Is AI a Real Threat to the Human Race?

 It is a fact that Artificial Intelligence scares the crap out of some people.  The knowledge and
resources are in place that allow for the construction of more powerful AI systems.  It doesn't stretch the imagination that  such AI systems could reach the level of humans in intelligence and in doing so have the capability to construct AIs that could be far more intelligent than the original AI.  

Present AIs are fairly cute and simplistic.  However as the past has demonstrated, as the systems become more capable, more responsibilities will be shifted to them.  The question on a lot of people's minds are how long before we can no longer control these computer intelligences?

As the author postulates in the Irish Times Technology section:

• Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to treat cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.

People who support AI postulate that things like this would never happen - that programmers will  build in safeguards.  This, author Nick Bilton says in part, from programmers who can barely keep present day computers from crashing whenever you check just your e-mail

From the the Irish Times  article:

• Elon Musk, recently said artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes”. Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest people on earth, wrote that successful AI “would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.

Google Wants to Create Robots That Think

 

 Google says it is working on a "quantum" computer chip.  The goal, stated Google researchers, is to, one day, have machines think like humans.

Researcher John Martinis and his team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has begun to work with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence team at Google.

Thise new pairing is part of Google's "hardware initiative" to design and build chips operating on sub-atomic levels in ways making them exponentially faster than processors currently used in computers today.

Now with an integrated hardware team, the blended Quantum AI team will now make it possible to implement and test new designs.

Recently, Google's artificial intelligence lab, partnered with NASA space agency on quantum computing research.

The complete Business insider article is HERE

Advances in Computer Literacy

Some big news in the world of AI. A computer at MIT has learned to read! Which is actually a much bigger breakthrough than you might think.

Computers, as we know, have no problem treating words as raw data. But they've never scored very high in reading for comprehension. Until now. MIT researchers set a computer to the task of playing the game "Civilization II". With no prior instruction, learning the game simply through trial and error, the computer was able to win 46% of its games. Which still sounds pretty impressive to me. Then the computer was given an instruction manual to read. The manual is written in broad language, intended to give the basics of the game. It tells you how to play, but not necessarily how to win. Once the computer read the manual, though, it won 79% of the games it played. It even began devising strategies, extrapolating upon the information from the manual.

All of which is very cool and exciting, but it does beg the question: are we really sure we want to be teaching our supercomputers to play games of world domination? Really?

You can read the full article here.

Unnatural Selection

From Shaun Saunders comes a very interesting article in New Scientist:

• Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to (environmental) changes by mimicking biological evolution.

Pretty strong statement by any definition. So just exactly are they talking about. Well at present, if you build a robotic device and then add on some other ability, you wind up having to retool and recode the whole system. The device on it's own can not make the adjustments to deal with environmental and structural changes. But MacLeod has added a wrinkle. The robot's software "brain" can automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops, this is very much how biological life evolved over million of years. Macleod's robot's brain assigns new clusters of "neurons" to adapt to new additions to its body. In effect mimicking life.

Up to this point robotic scientists have used a try it, fail, succeed system for robot learning which is often slow and time consuming. MacLeod's team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time. This new system can learn and adapt to changes and relearn functions by adding on "brains" to deal with the changes.

Read the complete New Scientist article

Voight-Kampff moot - Deckart out of work - Future androids will be empatic

IO9 always comes up with the most interesting stuff! If you remember your Blade Runner lore, The robotic Replicants in Blade Runner were indistinguishable from humans except for their lack of empathy. Now researchers are creating virtual human analogs that can detect human emotions through non-verbal cues and develop appropriate responses. This could lead to artificial life forms who are not only intelligent, but empathic as well.

Why you might ask? It is becoming more and more common to interact with machines in everyday life. From leaving messages, to being connected to the proper agent or becoming more common to complete a sale or service call start to finish with a machine.

However researchers at Paris' Institute of Technology have found that people frequently lose interest in some systems because they don’t seem sufficiently human in their responses. To create programs that keep humans engaged, teams at the Paris Institute of Technology are developing a virtual human that will recognize and respond to human emotions. They are training them to detect emotional expressions via webcam, and studying how flesh and blood humans react to the virtual's responses. They are hoping that this will improve the way that humans interact with them.

<- IO9 article ->

AI wins bronze Turing Award

British mathematician Alan Turing, if not the father of artificial intelligence, can at the very least be considered the father of methods of understanding and discerning if a machine is in fact capable of artificial intelligence. Turing came up with a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Writing in 1950, Turing argued that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human too. His tests, and by extension, the yearly competitions that have been ongoing since 1991, consists of a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Turing's test consists of a human judge who would swap messages simultaneously with a computer and another human, without being told which was which. If the judge had trouble telling his correspondents apart, Turing said, then the computer met the human standard of intelligence. This year's Bronze award (no software has yet won the silver or gold awards) handed out by organizer American scientist and philanthropist Hugh Loebner goes to the piece of software that best mimics human conversation in text form. That software was a "chatbot" called Elbot designed by Fred Roberts a Hamburg, Germany-based consultant. Elbot duping three out of 12 judges assigned to evaluate it.

<- read more in the Associated Press article ->

Father of "Eliza" Joseph Weizenbaum, Dead at 85

Joseph Weizenbaum, whose famed conversational computer program, Eliza, foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, died on March 5 in Gröben, Germany. Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines. The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client’s statements as questions. Mr. Weizenbaum later said that he was stunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details. Often people failed to understand that they were talking to a computer program.

Click Here For the complete article from the New York Times

Plan to teach baby robot to talk

ok, this is one story that I was kind of sitting on for no other reason than it at first seemed to be alarmist and derivative. So many are looking at it as either just a waste of effort and other reactionaries are screaming the AI's are commin! When both sides are patently wrong, why bother? But then Shaun sends in a report on the project that the BBS News had picked up on. And what are we talking about? The project to teach a "baby" robot to speak. And your already saying "teach a robot to speak? Just program in the words!" nope, wrong answer. What you have created is a fancy recorder. The "baby" would understand nothing about what was being said or why it was being said. The experiment is to try to get an AI to learn and understand the fundamentals of language just as a child would as it was learnig to speak. As the BBC reports:

Their findings could lead to the development of humanoid robots which learn, think and talk.

Here is more from the BBC article

What's next you ask - well Shaun say iChild...lol I on the other hand are a bit more freaked out and the first thing I though of was Kubric's AI based on Aldiss' "Super Toys Last all Summer" Read the article, read the story....you judge. Oh and yes I am trying to get Brian to let me read this disturbing piece on BMU and for your money, I thought Kubric nailed it.

Techies ponder computers smarter than us.....

According to futurists gathered at a recent weekend conference, information technology is hurtling toward a point where machines will become smarter than their makers. If that happens, it will alter what it means to be human in ways almost impossible to conceive. There techies and scientists to imagine a future of self-programming computers and brain implants that would allow humans to think at speeds nearing today's microprocessors. Artificial intelligence researchers at the summit warned that now is the time to develop ethical guidelines for ensuring these advances help rather than harm. Some critics have mocked singularists for their obsession with "techno-salvation" and "techno-holocaust" — or what some have called the coming "nerdocalypse." Their predictions are grounded as much in science fiction as science, the detractors claim, and may never come to pass. But advocates argue it would be irresponsible to ignore the possibility.

The Human Brain....

Jeff Hawkins created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. Now he says he’s got the ultimate invention: software that mimics the human brain.

Jeff Hawkins of Palm Computing and Handspring is at it again. This time he is going where conventional wisdom has cashed in and given up the ghost. Hakins has set up a new company
called Numenta. Numenta's product will be something different for Hawkins - a data set based on how the human mind thinks, and learns. Hawkins has some radically different ways of
expressing how the mind learns and thinks, which puts him ahead of how conventional have addressed the problem of a true human level AI.

click the article title to go to the complete story. Its truly fascinating.

submitted by Shaun Saunders