Nanowerk reports: Taking the patent land grab to a new level, the government of Greece today, April 1, filed a patent and trademark application for the term nanotechnology with the European Patent Office. The country is thereby seeking the right to prevent third parties from commercially exploiting these and related terms without paying royalties. “Quite [...]

From David Cassel: The military is funding a project to create neural computing using memristors, a sophisticated circuit component which HP Labs describes as a stepping stone to “computers that can make decisions” and “appliances that learn from experience.” http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/synapse-chip In a video, HP researcher R. Stanley Williams explains how his team created the first [...]

The March 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on cryonics, a method of suspended animation, featuring Dr. Ralph Merkle.  Ralph is described as a nanotechnology expert; apparently the issue went to press just before he was also named as a co-winner of the 2010 IEEE Haming Medal. As a long-time IEEE member, I [...]

I’m on my way to AGI-10, the general AI conference, in Lugano.  If any readers are attending, let’s get together. Among other things, we’ll be unveiling a preliminary take on the AGI Roadmap (of which Foresight is a sponsor).

Let’s try to pull all the threads together, as futurists — which is the whole point here — and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect AI to show up.  When I say AI I want to look at the entire diahuman range, so the answer would still be a range [...]

Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in [...]

… to boldly go where no man has gone before! This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people after the fact, and the other as seen by those who had gone before. As seen by earlier generations, the phrase “to boldly go” is [...]

Over the past ten to fifteen years, research in computational linguistics has undergone a dramatic “paradigm shift.” Statistical learning methods that automatically acquire knowledge for language processing from empirical data have largely supplanted systems based on human knowledge engineering. The original success of statistical methods in speech recognition has been particularly influential in motivating the [...]

In E.E. Smith’s famous Lensman series, the galaxy is the battleground between two races of superintelligent beings, the (good) Arisians and the (evil) Eddorians.  When I listen to people who worry that we are about to create a superintelligence which will take over the world, I get the impression they’ve come from reading “Galactic Patrol” [...]

“It was a true solar-plexus blow, and completely knocked out, Perkins staggered back against the instrument-board. His outflung arm pushed the power-lever out to its last notch, throwing full current through the bar, which was pointed straight up as it had been when they made their landing.” My current research in AI, such as it [...]

Phaedon Avouris, winner of the Feynman Prize in 1999, is head of the nanoscale science and technology group At IBM, which has recently reported significant advances in synthesizing transistors from graphene using conventional lithography methods. IBM Demonstrates Graphene Transistor Twice as Fast as Silicon Graphene transistors promise 100GHz speeds Graphene Transistors that Can Work at [...]

The first AI blog was written by a major, highly respected figure in the field. It consisted, as a blog should, of a series of short essays on various subjects relating to the central topic. It appeared in the mid-80s, just as the ARPAnet was transforming over into the internet. The only little thing I [...]

So far, in making my case that AI is (a) possible and (b) likely in the next decade or two, I’ve focused on techniques which are or easily could be part of a generally intelligent system, and which will clearly be enhanced by the two orders of magnitude increase in processing power we expect from [...]

AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran.  Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they’re doing. The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn’t work like a von Neumann [...]

So we will take it as given, or at least observed in some cases and reasonably likely in general, that AI can, at the current state of the programming art, handle any particular well-specified task, given enough (human) programming effort aimed at that one task. We can be a bit more specific about what “well-specified” [...]

At the Foresight congerence special-interest lunch on IQ tests for AI, Monica Anderson suggested a test involving separating text which had had spaces and punctuation removed, back into words.  As a somewhat whimsical version of the test, I suggested the Sigil of Scoteia: In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the frontispiece of the novel [...]

In the terminology I introduced in Beyond AI, all the AI we have right now is distinctly hypohuman: The overall question we are considering, is AI possible, can be summed up essentially as “is diahuman AI possible?”  The range of things humans can do, done as flexibly as humans can do them, and learned the [...]

40s: Cybernetics, the notion the brain did logic in circuits, feedback 50s: the computer, stored programs, Logic Theorist 60s: LISP, semantic nets, GOFAI 70s: SHRDLU, AM 80s: AI winter, expert systems, neural nets 90s: robots, machine learning 00s: DARPA grand challenge level of competence The main point of this post is to answer any objections [...]

I’m about to start a series of posts on the topic of why I think AI is actually possible.  I realize that most of the readers here don’t probably need too much convincing on that subject, but you’d be surprised how many very smart people, many of them professors of computer science, are skeptical to [...]

Today is the last day of the free webcast of the 2010 Foresight Conference being held now in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video may be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting (feel free to assist with this goal!). You can also follow the conference on [...]