Google Will Soon Know You Better Than Your Spouse Does, Top Exec Says Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, believes that the tech behemoth will soon know you even better than your spouse does. Kurzweil, who Bill Gates has reportedly called "the best person [he knows] at predicting the future of artificial intelligence," told the Observer in a recent interview that he is working with Google to create a computer system that will be able to intimately understand human beings. (Read Kurzweil's full interview with the Observer here.) "I have a one-sentence spec which is to help bring natural language understanding to Google," the 66-year-old tech whiz told the news outlet of his job. "My project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means." "When you write an article, you're not creating an interesting collection of words," he continued. In short, the Observer writes, Kurzweil believes that Google will soon "know the answer to your question before you have asked it.
Risk of robot uprising wiping out human race to be studied 26 November 2012Last updated at 13:28 ET In The Terminator, the machines start to turn on the humans Cambridge researchers are to assess whether technology could end up destroying human civilisation. The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change. The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be "dangerous". Fears that machines may take over have been central to the plot of some of the most popular science fiction films. Perhaps most famous is Skynet, a rogue computer system depicted in the Terminator films. Skynet gained self-awareness and fought back after first being developed by the US military. 'Reasonable prediction' But despite being the subject of far-fetched fantasy, researchers said the concept of machines outsmarting us demanded mature attention. "What we're trying to do is to push it forward in the respectable scientific community."
Can We Make the Hardware Necessary for Artificial Intelligence? My POV is hardware driven, I do electronic design. I don’t present myself as “an authority” on Artificial Intelligence, much less “an authority” on sentient artificial intelligence, until they are Real Things, there is no such thing as an authority in that field. That said, if the hardware doesn’t exist to support sentient AI, doesn’t matter how wonderful the software is.
Tinder: the 'painfully honest' dating app with wider social ambitions | Technology If you’re a twenty or thirtysomething single person – or if not, if you’ve sat with a group of them in a bar recently – chances are you’ll have encountered Tinder. Originally launched in the US in August 2012, the smartphone dating app has since spread its blend of location-based profile matches and text-chatting around the world. That includes becoming the latest participation pub-sport in the UK, where groups of friends enthusiastically approve or reject potential matches on behalf of one another. For fans, it’s an addictive cross between online dating, Am I Hot or Not and Fruit Ninja – the latter in terms of its speedy-swiping user interface. In the last 60 days, Tinder has added more than 1m new users in the UK alone, according to co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, who tells The Guardian that the app is currently generating more than 600m profile reads and 6m matches a day. “We never intended it to be a dating platform. But yes, definitely not a hookup app.
SOFT Blimp Bumper Bus: Terreform One Designs Giant Jellyfish Buses for NYC | Inhabitat New York City We have seen the future and it is full of jellyfish blimps. In a new sci-fi like depiction of New York City‘s future designed by Terreform ONE and KARV, our metal buses have been replaced by the SOFT Blimp Bumper Bus, a playful new means of transportation with dangling tentacle chairs. The bulbous bus is part of “Smart DOTS + Soft MOBS: NY 2028 Environmental Mobility,” a new strategy whereby the “streetscape” of the city is reorganized to better fit human needs and increase environmental contact by eliminating the boundaries and limitations that cars pose on humans. Smart DOTS aims to design “a system of intelligent environmental elements… that can spread out from the core to the periphery, reorganizing the streetscape.” The next part of the project is Soft MOBS, a new mode of transportation designed for “adapting cars to cities in pliable organized movements” where “softer vehicles” are used in order for people to be in more direct contact with the street. + Terreform 1
Are we already living in the technological singularity? The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon's fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now "sound like science fiction" that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google. The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it's possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you'll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? The most radical prediction of science fiction is the technological singularity. Imagine a graph charting the growth in modern computing power. That spike is the singularity. Today as director of engineering at Google, Kurzweil is developing concrete policy based on those predictions. The most successful exploration of the singularity to date remains Accelerando by Charles Stross, a linked series of nine stories, first collected in 2005.
Why a superintelligent machine may be the last thing we ever invent "...why would a smart computer be any more capable of recursive self-improvement than a smart human?" I think it mostly hinges on how artificial materials are more mutable than organic ones. We humans have already already developed lots of ways to enhance our mental functions, libraries, movies, computers, crowdsourcing R&D, etc. But to actually change the brain itself has been very slow going for us. "...would a single entity really be capable of comprehending the entirety of it's own mind?" It probably won't need to. This idea also applies to doctors. Or think of it this way, genes and cells are hardly intelligent enough to "design" a human brain, yet over billions of years of blind selection intelligence was embedded in higher levels of biological organization (tissues, organs, systems of organs, etc.) that eventually lead to an organ that was capable of dealing with the more rapid changes of culture and learning.
Robots aren’t getting smarter — we’re getting dumber Huge artificial intelligence news! Our robot overlords have arrived! A “supercomputer” has finally passed the Turing Test! Except, well, maybe not. Here’s what actually happened: For five whole minutes, a chatbot managed to convince one out of three judges that it was “Eugene Goostman” — a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with limited English skills. Alan Turing would not be impressed. So, raspberries to the Guardian and the Independent for uncritically buying into the University of Reading’s press campaign. But, the bogosity of Eugene Goostman’s artificial intelligence does not mean that we shouldn’t be on guard for marauding robots. Proof of this arrives in research conducted by a group of Argentinian computer scientists in the paper Reverse Engineering Socialbot Infiltration Strategies in Twitter. Out of 120 bots, 38 were suspended. More surprisingly, the socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. (Emphasis mine.) Hey, guess what?
Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel –interview | Technology | The Observer Jaron Lanier is that rarest of rare birds – an uber-geek who is highly critical of the world created by the technology he helped to create. Now in his 50s, he first came to prominence in the 1980s as a pioneer in the field of "virtual reality" – the development of computer-generated environments in which real people could interact. Ever since then, he has attracted the label of "visionary", not always a compliment in the computer business, where it denotes, as the New Yorker memorably put it, "a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills". In person, he looks like central casting's idea of a technology guru: vast bulk, informal attire, no socks, beard and dreadlocks. Yet he also has good people skills. Lanier's been thinking along these lines for a while. His new book takes that point of view a good deal further by articulating three big ideas. The second idea is that the decisions we make in designing technology systems eventually come back to bite us.
ONE (Open Network Ecology) New York City Possibility of cloning quantum information from the past Popular television shows such as "Doctor Who" have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU's Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past. It all started when David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford, came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the paradoxes that would occur if one could travel back in time. "The question is, how would you have existed in the first place to go back in time and kill your grandfather?" Deutsch solved the Grandfather paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner. "Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half," Wilde said. "We can always look at a paper, and then copy the words on it.