The brothers Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon upon the observation that smoke rises, and thus they figured that if they could catch it in a bag, the bag would be pulled upward. Hot air ballooning is quite popular today; people think of balloons as being quaint and pretty and natural, or at least more… Continue reading Steam balloons
We’ve had a fair amount of interest in the Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes, mostly from RepRap types. They pointed out that we had a slight incompatibility in the specification of the open source requirements with those of the RepRap community itself. We’ve changed the requirements to allow either BSD or GPL. To make… Continue reading Gada Prize update
At the Foresight congerence special-interest lunch on IQ tests for AI, Monica Anderson suggested a test involving separating text which had had spaces and punctuation removed, back into words. As a somewhat whimsical version of the test, I suggested the Sigil of Scoteia: In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the frontispiece of the novel… Continue reading The Sigil of Scoteia
In the terminology I introduced in Beyond AI, all the AI we have right now is distinctly hypohuman: The overall question we are considering, is AI possible, can be summed up essentially as “is diahuman AI possible?” The range of things humans can do, done as flexibly as humans can do them, and learned the… Continue reading AI: how close are we?
40s: Cybernetics, the notion the brain did logic in circuits, feedback 50s: the computer, stored programs, Logic Theorist 60s: LISP, semantic nets, GOFAI 70s: SHRDLU, AM 80s: AI winter, expert systems, neural nets 90s: robots, machine learning 00s: DARPA grand challenge level of competence The main point of this post is to answer any objections… Continue reading A brief history of AI
I’m about to start a series of posts on the topic of why I think AI is actually possible. I realize that most of the readers here don’t probably need too much convincing on that subject, but you’d be surprised how many very smart people, many of them professors of computer science, are skeptical to… Continue reading Is AI really possible?
Feynman anniversary event to be held at University of South Carolina. h/t Nanowerk In February 1960, the Caltech magazine Engineering & Science published Feynman’s “Plenty of Room”, and it has been re-published ten times since then. This has become one of the best-known papers in the history of nanotechnology. The fiftieth anniversary of the initial… Continue reading Feynman anniversary event to be held at University of South Carolina
From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools… Continue reading Keeping computers from ending science's reproducibility
Roadmaps to Nanotech and AGI slides are here Josh [note — we know about the permission problem, trying to get it fixed][should be fixed now]
Glenn Reynolds, a past Foresight Director, writes some analysis of the recent special election in Mass.: Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the… Continue reading "Lies don't work as well as they used to…"
