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.

This Is the State of CGI!

Get ready to get your minds blown.....This has to be one of the best demos of high end CGI I have ever seen.

Computer Passes Turing Test for the First Time!

That one get your attention?!  Thank Crystal-Wizard for this little dandy!   The computer, posing as a 13 year old boy named Eugene Goostman managed to fool a group of researchers.

The test, named after computer pioneer Alan Turing, is fairly straight forward.  To say that a computer program has passed the Turing Test, it needs to fool  30 percent of human judges in five-minute, text-based chats,  something until now has never happened.

It should be noted though that a chat bot has now also passed by posing as a 13 year old boy with whom English is not a primary language. 

So it is not AI going on here but some very clever library scripts and the like but still, there are huge implications. 

Read the whole article here

China's Super Computer Retains Title of Fastest

 

China's Tianhe 2  which can operate at 33.863 trillion operations a second again retains it's title as world's fastest computer, a benchmark it set in June of 2013.  The benchmark is called the Linpack and it compiles it's list twice yearly.  

From the BBC News online article:

• It  (the linpack benchmark) measures how fast the computers can solve a special type of linear equation to determine their speed, but does not take account of other factors - such as how fast data can be transferred from one part of the system to another - which can also influence real-world performance.

IBM has five out of the top ten fastest computers believes that the test should be changed to reflect the way computers are used today.  For example the Linpack does not measure how fast data travels inside the computer.  This is very important on the usefulness of the system.  However officials from Linpack hint that the test changes would not take place. 

 Worlds top 10 fastest computers

1. Tianhe-2 (China) 33.86 petaflop/sec
2. Titan (US) 17.59 petaflop/sec
3. Sequoia (US) 17.17 petaflop/sec
4. K computer (Japan) 10.51 petaflop/sec
5. Mira (US) 8.59 petaflop/sec
6. Piz Daint (Swiss) 6.27 petaflop/sec
7. Stampede (US) 5.17 petaflop/sec
8. Juqueen (Germany) 5.09 petaflop/sec
9. Vulcan (US) 4.29 petaflop/sec
10. SuperMuc (Germany) 2.90 petaflop/sec
(Source: Top500 List based on Rmax Linpack benchmark)

castAR Will Blow Your Mind!

Hey catch this video from the Kickstarter program for this new VR rig that is also an AR system.  It is called castAR, don't forget that name because I am willing to bet that this just could be a big changer in how game, computers, movies you name it....this looks like the real deal.

Check out the video.

Texas Gets a BiblioTech

No it is not some high tech baby bib but a very special library - a bookless library.   

By the fall of 2013,  San Antonio's Bexar County library will be the country's first book-less public library.  Well, paper books that is - the library or biblioTech will contain only e-books.  

The 4,989 square-foot space will be given over to rows of computer terminals, with which the library will augment with 100 e-readers for onsite and outside rentals.  The plan then is to provide 50 e-readers for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops and 25 tablets on site.

 Bexar County is still waffling on who will provide the e-readers and associated equipment.  

read complete article here 

Mind Reading Computer Program

The Guardian list an article that very well could help people who may have lost the ability to speak as a result of a stroke or other medical conditions.

Scientists have had some success in decoding the brain activity caused by words that they hear.  Quite literally,  the mental "thoughts" that go along with hearing spoken words.

This tech is of course still very much in the early phase, but ultimately - from  the article -

•  the work paves the way for brain implants that could monitor a person's thoughts and speak words and sentences as they imagine them. 

Check out the video here

This is a WHAT?!

his great pic really brings home just how things have changed....Check out the pic.  Like the article asked - is it a:

• A toaster? Farm equipment? Part of an engine? Wreckage from a destroyed tank?

Nope - amazingly it is a 4k memory module from an early computer.  Like the author said, since the pic is 600+ kbytes, if you wanted to carry this photo around it would take 172 more of these memory modules and a tractor trailer to transport the pic around. 

HP wants to phase out flash memory and SSDs by 2013

According to this Dvice article HP's new technology may well make DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015. flash memory in a year and a half, and they're planning on rendering. The computer giant plans on having new technology ready in a year and a half.

From the Dvice article:

• This new technology that HP is betting on is called the memristor. Memristors are wires made of titanium dioxide a mere 150 atoms wide.
  
• Like conventional solid state memory, memristors can store data without using any power. Memristors are also relatively easy to manufacture using existing technology.
  
• The advantages of memristors are that their read times are about 10 nanoseconds, with write and erase times of 0.1 nanosecond. Data stored in memristors lasts years, and you can read and write them about 1,000,000,000,000 times (HP is still counting) without data loss.
• HP says that it should have a version of what they're calling ReRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory) on the market by 2013 ...and over the next few years, they'll be rolling out memristor-based versions of both DRAM and SRAM, which ought to speed up computers immensely.

The Future of Banking from the BBC in 1969

Here the BBC from 1969, suggest banking and purchasing in the future. They got a lot right but failed to see how ubiquitous the system could and did become. Mainly because it became so much easier to install in any business environment and also the size and relative cost of the computer equipment needed to keep these type of records.




Thanks to Xnewsman for the article

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.

Lego Antikythera Mechanism

Now talk about facinating... Mix whimsey with real practical science and you get something like this post I first came across on Dvice. It is a fully functional Antikythera device rendered in Legos. In my mind you could not have picked a better medium for demonstrating this marvelously complex mechanism. The blocky nature of the hardware lends itself well to a modular design that shines in this video as they demonstrate what has to be described as the oldest known mechanical computer.

Computer That Thinks Like a Person?

Are you familiar with the Turing Test? The Turing The Turing is measure of artificial intelligence. It is arrived at if a human can have a conversation with a machine and not know they are talking to a machine. If so the computer or more to the point, it's programming is thought to be as 'intelligent' as a human. In most cases however the programs simply mimic how a person reacts and is easily caught when asked to perform outside it's program parameters.

Now there is a program called "CLARION", a program that performs the same way human subjects does in cognitive tests. It provides results that are not so much what we think, as earlier programs did, but how we think. And that is a huge difference.

When programmed, Clarion was not filled with pat human responses but a set of rules instead that were modeled on how human subjects went about solving a problem.

From the IO9 article on how the results were formulated:

• When humans were asked to discuss their thoughts about the problem prior to giving a solution, they answered correctly 35.6 percent of the time. When they were assigned another task, interrupting their work on the problem before going back to thinking about it, they answered correctly 45.8 percent of the time.

This is what happened when Clarion was put to the same conditions:

• When CLARION solved problems under similar conditions, the results uncannily mirrored those of human subjects. Five thousand runs of the program returned a correct result 35.3 percent of the time when the scientists imposed conditions similar to a human 'discussing' their work, and 45.3 percent of a time when it was interrupted to work on another task.

Does this mean that the program is thinking just like a person? Well, not really, but it does show some of the possibilities and what we can expect from expert systems in the future.

Wiki Turing Test article complete IO9 article Wiki article on Cognitive Architecture

DARPA to Have World's Fastest Computer by 2018

DARPA in co-operation with Intel and the San Diego Supercomputer Center are setting their sights very high indeed. DARPA plans on having an exaflop capable computer by 2018.

What is truly amazing is just how fast this system will be. From the physorg blog:

• An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

That's right, DARPA's computer would be 1 million times faster than present day super computers!

The project is the brain child of Institute for Advanced Architectures, formed cooperatively at Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories which are researching some of the drawbacks to the ultrafast machines. The one major problem that the super computers face is, the faster they operate, the farther the data has to travel, effectively slowing the machine down. This slow down comes from the huge amount of processors used. A single processor may call for data that may be stored in a processor tens of thousands processors away.

Physorg article Wiki on FLoating point OPerations per Second (flops)

Review: Ark

I am fast finding the "webisode" platform a very interesting in innovative way to present a series or even what on TV would be called a single one hour episode. Instead of one long episode of an hour or longer, each web episode is instead a short bite sized offering. Instead of that single hour you may in fact have nine or more episodes ranging anywhere for 3 minutes to upwards of 10 minutes. SyFy's Sanctuary started this way on the web - with 4 to 6 per hour, giving the fan little morsels at each visit. The beauty of this is that if you don't have enough time for a half to full hour, you can break it up and watch snippets during breaks or what have you. Plus if you want more, you simply keep watching other episodes in the series or better yet instead of once a week, you have a piece every day of the week.
So for me, the first was Sanctuary, a couple other less well hyped, then Woke Up Dead and more recently is a really good web-isodic program called ARK on Hulu.com

Here is the snipit that Hulu provides for the program:

• Two strangers plucked from different decades find themselves lost on a massive spaceship deep in space. With no information about where they are or how they got there, they must work together to figure out a way home.

At present there are 9 episodes that add up to about a regular 1 hour program sans adds (hulu of course has ads, but they are short and not intrusive)

Like Santuary I will bet that ARK is dependant on green screen, but even so there has been effort to provide an environment much like say SyFy's Stargate Universe's ancient mysterious ship. So far, with 9 shorts down, we have a mix of SG Universe and Riverworld. There are hints that the "ARK" is ancient and carrying a precious cargo.

It is worth checking out and if you don't like it, well what, you're down 10 minutes or less? The ninth doesn't wrap much up, so maybe there is a bunch of other webisodes in the wings.

Reasons why you will never store you "mind" online

Dvice blog has postulated that a person's mind will never be "living" online or digitally. There are some good arguments made...I am sure some counters are available as well? So here goes

Even the most reliable service crashes at the most inopportune moment. Without constant "backup" you would be in trouble in short order.

Digital storage media wears out alarmingly fast. Forget thinking.... constant backups, refreshes, and format updates, would be the rule of the day.

Power consumption. Your brain works on 25 watts. As the article states, Google takes 100 megawatts just to do a simple index, imagine what it would take just to power up the processing power of the human brain let alone enough power to let it think?!

Processing power. The brain in theory can do about 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops. IBM's Blue Gene/P supercomputer has a maximum theoretical limit of around 3 petaflops. But you say...well get three and you have enough...well not really, neuro-scientists now are certain that a neuron does more than just flip on and off to store data, but may in fact process and encode the data which in my mind ups the anti in a BIG way.

People forget that the brain is a management system for the body as well. The nervous system collects data and feeds the brain constant amounts of high bandwidth data every fraction of a second of the day. Without this constant stream of data, the mind soon stops functioning in any useful way. So now we are up to huge data loads, massive processing and unbelievable amounts of power.....

So it soon becomes evident that with all of this infrastructure will not be available, even if it worked, to everyone...wana guess who goes and who doesn't?

soooooooo lets say that all the problems are solved and everyone goes over...who does maintenance? Robots? ok, so who maintains them? and so on .......and we are counting on it all working perfectly forever?

The article really goes a lot more into depth. Read more here over at Dvice

Researchers build an 8bit pneumatic processor!

Hey, who read Ted Chiang's Exhalations? Did the idea of the pneumatic brain (and for that matter the whole physiology of the stories beings) that the main character found out that every person contained, trip your trigger? Did it seem a bit improbable however? Well check out this article that I found on Make Magazine's site:

• Researchers Minsoung Rhee and Mark Burns at the University of Michigan have created an 8 bit processor using logic gates made of pneumatic valves.

What is even wilder is they have videos of logic states, (flip flops and what have you) working!
Check out this link here for videos

New storage research could mean data lifespan of 1 billion years!

By any stretch of the imagination, today's data densities are amazing! Today it is possible to store 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today's memory cards. That is a huge amount of data by any standard. Of course this technology comes at a price. Because of it's density today's data has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. What is even more cause for concern is the fact that even higher storage densities are needed for future electronic devices. That should frighten even the most stalwart of digital storage devotees.

But now researchers are reporting that they are working on a computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years! This according to an article in ScienceDaily.

The researchers describe development of a memory device consisting of an iron nanoparticle enclosed in a hollow carbon nanotube. In the presence of electricity, the nanoparticle can be shuttled back and forth with great precision. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back. Plus researchers showed that the device had a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch (a trillion bits of information) and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years.

read more in the ScienceDaily article

Building a Silicone Brain

Technology Review has a great article about the ongoing efforts to simulate a human brain in a chip. previous efforts have been in software. The major advantage is that a hard-wired version runs much much faster and requires less computing power.

From the article:

• The silicon chip is designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Of course this is no where near the scope of a real human brain, but the tech is designed to be scaled up. All of this in hopes of understanding how to develop massively parallel computers.

The one thing that really struck me about this article was the statement:

• ...the current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain. "We can simulate a day in a second,"

Think about what would happen should the science fiction kick in and its scaled to the point that it becomes self aware. But at 100,000 times normal a year happens in 6 minutes and a century in what 10 hours? So if this were you and you just woke up 100,000 times faster than anything else...well that means for all intents everything is frozen and you spend a century in 10 hours say and a milenium in something like 41 days. So they run you non stop for a month and a thousand years goes by....imagine....

A step closer to quantum nano computers

Barry sends in a very interesting article from the Edmonton Journal concerning the future of computers.

Drastically smaller and more energy efficient computers are much closer now thanks to a breakthrough by scientists at Edmonton's National Institute for Nanotechnology.

According to the article, scientists there:

• (have) invented the world's smallest quantum dots, atom-sized devices capable of controlling electrons, using a fraction of the power of current computer technology.

This could lead to computer circuits that are 1000 time more energy efficient. Plus being 1000 times smaller than today's processors.

This efficiency is achieved by what is knows as the quantum wave effect. Present circuits are basically wires and switches that control the flow of electrons. Engineers have made these circuits are becoming smaller and smaller and are being asked to handle more and more electrons. This adds heat and effect efficiency. The new technology largely eliminates the need for electron flow and instead makes use of a wave-like phenomenon to transmit information.

Robert Wolkow, the lead scientist on this project, described a scenario in which two people are standing at opposite ends of a calm pool and one person drops a pebble in the water. A tiny wave eventually moves across the pool, sending information about the pebble to the other person. As you can see, if the pebble were an electron, it would not have to travel through a circuit to transmit information, but just create a wave that could be picked up at the end of the circuit.

By creating very small quantum dots (again the dots could be though of as pools with pebbles dropping in them) there is no need for the impracticable ultra cool temps that were previously needed. Also with ultra small dots, its much easier to control the electrons inside and make the output much more predictable.

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