http://www.freep.com/article/20110216/NEWS01/110216015/Sci-fi-fans-rejoice-RoboCop-statue-coming-Detroit
Oh, Internet people, how you make life interesting. If you head over to http://www.detroitneedsrobocop.com/, you too can be part of the crazy - the Kickstarter to fund an actual RoboCop statue to be installed somewhere in Detroit has blown past a couple of funding goals already. At this point it's at just over $62,000 - the organizers have said they'll let it run for the whole funding period, and just make the statue as awesome as they can with whatever ridiculous total they end up with.
Apparently it started with a random tweet to the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing (how'd Microsoft swing that deal, I wonder?) suggesting they build a RoboCop statue. Perhaps unwisely, he actually responded to the tweet, saying "There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion." Enter the fine folks at Imagination Station, a non-profit group dedicated to reclaiming and refurbishing some of Detroit's less-pleasant buildings and turning them into an art commune/gallery/park/something. They decided this was something people could get behind, and threw up a Kickstarter for it.
As it turned out, they were right - in the first four days, they had $17,000 of pledges. They got a boost shortly afterward from Pete Hottelet, the CEO of Omni Consumer Products...yes, really. Apparently this is a real company, that makes little real products based on various fictional properties. Mr. Hottelet pledged $25,000, which I suppose he really had to, given his company's name.
So, none of this has much to do with real cyborgs or transhumanism, but I figured it's worth noting. Not least of which because, while RoboCop was great, I had a serious crush on Peter Weller in Buckaroo Banzai. Even as a young prototype, I was not your standard model, I guess. ;) Although now that I think about it, maybe his later portrayal of RoboCop did have something to do with my eventual robotic inclinations.
Chronicling our increasing acceleration towards escape velocity from biology.
2011/02/22
Study Suggests Brain Is More Modular - "Reading" Is Input-Agnostic
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/thuo-022211.php
Researchers found that the same brain areas are active in people reading visually as in never-sighted people reading Braille, to the point where the fMRI's were essentially indistinguishable between the two groups.
This seems like a plus for neurology-based understanding of intelligence, as it suggests that some brain functions may be relatively generic - doing specific kinds of processing tasks regardless of the source of the data being processed.
Researchers found that the same brain areas are active in people reading visually as in never-sighted people reading Braille, to the point where the fMRI's were essentially indistinguishable between the two groups.
This seems like a plus for neurology-based understanding of intelligence, as it suggests that some brain functions may be relatively generic - doing specific kinds of processing tasks regardless of the source of the data being processed.
2011/02/21
DARPA Contractor Builds Robo-Hummingbird, Onboard Power, Video
http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-fully-operational-life-size-hummingbird-like-unmanned-aircraft?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=97fb8158e5-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email
This is both neat, and impressive technically, though I'm wondering what the advantage is over, say, a quad-rotor?
Presumably the idea is to use it for spying, but I'm not sure that makes sense. Every place I've ever lived, hummingbirds are rare enough that I'd pay particular attention to any I saw, because they're cool, and as good as it looks, I'm not sure it can withstand any significant scrutiny. Are there areas of the world where hummingbirds are like flies and people actually ignore them?
This is both neat, and impressive technically, though I'm wondering what the advantage is over, say, a quad-rotor?
Presumably the idea is to use it for spying, but I'm not sure that makes sense. Every place I've ever lived, hummingbirds are rare enough that I'd pay particular attention to any I saw, because they're cool, and as good as it looks, I'm not sure it can withstand any significant scrutiny. Are there areas of the world where hummingbirds are like flies and people actually ignore them?
More Discriminating BCI for Robot or Computer Control
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/epfd-tbi012111.php
Apparently - and this was news to me - most current production BCIs are mentally tiring for the user, because "do nothing" is actually something you have to keep thinking about, actively. It's sort of like the Douglas Adams bit about a gesture-controlled radio interface that was eventually so sensitive you had to "sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program". But since we're talking about the only means of mobility for some users, rather more serious.
This one is more flexible in that it uses some statistical analysis to better catch commands (or "no command") even while other things are going on, like reading or speaking aloud. Seems like a definite benefit!
Apparently - and this was news to me - most current production BCIs are mentally tiring for the user, because "do nothing" is actually something you have to keep thinking about, actively. It's sort of like the Douglas Adams bit about a gesture-controlled radio interface that was eventually so sensitive you had to "sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program". But since we're talking about the only means of mobility for some users, rather more serious.
This one is more flexible in that it uses some statistical analysis to better catch commands (or "no command") even while other things are going on, like reading or speaking aloud. Seems like a definite benefit!
2011/02/17
Watson Kicks Around the Humans Again, Skips Victory Lap
The third and final night of the IBM Watson Jeopardy Challenge (http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/) was last night, and IBM's green-haired wonder (I started thinking of the five emo-lines on its avatar as hair) pulled it out again. The individual score for the second game was much closer by Final Jeopardy than the first game - Watson had $23,440, and Ken had managed to rack up $18,200 (Brad had $5,600 and seemed rather cavalier about the whole thing - after all, given the prizes and the charity split, he was guaranteed $100,000 just for showing up).
Some analysis of the second game is making much of Watson's "changed" wagering behavior (it bet $17,973, where it had low-balled Final Jeopardy in the first game), but it's not very surprising. Watson was always basing its wagers on the two-game total score victory conditions. By Final Jeopardy (in fact, rather earlier than that, as I'm sure Watson was aware more than I was) in the second game, Watson had already mathematically eliminated the other two contestants...its large wager was based on the most it could risk while still guaranteeing overall victory. Ken low-balled for similar reasons. He knew there was zero chance of Watson over-bidding, and thus zero chance of him taking first place over-all. He might have tried for a symbolic victory in the second game, but I suspect he was being more practical and guaranteeing that he took second, for a much larger prize.
Performance-wise, Watson seemed to be having a few more category misunderstandings than during the first game. It had a few flubs, and many questions where I suspect if Ken had not beaten it to the buzzer, Watson's answer would have been rejected for poor phrasing. Both humans seemed to be doing significantly better in the buzzer contest this game, compared to the first - I bet my speculation about them practicing in their hotel rooms before bed has some truth to it. Though based on Watson's would-have-been-wrong answers, Ken might have actually had a chance to get closer to Watson's total if he'd been less fast on the buzzer, letting Watson blow it and lose score, then buzzing in for clean up. But given Watson's high percentage of correct answers, it seems clear Ken had to do whatever he could to maximize his chances of being allowed to answer (and score) at all.
Overall, I don't have much more to add to my analysis from the first game. Watson's technology is impressive (and as Ray K. mentions, is only going to improve) in practical terms, but it's not impressive in conceptual terms - the intelligence displayed isn't general and isn't reliable (say, for unsupervised question-answering that might have consequences)...and it's not clear if it's adaptable or learning. Still, it's much better at answering Jeopardy clues than I am, and demonstrably better at playing Jeopardy than two noted Champions of the game.
I was a bit worried that, past my excitement, my dismissive analysis of the technology is an example of the "moving target" that AI is, seemingly based on an innate human desire for exceptionalism - intelligence tends to be re-defined to exclude whatever the most recent AI has managed to accomplish. I don't think that's the case here - the output of Watson is both impressive and laughable (because when Watson is wrong, he's really wrong), but the means to produce it don't seem generally applicable. As Noam Chomsky put it when asked (by Gavin Schmitt), "I'm not impressed by a bigger steamroller."
The question is, how much is IBM's technology here going to advance the field? The hardware required to run Watson alone is apparently north of one million dollars. But I wonder how much of that is involved in the knowledge library and the relevant searches...could they pare down the natural language parts of the system into something more manageable and affordable? Either way, the costs are going to come down with time and volume, which IBM itself mentioned. Ideally, the language innovations they've come up with can be incorporated into more general, learning-based approaches which will produce more robust results.
The avatar is cute, though. I wonder if there will be Watson costumes this Halloween?
Some analysis of the second game is making much of Watson's "changed" wagering behavior (it bet $17,973, where it had low-balled Final Jeopardy in the first game), but it's not very surprising. Watson was always basing its wagers on the two-game total score victory conditions. By Final Jeopardy (in fact, rather earlier than that, as I'm sure Watson was aware more than I was) in the second game, Watson had already mathematically eliminated the other two contestants...its large wager was based on the most it could risk while still guaranteeing overall victory. Ken low-balled for similar reasons. He knew there was zero chance of Watson over-bidding, and thus zero chance of him taking first place over-all. He might have tried for a symbolic victory in the second game, but I suspect he was being more practical and guaranteeing that he took second, for a much larger prize.
Performance-wise, Watson seemed to be having a few more category misunderstandings than during the first game. It had a few flubs, and many questions where I suspect if Ken had not beaten it to the buzzer, Watson's answer would have been rejected for poor phrasing. Both humans seemed to be doing significantly better in the buzzer contest this game, compared to the first - I bet my speculation about them practicing in their hotel rooms before bed has some truth to it. Though based on Watson's would-have-been-wrong answers, Ken might have actually had a chance to get closer to Watson's total if he'd been less fast on the buzzer, letting Watson blow it and lose score, then buzzing in for clean up. But given Watson's high percentage of correct answers, it seems clear Ken had to do whatever he could to maximize his chances of being allowed to answer (and score) at all.
Overall, I don't have much more to add to my analysis from the first game. Watson's technology is impressive (and as Ray K. mentions, is only going to improve) in practical terms, but it's not impressive in conceptual terms - the intelligence displayed isn't general and isn't reliable (say, for unsupervised question-answering that might have consequences)...and it's not clear if it's adaptable or learning. Still, it's much better at answering Jeopardy clues than I am, and demonstrably better at playing Jeopardy than two noted Champions of the game.
I was a bit worried that, past my excitement, my dismissive analysis of the technology is an example of the "moving target" that AI is, seemingly based on an innate human desire for exceptionalism - intelligence tends to be re-defined to exclude whatever the most recent AI has managed to accomplish. I don't think that's the case here - the output of Watson is both impressive and laughable (because when Watson is wrong, he's really wrong), but the means to produce it don't seem generally applicable. As Noam Chomsky put it when asked (by Gavin Schmitt), "I'm not impressed by a bigger steamroller."
The question is, how much is IBM's technology here going to advance the field? The hardware required to run Watson alone is apparently north of one million dollars. But I wonder how much of that is involved in the knowledge library and the relevant searches...could they pare down the natural language parts of the system into something more manageable and affordable? Either way, the costs are going to come down with time and volume, which IBM itself mentioned. Ideally, the language innovations they've come up with can be incorporated into more general, learning-based approaches which will produce more robust results.
The avatar is cute, though. I wonder if there will be Watson costumes this Halloween?
2011/02/16
The Very Model of a Singularitarian
Via KurzweilAI - the singing is...hmm...earnest, but it's still catchy.
The Very Model of a Singularitarian [video]
The Very Model of a Singularitarian [video]
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