These guys may save us

Did you hear this NPR story about The Singularity Institute? The organization is trying to understand what may happen if computers get to be so smart they take over.

The story was broadcast on about two weeks ago - sorry I only now just got around to thinking about posting it. Ooops!



The entire piece is 7 minutes. A bit long, but it's fun to listen to. And includes this wonderful quote:

If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.

(By the way, hi people of POT! Sorry I've been absent for a while!)

A passing analogy between artificial flight and artificial intelligence

I thought this was pretty funny. There's those who say we could never create an artificial intelligence because even if we designed something that passes the ultimate Turing Test, how will we know it's not just a hollow shell that only mimics cognition? As an analogy, however, the same logic could be used by a bunch of birds talking about artificial flight:

"This is flight in the natural world, the product of millions of years of evolution, and not a phenomenon easily replicated. Current A.F. is limited to unpowered gliding; a technical marvel, but nowhere near the sophistication of a bird. Gliding simplifies our lives, and no bird (including myself) would discourage advancing this field, but it is a far cry from synthesizing the millions of cells within the wing alone to achieve Strong A.F. Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird"

via boingboing

We Will Fail the Turing Test First

Well this is all kinds of disturbing. But I for one welcome our freakish computer overlords.

From these guys, and the spawn of this.

Emergent AI in Fleets

Kind of skimming the top of the Curated Internet today, but I saw this article on how the AI in the game AI War: Fleet Command. works. The title of the game is apparently to make up for the game's weird graphics, but the article from one of the game's designers may be very interesting to those of you currently developing games; looking at fleet command from a bottom-up approach rather than an entirely top-down command path.

Article here.

Internet Meme Generation Discussion

Behold, as these three guys take you on an hour and a half long discussion of Internet meme generation. This isn't just an exploration of the memes themselves--these guys take a serious look at the groups and subgroups where the ideas seem to continually originate from.

Of particular interest is the part early on about 4chan's /b/ imageboard (beginning at about 3:45) Rapid combination and recombination of ideas and content, along with complete anonymity seems to be a recipe for exactly the kind of hive mind we've been talking about.


Warning: This hour and a half long video is an hour and a half long.

oh god get her away from me

FFS

If, of course, you remember this.

ROBOTS BEHAVING LIKE PEOPLES!

Well if not people, then spastic horse creature-things. This is really going to piss off GP at about 0:35 with his dysfunctionally wired empathy circuit, but I think it's worth the humiliation to prove what robots can do these days (make sure you at least watch the bit at 1:25! Slick!). I've seen videos from these Boston Dynamics guys before, and at this rate of progress I'm expecting full on helper monkey bots (Helbots?) within a years time. Should we throw caution to the wind and ignore all those apocalyptic scifi stories of robot revolutions against their creators? Of course we should!

Actually, how many are there? Off the top of my head: BSG, Dune (the early years), Terminator, Matrix, 2001 (not really robots, I guess)... I, Robot the movie doesn't count because it's piss, and the book is nothing like that.