AI
milhayser | July 23, 2014With 2001 in the rear-view mirror, there have been no little green men, no meal-replacement pills, no flying automobiles, no space odysseys. But as big-budget plans to model the human brain prove, proponents of artificial intelligence remain hopeful. In its most literal sense, AI exists already: encoded and executed, endowed with sensors, lenses and microphones, connected to the internet, and stuck in your pocket. But how intelligent does a machine have to be before our worst nightmares come true? Intelligent enough to pass a Turing test? Intelligent enough to nuke the human race? And/or…
cevans | May 7, 2012Last week, I wrote a piece for Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick's flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to Motherboard and mainline it for yourselves. For the piece, I interviewed the lead programmer on the first version of the PKD Android, Dr. Andrew Olney. Aside from bringing science fiction legends back from the dead, Olney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis and Associate Director of the same university's…
gregladen | November 20, 2009Artificial Intelligence as a term implies that there is a "natural" intelligence we wish to replicate in the lab and then engineer in any one of several practical contexts. There is nothing in the term that implies that "intelligence" be human, but the implication is clear that such a thing as "intelligence" exists and that we have some clue as to what it is.
But it might not, and we don't.
Read the rest here...
sciencepunk | August 13, 2009"Our emotional intelligence is not just a sideshow to human intelligence,
it's the cutting edge"
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. And for good reason: Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007There are a number of Chatbots out there on the internet. Most of the new variety actually learn words and expressions as users spend time talking with them. The idea is to make them so advanced that they can actually fool people into thinking they are talking to another person instead of a bunch of silicon and plastic. But what happens when two chatbots get into a conversation with each other? It looks pretty deep to me ;)
ALICE: Are you alive?
Jabberwacky: Perhaps.
A: Why the uncertain tone?
J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.
A: The whole universe?
J: And we both might…