By Jack Uldrich
Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve.net
A couple of newsworthy piece have gotten me to thinking about
the Beatles’ hit song, “It’s getting better all the time.”
The two articles that triggered the connection to the
songs’ lyrics are both related to rapidly emerging field of
artificial intelligence and I think the saying “getting better all
the time” is a phrase we all need to keep in mind as we move into
the future.
The first article discusses how intelligent computers can
now “see” human traits with an impressive success rate of 82%.
In other words, a computer can, with a good degree of confidence,
now tell if you are happy, sad, angry or confused. (By way of
comparison, I can only wish I was half as accurate in assessing my
wife’s many moods.)
At a minimum this suggests that artifical intelligence will
become an even more integral component in a host of daily
activities, including customer service, computer games and
educational software, than it already is. Imagine, for instance, if
an educational computer system could tell if a child was confused
about a certain concept in biology and then reexplain it to him or
her in a way that the child could understand. This compelling
future is on the way because such computers are, in fact, “getting
better all the time.” (cont.)
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By Dick Pelletier
Bodies that never get sick, clothes that change their material
and color, and machines that fix their own glitches. These are some
of the dreams researchers see as they attempt to copy how nature
gathers non-living matter and transforms it into living things.
Life is generally not thought of as being mechanical, but a cell
basically is a miniature machine which rearranges non-living atoms
to create parts that “bring it to life.”
What makes life possible, scientists say, is the natural
tendency of atoms to assemble into molecules, and molecules to
assemble into larger structures. Scientists want to understand this
process and use it to create self-replicating nano-materials that
can be instructed to “grow” into a variety of products.
If we could make life, researchers say, we could apply its
principles towards building almost any product. Life is very
complicated, but it repairs itself, organizes itself, and adapts to
changes – all automatically. It’s the ideal blueprint for
assembling things atom by atom with no material waste and minimal
labor costs.
Commercial benefits could include nano-size cell-repair machines
that create new arteries, deliver drugs to specific sites, and heal
the body from the inside; clothing that changes its molecular
structure and color on command; bio-systems that clean up the
environment; and powerful nano-chips that improve electronic and
communication devices.
Leaders in artificial life research are the European Union’s
Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution project, and the
NASA-supported Protocell project at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. (cont.)
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At today’s big Singularity Summit researcher Ben Goertzel explained to the audience that achieving a working Artificial Intelligence will need to be accomplished through open source software. This of course is a hotly debated topic in the sense that the government may step in to stop development of such a thing. The idea that anyone in the world could then develop an AI freaks out military and political groups (not to mention a lot of the citizenry).
So how does an AI learn?
Ben says games will be used to teach computers to learn functions. You might have a virtual parrot which you’d teach to speak (the parrot being the virtual depiction of the AI itself), or by putting it through virtual world immersion in an interactive digital environment like Second Life, learn a basic skewed version of human reality.
French scientists unveiled the world’s first fully functional artificial heart at the cost of about $192,000 a unit. The heart, which gets some of its design from modern aerospace research, consists of two pumps which help regulate flow.
The reason this is called the first fully functional artificial heart is that, unlike other hearts currently made, it comes equipped with sensors which can increase or decrease blood flow depending on the persons level of activity. “The same tiny sensors that measure air pressure and altitude in an airplane or satellite are also in the artificial heart. This should allow the device to respond immediately if the patient needs more or less blood.”(CNN) Current models require an outside regulator to adjust blood flow to the body (and only consist of one pump).
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