Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/28/scientists-worry-machines-may-outsmart-man/

100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-fearing-technologyin-its-own-words.ars

Excerpt:

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton's Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to "musical taste" itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.

"From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful," he wrote. "And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters."

In fact, things were so bad that amateur music-making was threatened, something that could lead indirectly to the rampant sissification of the entire country. "Under such conditions," Sousa believed, "the tide of amateurism cannot but recede until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises so important a factor in the curriculum of physical culture will be out of vogue. Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile

http://vimeo.com/6747788

Military Researchers Develop Corpse-Eating Robots

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/military-researchers-develop-corpse-eating-robots/

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Stalins-halfman-halfape-superwarriors.2688011.jp

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

We're one-tenth human Rest of the body is a swarm of foreign microbes

Rest of the body is a swarm of foreign microbes

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/were-one-tenth-human-59601992.html

Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery?currentPage=all

Robot attacked Swedish factory worker

http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html

Japanese professor creates baseball-playing robots

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090724/ap_on_sp_ba_ne/bbo_baseball_robots_1

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html?_r=1&hp

Killer Robots : The Coming Reality

Can Military Robots Commit War Crimes?

http://yournewreality.blogspot.com/2009/05/im-killer-robot-but-i-didnt-know-that.html

The Tornadoes (Joe Meek) - Robot - 1963

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Robots are gaining on us humans.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.

At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.

A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.

Intel, the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as "please clean this mess," according to Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer.

In a talk last year titled "Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,'' the widely respected Rattner lent some credibility to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people.

"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. It's conceivable, he added, that "machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.''

Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability.

Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers

"One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,'' wrote Rodney Brooks, a robot designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. "But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.''

"We're in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind's children,'' agreed Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. "Eventually, we're going to reach the point where everybody's going to say, 'Of course machines are smarter than we are.' ''

"The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,'' Saffo said. "If we're very lucky, they'll treat us as pets. If not, they'll treat us as food.''

Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.

According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called "Turing test.'' In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can't tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence.

"We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,'' Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near.''

To Kurzweil, the "singularity'' is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It won't come in "one great leap,'' he said, "but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.''

Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled "The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,'' that's due in theaters this summer.

Intel's Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens.

Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco, doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.

It's "extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,'' Kapor said. "While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning 'Jeopardy' — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.''

Nevertheless, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with "humanoid'' robots, with faces, movements and voices resembling their human masters.

A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan, sashays down a runway, turns and bows when "she'' meets a real girl.

"People become emotionally attached'' to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.

At a technology conference last October in San Jose, Calif., Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off "Leonardo,'' a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls.

"Robot sidekicks are coming,'' Breazeal said. "We already can see the first distant cousins of R2D2," the sociable little robot in the "Star Wars" movies.

Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to "go to my room'' or "take me to the cafeteria.''

So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. The Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States, second only to Japan. It's estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/66530.html

In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. A thinking mind cannot feel.

http://www.1stpm.org/articles/emotion.html

Who counts as human?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/01/deconstructing-human-rights-equality

Pentagon exploring robot killers that can fire on their own

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/64779.html

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=merging-of-mind-and-machine

The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine

The accelerating pace of technological progress means that our intelligent creations will soon eclipse us--and that their creations will eventually eclipse them

Computers can now do your praying for you

http://www.livescience.com/technology/090325-computer-prayer.html

Regulate armed robots before it's too late

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126986.300-regulate-armed-robots-before-its-too-late.html

Why computer voices still don't sound human.

http://www.slate.com/id/2212800/pagenum/all/#p2

Did You Know?

Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,496309,00.html

The Pentagon’s dream of a techno army is doomed to fail.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/16-8

Merciless robots will fight future wars: researcher

http://www.physorg.com/news153049974.html

Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.

"We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Singer said.

"What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?"

Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.

The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame, and some real-world weapon controls copy designs of controllers for popular videogame consoles.

Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.

Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.

"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."

There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.

"You don't have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said.

Robots also record everything they see with built-in cameras, generating digital video that routinely gets posted online at YouTube in graphic clips that soldiers refer to as "war porn," according to Singer.

"It turns war into entertainment, sometimes set to music," Singer said. "The ability to watch more but experience less."

Robotics designer David Hanson offered hope when it comes to making robots a little more human.

Hanson builds robots that have synthetic flesh faces and read people's expressions in order to copy expressions.

"The goal here is not just to achieve sentience, but empathy," Hanson said.

"As machines are more capable of killing, implanting empathy could be the seeds of hope for our future."

Hanson demonstrated a lifelike robotic bust of late genius Albert Einstein that makes eye contact and mimics people's expressions.

"I smiled at that thing and jumped out of my skin when it smiled back," TED curator Chris Anderson quipped. "It's freaky."

Google and Nasa back new school for futurists

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b162dfc-f168-11dd-8790-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Knowledge, technology can lead to 'Burning'

http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2009/01/09/opinion/letters/152461_16.txt

Coming to the Battlefield: Stone-Cold Robot Killers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202191.html?hpid=opinionsbox1