Category: Machine Intelligence

from the software-immune-system dept.
JohnPierce reports on work at Sandia: "A thought-provoking article on software security agents. They are self-replicating, and work in a social structure. These may be precursors to AI and distributed control of swarms of nanomachines."

from the great-stuff dept.
Strongly recommended by Foresight chairman Eric Drexler is this paper by Senior Associate Josh Hall. Josh writes "The final version of my ethics for machines paper is now available. Thanks to all those at the "Confronting Singularity" Gathering who read the draft and discussed the ideas with me."Do you agree with Eric that this work is important and should be expanded into a book?

from the Moravec-as-religious?! dept.
Virtual reality pioneer/musician JaronLanier has published a Critique of Machine Intelligence. Excerpt: The culture of machine consciousness enthusiasts often includes the expressed hope that human death will be avoidable by actually enacting the first thought experiment above, of transferring the human brain into a machine. Hans Moravec is one researcher who explicitly hopes for this eventuality. If we can become machines we don't have to die, but only if we believe in machine consciousness. I don't think it's productive to argue about religion in the same way we argue about philosophy or science, but it is important to understand when religion is what we are talking about. Do you agree with Jaron that the uploading meme is a religious concept?

from the great-stuff dept.
If you missed the wonderful Spiritual Robots Symposium held at Stanford in April, featuring the best debate on machine intelligence seen in academia in years, you can now see it online courtesy of Dr Dobb's. Includes Frank Drake, Doug Hofstadter, John Holland, Bill Joy, Kevin Kelly, John Koza, Ray Kurzweil, Ralph Merkle and Hans Moravec.

from the Palm-Pilot-will-be-smarter-than-we-are dept.
Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee (ping) writes "For a recent keynote talk i gave on the future of technology, i put together a chart of computing power based on the data in Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. I wasn't too happy with the readability of the chart in the book, so i asked myself "What would Tufte do?" and tried to design a clearer layout. A couple of things to note (if you have not already read Kurzweil's book):

• The vertical scale is a log scale, yet the best fit is not a straight line. It still curves upward slightly. (Try to fit a straight line and you'll see that it doesn't work.)
• We aren't just plotting maximum available computing power here — it's computing power available for a modest amount of money ($1000 in 1999 dollars).
• All the data, except for the last point (the Athlon) is taken from the book.

What do you think? Are we on schedule? Any bets for when the computational power of an affordable desktop machine will approach the computational power of a human brain? "