Thu 5 Jun 2008
DARPA does awesome awesome stuff. Now they are funding the devlopment of a computer that will manage the battlefields of the future. This combined with advances in the area of what can only be called cybernetics not to mention laser weapons is an amazing portrait of the future. There are two problems I see arising from this: 1.) There aren’t that many people left on the planet dumb enough to engage in global war. 2.) What the hell are sci-fi authors going to write about?
Fri 18 Jan 2008
Interestingly enough I had a talk recently about the possible rights and such of robots. I thought of it as nothing more than an interesting thought exercise: at what point will robotic entities be considered to fall under governmental sanctions? How advanced does a robot have to become before someone, somewhere, decides it too should be allowed a set of inseparable ‘human’ rights? As so typically happens with me, shortly there after there was an article recently over at io9 about a conference at Stanford about what happens when robots commit war crimes. This isn’t speculation, this isn’t sci-fi (at least not anymore) this is something we are facing NOW. crazy world. Awesome future world.
Tue 4 Dec 2007
Just a quick note. I recently (last night) went to a talk on using AI for data mining. The interesting thing to me was the use of genetic algorithms to generate decisions trees. This was essentially a program that took nodes from a binary tree and ditched the ones that were not performing and spliced in something with new parameters.
Also evidently some cities use RFID tags on trash cans to indicate when they are full and need dumping. Evidently the future happened when I was looking the other way. More later.
Wed 21 Nov 2007
Thoughts on AI:
I have a hard time believing we will EVER be able to create a functional AI based on current technology and paradigms, at least according to the Turing test. The current method seems to consist of assigning probabilities to EVERYTHING. This will never fool a human. No human decides if the sprinklers were on based on the wetness of the grass. Correction: no human ACCURATELY determines this. see if you can spot the robot in this sample dialog:
speaker 1: the grass appears to be wet.
Speaker 2: It’s probably from the dew.
speaker 1: statistically speaking for this time of year there is only a .0123 percent chance that condensation would still be present on the grass at this time of day. Given the climate, the water bill, and past watering habits: it is far more likely that the sprinklers have been turned on at some point in the night.
speaker 2: Whatever.