Category: All articles

Light pollution

During a family holiday (a California road trip) we have been enjoying the stunning beauty of starry nights above the Grand Canyon and elsewhere.  (Not my photo, I hasten to admit.)  This wonderful sight was available to everyone since the dawn of human history up until very recently.  In the late eighteenth century, the industrial revolution began to place an umbrella of smog above the minority of humans who lived in cities.  Then, between the world wars, the great blessing of electric light brought light pollution, and now hides the stars from most of us.  It is an extraordinary irony...

Google Glass and different reactions to our cyborg future

Today I went on a tour of the Google campus at Palo Alto, arranged as part of a family holiday in California.  It was, of course, inspiring. (Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google late last year, and we were told that he works in building 42, but I did wonder if that was no more than a jokey reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) When I told Eryka, our charming Google staffer guide, that the first group of Google Glass users are now able to invite their friends to join the second wave, she gasped and reached for her phone...

Brain Preservation

Three senior people at Oxford University's Institute for the Future of Humanity have just announced that they are signing up for cryonic storage after death.  This is a service which flash-freezes your brain when you die, in the hope that future technology will enable you to be defrosted safely.  The Oxford academics think there is a 15% chance the process will work, but they believe it is their only hope of long-term survival.  To coin a phrase, "better fresh than frozen; better frozen than dead." Ken Hayworth and colleagues at the Brain Preservation Foundation are developing an alternative approach to...

Minsky vs Markram

In the previous post, I mentioned that there are, broadly speaking, two main ways for us to build a human-level, conscious AI.  One is to assemble the most advanced AI systems available and have them learn, and the other is to build a model of a human brain which is as precise as we can manage, and see if it appears to exhibit consciousness. Henry Markram is doing exactly that at the Human Brain Project in Lausanne, funded to the tune of €1bn by the EU and others.  But in an interview on the Singularity 1 on 1 website, AI...

Artificial intelligence system has the IQ of a four year-old

A team at the University of Illinois, Chicago, gave one of the world's most advanced AI systems an IQ test.*  They reported its IQ as the level of an average four year-old. This research has to be taken with a pinch of salt.  For a start, many psychologists are sceptical of the value of IQ tests.  The fact that you can improve your test results with practice suggests that they don't test anything more inherent than the ability to pass IQ tests. Also, the system scored very differently on different parts of the test, to the extent that a child...

Meet Atlas, the military’s latest robot

The performance of robots from DARPA-funded Boston Dynamics continues to improve dramatically.  As several commentators on this YouTube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zkBnFPBV3f0 (prepare yourself for dubious musical accompaniment) have pointed out, robots like this are likely to be killing people soon.  Human Rights Watch is trying to stop this http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/30/prevent-killer-robots-deciding-when-kill-battlefield.  It will be an interesting test of the feasibility of "relinquishment", the idea that research into artificial intelligence (or any of the other new technologies that could bring marvellous benefits or hideous harms) can be stopped on the precautionary principle.  Good luck to them - they'll need it!

Robert Peston warns about Artificial Intelligence

Has Robert Peston, the BBC's high-profile business editor, been reading Ray Kurzweil? He broadcast some intriguing comments in A Dark Magic, a programme about the use of computers in financial trading which aired on 8th July.  Near the start of the programme, an unidentified American interviewee says: "The most interesting thing I've observed is this battle between man and machine.  It's like watching the Terminator movies in the financial markets.  We came that close to being wiped out." Towards the end of the show, Peston himself asks us to: "...remember the fate of world in the film Terminator, when machines...