Mimicking the behaviour of ants, bees and birds started as a poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. It may, though, be the key to the real thing
Brockman asked about 130 scientists and several artists the following question: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? Their two- to three-page prognostications bid farewell to the present while disagreeing on the mode of change. Several respondents espy catastrophes such as nuclear war or global warming, but the majority tell readers to expect a fundamental alteration in the human species. This group predicts that a stupendous expansion in computational capacity allied to genomic engineering will transform the human body, brain included, such that one writer suggests the end of Homo sapiens and its succession by Homo evolutis.
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?
Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level processes such as complex-pattern analysis, which can be applied to speech recognition, weather analysis and smart cars.
"He wants it to live inside Second Life," as she put it to me. "It will think and dream and everything." Indeed, the company's website now lists as one of its three projects, "The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?"
Knowledge of the brain is increasing exponentially. We are currently gathering as much information on the brain's structure and function each year as was gained in the entire 20th century. Neuroscientists are currently producing about 50,000 peer-reviewed articles per year. The Blue Brain project was launched in part to organize and coordinate this research.
Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.
Welcome to IdeasProject, an entirely new way to connect with some of the most visionary and influential thought leaders in communications technology and their disruptive ideas. A project of Nokia, hosted at www.ideasproject.com, IdeasProject brings together these important big thinkers to contemplate the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications, joining them up through video clips, links, articles, podcasts and dynamic maps to push the boundaries of Web navigation and the thought process itself.
Welcome to OnIntelligence.org, the companion Web site for the book On Intelligence. If you liked the book, want to learn more about the book or want to discuss the book with others, this web resource is for you.
The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.
Computer go is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to creating a computer program that plays go, an ancient board game.
People who believe that the mind can be replicated on a computer tend to explain the mind in terms of a computer. They rarely justify it by reference to the actual workings of computers, and they misuse and abuse terms that have clear and established definitions in computer science—established not merely because they are well understood, but because they in fact are products of human engineering. An examination of what this usage means and whether it is correct reveals a great deal about the history and present state of artificial intelligence research. And it highlights the aspirations of some of the luminaries of AI—researchers, writers, and advocates for whom the metaphor of mind-as-machine is dogma rather than discipline.
While the EvoGrid may bear some similarity to many Singularity concepts, it is at heart very much an "un-singularity" project. A co-author of the concept, Bruce Damer, believes that humanity is likely very far from being able to create top-down intelligence in software. Instead, he proposes that a more realizable and profound goal for humanity would be to show that an analog to evolution of life from the simplest starting virtual materials can in principle happen in a properly tuned and sufficiently powered digital simulation. The buildng of a successful "Evolution Machine" would shed life on the origins of terrestrial life, help us understand where in the universe life might arise, and give Humanity a powerful new tool: the tool of evolution, to shape life in the 21st Century and beyond.
The creators of the Child-robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, say it's slowly developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship.
Blending aspects of philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology and computer gaming, Grand attempts to define life, discuss the nature of the human soul and demonstrate how it is possible to create entities that demand to be called both living and intelligent. A tall order indeed, and to wonderful effect, Grand draws heavily on his experience writing computer code (he developed the popular computer game Creatures, e in which cyberbeings "live," learn and reproduce). He is at his best describing the problems encountered and the solutions used to animate his virtual universe. While at first glance Grand's definitions of life ("patterns that persist by metabolizing and reproducing" or "high-order persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction with their environment") might be off-putting, he explains his terms clearly and carefully, guiding the reader comfortably through various levels of discussion. He argues persuasively that life, both real and artificial, is an emergent property, arising inevitably from the interactions of its component parts and, as such, is something much greater than and qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. This view leads Grand to assert that most scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence are taking the wrong tack when they attempt to program intelligence into machines.
