Tag: Artificial intelligence

It’s that man again!

OK, I know some people have had enough of Mr Musk lately, but he does keep saying and doing interesting things. In a wide-ranging and intriguing 8-minute interview with Max Tegmark (leading physicist and a founder of the Future of Life Institute), Musk lists the five technologies which will impact society the most.  He doesn't specify the timeframe. His list of five is (not verbatim - it appears at 4 minutes in): Making life multi-planetary Efficient energy sources Growing the footprint of the internet Re-programming human genetics Artificial Intelligence A pretty good list, IMHO. What is very cool is that he...

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...

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.

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....

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...

Europe hits the gas pedal on driverless cars

There is no longer any doubt that driverless cars are coming.  Google recently announced that its test cars have completed half a million miles, with a flawless safety record. It hopes the technology will be available to the public in 2017.  Elon Musk, of PayPal and Space X fame, hopes that his electric car company Tesla Motors will have autonomous cars ready a year earlier. Outside the USA, governments and manufacturers don't want to be left behind.  Nissan has carried out the first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a Japanese highway, and now European governments are getting...

Hollywood passes the Turing Test

When will a computer pass the Turing Test?  December 18th.  Well, according to Hollywood, anyway.  That's when "Her", a film by Spike Jonze, opens in the US.  Critics who saw it at the New York Film Festival in October liked it enough to give it a 100% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review site, and Scarlett Johansson is being talked about as a serious Oscar contender even though she never actually appears in the film. The plot involves a sensitive man played by Joaquin Phoenix who is upset by the failure of a long-term relationship.  He falls in love with...

Automation or liberation?

People get worried about automation.  Every time Google's driverless cars hit the headlines, journalists fret that the people who drive lorries, taxis, buses and so on - will soon be out of a job.  It's probably not true.  Trains have drivers even though they can't be steered.  Planes have pilots even though much of the flying process is automated.  Lorries, taxis and buses are likely to have humans in charge of them for many years to come, even if only to sort out the problem when they break down, or when passengers or cargo create an unexpected situation.  With any...

Neuroscience hat trick

Three significant announcements in one week!  Neuroscience is galloping ahead, thanks to improved scanning techniques, and also to Moore's Law, which allows bigger and bigger data sets to be acquired and analysed.  You need that when you're studying the most complex thing known to man. Perhaps the most interesting of the three is a review of what happens in the brain when its owner loses consciousness.  A team at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 12 healthy volunteers to see how information flows changed inside their brains as they lost consciousness...

Alzheimer’s breakthrough?

The headlines today (10th October) suggest that a cure for Alzheimer's is imminent. Well, not quite.Scientists at the University of Leicester have arrested brain cell death from prion disease in mice.  This is reported to be the first proof that neuro-degeneration can be delayed in any living animal. Many neurodegenerative diseases involve the production of "mis-folded" proteins, or prions. In Parkinson's the alpha-synuclein protein goes wrong, in Alzheimer's it's the amyloid and tau proteins, and in Huntington's it's the Huntington protein.  The brain responds by shutting down local protein production for so long that the cells are eventually destroyed.  By targeting the...