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| Science |
| Machines 'to match man by 2029' |
| 2008-02-18 |
| Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil. The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health. "It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us." Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said. For example, my vacuum cleaner is much smarter than your average jihadi, and they both suck. "I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said. Will machines have PTSD, ADHD, or schitzophrenia? How will it be treated? Reset to the last known-good restore point? "We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that." Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil. "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system". Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter. The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #12 I will grant that AI produces useful artifacts that easily meet or exceed human levels of task performance, lotp. The key phrase I was objecting to was human levels of Intelligence. Do not confuse performance with intelligence, even though intelligence is most often manifested and measured in terms and by means of performance. The difference between performance and intelligence is illustrated by the controversy raised by Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment that challenged Turing's attempt to substitute performance for intelligence. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2008-02-18 21:20 |
| #11 We are twenty years away from true Artificial Intelligence, and we've been twenty years away for the past thirty years. (Talk to the Japanese about the "Fifth Generation" project and the billions they poured down that rat hole). |
| Posted by: DMFD 2008-02-18 20:57 |
| #10 learning |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2008-02-18 17:38 |
| #9 lotp, I have a kick-arse idea for a self leaning neural net. I would like to chat to you about it. How could I do that? |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2008-02-18 17:38 |
| #8 Would you trust your ass-chip to windows? might just become a literal question... |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2008-02-18 15:09 |
| #7 No doubt we'll all have the equivalent of USB ports, Jim. ;-) |
| Posted by: lotp 2008-02-18 14:35 |
| #6 With the rapid advance, and following rapid obsolescence of Computers, software, and peripherals, I wouldn't want ANY computer inside My skull. Think of it, you're locked into the eight track version when everyone else has Blu-Ray discs? And the only alternative is brain surgery? No thanks |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-02-18 14:17 |
| #5 Lots going on under the rubric 'AI'. The sleeper disciplines are: From the bottom up, what is now called computational intelligence - often fuzzy inferencing combined with self-organizing neural nets and genetic/evolutionary algorithms. And from the top down, a lot of work in hybrid approaches to semantic understanding of natural language, e.g. books, articles etc. Lots of advancement here, but nothing dramatic for now. Where they will be visible to most people is when they combine with capabilities like facial expression/emotion interpretation in e.g. robots. The computational intelligence people in particular are doing a lot of interesting work in embedded intelligence, i.e. where machine learning approaches are driven by and looped referentially into sensor interaction with external entities / agents. That's where the fuzzy sets and fuzzy probabilistic reasoning are particularly powerful and, as Kurzweil says, 'supple'. Not my current area of research - I'm doing robot object recognition using straight Bayesian reasoning and language interpretation using unifcation grammars and other non-statisitical techniques. But I've got my eye on the fuzzy technique people .... FWIW ;-) |
| Posted by: lotp 2008-02-18 13:36 |
| #4 Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said. Bullshit. Name them. Maybe ten or twenty, if that many, but not "hundreds" "at human levels of intelligence or better." Worked in AI for a while. Saw how the sausage was made. Saw how much sausage WAS made. Got into it worried about computers replacing programmers to program computers. got out convinced my grandkids will be able to get work as programmers. Bullshit, I say. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2008-02-18 12:22 |
| #3 Playstations are a virus, they use addict people and capture them using their resources to ensure more playstations are produced. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2008-02-18 10:19 |
| #2 Does this mean my computer will eventually pass moral judgement on me when I will be surfing for Pr0n? Looking down at me and shaking its digital head? That's a very disturbing thought, I think I must make good use of the little time I have left! |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2008-02-18 10:17 |
| #1 Machines 'to match man by 2029' Right now my computer and Playstation don't require food or sex. I see no need to create additional competition for fundamental resources. :) |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-02-18 08:49 |