Drew Clinkenbeard

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.

So many of the systems of yore are now availible under one banner,,, soon the world will be dominated. But the interesting thing is,, it’s competition that keeps things alive,, a lesson that may have finally been learned.

The other day the following comic from XKCD struck me as amusing:

It also made me think, the last gift I got my mother was a robot. I bought my mother a roomba and now she has a robot roaming free in her home. I may be working with a team designing a robotic soccer team. My friends mother was buying digital picture frames for her parents. We live in a science fiction world and NO ONE NOTICED. We all carry communicators. I am laying in bed typing this on a machine about 10000 times more powerful than what sent men to the moon. If the allies had this computer during WWII Hitler would have been dead,,,, crap godwins law.

(more…)

So Google is pushing their new android platform for mobile devices. I have downloaded the API but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. If the big G follows the pattern of the past it will probably be pretty easy to work with. I am pleased with this development. I have many reasons ($10,000,000us is not the least of them) one of the biggest is the fact that it is open source. I think having a project that is open to the community of developers is the best way of ensuring a good product. Essentially this gives a good chance that your product will play well with others, an idea shunned by many.

It has always seemed to me that by making your product only work with your other products that you are cutting yourself off from a valuable portion of market share. If you make your product the best, then allow EVERY one to use it than people will love you. If you tell people it’s the best then force them to use it they will resent you. Well actually a lot of people will follow your lead regardless. There will always be the few that are interested in their own way though.

(more…)

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.

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.

(more…)

There is a book called ‘The Phantom Tollbooth‘ it’s one of those books that I read that redefined my personality. There was demon in that looked like le fils de l’homme only he actually didn’t have a face. He went on all the time about change being bad. This was also the book that made me love math and language. It was dark in places and demonstrated that just because you were a child you could still deal with tough decisions. Indeed it really emphasized that when you are a child your lack of experiance makes MANY things a tough decision.

The one thing that really stuck out in my mind though was a house with a door on each of its four walls. Each door was labled differently. There was ‘The Giant’, ‘The Midget’, ‘The Fat Man’ and ‘the Thin Man’ as you may have guessed each door was answered by the same perfectly average man. The reasoning was that from a thin perspective, he was fat, tall he was short etc.

We’ll be right back

Everyone follows a path. There are as many paths as there are people. We all travel a path toward a goal, often the goal is not attainable, this makes it no less appealing nor any less a worthwhile journey. Indeed in the end it becomes the path and the act of traveling which is the worthier part. In the end finding the goal would cause the traveling to end. I have crafted my own path, one of honor and respect. one of hard work and study. I have, unbeknown to myself, begun traveling the path of zazen.

Unfortunately this path of honor has prevented me from taking chances that would have not caused me to bat an eye some years ago. In the end I hope that this path causes me to clean some of the tarnish from my soul and my belief in karma means that I hope it pays off in the end, but if not, at least I made the world a little better for others. I would say it has also caused me to “regret not doing things instead of regretting doing them” but regret, like gloating, is a waste of time. (15 points to the first one to get the quotes)

(more…)

Okay site update: there is a new section: Stories have a gander, read the stories then tell me what you think! Please! There is a link to that page in the header.

edit: comments will have to go here because I can’t get them to work on the page.

other things, I am still feeling all weird I think it is simply the lack of stuff to do. If I don’t hear from that one guy by like say, Wednesday, I am going to start applying for jobs at other places. Because

1. The money would be nice
2. I am bored
3. Work is a good place to meet people
4. It will get me out of the house
5. It will get me out of this funk

(more…)

It has been just over a fortnight since my last posting. By the time I am done with this it will be a nice even 16 days I am sure. In those two weeks I have taken two tests, written 30+ pages of papers and reports, given two presentations earned one bachelors degree gone on one date and gotten an average of 5.2 hours of sleep a night and sat in my chair in front of my computer for probably a solid 5 days if not more.

(more…)