain costs $1 - you could have a pocket full of them. The web will wake up, like Gaia. Nova Spivack, founder of EarthWeb and, more recently, Radar Networks (creator of Twine.com), quoted Freeman Dyson: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
Listening, you'd never guess that artificial intelligence has been about 20 years away for a long time now. John McCarthy, one of AI's fathers, thought when he convened the first conference on the subject in 1956, that they'd be able to wrap the whole thing up in six months. McCarthy calls the singularity, bluntly, "nonsense".
Even so, there are many current technologies, such as speech recognition, machine translation, and IBM's human-beating chess grandmaster Deep Blue, that would have seemed like AI at the beginning. "It's incredible how intelligent a human being in front of a connected computer is," observed the CNBC reporter Bob Pisani, marvelling at how clever Google makes him sound to viewers phoning in. Such advances are reminders that there may be valuable discoveries that make attempts at even the wildest ideas worthwhile.
Dharmendra Modha, head of the cognitive computing group at IBM's Almaden research lab, is leading a "quest" to "understand and build a brain as cheaply and quickly as possible". Last year, his group succeeded in simulating a rat-scale cortical model - 55m neurons, 442bn synapses - in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The key, he says, is not the neurons but the synapses, the electrical-chemical-electrical connections between those neurons. Biological microcircuits are roughly essentially the same in all mammals. "An individual human being is stored in the strength of the synapses."
Smarter than smart
Modha doesn't suggest that the team has made a rat brain. "Philosophically," he writes on the subject, "any simulation is always an approximation (a kind of 'cartoon') based on certain assumptions. A biophysically realistic simulation is not the focus of our work." His team is using the simulation to try to understand the brain's high-level computational principles.
But computational power is nothing without software. "Would the neural code that powers human reasoning run on a different substrate?" the sceptical science writer John Horgan asked Kurzweil, who replied: "The key to the singularity is amplifying intelligence. The prediction is that an entity that passes the Turing test and has emotional intelligence ... will convince us that it's conscious. But that's not a philosophical demonstration."
For intelligence to be effective, it has to be able to change the physical world. The MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld was therefore at the summit to talk about programmable matter. It's a neat trick: computer science talks in ones and zeros, but these are abstractions representing the flow or interruption of electric current, a physical phenomenon. Gershenfeld, noting that maintaining that abstraction requires increasing amounts of power and complex programmning, wants to turn this on its head. What if, he asked, you could buy computing cells by the pound, coat them on a surface, and run programs that assemble them like proteins to solve problems?
Gershenfeld is always difficult for non-physicists to understand, and his video of cells sorting was no exception. Two things he said were clear. First: "We aim to create life." Second: "We have a 20-year road map to make the Star Trek replicator."
Twenty years: 2028. Vernor Vinge began talking about the singularity in the early 80s (naming it after the gravitational phenomenon around a black hole), and has always put the date at 2030. Kurzweil likes 2045; Rattner, before 2050.
Turning back time
These dates may be personally significant. Rattner is 59; Vinge is 64. Kurzweil is 60, takes 250 vitamins and other supplements a day, and believes some of them can turn back ageing. If curing all human ills will be a piece of cake for a superhuman intelligence, then the singularity carries with it the promise of immortality - as long as you're still alive when it happens.
It is in this connection between the singularity and immortality, along with the idea that sufficiently advanced technology can solve every problem from climate change to the exhaustion of oil reserves, that gives the summit the feel of a religious movement. Certainly, James Miller, assistant professor of economics at Smith College, sounded evangelical when he reviewed how best to prepare financially. He was optimistic, reviewing investment strategies and assuming retirement funds won't be needed.
HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain, by contrast, explained why 50 million people will lose their jobs when they can be replaced by robots. "In the whole universe, there is one intelligent species," he said. "We're in the process of creating the second intelligent species."
The anthropologist Jane Goodall may disagree. She sees a different kind of singularity - the growing ecological devastation of Africa - and worries about the disconnection between human minds and hearts. "If we're the most intellectual animal," she said, "why are we destroying our only home?"
If Goodall's singularity comes first, the other one might never happen at all - one of those catastrophes that Vinge admits as the only thing he can imagine that could stop it.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Will machines outsmart man?
Scientists believe the point of 'Singularity' – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans – is closer than we thought
Wendy M Grossman
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 5 2008 00.01 GMT
The Guardian, Thursday November 6 2008
larger | smaller
Ray Kurzweil at a conference — as a hologram. Photograph: Ed Murray/Corbis
They are looking for the hockey stick. Hockey sticks are the shape technology startups hope their sales graphs will assume: a modestly ascending blade, followed by a sudden turn to a near-vertical long handle. Those who assembled in San Jose in late October for the Singularity Summit are awaiting the point where machine intelligence surpasses that of humans and takes off near-vertically into recursive self-improvement.
The key, said Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the first reading machine and author of 2005's The Singularity Is Near, is exponential growth in computational power - "the law of accelerating returns". In his favourite example, at the human genome project's initial speed, sequencing the genome should have taken thousands of years, not the 15 scheduled. Seven years in, the genome was 1% sequenced. Exponential acceleration had the project finished on schedule. By analogy, enough doublings in processing power will close today's vast gap between machine and human intelligence.
This may be true. Or it may be an unfalsifiable matter of faith, which is why the singularity is sometimes satirically called "the Rapture for nerds". It makes assessing progress difficult. Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel, addressed a key issue at the summit: can Moore's law, which has the number of transistors packed on to a chip doubling every 18 months, stay in line with Kurzweil's graphs? The end has been predicted many times but, said Rattner, although particular chip technologies have reached their limits, a new paradigm has always continued the pace.
"In some sense - silicon gate CMOS - Moore's law ended last year," Rattner said. "One of the founding laws of accelerating returns ended. But there are a lot of smart people at Intel and they were able to reinvent the CMOS transistor using new materials." Intel is now looking beyond 2020 at photonics and quantum effects such as spin. "The arc of Moore's law brings the singularity ever closer."
Judgment day
Belief in an approaching singularity is not solely American. Peter Cochrane, the former head of BT's research labs, says for machines to outsmart humans it "depends on almost one factor alone - the number of networked sensors. Intelligence is more to do with sensory ability than memory and computing power." The internet, he adds, overtook the capacity of a single human brain in 2006. "I reckon we're looking at the 2020 timeframe for a significant machine intelligence to emerge." And, he said: "By 2030 it really should be game over."
Predictions like this flew at the summit. Imagine when a human-scale brain costs $1 - you could have a pocket full of them. The web will wake up, like Gaia. Nova Spivack, founder of EarthWeb and, more recently, Radar Networks (creator of Twine.com), quoted Freeman Dyson: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
Listening, you'd never guess that artificial intelligence has been about 20 years away for a long time now. John McCarthy, one of AI's fathers, thought when he convened the first conference on the subject in 1956, that they'd be able to wrap the whole thing up in six months. McCarthy calls the singularity, bluntly, "nonsense".
Even so, there are many current technologies, such as speech recognition, machine translation, and IBM's human-beating chess grandmaster Deep Blue, that would have seemed like AI at the beginning. "It's incredible how intelligent a human being in front of a connected computer is," observed the CNBC reporter Bob Pisani, marvelling at how clever Google makes him sound to viewers phoning in. Such advances are reminders that there may be valuable discoveries that make attempts at even the wildest ideas worthwhile.
Dharmendra Modha, head of the cognitive computing group at IBM's Almaden research lab, is leading a "quest" to "understand and build a brain as cheaply and quickly as possible". Last year, his group succeeded in simulating a rat-scale cortical model - 55m neurons, 442bn synapses - in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The key, he says, is not the neurons but the synapses, the electrical-chemical-electrical connections between those neurons. Biological microcircuits are roughly essentially the same in all mammals. "An individual human being is stored in the strength of the synapses."
Smarter than smart
Modha doesn't suggest that the team has made a rat brain. "Philosophically," he writes on the subject, "any simulation is always an approximation (a kind of 'cartoon') based on certain assumptions. A biophysically realistic simulation is not the focus of our work." His team is using the simulation to try to understand the brain's high-level computational principles.
But computational power is nothing without software. "Would the neural code that powers human reasoning run on a different substrate?" the sceptical science writer John Horgan asked Kurzweil, who replied: "The key to the singularity is amplifying intelligence. The prediction is that an entity that passes the Turing test and has emotional intelligence ... will convince us that it's conscious. But that's not a philosophical demonstration."
For intelligence to be effective, it has to be able to change the physical world. The MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld was therefore at the summit to talk about programmable matter. It's a neat trick: computer science talks in ones and zeros, but these are abstractions representing the flow or interruption of electric current, a physical phenomenon. Gershenfeld, noting that maintaining that abstraction requires increasing amounts of power and complex programmning, wants to turn this on its head. What if, he asked, you could buy computing cells by the pound, coat them on a surface, and run programs that assemble them like proteins to solve problems?
Gershenfeld is always difficult for non-physicists to understand, and his video of cells sorting was no exception. Two things he said were clear. First: "We aim to create life." Second: "We have a 20-year road map to make the Star Trek replicator."
Twenty years: 2028. Vernor Vinge began talking about the singularity in the early 80s (naming it after the gravitational phenomenon around a black hole), and has always put the date at 2030. Kurzweil likes 2045; Rattner, before 2050.
Turning back time
These dates may be personally significant. Rattner is 59; Vinge is 64. Kurzweil is 60, takes 250 vitamins and other supplements a day, and believes some of them can turn back ageing. If curing all human ills will be a piece of cake for a superhuman intelligence, then the singularity carries with it the promise of immortality - as long as you're still alive when it happens.
It is in this connection between the singularity and immortality, along with the idea that sufficiently advanced technology can solve every problem from climate change to the exhaustion of oil reserves, that gives the summit the feel of a religious movement. Certainly, James Miller, assistant professor of economics at Smith College, sounded evangelical when he reviewed how best to prepare financially. He was optimistic, reviewing investment strategies and assuming retirement funds won't be needed.
HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain, by contrast, explained why 50 million people will lose their jobs when they can be replaced by robots. "In the whole universe, there is one intelligent species," he said. "We're in the process of creating the second intelligent species."
The anthropologist Jane Goodall may disagree. She sees a different kind of singularity - the growing ecological devastation of Africa - and worries about the disconnection between human minds and hearts. "If we're the most intellectual animal," she said, "why are we destroying our only home?"
If Goodall's singularity comes first, the other one might never happen at all - one of those catastrophes that Vinge admits as the only thing he can imagine that could stop it.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
What elements would you include if you were a robot?
Today in class, we discussed what elements we would include if we were a robot. I am a bit skeptical about the whole robot idea and mimicking human nature, so I was hesitant to even think about this aspect. I don't think that it will be possible in the near future for robots to mimic humans in every aspect, giving them freedom of choice. I think it will be a difficult task for researchers to accomplish because in my opinion, in order for robots to be given choice, emotion has to be present. Emotion is a huge aspect throughout the daily lives of people, and if robots didn't have this emotion, they are not experiencing the full capacity of freedom. I think if I was mimicked into a robot, I would for sure include this idea of emotion. Also, in class, Dr. Langguth asked whether we would include our flaws or not in our robot. My answer would be yes because I am who I am today because of the mistakes I've made in my past. If I didn't experience that, I don't think I would be the same person.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Star Trek
In class this week we watched and episode of Star Trek. I thought the episode benefit what we learned in class about robots. I agreed with the people who said since the robot was able to make decisions he shouldn't be treated like any other machine. In the James Bond series James never spoke to his vehicles as like they were machines. So I agreed with the final decisions. I like the episode.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Data: human or robot?
In the StarTrek episode that we watched in class today, the question was if Data was a person or a robot. He is defended well and it's very convincing in the episode to take his side that he should have the right to choose for himself. And this is ultimately the decision that is made. However, after thinking about the subject again, I still think that robots should not be considered as humans and they don't ultimately have the 'right' to choose. I don't think that a robot has a soul and can therefore not be considered human.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Reflection on Dr. Riehemann Speech
The speech that Dr. Riehemann gave was very interesting. It definitely made me think about what intelligence really is. Once we started talking about what intelligence would be considered, I really think intelligence would have to include emotions and humor. Showing emotion and having passion for something and to grow in learn, instead of being programed like a robot would be. So I wouldn't consider a robot intelligent until these features are reached. Humor and emotions would definitely be something that would be a key for me to be consider intelligent.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Robby the Robot
In class this week we watched a filmed that was made in the 1950's called Forbidden Planet and the main attraction of the film was a robot named Robby. I thought it was a real robot at first but then later the director said it was a man in suit. Robby the robot reminded me of the robot maid from the cartoon The Jetsons, they did basically the same thing they cleaned and was able to interact with their owners. I was wondering in class was the cartoon the Jetsons made before or after the film Forbidden Planet because both had the same ideas of what a robot was to look like. Both robots were parts of metal put together and they didnt look like humas at all. I'm really enjoying the topic of robots and is enjoying the novel Robot Visions.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Robby the Robot
I find the entire idea of robots rather fascinating. I didn't realize at all that the concept of robots has been used and developed for many years. I also didn't realize that Robby the robot himself had appeared in so many different films. I am very anxious to hear the speaker on Thursday. Technology is so amazing in our current time that I can only imagine the kinds of things the speaker will enlighten us on.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Robot Visions
I really enjoyed reading the chapter titled Robot Visions. It was sort of like a suspense to me because I was trying to figure out was life a hundred years from there time really like that. It seemed to perfect for humans to to live in harmony like that because according to some theroist conflict is necessary and what makes the world go around. Society according to RG-13 was to perfect for humans. When I got to the end of the section my jaw dropped in amazement because first of all there was no humans alive and the letter was sent to the future by a human like robot and that robot was the one telling the story.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Can thought go on without a body?
Can thought go on without a body? When asked this question I really don't think this could ever happen, and I think that is what makes humans so unique. We can think and have our own minds. Robots don't get to have this because they can only think and do what humans have programed into them. So it is still human with our own bodies and minds that give robots the chance to walk around. Minds are something only a human body can have, and I think no matter how much intelligence we may have a robots "brain" will never match a humans mind.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Robots
It really caught me off guard when the meaning of robots meant slave. Robots are the mechanical slaves to work of humans. It is strange for me to think of them as slaves and that does put me in fear because the first thing that I think of is, is the movie iRobot. If we are working to make the perfect robot to use in our homes what if we make them to smart and they end up having their own minds and want to over take humans. They would have the ablity to do just that since we have made them to be the strongest we could, stronger than humans. When we try to make a pretty much just better human being with a mechanical human, we just need to be careful in fear of our future and limit them to never be just like humans as much as we can. This is why I would never consider robots humans, because I never want them to actually have minds.
Wilderness as "focal things"
I love the wilderness but when we discussed the wilderness it opened my eyes to something. The fact that we need technology to conquer the wilderness that we see. If you think about it even when we think we are out in nature, most of the time it is some how made that way by man. I rarely am in an completely untamed area of land. In some way man has come in to play around with the land to make it easier. Either we go to a park to be outside but that is basically made by man or when we on a trial, made by man, you still even hear cars passing by, which takes away from the outside enviorment that would have been experienced 100 years ago.
Robots
Society is making enormous strides in the field of robotics, slowly but surely incorporating them in all fields of life. We have seen a tremendous advancement in robotics over the years in all aspectes of society. The introduction and adaptation of new surgical devices and methods has revolutionized the medical field. Industrial factors have shifted from the man-made method of construction to factories ran mainly by mechanics. The automobile industry has recently introduced vehicles that preform various task for the driver, eliminating a specific skill once required by the driver. These advancements seem to help adjust society by allowing us to become comfortable and trusting of technology. The age of a robotic society is approaching and soon we will have robots preforming most of our daily task. This advancement fuels our discussion in class, whether robot's have rights or not?
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