Back in my Moral Railroads post I opined: Unless I am completely mistaken and deluded, there was and is nobodyassociated with the DC train system who wanted the crash to happen. It’s not a question of morality at the level of bad intentions, either of people or machines. It was, in simple terms, a case of… Continue reading Moral Railroads again
There are those who worry about AIs or robots taking over the world. Isaac Asimov famously worried about people worrying about it — what he called the Frankenstein Complex — and invented the Three Laws of Robotics to show, at a sort of literary level of understanding, that we could build machines that were safe… Continue reading Building Safe AI
With the Singularity Summit fast approaching, it’s worth spend a little time pondering the perennial question of nanotechnology vs AI: which will happen first, will they be independent, symbiotic, or synergetic, and so forth? I say perennial because this is a question that has been discussed at Foresight meetings ever since the first Conference 20… Continue reading Nanotech and AI
Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: A California company is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The Sunnyvale, CA, firm Innovalight says that the inkjet process is a cheaper route to more-efficient solar power.… Continue reading Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency
More on the “is technological change accelerating front, from Ars Technica: High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth – Ars Technica. Some economists have attempted to measure the spread of technology within various nations, and discovered it’s not just our imagination: newer tech is being adopted faster, and appears to account for some of the… Continue reading High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth – Ars Technica
Koreans Show Feasibility of Room Temperature Version of IBM Millipede Super High Density Memory.
Accelerating Future » World Future Society 20 Forecasts for 2010-2025. Michael A is mildly skeptical about World Future Society claim we’ll have “human-level AI” by 2025. This caused me to think about whether I believed it myself. I think the answer depends on how you define it. I think AI is going to be really… Continue reading Human Level AI
Five essential things to know about evolution – Ars Technica. John Timmer dispels some common misconceptions. An understanding of evolution is key to understanding technological change — we individual humans are the mutations and crossover, but the dynamics of the overall process is similar.
I (and others) get interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio (podcast) about machine ethics… Robots: Our Future or Our End? | In the Loop | Minnesota Public Radio . Not deep but fun…
Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Saved More Human Lives Than Any Other Has Died – (h/t Reason Magazine). Norman Borlaug, the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history, has died at age 95. Borlaug was the Father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe… Continue reading Norman Borlaug, R.I.P: The Man Who Saved More Human Lives Than Any Other Has Died
