Category: All articles

Volvo speeds up driverless car project

Volvo's test of self-driving cars seems to be progressing significantly ahead of schedule.  In a press release last December, the company said that "the project would commence in 2014 with customer research and technology development, [with the first cars] expected to be on the roads in Gothenburg by 2017."  An update just released says that "the first test cars are already rolling around the Swedish city of Gothenburg and the sophisticated Autopilot technology is performing well." Why the rush into self-driving cars, and what will be the consequences – intended and otherwise? One big reason for introducing self-driving cars is...

Terminator or Transcendence?

Yesterday I participated in an online discussion of the movie Transcendence, along with Nikola Danaylov, the "Larry King" of transhumanism, and Stuart Armstrong of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity.  The debate was chaired by David Wood, chair of the London Futurist Group. The video is here: Terminator ot Transcendence?  

Stephen Hawking joins the debate

Stephen Hawking has joined the small group of people sounding the alarm about the possibility of super-intelligence arriving in the next few decades. In a blog in the Huffington Post, he and three American professors at MIT and Berkeley warn that it "would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever ... to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction." "Artificial intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly," the post continues, arguing that Watson's Jeopardy success and self-driving cars " will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring. ... Success in creating AI...
Movie review: “Transcendence”

Movie review: “Transcendence”

It was keenly awaited by people interested in the possible near-term arrival of super-intelligence, but Transcendence has opened to half-empty cinemas and terrible reviews - at the time of writing it has a 20% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The distributors kept changing the release date, which might indicate they realised the film wouldn't open with a splash, but that they hope it could grow to become a cult classic.  Sadly, I doubt it.  Sadly, because in some ways Transcendence is a fine film with great ambitions.  For me it is one of the best science fiction films of recent...

Paul Allen’s institute maps a mouse brain

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published a paper in Nature describing how they have posted a comprehensive data set on the wiring of a mouse brain.  The data is freely available at the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, in case you want to see for yourself. A mouse brain has 75 million neurons, far fewer than the 100 or so billion in a human brain.  The only species for which we so far have a complete wiring diagram (or "connectome") is the C. Elegans worm, with only 302 neurons. The researchers used genetically engineered viruses to illuminate and trace individual...

The EU and the USA to build a brain together

The world's two biggest brain mapping projects are to join forces.  The EU's €1bn Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1bn BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will start to collaborate later this year. Details are yet to be provided, but the effort will start this summer and will include all of the BRAIN Initiative's government partners — the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the NSF (National Science Foundation) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Henry Markram, who directs the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), says that Israel's brain...

"Transcendence": 2-minute mini-feature

The director, writer, producer and stars of "Transcendence" talk here about the movie and the ideas behind it.  They all seem to think that uploading a human mind into a supercomputer is a serious possibility.  Paul Bettany reports neuroscientists at CalTech telling him that it may be only 30 years away. Of course this may just be movie hype.

More funding for Obama’s BRAIN

Just under a year ago, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a multi-agency project to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain.  The scale of his ambition is enormous: "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will [do it] by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. That knowledge could be -- will be -- transformative." The spend in 2014 was $100m, and the 2015 Budget proposes...

Australia wants to join the brain-building party

The Australian Academy of Science has published a report calling for an investment of AUS$200 million over 10 years to build a computer system that has the capacity for thought and intelligent decision-making. It wants to do it the hard way. The report describes the $3bn US BRAIN initiative as seeking to map the human brain in great detail, and the $1.2bn European-led Human Brain Project as seeking to model a functioning brain. It recommends that Australia takes a different approach, by working out how the human brain generates thoughts, and then replicating this inside a computer. My layman's understanding...

The Guardian asks: Are the robots about to rise?

The Guardian has a detailed article (here) about Ray Kurzweil, and the prospects for artificial general intelligence.  It's by Carole Cadwalladr, a feature writer and novelist who has produced a series of speculative pieces about the impact of technology. Presumably it was the sub-editor who added the obligatory Terminator photo, but it's still worth a read. In 2004 Andrew Marr wrote that the default answer to questions like this in newspaper headlines is "No".  (The observation was later named Betteridge's Law of Headlines.)  Phew.

Should you short Apple?

Here's a brief history of the human race, plus a glimpse into our near future. A few geological seconds ago, our ancestors discovered that cooking meat made it safer, more nutritious, and longer-lasting.  Cooked food is an efficient fuel, and it enabled the human brain to grow. Brains are expensive in terms of energy: ours use 25% of all the energy we consume.  If you're going to have a bigger brain, you need a more efficient source of energy.  The human brain is not the biggest in the animal kingdom, but it is large proportionate to our size and weight....

Google Glass for Virgins

Virgin Atlantic is trialling Google Glass.  For the next six weeks, Passengers flying Virgin Upper Class from Heathrow's terminal three will be greeted by staff wearing Google's wearable computers.  The Virgin staff will be able to greet their customers by name, and will have immediate access to their preferences for drinks and food.  They will be able to update travellers on weather, flight times, connections, and, well, pretty much anything the internet knows. If the trial goes well it will be rolled out to other locations.  Which prompts the question, is this the first time in history that Heathrow terminal...

Short story prize

Woo-hoo!  My short story The Raid won first prize in a competition run by Dark Places, an online literary magazine.  You can buy it (and four other stories) here for 77 pence - worth every penny!

Our Final Invention – Panel Discussion

A couple of days ago I took part in an online panel discussion of James Barrat's book, "Our Final Invention".  The session was organised by David Wood, chair of the estimable London Futurist Group.  Apart from David, James and me, the other panel members were Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype), and William Hertling (author of the very good "Avogadro Corp.").   Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3sB7Nk-_oI

Startling progress in brain simulation

Researchers claim to have modelled one percent of a human brain, taking 40 minutes to replicate one second of brain activity.  If this is true it is startling, and should be making much bigger headlines than it is. You might wonder why, given that it was only 1% of a brain, and it took so long to model just one second.  But that would be to ignore the power of exponential increase, as recorded in Moore's Law.  As a comment on Reddit pointed out, applying Moore's Law generates this forecast: Jan 2015 - 20 minutes for 1 second of 1%...

Why did Google buy all those robot companies?

Late last year the internet was lit up by the news that Google had bought eight companies that develop and manufacture robots.  A newsworthy development in itself, but what really got people talking was that Google did its buying very quietly, and didn't explain what it wanted all that robot tech for. The move into robotics wasn't taken lightly.  The (undisclosed) cost of the shopping spree probably wasn't enough to have a perceptible impact on Google's torrential cash flow, but it is significant that one of their key talents runs the new department: Andy Rubin, who was responsible for establishing...

Transcendence

The trailer for an intriguing movie has just been released.  Transcendence, which opens in April 2014, stars Johnny Depp, and is directed by Wally Pfister, long-time cameraman and collaborator for Chris Nolan, the director of Inception, and the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy.  As well as Depp, the strong cast includes Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara (House of Cards) and Rebecca Hall (Iron Man 3). This quote from the trailer explains why the movie is causing excitement among those who think that a conscious machine may be created within the next few decades. "Imagine a machine with...

Virtual reality – for real?

$75m is a large investment for a one year-old company, even for Silicon Valley in these excitable times.  Oculus VR has just added that sum to its previous $18.4m Kickstarter and series A rounds. The reason for the excitement is that the Oculus Rift headset just might be the first product to provide a genuine virtual reality experience for consumers.  Only 300 people have tried the current prototype, but over 42,000 people have bought developer kits based on its predecessor. Previous VR products have failed to provide a genuinely realistic environment, and some have made users feel dizzy or nauseous. ...