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…"
Today is the last day of the free webcast of the 2010 Foresight Conference being held now in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video may be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting (feel free to assist with this goal!). You can also follow the conference on… Continue reading Last day of free webcast of Foresight Conference on nanotech & AI
There’s still time to register, but if you just can’t participate in person this year, check out the free webcast of the Foresight Conference being held this weekend in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video will be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting… Continue reading This weekend: free webcast of Foresight Conference
Two nanoparticles connected by a polymer will tend to be drawn together at finite temperatures (though not at absolute zero) because as the polymer chain explores the states available to it, there are many more tangled and balled up ones than stretched-out straight ones — even though there is no overt force pulling the chain… Continue reading Is gravity an entropic spring?
