In the latest edition of TIME, the venerable publication features “10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil,” in which they ask him about how technology will change the way we live, including the role of artificial intelligence, food production, longevity, and even whether we’ll discover extraterrestrial intelligence. A sample: You predict we’ll reach a point with artificial [...]
Posts under ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Transhumanist Week in Review: October 17, 2010
Here are a few items I wanted to cover here this week, but didn’t get around to because of work, travel or other priorities. If you’re interested in helping out on this blog, feel free to drop me a line. Why the Singularity isn’t going to happen (10/16/10) – “That is how Singularity-level technologies work [...]
Michio Kaku on how to prevent hostile AI
Over at Big Think, physicist Michio Kaku appears in a video where he talks about the progression of Moore’s Law, the evolution of AI, and how to prevent robots from doing us harm: Right now our machines are as smart as insects. Eventually they’ll be smart as mice. After that they’ll be smart as dogs [...]
Astronomy: The first “post-singularity” science?
Computers are playing an increasingly active role in astronomy. Human astronomers are able to devote more of their time to analyzing and interpreting data gathered by machines, thus automating much of the process. However, we may be close to a time where the number of discoveries made by computers far outweighs the ability of astronomers [...]
“What if the doctor was your cell phone?”
Many people around the world (and in the United States) do not have reliable access to medical care. This may be due to geographical factors, financial factors, cultural factors, or a combination thereof. However, mobile phone adoption continues to grow rapidly in both developed and underdeveloped countries. With fast rates of adoption and increasing levels [...]
MIT develops software to decipher ancient text
Archaeologists have uncovered many examples of ancient written languages yet to be deciphered. In most cases, the trick to deciphering extinct writing systems is to trace the evolution of that system backward – for instance, the Cyrillic alphabet evolved from the Greek alphabet, itself an evolution of the Phoenician alphabet. In order to assist with [...]
Answer: The name of the supercomputer that will be the first to compete on “Jeopardy!”
Quiz show Jeopardy! has been stumping human contestants and viewers for more than 45 years. Part of the show’s challenge lies in the way contestants are required to phrase answers, which must be in the form of a question. It can be flummoxing for humans, and would understandably be difficult for a machine. Apparently IBM’s [...]
R.U. Sirius offers his utopian vision for a transhuman future
One of my favorite blogs, io9, has been running a series of posts on “posthumanity” from both fiction and real-life. Today R.U. Sirius of h+ Magazine has a great post up about his “best-case scenario for posthumanity.” In it, he describes what his ideal vision of the future might look like, which includes open-source style [...]
Does the road to AI begin with smartphone chips?
While the computer chips in our smartphones (say, iPhones or Android phones) are increasingly capable of processing a large amount of information, their most valuable asset is their low power consumption. Steve Furber is a computer engineer who plans on combining 50,000 of the chips, however, to create an “artificial brain” that simulates one billion [...]
Can computers replace sports reporters?
Statistics form the backbone of sports reporting – shot percentages, batting averages, quarterback ratings, and so on. StatSheet.com, a site focused on sports statistics and analysis, is working on developing an algorithm that will create original sports reporting without human input: Now, I’m in the process of developing completely automated sports content, which will take [...]