From Singularity Hub, 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet… Continue reading Industrial robot carves metal like butter (video)
Finally, the first step has been made toward the longed-for goal of a robot which can do laundry: http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/31/berkeley-gets-willow-garage-robot-to-fold-towels-simply-stunning-video/ Of course, this also gives us some idea of other formerly human-only tasks that robots are likely to take over in the next decade or two. Thanks to SingularityHub.com for bringing this to our attention. —Chris… Continue reading Berkeley gets Willow Garage robot to fold towels: video
One of the fastest-growing general areas of technology, of which robotics is just a part, is the ability to control things using increasingly sophisticated theory and algorithms, and the ability to run non-trivial simulation models as part of the control process. Consider this use of compressed air jets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkhMCCOHFmM From the report at IEEE… Continue reading Air jet manipulation
There’s an interesting debate between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson on their respective blogs. Caplan writes: … Robin didn’t care about biological survival. He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body. He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to… Continue reading Cryonics and Philosophy of Mind
In Popular Mechanics, longtime Foresight friend Prof. Glenn Reynolds looks at the future of nanotech and artificial intelligence, among other things looking at safety issues, including one call that potentially dangerous technologies be relinquished. He takes a counterintuitive stance, which we’ve discussed here at Foresight over the years: But I wonder if that’s such a… Continue reading Reynolds advocates faster nano/AI R&D for safety reasons
According to the loose length-scale based definition, nanotechnology has long since conquered the world: feature sizes in microprocessors have been below the 100 nanometer mark for some time, qualifying them, if anyone wanted to, to be called nanoprocessors. The latest reports and plans are mentioning 22-nanometer parts just 2 years from now: DailyTech – AMD… Continue reading Moore's Law Marches On
From the Albany (OR) Democrat Herald: Phone robots: Let’s all rebel By Hasso Hering, Columnist | Posted: Saturday, November 7, 2009 11:45 pm What this country needs – even more than a shorter baseball season so the World Series doesn’t go into November – is a popular uprising against the tyranny of telephone robots. This… Continue reading The bad robot takeover
There was some objection to my post Is Robo Habilis a gateway to Intelligence? to the effect that it might take a lot of extra time to build the robots, and that would lengthen the time necessary to develop AI. That might certainly be true of the garage experimenter, but in the world at large,… Continue reading Robots
In response to my Robo Habilis post, Tim Tyler replied: An intelligence challenge should not involve building mechanical robot controllers – IMO. That’s a bit of a different problem – and a rather difficult one – because of the long build-test cycle involved in such projects. There are plenty of purer tests of intelligence that… Continue reading Is Robo Habilis a gateway to Intelligence?
There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names: Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such… Continue reading More on the AI takeover
