I just ran across a cool video of a flying robot playing Jingle Bells on an electric piano. The tempo seemed a bit off, so I clicked through to YouTube to see if there were any more videos. A link for how it works popped up, so naturally I clicked it. Base off of the video, it looks like a human was controlling the robot, so not as impressive as I initially thought. They show some background on “co-pilot” routines that assist the human controllers to keep them from making mistakes. I find this interesting because eventually with AI, these little machines could be completely automated. This reminds me of the creepy surveillance robots from Dark Angel. With special routines to keep these from bumping into obstacles, I can definitely see them flying around our cities sometime in the near future. If you want to see the Jingle Bells video, click through the via link at the bottom. I found this video more interesting though.
There have been quite a few companies that have explored letting employees work from home part time or even full time. Trevor Blackwell, founder of Anybots, is working on a technology that can make interacting with workers still physically at a building much easier. This seems to me to be an early step to a world like I saw in Surrogates. I’m always fascinated when I see science catching up with Sci-Fi. Check out the company’s promo video at the Anybots homepage.
A few months ago a co-worker of mine suggested that I read The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil. We had been talking about AI and he mentioned that this was an interesting read. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, as I had never heard of Kurzweil before. After a few Google searches I got the impression that he was a quirky futurist.
This book was published back in 1999 and by the end looks very much like science fiction. Many of his predictions are founded on some sort of research. I can see how they would have seemed a bit “out there” almost 10 years ago. I wondered how many of his predictions would hold up. Central to his philosophy is the Law of Accelerating Returns. In short, technology will continue to progress ever faster as time goes on. He displays an interesting graph of the exponential increase of computational power in various models of computers over time. The line is slightly curved upward, which represents an increase in exponential growth over time. So, according to Kurzweil computation is progressing exponentially exponentially faster. (more…)
Tonight with my wife, I watched an interesting episode of Nova titled “The World’s Smartest Machine.” Romantic, right? You can tell we are a couple of geeks at heart. Being a huge fan of Asimov and his robot creations, I am continually amazed at the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a kid I was playing chess as early as the 3rd grade. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good chess player. When I heard about a computer that supposedly could beat a world champion chess player, I was intrigued. Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and won, however he eventually lost a rematch in 1997. Well, IBM is back at it, this time taking on Jeopardy. Nova takes us behind the scenes with the developers of “Watson,” the next step in AI. I was disappointed when the episode ended and it didn’t say who won. I didn’t realize until logging on PBS.org that the contest actually was taking place while I was watching Nova (on my media center PC). After some frantic Google searches, I eventually came across a Twitter feed with a link to a Youtube posting of the episode. This was not quite 2 hours after the episode aired! Isn’t technology great? I expect the Youtube post to be served a DMCA take down, so watch it soon if you plan on it. In addition to the episode at the end of this post, I’ve embedded the Nova preview and an humorous parody of the challenges Watson overcame during his development. I suggest watching the Nova episode first. If you are at all interested in AI, you must check these out!
There are two more nights to the match, airing Tuesday February 15th, and Wednesday the 16th. Be sure to check them out, along with some live blogging on PBS.org. I find myself rooting for Watson, not because I want to see humans defeated, but because I want to see humans capable of making something smart enough to do it. Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win?
