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Tag: EthicsPages, news, and videos PagesAITopics/Ethics News Philip Ball -> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/13/nanotechnology-religion-secular-moral-acceptance?INTCMP=SRCH? Of the rather few explicitly religious commentaries on nanotech so far, some have focused on issues that could have been raised by secular voices: safety, commercial control and accountability, and responsible application. Nanotech scientists have long sought to rescue their discipline's public image from the vocal but fringe spokespersons such as Eric Drexler and Ray Kurzweil, who have painted a fantastic picture of tiny robots patching up our cells and extending our longevity. Kurzweil has suggested nanotech will help guide us to a moment he calls the Singularity: a convergence of growing computer power and medical capability that will transform us into disembodied immortals. But the transhumanism question isn't unique to nanotech it's part of a wider debate about the ethics of human enhancement and modification. (more) Viewpoint: AI will change our relationship with tech It seems likely that in 2012 a computer will pass the Turing Test - which might get us closer to a digital machine with true artificial intelligence (AI). Because right now the digital devices in our lives are quite insecure - they require constant reassurances: "yes, I do want you to delete that file"; Attention seeking A machine passes Alan Turing's test if you cannot tell from its responses if it is human or computer I sometimes think if our devices were people, we would describe them as high maintenance and would wonder quietly to ourselves if it was time to break up with them. cameras that know how to make you look your best, smart devices that actually learn about your likes and dislikes and make better choices to delight and surprise you. Creativity I think this means we can look forward to our interactions with digital devices maturing into something more like a relationship, and a little less like a lot of hard work. (more) The Future of Moral Machines The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel apeks 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; Machines are increasingly operating with minimal human oversight in the same physical spaces as we do. The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word robot is old. The techno-optimists among them also believe that such machines will be essentially friendly to human beings. (more) Let's hand over the analogue TV airways to machines (Wired UK) This is a guest post by Luke D'Arcy, Vice President of Marketing at mobile wireless data service provider Neul The ideas surrounding machines "taking over" has long been a popular topic both for writers and scientists. Over the last few years society has become increasingly used to seeing machines talking to other machines. In the home machines will monitor and communicate, ensuring your heating is set to the right temperature and your supermarket delivery service is notified when you run out of milk. A world of machines communicating with each other will see devices capable of productivity and customer service unachievable by humans as machines keep a constant watch, refuelling, restocking and repairing as needed. (more) Watchers, carers, and administrators: the smart homes of tomorrow These technologies are almost synonymous with the smart home and so-called intelligent buildings in general, but there's little or no intelligence to them. For a home to be considered smart, it must in a sense become a robota machine capable of, if not true intelligence (and certainly not sentience), sensing data, processing it, drawing conclusions of its own accord, and then acting upon those conclusions. Pervasive computing goes beyond the idea of a personal computer in every home, or even in every pocketit's to do with chips and sensors in everyday objects and the Internet of Things. When computers are everywhere, ambient intelligence is what followsat least in theory: a soft network of computers and devices (sometimes visible and recognizable, sometimes not) watching, thinking, and communicating for the betterment of humankind. (more) Robots fighting wars could be blamed for mistakes on the battlefield If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? The researchers' latest results show that humans apply a moderate amount of morality and other human characteristics to robots that are equipped with social capabilities and are capable of harming humans. This suggests that as robots gain capabilities in language and social interactions, it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes, the researchers wrote. They argue that as militaries transform from human to robotic warfare, the chain of command that controls robots and the moral accountability of robotic warriors should be factored into jurisprudence and the Laws of Armed Conflict for cases when the robots hurt humans. (more) Artificial intelligence: how close is it to passing the test? TagsThe iCub robot tries to catch a ball during the Innorobo European summit, March 2012 Image: Laurent Cipriani/AP/Press Association Images THE QUEST FOR artificial intelligence (AI) began long ago in human history even earlier than you might think. Recently, scientists have said to we could be closer than ever to passing the Turing Test a method of monitoring the human perception of intelligence in a machine, developed by British mathematician Alan Turing. In practice, the test involves a panel of human judges who read typed answers to questions addressed to both a computer and a human. Turing reasoned that if a computer could impersonate a human being so well as to be indistinguishableas a machine, it could be said that computer is at least as intelligent as a person. (more) Google's self-driving car gets green light in Nevada The first fully licensed self-driven car a modified Toyota Prius won a special permit on Tuesday, the first of three applied for by Google, which allows it to be used on the state's roads, including the famous Las Vegas strip. Autonomous vehicles are the "car of the future," said Bruce Breslow, the director of Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), in a statement. He also thought that self-driving cars whose brakes and accelerators are connected to computers, and which are fitted with GPS, a substantial database, artificial intelligence systems, and a laser radar (Lidar) which can detect obstacles such as people, cyclists and other cars on or around the road could be substantially safer than human drivers. The cars in Nevada will have a special licence plate with an infinity sign to indicate that they are not necessarily being driven by a human...... (more) The Need for Autonomous Vehicle Law Advertisement Related What happens if you get into a collision with an autonomous car? The development of autonomous cars is accompanied by numerous legal uncertainties that, if left unresolved, may discourage companies from investing in the development of such technologies, despite their great promise for reducing the number of deaths and injuries on our highways. What if you could make your car follow the car in front of it perfectly would the driver be responsible then? Nevada has updated their laws to allow texting while driving a licensed autonomous car, but Nevada has prohibited being intoxicated in the same autonomous vehicle. (more) Be afraid: Robot experts say machines are catching up The idea of a robot coup d'etat is based on the sci-fi notion of "technological singularity" -- the point where machines become powerful enough to improve their own instruction sets and capabilities without human intervention, leading to a runaway chain of self-upgrades that surpasses human comprehension. Smart machines like IBM's Watson supercomputer aren't the product of some magical breakthrough, but of a lot of separate research efforts that solved individual problems. The rapidly advancing power of microchips means that machines with far fewer chips will be able to perform Watson-like feats. Smart machines are already designing the chips that are paving the way for ever smarter machines. (more) How Machine Translation Has A Habit Of Mangling Multilingual SEO Recent discussions force me to return to the subject of translation versus SEO particularly machine translation as it seems this old topic has not yet gone away. For multinational sites, maintaining your site can be an expensive affair, and the cost savings of machine translation seem outstandingly attractive. Often abbreviated to MT, machine translation involves using computers to do the work which human translators would normally do. Keywords are very special creations of the human mind I once nicknamed them abbreviated thoughts and have found myself using that description many times over the years as the easiest way to explain their different nature. (more) New App Can ID Complete Stranger's Facebook and Social Security No. Please input the letters/numbers that appear in the image below. PittPatt jumps online and compares that picture to millions of images in Facebook and in Google Inc.'s ( GOOG ) image search, using advanced facial recognition technology. We are RAPIDLY approaching civil war in this country due to the government's refusal to operate within its constitutional limits. Gun control is unconstitutional. (more) Formspring open to bullying, says anti-bullying charity Anti-bullying charities say they are worried about anonymous messaging facilities on the social networking site Formspring. Natalie is 15 and is one of those young people who have had problems. Abuse It turned bad, she admitted. I think the problem with Formspring is that there's no recourse for the victim I get more abuse in person, so I was kind of used to it, she said. (more) Military Robots Take Off Photos:Drone Time The brawny combat robot, made by QinetiQ North America, a unit of the U.K.'sQinetiQ GroupPLC, rolls on tank-like treads. Military robots are a deadly serious business, and the gadgetry on display at the Unmanned Systems North America exhibition here underscores the shift by defense companies to selling combat by remote control. Over Japan, pilotless military surveillance planes recently inspected the damage from a nuclear disaster. The former Navy admiral said military researchers are starting to see the potential of unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, to hunt for mines or other threats, much as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accelerated the demand for bomb-disposal robots to search for suspected roadside bombs. (more) September 11 and the Rise of Robots Military robots such as the SUGV and the Packbot in development at Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot do things humans can't or don't want to do.Click to enlarge this image.James Leynse/Corbis September 11 had quite a different meaning for me before it became 9/11. And early on that cool blue morning I took my daily run from our Chelsea apartment down the West Side Highway past the World Trade Center to South Ferry and back. I never thought much about the Twin Towers then, except sometimes to remember the convoluted history of how they got built in the first place, or to feel their overwhelming presence in what was then a low-rise part of Manhattan as I breezed past, with no sense of how gigantic their absence might become. Robots have been used in the aftermath of many subsequent disasters -- hurricanes, building collapses and, most recently, in the nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima. (more) LifeNews.com -> http://www.lifenews.com/2011/08/29/the-transhumanism-trap-using-technology-to-perfect-the-human-race/? The Transhumanism Trap: Using Technology to Perfect the Human Race The Transhumanism Trap is out there. Transhumanists hunger for technology that will take an otherwise healthy individual and enhance him or her beyond normal human ability. Anyone who has seen any science fiction film like Surrogates, Limitless,or Splice has seen transhumanism in action. In a post by Joseph Farrah on the dangers of transhumanism at World Net Daily , a commenter wrote the following: So does Farah now believe that former VP Cheney should have the implanted defibrillator (thats been keeping him alive for the last decade) removed? (more) Foreign Policy: A Predictable Future For Technology Ayesha and Parag Khanna are co-directors of the Hybrid Reality Institute. Just before sunset on a hot August day in Los Angeles, we sat in a nearly empty hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of one of the most influential husband-and-wife intellectual teams in history: Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Growing up in post-Depression America, they abandoned New York City and moved to the heartland, working for years as welders and union stewards at aluminum foundries and mills, experiencing all the hardship of industrialism at its peak. Five characteristics differentiate this Hybrid age from those that came before it: the ubiquitous presence of technology, its growing intelligence, its increasingly social dimensions, its ability to integrate and combine in new forms, and its growing power to disrupt, faster and on a larger scale than ever before in human history. (more) What happens after your final status update? Editor's note: Adam Ostrow is editor-in-chief of Mashable. He spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, UK, in July. " But that's something that will be forever changed as a result of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content the average person will produce in his or her lifetime. Think about it -- while at best you might have a few photos, newspaper clippings or secondhand accounts of your ancestors, our descendants and all those to follow will have at their fingertips a deep digital archive of information that we created ourselves. (more) Science fiction brings up religious conflicts tool nameIn my previous column, I briefly described how I came to be interested in the film and literary genre of science fiction from the perspective of a religious practitioner, in my case, Roman Catholic Christianity, and how it could be a useful way of exploring issues such as the increasingly pervasive presence of technology in our world. Defining the human being is a way of trying to understand what human beings are as a foundation for understanding the purpose of human beings in the universe. More often in science fiction the nonhuman characters with human appearance are machines such as the cyborgs in the Terminator franchise, the cylons in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and its spin-off, Caprica, or the replicants in the classic, Blade Runner, based on Philip Dicks novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Some science fiction works explore the human motivations behind the creation of such humanoid machines. (more) The future cometh: Science, technology and humanity at Singularity Summit 2011 ... Suggested by mathematician Vernor Vinge in his acclaimed science fiction novel True Names (1981) and introduced explicitly in his essay The Coming Technological Singularity (1993), the term was popularized by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near (2005). Part 1:rt I) In an ambitious talk (and accompanied by his engaging dry wit), neuroscientist Christof Koch Professor of Biology and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle discussed The Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness a thorny problem at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. Christof Koch on "The Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness" at Singularity Summit 2011 For Koch, whose research has focused on the physical basis of consciousness for well over a decade, consciousness is a fundamental property of networked entities that may well be explained by psychiatrist Giulio Tononis integrated information theory (IIT) an approach hypothesizing that consciousness is measure in that it corresponds to the capacity of a system to integrate information. (more) The future of artificial intelligence I believe as artificial intelligence advances, a new model "software as collaborator" - will become possible, with tremendous potential benefits. Software collaborators could be designed to be enough like people that this mutual adaptation is possible, and that we can understand and trust their contributions. Software collaborators that do not share these frailties could become valuable complements to individuals and to teams. We are still a long way from being able to build software collaborators, but there is important progress being made in many fronts in artificial intelligence. (more) It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Siri Passes The Turing Test So as this database grows by orders of magnitude and the logic is refined accordingly, if a Turing Test is fashioned to distinguish a computer from a person in the day-to-day tasks of working with a personal assistant in one room is hidden an iPhone, in another room a person, you interact with them as you would an executive assistant over the course of the day, and then at the end of the day you choose which one you think is the person it is only a matter of time before the iPhone becomes indistinguishable from the human. There already is an annual Turing Test underway, the Loebner competition, where a set of judges spend a few minutes conversing (via keyboard) with computers and with people, and then have to decide which is which. A more reasonable Turing Test would be to invite a computer into a round of dinner conversations where the human subjects are not made aware that this is occurring. (more) Androids and angels Search smh: Search in:Nick Miller November 6, 2011 Illustration: Michael Connolly Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil believes humans will soon be able to live forever with the help of computers. and the handsome stranger, a network of hyper-intelligent computers that will take over the world. Photo: Trevor Collens It is hard not to think Arnold Schwarzenegger while talking to futurist Ray Kurzweil. He says that in the first half of this century there will be a Singularity, a period of incredibly rapid technological change, triggered by the moment that computers become smart enough to improve themselves without human intervention. (more) Videos AAAS 2007 Annual Meeting Plenary Lecture by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President, Products, Google Inc. Larry Page shares his views about science/technology education, opportunities for changing the world, AI research at Google, access to information, and much more. February 16, 2007. (more) Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes Reality Mining. "Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT, describes a future in which cell phones log data about their owners' behavior. He reasons that this data can be used to strengthen social networks, generate recommendations, help track diseases, and monitor personal health." 2008?. (more) Computer Chronicles: Computers & the Pentagon - Part Two (1986). "A look at the uses of computer hardware and software in the Defense Department. Shot on location at various military installations around the country. Featured are demonstrations of SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the AEGIS combat control system on board the USS Valley Forge advanced navy cruiser, and the Air Force's Advanced Sensory Exploitation System using distributed networks and artificial intelligence to detect enemy threats." 1986. (more) Evil HAL 9000 or Benevolent R2D2: The Future of A.I.. Patt Morrison's live one-hour public affairs show with guest host, Jon Beaupre. 89.3 KPCC-FM , Southern California Public Radio. "Our most vivid images of artificially intelligent machines tends to come from science fiction movies, and they usually fall into two categories: evil robots run amok, bent on destroying mankind or wise androids assisting and saving humans. The reality of A.I. machines is a little more complex, but the advancements are coming in leaps and bounds with ever more intelligent and autonomous systems that are being designed for such tasks as caretakers for children and the elderly, independent transportation vehicles and war making. There are still many ethical and safety concerns that must be addressed. How long before we can all expect to have our own A.I. robot friend in our homes?". July 24, 2007. (more) Of Robots and Men - Rights for the Artificially Intelligent. "KJZZ's Dennis Lambert speaks with Scottsdale attorney David Calverley, whose research into bioethics is driving him to artificial intelligence." January 23, 2007. (more) SIAI Interview Series: Barney Pell, Powerset CEO. Dr. Barney Pell is an SIAI Advisor and co-founder and CEO of Powerset, a San Francisco company working to build a transformative consumer search engine. In this interview, Pell talks about advanced AI, progress in the AI field, Powerset, his involvement with SIAI, his robotics work at NASA Ames, the dangers of AI, the importance of foresight, and more. May 30, 2007. (more) Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence. Lecture at Stanford by Stephen Omohundro, Self-Aware Systems. "We are on the verge of a radical new paradigm for both computer software and hardware. "Self-improving systems" will have detailed models ... all » ... all » of their own designs and will improve themselves by learning from their own operation. They will continuously adapt themselves to the tasks they need to perform. Eventually they will be able to improve every aspect of themselves: their programs, programming languages, specification logics, instruction sets, and hardware architectures. In this talk we present fundamental principles that underlie the operation of this kind of system. ... We conclude with a discussion of some of the broader social implications of this kind of system.". October 31, 2007. (more) Singularity Summit 2007 Keynote Speaker - Rodney Books: The Singularity, A Period Not An Event. Whatever writes future history will look back at what we are calling the singularity not as a single event but as a period of time. The singularity period will encompass a time where a collection of technologies were invented, developed, and deployed in fits and starts, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself, but by the normal economic and sociological pressures of human affairs. A Hollywood treatment of the singularity would have a world just like today's, plus the singularity, as a singular event. In reality, the world will be changing continuously due to rapid growth in technologies that are both related and unrelated to the singularity itself. The future will be embedded in a different world than the one we inhabit. And the AI systems we create will not have the same desires, beliefs, and goals as today-us. Tomorrow-us will be much better equipped for the changes that will take place in our world. This talk will explore how things might unfold and how we will transform ourselves along the way. September 8, 2007. (more) The Next Big Thing (Series Two): Machines with Minds. Real moving, interacting robots is one promising direction in artificial intelligence. But what about the original hope of matching human performance, and what has A.I. told us about the human brain? When science of artificial intelligence was launched in the 50s, its goal was to match the intellectual achievements of human beings. Why isn't machine intelligence already far superior to that of people? Chaired by Colin Blakemore [Oxford University], the panel consists of Professor Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham), Dr Amanda Sharkey (University of Sheffield), and Professor Igor Aleksander (Imperial College). 2002. (more) USC Presents...Closer To Truth: Is Science Fiction Science? "Science Fiction enables scientific creativity to break free, unrestricted by the laws of nature as we know them, and allows contemporary issues to be explored in radically different environments than the normal trappings. By definition, Science Fiction is a genre that creates alternate scenarios and then watches them play out. Joining host Robert Kuhn is author/producer/director Michael Crichton; Physicist David Brin; and author Octavia E. Butler." May 15, 2006. (more) Washburn Lecture Series at the Museum of Science, Boston: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" Lecture one (of three) - Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond, with Justine Cassell, Ph.D.. Justine Cassell's lecture, "Human/Computer Conversation: HAL and Beyond," was the first in the three speaker lecture series: "2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we there yet?" November 6, 2001. (more) |
