Wired for War - Video
>> Saturday, January 29, 2011
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Will the Singularity be the End of Us?
>> Saturday, January 22, 2011
NPR - 1.11.11 by Martin Kaste (All Things Considered)
It's been called "the rapture of the nerds." For some computer experts, the Singularity is the moment when an artificial intelligence learns how to improve itself in an exponential "intelligence explosion." They say it's a bigger threat to puny humans than global warming or nuclear war — and they're trying to figure out how to stop it.
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Handing the Keys to the Bots - Here, You Drive
>> Sunday, January 16, 2011
There are many good reasons to use unmanned vehicles to fight our wars for us. Fewer humans get killed (our humans, not theirs). Unmanned vehicles can do things manned ones can't with squishy humans aboard. And so on. And while we're at it, let's give them the ability to make tactical decisions without having to wake us up at all hours. But is there a possible downside?
PopSci - 1.13.11 by Ben Austen
Last August, U.S. Navy operators on the ground lost all contact with a Fire Scout helicopter flying over Maryland. They had programmed the unmanned aerial vehicle to return to its launch point if ground communications failed, but instead the machine took off on a north-by-northwest route toward the nation’s capital. Over the next 30 minutes, military officials alerted the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Aerospace Defense Command and readied F-16 fighters to intercept the pilotless craft. Finally, with the Fire Scout just miles shy of the White House, the Navy regained control and commanded it to come home. “Renegade Unmanned Drone Wandered Skies Near Nation’s Capital,” warned one news headline in the following days. “UAV Resists Its Human Oppressors, Joyrides over Washington, D.C.,” declared another.
The Fire Scout was unarmed, and in any case hardly a machine with the degree of intelligence or autonomy necessary to wise up and rise up, as science fiction tells us the robots inevitably will do. But the world’s biggest military is rapidly remaking itself into a fighting force consisting largely of machines, and it is working hard to make those machines much smarter and much more independent. In March, noting that “unprecedented, perhaps unimagined, degrees of autonomy can be introduced into current and future military systems,” Ashton Carter, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, called for the formation of a task force on autonomy to ensure that the service branches take “maximum practical advantage of advances in this area.”
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What Reasonable People Should Think about the Singularity
>> Saturday, January 15, 2011
Michael Nielsen - 1.12.11
In 1993, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge wrote a short essay proposing what he called the Technological Singularity. Here’s the sequence of events Vinge outlines:
A: We will build computers of at least human intelligence at some time in the future, let’s say within 100 years.
B: Those computers will be able to rapidly and repeatedly increase their own intelligence, quickly resulting in computers that are far more intelligent than human beings.
C: This will cause an enormous transformation of the world, so much so that it will become utterly unrecognizable, a phase Vinge terms the “post-human era”. This event is the Singularity.
The basic idea is quite well known. Perhaps because the conclusion is so remarkable, almost outrageous, it’s an idea that evokes a strong emotional response in many people. I’ve had intelligent people tell me with utter certainty that the Singularity is complete tosh. I’ve had other intelligent people tell me with similar certainty that it should be one of the central concerns of humanity.
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Making it Easier for Machines to Track and Kill You
>> Saturday, January 08, 2011
What's called "visual intelligence" in your brain is really extraordinary. Machines can't come close to your ability to see and imagine ways to manipulate your environment. DARPA wants to change that.
DARPA Kicks off Mind's Eye Program
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