An article in New Scientist with the optimistic title “Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence” gives an update on how two specific examples of computational artificial life is doing in terms of evolving to have more interesting behavior.  An excerpt: Brains that have been evolved with HyperNEAT have millions of connections, yet still perform a [...]

We’ve received an update on work by our friend Anirban Bandyopadhyay at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan.  Here’s the abstract of his recent Nature Physics paper: Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 1013 instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are [...]

From Singularity Hub, 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet [...]

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 [...]

From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools [...]

Back in April, I wrote: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. The ability of a machine system to make more of itself, or more generally, make its own parts and be able to assemble or replace them as needed, is called autogeny.  There’s [...]

There’s a really nice article at Wired about Kevin Dunbar’s research how science is really done and how often scientists get data they didn’t expect. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science — from Aristotle to Karl Popper [...]

Mike Treder has a post at IEET that reads like a catechism of the Gaian religion. Now I’m a firm supporter of freedom of religion and Mike has a perfect right to believe what he does and indeed to preach it to whomever will listen. (And besides, Mike is a friend of mine.) But in [...]

We here at Foresight are not particularly interested in climate change — the effects, even if you take the IPCC projections as gospel, are dwarfed by the capability of nanotech (for good or ill).  But we are considerably more concerned about the way science is done, and whether it can reliably find the truth.   So [...]

There’s an amusing cartoon at XKCD: … which underlines yet again how amazing the technology is beneath the abilities we take for granted everyday (and put to very ordinary uses). Back in this post: The heavily-loaded takeoff I pointed out that that was likely to be the fate of most of the to-us astounding capabilities [...]

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 [...]

At Bryan Caplan’s blog this morning there was an odd comment that stirred up a 40-year old memory: A single sentence in the Durants’ The Age of Napoleon makes me wonder whether I can trust a word they write on economic policy: The memory is that it was reading another part of the Durant’s Story [...]

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 [...]

Raw data are important in validating scientific work. Even so simple an operation as smoothing by time-averaging can have counter-intuitive effects, such as Simpson’s Paradox: For a simple and homey example, here are the batting averages of Derek Jeter and David Justice in 1995, 1996, and 1997: in 1995, Jeter had 12 hits in 48 [...]

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 [...]

More on the “is technological change accelerating front, from Ars Technica: High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth – Ars Technica. Some economists have attempted to measure the spread of technology within various nations, and discovered it’s not just our imagination: newer tech is being adopted faster, and appears to account for some of the [...]

Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into [...]

If you were an alien from an advanced civilization who had been stranded on Earth, but had all your people’s knowledge on a thumb drive, how would you go about creating nanotech and building up Earth’s technology to the level you could rejoin your galactic civilization? If you actually knew the details, probably one of [...]

A couple of bloggers have noted the article at Wired about the Good Enough “revolution.” After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, [...]

Consider this marvelous story by Richard Feynman: (watch it now, this won’t make too much sense otherwise) Feynman and his friend John Tukey discover that they have completely different internal ways of thinking, or at least of counting, even though they are using the same words to talk about what it is they’re doing. Consider [...]