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.

How to talk to aliens or mom Herb just made a bad smell at me!

Over at the SciFi Scanner blog, John Brownlee posted an interesting article that has facinated and bothered me equally for years. Science fiction tv shows and movies have, to varying degrees, show that aliens may well not look like us, but for the most part, they all seem to sound like us. In John's words:

The problem of communicating with extraterrestrials has been a fascinating intellectual exercise for scientists and philosophers for most of the 20th century. Although Star Trek and Star Wars are rather optimistic that aliens will speak English with a perfectly recognizable American accent, it's possible that they will, in fact, communicate in an unintelligible cacophony of blurps and farting noises.

And there's the rub: We may communicate visually and aurally, but what if aliens communicate chemically? How do you convince them you are an intelligent life form when your body can only squirt out the smell of methane from time to time?

With that in mind, I might come across as verbose and loud.....but that's another subject....

Well, John came across a really fascinating article in the December 1947 Popular Mechanix which he calls clear and charming, Called "How will we talk to Martians, dealing with just such a problem. Check it out.