The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law.  My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot.  The amusing, if you can call it [...]

Shane Legg seems to think so:  Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING. Having dealt with computation, now we get to the algorithm side of things. One of the big things influencing me this year has been learning about how much we understand about how the brain works, in particular, how much we know that should be [...]

Ray Solomonoff, inventor of algorithmic probability and one of the founding fathers of AI, died December 7 after a brief illness. I met Ray at the AI@50 conference at Dartmouth, given to celebrate the first AI conference and honor the five then surviving participants. He was very friendly, still sharp and insightful, and we had [...]

Michael A. writes: I support the consensus science on intelligence for the sake of promoting truth, but I also must admit that it especially concerns me that the modern denial of the reality of different intelligence levels will cause ethicists and the public to ignore the risks from human-equivalent artificial intelligence. After all, if all [...]

Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a programmer.  He was an amazingly productive programmer, producing thousands of working, debugged lines of code every day. Then he learned about DO-loops. One of the foundational concepts behind the idea of Singularity is the notion of self-improving AI.  And one of the key notions behind [...]

There’s an interesting debate between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson on their respective blogs. Caplan writes: … Robin didn’t care about biological survival.  He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body.  He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to [...]

In Popular Mechanics, longtime Foresight friend Prof. Glenn Reynolds looks at the future of nanotech and artificial intelligence, among other things looking at safety issues, including one call that potentially dangerous technologies be relinquished.  He takes a counterintuitive stance, which we’ve discussed here at Foresight over the years: But I wonder if that’s such a [...]

From the Albany (OR) Democrat Herald: Phone robots: Let’s all rebel By Hasso Hering, Columnist | Posted: Saturday, November 7, 2009 11:45 pm What this country needs – even more than a shorter baseball season so the World Series doesn’t go into November – is a popular uprising against the tyranny of telephone robots. This [...]

I’m at the AAAI Fall Symposium session on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, and there was a really interesting talk by Walter Schneider of Pitt about progress in mapping the nerve bundles that are the “information superhighways” between the various parts of the brain.  You’ll find his slides from last year’s talk on his home page, and [...]

In response to my Robo Habilis post, Tim Tyler replied: An intelligence challenge should not involve building mechanical robot controllers – IMO. That’s a bit of a different problem – and a rather difficult one – because of the long build-test cycle involved in such projects. There are plenty of purer tests of intelligence that [...]

There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names: Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such [...]

My Robo Habilis post was picked up on by Michael Anissimov who wrote: (me:) It seems to me that one obvious way to ameliorate the impact of the AI/robotics revolution in the economic world, then, is simple: build robots whose cognitive architectures are enough different from humans that their relative skillfullness at various tasks will [...]

One of the species of early hominids is named Homo habilis, meaning “handy man,” after their significant advancement in tool use over previous hominids. One of the goals of the AGI Roadmap is to chart paths to full human intelligence, and one of the paths might follow the one that evolution took. The Wozniak Test, [...]

Foresight’s mission is essentially an educational one.  In simplest terms we are here to point out foreseeable technological developments that not only will make the future different from the past, but make it different in ways that aren’t obvious and which everyone isn’t already planning for. Nanotechnology — true nanotech in Drexler’s original sense of [...]

Interview of Artificial General Intelligence Researcher Itamar Arel by Sander Olson. on Next Big Future This is particularly apropos, since as I write I’m heading off to the AGI Roadmap meeting which Itamar has organized (and of which Foresight is a sponsor).

US General Demands Robot Army, Counts 122 Lives That Bots Could Have Saved | Popular Science. It isn’t really clear from this story whether the “robots” involved or available were autonomous, teleoperated, or some combination. However, this story wraps up my reaction to a lot of techno-angst in a nutshell: Speaking at the Association for [...]

Overcoming Bias : Prefer Law To Values. Robin Hanson blogs on what kind of robots we’d want to live with in the future: The later era when robots are vastly more capable than people should be much like the case of choosing a nation in which to retire.  In this case we don’t expect to [...]

Less Wrong: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid. The real question isn’t whether people are stupid. The real question is whether people make decisions that matter a lot incorrectly. I claim that we’ve already, as a society, decided that they do.  We’ve replaced kings — human beings — with artificial rule-based decision procedures based on [...]

“Matter and Beyond” is a webcast / local cable program in New Jersey, and they won an Emmy for the episode about future AI and machine ethics. It featured interviews with, among others, your humble narrator: TV PROGRAM EXPLORING SCIENCE, ETHICS & SPIRITUALITY WINS 2009 MID-ATLANTIC EMMY AWARD SOMERSET, NEW JERSEY – Ebru Television Network, [...]

There were talks by two of SIAI’s researchers, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon, on the general subject of producing a friendly AI as opposed to whatever the alternative is, presumably the Terminator scenario or the like. Eliezer did his usual thing on cognitive biases in humans, and Anna ended the conference with a very nice [...]