25/06/2010 - Robots go to work at Scotland hospital
The construction of the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Stirlingshire, cost a hefty sum of £300m British pounds, but its new method of patient-care promises to lead the way towards a brighter future. The hospital will use a number of worker robots to clean the facilities, bring fresh linen and food to patients, as well as dispense drugs and remove clinical waste. The machines will be set up to follow specific routs to make sure they don’t bump into obstacles or each other, and will move through corridors underneath the hospital. They will also have the ability to open doors and locate their exact position with the laser beams mounted on top of their forklift-like frames. And to minimize errors and problems, there will always be a human on stand-by.
Besides making the lives of nurses easier, one of the most important aspects of their application will be controlling infection. When dealing with disease, tasks are often separated between “dirty and clean”, and one person doing both jobs increases the risk of spreading the sickness. The robots, however, will be immune to such threats, and will make the hospital a safer place both for staff and patients.
The hospital workers will not have to worry about their jobs, however, as the primary mission of these robots will be to make sure staff have more time to spend with patients, while the machines do the manual work. The hospital opens in August, and it will be interesting to see how well this innovative method will work.
BBC has more details and a sort video here.
16/04/2010 - Banking center gets robotic guides
It looks like that highly stylish A.I. future promised to us by movies may finally be on its way to becoming a reality. A 395-acre Spanish banking center, which has no less than nine buildings and 5,500 employees, is turning to various high-tech to help greet and accommodate its guests. Perhaps the most impressive of all is its “swarm” of Santander Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGA) robots, which will help users find their way around the massive buildings. Of course, robotic tour guides have been in development since the 90s and several have already been deployed in museums in North America and Europe.The robots themselves look pretty cool. In appearance they resemble large red helmets, and can wisp effortlessly around the different destinations they are instructed to show the visitors around. They can also sense other people and robots around, so as not to bump into them, and follow maps that tell them exactly where everything in the financial center is located. They are WiFi-controlled and operate on touch-screen technology, which allows guests to choose their language, or access features such as an audio and video history of the banking center, or the Santander group itself.
The video below shows the robots in action, as well as the other highly impressive innovations, such as the LED-panels that can digitally expand and access various facilities around a miniature model of the financial center. All this must have cost a huge amount of money, but as the employees interviewed in the video say, they wanted to offer a truly unique experience for their visitors. If the robots and all the other technology works as smoothly as shown here, they might have indeed created an environment that can’t be found anywhere else in the world—yet. It’s a model that many other businesses and institutions will want to one day emulate, though can only sit back and admire for now.
09/04/2010 - Chalmers: “The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously”
Here is a quote from the Chalmers paper that I linked yesterday:
One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case. Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance to the idea.
I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the singularity are of enormous practical and philosophical concern.
Practically: If there is a singularity, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. An intelligence explosion has enormous potential benefits: a cure for all known diseases, an end to poverty, extraordinary scientific advances, and much more. It also has enormous potential dangers: an end to the human race, an arms race of warring machines, the power to destroy the planet. So if there is even a small chance that there will be a singularity, we would do well to think about what forms it might take and whether there is anything we can do to influence the outcomes in a positive direction.
Great advice for everyone living in the 21st century!
08/04/2010 - David Chalmers on Singularity, Intelligence Explosion
Recently, David Chalmers announced that he was posting a new paper based on his Singularity Summit 2010 talk: “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. In his announcement, Chalmers notes, “I’m still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.” You can also watch a video of Chalmers’ Summit talk.
05/02/2010 - Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence
Here’s a paper presented at the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy by participants in SIAI’s 2009 Visiting Fellows Program that is making the rounds. The point of the paper, which was written by Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson, is that consequentialism as commonly discussed has a number of “free variables” where intuitions disagree about the right values of these variables. Therefore, machine ethics should draw on the emerging field of moral psychology to figure out how to fill in these free variables. This point is plainly put in the title of one of the last sections, “Current moral theories are inadequate for machine ethics”.
A reply from UK philosopher David Pearce has recently been posted by Roko Mijic at Less Wrong.
06/01/2010 - SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov on KUSP Radio in Santa Cruz
On Sunday, January 3rd, I did an interview on KUSP in Santa Cruz, California, a National Public Radio affiliate. I talked to Rick Kleffel for an hour about the Singularity, the Singularity Institute, what we do, anthropomorphism, Friendly AI, and the like. It was for his “Talk of the Bay” radio program. Here is the audio archive.
audio/x-mpegurl
10/11/2009 - Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values
Check out my blog post, “Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values” at Accelerating Future.
11/09/2009 - Ed Boyden on the Singularity in Technology Review
Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, is concerned about the Singularity, and will be speaking at our upcoming Singularity Summit conference in New York. He recently published the article “The Singularity and the Fixed Point” on the website of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine, which looks into the challenge of giving Artificial Intelligence proper motivations. Making theoretical progress on the question of, “how do we give Artificial Intelligence proper motivations, such that we can trust those motivations even if the AI becomes smarter and more powerful than humans?” is a primary reason for SIAI’s existence.
29/05/2009 - Reach: Robot video
28/05/2009 - Videos from Global Catastrophic Risks Conference Available
Video is now available from the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference held at Oxford University, July 2008. Lecturers include SIAI Scientific Advisor Prof. Nick Bostrom and SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky.
26/05/2009 - Lectures by Steve Omohundro
A compilation of talks by SIAI Advisor Dr. Steve Omohundro, some not previously mentioned on this blog, is at Future Current.
In particular, note Omohundro’s talk on “AI and the Future of Human Morality” at the Silicon Valley World Transhumanist Association Meetup, May 2008. Video and a transcript are available online.
26/05/2009 - SIAI Team Members on The Future and You
Several SIAI Team members have been interviewed over the last year for Stephen Euin Cobb’s podcast, The Future and You:
- Scientific Advisor Professor Nick Bostrom , September 2008.
- SIAI Media Director Michael Anissimov, March 2008.
- As well as Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel, August 2008, mentioned earlier on this blog.
22/05/2009 - AGI-08 Video Available
Video from the AGI-09 conference, chaired by SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel and with the participation of SIAI Scientific Advisor Dr. Moshe Looks, is now available online.
14/04/2009 - Yudkowsky?s Talks
Jeriaska has compiled links to talks by SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, including some not yet mentioned on this blog, at Accelerating Future.
In addition, Tim Tyler has collected lectures and discussions by Yudkowsky. See the collection of links at Facebook.
06/04/2009 - Goertzel interviewed at the Immortality Institute
SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel was interviewed by Immortality Institute Executive Director Justin Loew at the ImmInst Sunday Evening Updates, Dec. 2008. Video is available online. Topics include Goertzel’s AGI roadmap, the Global Brain, and AGI risks.
30/03/2009 - Goertzel, Omohundro, Pell, and Lamis at Convergence08
SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel participated in a panel discussion on “AI Convergence with SIAI Scientific Advisors Dr. Barney Pell and Dr. Steve Omohundro, SIAI Director of Partnerships Jonas Lamis, and Google Director of Research Dr. Peter Norvig at Convergence ‘08.
21/03/2009 - Pitt Interviewed on OpenCog
Dr. Joel Pitt, working on OpenCog with support from SIAI, was interviewed by Russell Brown of the New Zealand TV show “Media7.”
15/03/2009 - Yudkowsky?s ?Heuristics, Biases & Rationality? Available Online
SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke on “Heuristics, Biases & Rationality” at the Global Catastrophic Risks Seminar in Mountain View on November 14, 2008. Audio, video, and a transcript are now available online.
26/02/2009 - Singularity Summit 2008: More Multimedia Available
The Singularity Summit 2008 media collection has been improved: MP3 audio added, bugs fixed in the video, and content descriptions attached to each talk; along with a podcast feed.
11/02/2009 - Singularity Summit 2008 Videos Now Available
After a delay, the Singularity Summit 2008 videos are again available online, both the first batch announced earlier and more.
Access them on the SIAI site.
05/01/2009 - Singularity Summit videos available
The first batch of Singularity Summit 2008 videos is now available online, with more to come.
16/12/2008 - De Grey speaks with Yudkowsky
SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky interviewed Dr Aubrey de Grey, SIAI Advisor and chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation, about the effort to end aging.
07/12/2008 - Call for Papers: Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies
A Call of Papers has been issued for a track on “Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies,” at the 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy?ECAP 2009, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2-4 July 2009.
Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, and technology–in particular in computing technology–suggests an accelerating rate of progress. This observation has led the attempted unification of the predictive power of biological evolution, cultural evolution, and technological evolution under a “Law of Accelerating Returns.” As a consequence, John von Neumann forecasted the arrival of an ?essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.? This notion of Singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines that exhibit intelligence on par with an average human by 2050. John Irving Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect it to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’: the process by which ultraintelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel process of explosive progress in human intelligence. Unfortunately, the very term ?Singularity? also suggests the presence of an ?event horizon,? an epistemological barrier on our ability to understand the events that may follow it.
We invite abstracts examining the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, and scientific points of view:
1. Empirical assessments of the Law of Accelerating Returns
2. Estimating the reliability of a technological forecasts
3. Historical analysis of the Law of Accelerating Returns
4. The impact of acceleration on science and society by 2050
5. Hazards of technological acceleration and preventative measures
6. The nature of the Technological Singularity
7. The nature of an intelligence explosion
8. Beyond the ?event horizon? of the Technological Singularity
Important dates:
Submission deadline: 23 Feb. 2009
Notification: 16 Mar. 2009
ECAP Conference: 2-4 Jul. 2009
Submission guidelines: http://ia-cap.org/e-cap09/
Papers submitted to the Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Elsevier).
Received from the track chair, Amnon H. Eden, School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY.
03/12/2008 - Emerson Interviewed at Fast Forward Radio
SIAI Executive Director Tyler Emerson was interviewed by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon of The Speculist on FastForward Radio.
Topics included the definition of the Singularity; and how the Singularity impacts what we can and should expect of the future.
15/11/2008 - Convergence08 Unconference on FastForward Radio
The Convergence08 Unconference will be happening this weekend.
If you can’t attend, follow the details live this Saturday and Sunday at FastForward Radio, presented by The Speculist.
03/11/2008 - Yudkowsky Speaks with Jaron Lanier
SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke with Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence at the University of California Berkeley, in “Science Saturday: Dreaming of an Artificial Intelligence”, at Bloggingheads.tv.
19/09/2008 - Free robotics courses from Stanford Engineering
The robotics course is taught by Oussama Khatib who is well known for his contributions in the field; he has published some 200 papers during 25 years of research and he is still going strong. The focus of Khatib's work these days is in human-centered robotics and haptic human-robot interaction.
The machine learning course is taught by Andrew Ng whose robots we have mentioned numerous times in this blog. If you don't remember, most recently we wrote about the latest iteration of Ng's autonomous RC helicopter that learns the autorotation maneuver using reinforcement learning. If you want to learn how they did it then you should follow his course on SEE. I have embedded below Ng's first lecture which gives a nice overview of machine learning (the first few minutes are boring but the lecture becomes very interesting after that.)
12/11/2007 - Omni-hand NASA prototype for sale on eBay
This impressive early prototype demands an important place within robotics history as the first motorized dexterous robotic hand. It represents one of the early steps towards making robots more anthropomorphic. The Omni-Hand was designed and built in the early 1990s by robot pioneer Mark Rosheim with funding from NASA contracts NAS8-37638 and NAS8-38417 for NASA. Two prototypes were made. The first was a "test bed" whose features were then incorporated into this complete unit. Both had the same power and control system.
Also, check out the following video showing the Omni-Hand grasping an egg and light bulb,
Additional information: Omni-Hand I eBay auction.
[Thanks Gary]
