[et_pb_section admin_label="section"] [et_pb_row admin_label="row"] [et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text"] Press release from the Center for A.I. Safety San Francisco, CA – Distinguished AI scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, have signed a single-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety that reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This represents a historic coalition of AI experts — along with philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, economists, physicists, political scientists, pandemic scientists, nuclear scientists, and climate scientists — establishing the risk of extinction from advanced, future AI systems as one of the world’s most important problems. The statement affirms growing public sentiment: a recent poll found that 61 percent of Americans believe AI threatens humanity’s … [Read more...] about Top AI Scientists Warn: Risk of Extinction From AI on Scale with Nuclear War
Storytelling in the Age of Robots, Androids, and Artificial Intelligence
Storytelling, mythology, and legends have always influenced the scientific mind. There are some spectacular examples of inventions inspired by fiction, including the first cell phone, created by Engineer Martin Cooper after seeing the Star Trek communicator; or the first functioning submarine (the Argonaut), designed by Engineer Simon Lake after reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. So when it comes to the invention of Robots, Androids, and Artificial Intelligence, artistic imagination is just as important as science. Stories featuring fantastic machines have existed for thousands of years. Ancient myths portrayed the creators of such automata as preternatural sorcerers, wizards, alchemists, or artisan gods. The Greek god Hephaestus forged an array of magic weapons from gold, ivory, or bronze for the gods and heroes; a silver bow and quiver of arrows for Artemis, a golden chariot for Apollo, a shield for Achilles, a spear for Athena, and a breastplate for Hercules. He also created artificial life; bronze bulls, fire-breathing horses, golden … [Read more...] about Storytelling in the Age of Robots, Androids, and Artificial Intelligence
Boston Dynamics Terrifying and Astounding Handle Robot
One day in the future, when an engineer discovers a robot has become self aware, there is a good chance that technician will be working at Boston Dynamics. The robotics and engineering company works with various government agencies such as DARPA, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps, and corporations like Sony. Using sensor-based controls and computation, Boston Dynamics's experimental robots mimic the capabilities of complex organisms, exhibiting remarkable agility, dexterity and speed. If you are a robot watcher like I am, Boston Dynamics's creations are startling in their ability to conjure both utopian possibilities and surreal nightmares. Robots like these could have powerful applications navigating hostile terrains like Mars, or become mindless weapons of war. Boston Dynamics' latest creation is Handle, a research robot with 10 actuated joints which resembles a bucking horse. Handle stands 6.5 ft tall with the ability to retract and extend its legs. The robot has uncanny balance, travels at 9 mph and is able to jump 4 feet vertically into the air, and lift 100 pounds. … [Read more...] about Boston Dynamics Terrifying and Astounding Handle Robot
Automatons: Imitation of Life
The creation of robots and androids has always fascinated mankind. There are accounts of automatons in ancient mythology such as the artisan/god Hephaestus who created divine machines like the bronze man Talos to defend Crete. There are accounts of Greek temples housing "god" machines that belched smoke, replicated thunder and even bled. and philosophers like Aristotle mused about robots replacing slaves. But throughout history, there have been actual attempts to construct such mechanisms. This is where mythology and reality blur. The Physical proof of such pursuits came in the form of the Antikythera mechanism (150 to 100 BC), recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1900/1901. The device served to calculate the positions of stars and planets. Other notorious accounts of automatons appear in the 8th and 9th centuries. Wind powered automatons appeared in the Abbasid Palaces of Baghdad and the Arabic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (writing under the name of Geber) recorded his methods of constructing snake, scorpion and human automatons in The … [Read more...] about Automatons: Imitation of Life
Future Shock: Writing Sci Fi, Drones & Paranoia
Dystopia. The word hisses off the tongue with sibilant ease, a slow slide into the dark cellar of the collective psyche. The black regimes of our fears, the fascism, the rage, the oppression which mirrors our inner shades, often realized in nightmarish reality. Conversely, Utopia sounds so hopeful, so inclusive, like a suspended note of a celestial choir. A future where technology is used compassionately to further creative pursuits, knowledge and collective awareness. What's it going to be? One of the great tasks of Science Fiction is to explore humanity in the context of earth shattering change. In the case of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 with its mechanical hound or George Orwell's 1984, the startling portrait of the darker probabilities of the future, shaped the minds of a generation. The word "Big Brother" is now part of our lexicon of ideas. On the Utopian side, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek inspired cell phones, interactive computers and has scientists noodling over the possibility of matter transfer and warp drive. Because I'm writing a dystopian novel, I … [Read more...] about Future Shock: Writing Sci Fi, Drones & Paranoia
A Million Robot Army
"Whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon—honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth—it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate "wars" that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation— Barbara Ehrenreich I was watching TV pundit/editor of Mother Jones Magazine David Korn commenting on Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's botched Iraq war when he said, "...it's almost like saying if we had an army of a million giant flying robots things would have turned out better. It's denying reality... it's all a giant experiment for them..." Those two ideas struck me; irresponsible, inexperienced leadership and a million robot army. A scary proposition, fast becoming a very real possibility. DARPA is slowly crafting robots around the art of war. What is DARPA? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . DARPA funds an … [Read more...] about A Million Robot Army