Computers Win Another One - All your games are belong to us

We've all heard about the computer's victory over humans in the game of chess. Eleven years ago, the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov lost handily to IBM's Big Blue. But the game of poker has remained in the humans' column, until now. As the author explains in this article, poker is quite a bit more complicated than chess, and the human brain has been better at it than any computer. No more.

A computer system called Polaris outperformed some of the world's top players last weekend at a human-vs.-machine competition in Las Vegas.

The score was computer 3, humans 2, with one draw.

Bowling's team launched Polaris five years ago as a project in artificial intelligence. At first it did well against amateur players but couldn't beat professionals. Last year, it narrowly lost a match against two poker pros in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This year, a stronger version of Polaris — one that learns how to adapt to an opponent's strategy in midgame — triumphed over seven top-ranked humans drawn from the online poker-training site www.stoxpoker.com.

Read the original article.

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REEM-B - The latest in humanoid robots

For those of us who think it's very likely that technology's accelerating pace of advance is soon going to become too rapid to follow, developments like this one already seem quaint. You know what it's like to look nostalgically at photos of computers from the '50s, or old ads for magical household appliances. In a few years that's exactly how it will be to go back to articles about robots like REEM-B.

A new humanoid robot called Reem-B was unveiled on Wednesday at an event on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.

The Reem-B robot from Pal Technology Robotics is capable of face recognition, speech interaction, biped walking, traversing stairs, and sitting (see video below). It can also recognize and pick up objects, as well as evaluate and map out a room to better navigate it.

Reem-B stands at 4'10" (1.47 meters) tall and weighs about 132 pounds (60Kg). It can carry up to 26 pounds (12Kg) in its arms and walk at a speed of 1 mph (1.5Km/h). It can also climb stairs. Using a main CPU that consists of a Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz) and a Geode (500MHz), the robot can operate for about 120 minutes before its battery needs to be recharged.

Full article.

Video.

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Memory Miniaturization - 256G Flash!

How easily we slip into taking profundities for granted. Looking into the purchase of a 4G micro secure digital (SD) drive for my smart phone. Ho hum, right?

Hold up, though. Let me think for a nano-second about this. My first computer entered my life not that long ago (1993). If I try really hard, I might be able to recall its specs. The hard drive was, I believe, 20Mb in size. Only 15 years later, I can buy a drive with 200-times the capacity and is only as big as my thumbnail.

Now here's some interesting news: "CNET site ZDNet Korea reports that Samsung announced the development of a 2.5-inch, 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at the fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan."

Can you not read the writing on the solid-state wall? Technological advance is accelerating!

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Robotic Spiders and Snakes Enter the Battlefield

Talk about a frightening taste of the future. People tend to have a fear of robots (which is perhaps why designers try so hard to make them look non-threatening), and they have a definite fear of spiders and snakes. So what happens when you mesh the two concepts? The military is about to find out.

"BAE Systems is developing electronic spiders, insects, and snakes to help soldiers gather information without exposing them to dangerous situations on the battlefield, according an announcement the defense giant released this week. The effort is being funded by a $38 million agreement with the U.S. Army.

The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance aims to create miniature robots that will act as the eyes and ears of soldiers in dangerous situations, such caves and mountainous areas, potentially saving many lives."

View the promo video here.

Read the original article here.


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Quantum Computing - A Prototype is Demonstrated

As a means (there are more than one being developed) of forcing the death of Moore's law into the very distant future, you cannot hope to beat quantum computing. Whereas conventional computing can, at best, make use of individual atoms to store bits of information (sort of like one man one vote), quantum computing makes use of the weirder features of quantum mechanics that hold sway at very small dimensions to allow unheard of processing power.

In traditional computing, binary code forms the most basic language, with an alphabet of only two letters: one and zero. Each unit of information, or bit, can register either of those two values. In quantum computing, however, the basic unit is called a "qubit," and can register simultaneous values of one and zero, making use of the phenomenon known as "superposition."

In the words of Seth Lloyd, writing for Technology Review:

Since one qubit can simultaneously represent two different values, two qubits can simultaneously represent four (00, 01, 10, and 11, in binary notation); four qubits can represent 16 values; eight qubits 256 values; and so on. Even a relatively small quantum computer, one that had a few tens of thousands of qubits, could consider so many different values at once that it would be able to break all known codes commonly used for secure Internet communication. Quantum computers might also be used for faster database searches, or to tackle hard problems that classical computers couldn't solve with all the time in the universe.

Now comes news that a Canadian company called D-Wave has built and tested a prototype of an "adiabatic quantum computer." The catch? The developers must prove that the computer is actually using adiabatic quantum computing. Turns out this is not an easy task. So stay tuned.

Click here for the original article.

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Time Travel Can Be Educational and Fun!

I used to think the following: Either time travel is never going to be possible, or the world will end before it becomes possible. How did I come to such a depressing conclusion? Simple. We haven't been visited by people from the future. Ergo, what I said before. If time travel ever becomes possible, we'd have been visited.

But now I see the flaw in my logic. There's another possibility: Perhaps time travelers from the future are just really sneaky. If so, and they've been here in our time, how would we know? So maybe they're all around us and are just not letting us in on the secret, not out of meanness, but because they don't want to destroy their own present by introducing the dreaded time travel paradox.

That's the problem caused when you go back in time to kill your grandfather, only to discover this means you were never born. Oh well. Maybe the instruction manual on the time machine makes this clear: Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, interact with the old-timers, or you'll screw up everything here!

Well, it turns out that math has come to the rescue, as it usually does:

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea.

The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveler could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But the existence of parallel worlds offers a way around these troublesome paradoxes, according to David Deutsch of Oxford University, a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, the deeply mathematical, successful and baffling theory of the atomic world.

He argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on parallel universes, the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory.

The new work bolsters his claim that quantum theory does not forbid time travel. "It does sidestep it. You go into another universe," he said yesterday, though he admits that there is still a way to go to find schemes to manipulate space and time in a way that makes time hops possible.

If you do kill dear old granddad, no worries, mate. You won't disappear like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. You'll just cause a fork in the road, as it were, whereby the new branch of the universe where you aren't born (because you killed your grandfather, you idiot) goes off on its merry way, while the old one where you were born, unfortunately goes on.

So time travel could well be possible. And it may be coming sooner than you think:

The first time travelers from the future could materialize on Earth within a few weeks.

Physicists around the world are excitedly awaiting the start up of the £4.65 billion Large Hadron Collider, LHC - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - which is supposed to shed new light on the particles and forces at work in the cosmos and reproduce conditions that date to near the Big Bang of creation.

Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe that the vast experiment at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, may turn out to be the world's first time machine, reports New Scientist.

The debut in early summer could provide a landmark because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the point of creation of the first time machine.

That means 2008 could become "Year Zero" for temporal travel, they argue.

Time travel was born when Albert Einstein's colleague, Kurt Gödel, used Einstein's theory of relativity to show that travel into the past was possible.

Ever since he unveiled this idea in 1949, eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveler could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

But, sixty years later, there is still no fundamental reason why time travellers cannot put historians out of business.

But the Russians argue that when the energies of the LHC are concentrated into a subatomic particle - a trillionth the size of a mosquito - they can do strange things to the fabric of the universe, which is a blend of space and time that scientists called spacetime.

While Earth's gravity produces gentle distortions in spacetime the LHC energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself. These loops are known to physicists as "closed timelike curves" and they ought, at least in theory, to allow us to revisit some past moment.

So keep your eyes peeled and your ears to the ground.

Original articles one and two.

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Rainbows End Contacts Coming Soon!

A future predicted in the novel Rainbows End is a bit closer to becoming the present. A very cool technology described by Vernor Vinge in his amazing novel centers around contact lenses that do a whole lot more than improve vision and change your eye color.

Vinge's contacts are actually connected wirelessly to an omnipresent Internet on steroids. They overlay what you see with everything from private text messages to an alternate reality. With these contacts you can share an augmented reality with others so that you all see the same things. For example, you could be sitting together at a table at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, enjoying good conversation and a view of the Parisian landscape, when each of you is in a different city.

Another use of these contacts would be informational overlays that could tell you what the restaurant you happen to be walking by is serving for lunch. A city utility worker could see which cables run under the sidewalk he stands on. The possibilities are virtually endless.

So here comes this article:

Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.

For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.

Remember this little article when you see what follows.

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Don't Play God? Someone Has To.

One very energetic group of opponents to technological advance and bioengineering happens to be composed of people who believe that the human race lives under the concern and protection of a benevolent deity. In their view, tinkering with something that this god made and called "good," is not only an affront to this god but also a path to destruction. The problem with this point of view is that science has proven it wrong. Throughout the history of life on this planet, species have come and gone. Nature does not care about perpetuating our species.

Take a look at an excellent article by Sam Harris, featured on RichardDawkins.Net entitled "Mother Nature is Not Our Friend." A brief excerpt:

The fossil record suggests that individual species survive, on average, between one and ten million years. The concept of a "species" is misleading, however, and it tempts us to think that we, as homo sapiens, have arrived at some well-defined position in the natural order. The term "species" merely designates a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; it cannot be aptly applied to the boundaries between species (to what are often called "intermediate" or "transitional" forms). There was, for instance, no first member of the human species, and there are no canonical members now. Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens — ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

Will this be a good thing? The question presupposes that we have a viable alternative. But what is the alternative to our taking charge of our biological destiny? Might we be better off just leaving things to the wisdom of Nature? I once believed this. But we know that Nature has no concern for individuals or for species. Those that survive do so despite Her indifference. While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven't adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene.

Sam Harris makes a profound point. The continuation of what we call human is not a given. If we do not play god on our own behalf, who will?

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Why You Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love AI

Anyone who has an interest in technology news should be able to see that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is inevitable. The forces that are driving technology toward that conclusion are enormously powerful; I am referring now to military and commercial interests. Just as the fundamental equations behind biological evolution through natural selection have resulted in human consciousness and intelligence, so the insatiable appetites of industry and combat for a better mousetrap must lead us down the garden path to conscious machines.

One has only to skim the science and technology news on a regular basis to conclude that, barring the near term ending of the world as we know it, a machine that harbors within its circuitry a mind, cannot be very far down the road. Take these excerpts for example:

Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson have now begun work on a set of computer algorithms that may be able to make sense of mountains of intelligence data that would overwhelm human analysts. Known as the Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, or ATRAP, the effort is aimed at dispassionately sifting through everything from fingerprints to cultural influences to establish useful links and connections. Full article.

By studying the famous honeybee waggle dance that communicates the location of top-notch nectar, researchers have designed a more efficient server system that also benefits Web surfers by cutting down on frustrating delays in accessing newly popular sites. Initial tests by collaborators at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford showed that the bee-like way of homing in on sweet spots improved a Web-hosting company’s revenue by up to 20 percent. Full article.

There is nothing in these articles that will cause anyone to enjoy a spike in their endorphin levels, but they simply demonstrate the relentless drive of the military and commercial forces of our society to make machines smarter and to get them to do more of our rudimentary thinking for us. No use crying about it, about how terrible this might be, because it will continue, and it will lead inexorably to conscious machines. So my advice is, stop worrying about whether or not we will soon be faced with AGI, and instead focus your energy on making sure when they arrive, they will like us.

There are researchers and organizations that understand the inevitability of AGI and that are working hard to figure out how to make it friendly. Either that or how to make humans and AGIs one and the same thing. Unfortunately, these guys are working with very limited resources, because most people have no clue about what is going on or where we are headed. If you would like to climb out from among the head-in-the-sand crowd, check out the following links:

KurzweilAI.net

Accelerating Future

Singularity Institute

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Computer Simulation of Human Brain Only a Decade Away

We have all heard an aphorism that enjoys an unearned degree of credibility based on no evidence whatsoever, to whit: The human brain can never be intelligent enough to understand itself. Poppycock. Scoffers will continue to believe in it, however, until a fully-developed computer simulation of the human brain smacks them on the noggin, jarring their not-smart-enough brains into the 21st century.

An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.

The rapidity with which developments are advancing continues to astound even me, one of the most optimistic singularitarian transhumanists around.



Technology Review Article

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Busting Through Moore's Law - Nanophotonics is Here!

This is a sharp stick in the eye for all the technological sticks-in-the-mud who prophesy an end to Moore's law.

FRANKFURT - IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

Picture it...today's supercomputer will be tomorrow's single chip. A computer that now requires enough power to run hundreds of homes will soon draw only enough to light up a single bulb.

Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores by using a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM says.

The new modulator IBM has developed is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated comparable modulators, IBM said on Thursday, paving the way for significant reductions in cost, energy and heat while increasing bandwidth.

Things just keep getting more and more exciting, yes?

Original article.

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It is Time for a Real PDA

Picture this: Your meeting with the team is over, you say your goodbyes and walk down the hall to your office. Sitting in a tray near your desk are the pages of a transcript of the meeting, which ended only a few minutes ago. You call up the project that was the subject of the meeting on your screen, and you see that every assignment is already listed, every appointment is already scheduled. You thank your PDA, and she replies, "Any time, Barry."

This scenario, which has been portrayed in many a science fiction novel, may become the real deal not too many years from now. An artificial general intelligence who lives in your corporate network, organizes your work life without being asked, and converses with you in natural human language. If truth be told, you've often fantasized about asking her out for a drink.

Enter CALO, "a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users."

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."

Adam Cheyer, program director of the artificial-intelligence center at SRI, explains that CALO tries to assist users in three ways: by helping them manage information about key people and projects, by understanding and organizing information from meetings, and by learning and automating routine tasks. For example, CALO can learn about the people and projects that are important to a user's work life by paying attention to e-mail patterns. It can then categorize and prioritize information for the user, based on the source of the information and the projects to which it is connected. The system can also apply this type of understanding to meetings, using its speech-recognition system to make a transcription of what's said there, and its understanding of the user's projects and contacts to process the transcription intelligently into to-do lists and appointments. Finally, a user can teach CALO routine tasks such as purchasing books online and searching for bed-and-breakfasts that meet specific criteria. CALO can interact with other people, taking on tasks such as scheduling meetings, coordinating among people's schedules, and making decisions, such as deciding to reschedule a meeting if a key member becomes unable to attend.

Look for the progeny of CALO to appear first in large corporations, filter down to medium-sized businesses, and eventually arrive in your own home network. I can't wait.

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Your Brain is a Machine - Get Used to It

There are many whose penchant it is to romanticize the human condition. It somehow makes them feel better about their lives to do so. One of the outgrowths of this habit of spiritualizing material things is the expressed certainty that machines can never become conscious. After all, they think, if machines can ever be made to experience consciousness, then it is very likely that we are no more than machines: There is no soul, no heaven, no spirit, no existence after death. For many people, this possibility is not to be countenanced.

However, more and more researchers are concluding that even our experience of conscious will is an illusion arising from our neurological programming. In a new book authored by Harvard professor Daniel Wegner titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, professor Wegner argues that:

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

I have written previously about the startling finding that our actions in fact come before our conscious intentions, that our minds are inventing reasons for actions over which we have no conscious control. If, as writes Dr. Wegner, our brains are trying to convince us that we are choosing actions that are merely the result of our neurological machinery, then it is only a matter of time before machines become conscious. According to some, that time may even have already arrived.

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Your Kids Could Soon Have a Virtual Teacher

My wife teaches 8th-grade algebra. She is very good at her job. She should be paid more than she is, but that is a complaint that often falls on deaf politician's ears. In any case, the time may soon come when at least certain parts of her curriculum are taught by a virtual teacher called Eve.

Eve is what's know in in the field of information systems an intelligent or affective tutoring system. It can "adapt its response to the emotional state" of its students (Blogging the Singularity).

The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, tell the story of creating Eve and the teaching system in the latest issue of the leading international journal on information sciences, Elsevier.

Because one-to-one teaching is known to be the most effective teaching method, Dr Sarrafzadeh says the researchers wanted to create a virtual teacher that could pick up body language and facial expressions – like a real teacher – to interact and to ensure they are holding the attention of students.

He says the realisation that software systems would significantly improve performance if they could adapt to the emotions of the user has spawned research and development in the field of affective or intelligent tutoring systems.

“With rising demand for long-distance learning and online tutoring, a computer programe capable of detecting human emotions may become a critical teaching tool.”

Although Eve was developed for one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds, she is a significant new character in the future of human computer interaction and could be a personalized virtual tutor by any name.

Linked to a child via computer, the animated character or virtual tutor can tell if the child is frustrated, angry or confused by the on-screen teaching session and can adapt the tutoring session appropriately.

If you plan to go into teaching, it's unlikely that Eve will completely replace all teaching kind, but there can be no doubt that there will be significant and far-reaching implications. Maybe you should think about teaching computer engineering.

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Self-Enhancement Unethical?

Safety concerns over people taking drugs to improve themselves is fine, but this article seems to go beyond the issue of safely. It seems to imply that well people should not be trying to enhance themselves.

The ability of prescription drugs and medical procedures to improve intellectual performance is likely to increase significantly in the next 20 to 30 years as technology advances.

"We know that there is likely to be a demand by healthy individuals for this treatment," Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA's Medical Ethics Committee said at the launch of a discussion paper on the issue.

"However, given that no drug or invasive medical procedure is risk free, is it ethical to make them available to people who are not ill?"

Why wouldn't it be ethical to make drugs or procedures available to people who are not ill? What is wrong with letting well people make themselves better? Perhaps it's competition they fear. Can't have the average idiots making themselves as smart as the cognoscenti, can we?

I am all for safety, but some folks seem to have a socialist view of medicine and do not want to see a day when people can make themselves more competitive by enhancing their "god-given" abilities. That wouldn't be "fair." But self-enhancing products do not remain out of reach for the average citizen for very long. Technology is always too expensive for most people in its early stages, but eventually everyone can have it. Computers and cell phones are just two examples of this phenomenon. So I say let the rich be the testers. Perfect the stuff with them and then, when all the bugs have been worked out, let me at it.

Brain-boosting drugs spark ethical debate in UK

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Vinge's Future: A Deepness in the Sky

I've been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the Vernor Vinge classic, A Deepness in the Sky, in which he paints a fairly discouraging picture of our common future.

If you'll recall, Vernor Vinge is credited with coining the term technological singularity, a phrase that refers to a near-term predicted future where technological development brings change so rapid that seeing beyond its event horizon is not possible.

In Deepness, as in A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor's future is marked by inevitable cyclical rises and declines of civilizations. No civilization enjoys technology for more than a few thousand years. Every one is inexorably destroyed, whether by war, biological pathogens, or by the crushing complexity of its own automation (Vinge's word for computer programming).

One aspect of the future envisioned in these novels, however, involves what Vinge calls the Failed Dreams of the dawn age of human civilization. He speaks, through his characters, of the naive optimism of humanity's earliest years of technology, when researchers believed that they could create things like general artificial intelligence, negligible senescence, and nano-assemblers.

Of course, those of us who cheer on the singularity believe these things are not only possible, but virtually inevitable. As far and what Vernor Vinge believes, he seems to leave his options open.

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The Call for Human Augmentation is Beginning

There have been innumerable occasions during my lifetime when I have wondered what it must have been like to be part of the beginning of something big. The 60s, for example. The sexual revolution. The birth of personal computing. I was not there at the beginning of many important, transformative periods. But this time, I am there. Or here.

I have written before about the absence of a hue and cry for technologies to augment the human animal. The last time I posted on this topic, a reader commented that cosmetic surgery was a kind of augmentation, but even there the goal is to bring people up to the standards of the super-beautiful, not really to go beyond what it means to be human. And I'm not talking about machines that exist outside of and separate from the body; we already have lots of those. I'm talking about enhancements to our senses that take us far beyond normal human ability, and to our powers of cognition, our durability, our ability to live underwater, etc. Almost no one in the mainstream of business or science is calling for that kind of augmentation. It is heartening, therefore, when someone with influence issues just such a call.

Ed Boyden, Assistant Professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Department of Biological Engineering, has written an excellent article called In Pursuit of Human Augmentation
The journey toward making "normal" obsolete. His central point:

It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities--that make the idea of normal obsolete. As a codirector of the Center for Human Augmentation, I lead a lab, the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, that is developing devices that will hopefully eventually allow us to enhance memory, creativity, and happiness in humans.

Will his determination to be at the forefront of such a discipline catch on? I certainly hope so. Stay tuned.

Source article.

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Visializing Atomic Interactions: Breakthroughs for Nanotech

A team of researchers from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, FEI Company (Nasdaq: FEIC) and CEOS GmbH, in Heidelberg, Germany, has succeeded in imaging below 0.5 angstroms using a new instrument.

To get a better idea how small 0.5 angstroms is, bear in mind that it is one-billions of 5 centimeters, the DNA helix is 20 angstroms in diameter, a carbon atom is about 2 angstroms, and the width of an average strand of hair ranges between 500,000 to 1,000,000 angstroms.

Electron microscopes can be used to observe fine details of the inner structure of materials. The ability to characterize the atomic-scale structure, chemistry, and dynamics of individual nanostructures makes this type of microscope a very powerful tool for scientists in all disciplines. With the extraordinary 'vision' of the special TEAM microscope it will become possible to study how atoms combine to form materials, how materials grow and how they respond to a variety of external factors. These constitute many of the most practical things that science needs to know about materials and will improve designs for everything from better, lighter, more efficient automobiles, to stronger buildings and new ways of harvesting energy.

It is not difficult to envision how this kind of development will enhance our ability to build structures with atomic precision, which is a significant aspect of the coming nanotech revolution. To see what is actually happening at this scale will enhance researchers' abilitiy to develop the means and methods of nanoscale design and manufacture.

Stay tuned!

Source article.

[via Advanced Nanotechnology]

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Birthplace of Strong AI: Virtual Worlds?

Where will strong AI make its first appearance? Where will it be born? There is some speculation that virtual worlds may prove to be the birthplace and nursery of super-intelligence.

What are the alternatives? Some researchers believe that an artificial intelligence must interact with other intelligences to become intelligent itself. This stands to reason when we consider the development of our own intelligence, which grows through interactions with other humans as we mature.

Another, related school of thought holds that a body is also necessary, some manifestation of the intelligence that can interact with others.

We have all seen the rudimentary efforts of researchers to combine these elements in the lab in the form of cute robots that interact with people in order to learn, but these may be simply too limited in scope.

What's left then is a virtual environment where an intelligent machine can have any kind of body and interact with human and other artificial intelligences at will.

BBC News in this article proposes this scenario, highlighting the work of one particular company, Novamente.

Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.

Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.

Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies.

It may not be very long before you are socializing with an artificial person in Second Life. So keep you eyes peeled and your ears to the ground, and as always, stay tuned.

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Confronting the Social Implications of the Singularity

Imagining the social implications and conundrums that humanity will be faced with in the coming decades with the development of machine consciousness and the uploading of human minds into machine substrates takes a special kind of mind. A mind like the one contained within the brain of Greg Egan.

Greg has both the technical knowledge, writing skills and penetrating imagination that, when combined, allow him to create fiction that examines many of the social dilemmas with which we will be confronted within a few tens of years. In his book of short stories, Axiomatic, Greg conceives some utterly captivating scenarios. Here are the gists of a few:

A ransom demand is made by a group that holds hostage a digital recreation of a man's wife. Does the virtual woman feel pain? Does she suffer? Should the man pay the ransom?

A man who has within his skull a "jewel" which has been matched with his own brain faces the prospect of turning over control of his body to the immortal jewel so that his biological brain can be disposed of. Is his consciousness that of the jewel, or the brain? When his brain is disconnected, will "he" die? Will the jewel be truly conscious, or will it be an imitation of consciousness? Is there a difference?

After an injury to his brain and its subsequent repair by nanobots, a man's perspective shifts to a position outside his body. Although he "knows" only that which his eyes can see, his mind builds a picture of reality as it might appear from a position a few feet above his physical body.

These are just a few of the stories within Axiomatic. If you want to think about what might actually happen when the singularity arrives, this book will certainly set you on the right path.

Axiomatic

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