Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Brain scans yield key first step to … reading your mind.

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A provocative experiment in Germany raises questions about the future of keeping our thoughts private and even free will itself.   Researchers have been able to predict, with modest accuracy, the *intention* of a person to complete a mental task.     Predicting physical actions with brain activity has been done before but this appears to be the first example of predicting mental activity from brain activity as measured by MRI.

Here’s the story

The implications are significant both philisophically and in practical terms.    What exactly is “free will”?   If our decisions are effectively made *before* we actively process the information then what exactly is in control of our thoughts and actions?      If your future “decisions” are simply a product of a bunch of your past thoughts and behaviors then you may be a lot more predictable than you think.

From a practical side this could make for a marketing dream world (or nightmare world?), where persuaders in advertising or politics would tailor the message to your specific brain activity, or even try to “short circuit” activity in their favor.

Hmmm – I suddenly feel compelled to vote Ray Kurzweil for president …

Thinking about the IBM Blue Brain Project … thinking …

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The IBM Blue Brain
project is working to model a human brain using computers. They expect to have a neocortical column, which they think is likely the key building block for conscious thought, modelled by 2008. If they succeed the next step will be to connect these columns and allow them to exchange information. At the point where enough information is exchanged it seems reasonable to assume the machine will probably become conscious, and that will be … cool.

Mobile Muppet Laboratory at Disneyland’s California Adventure

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The Mobile Muppet Laboratory is roaming Disney’s California Adventure this spring.  I’m glad our family is heading down their in a few weeks for spring break.   We’ll be able to see how this advanced animatronics display is interacting with people all over the park.

Engadget and the LA Times  seem to approach this using the “will this put Mickey Mouse out of work” angle which is unfortunate because the big story on robotics is 1) Robots are here to stay and as AI improves they’ll be taking over more and more jobs, allowing humans to blossom in creative rather than mundane physical tasks.   2) Robots have been helping us for decades – they’ve just been in “boring” jobs like car assembly.  3) Robots are cool.

Robots and emotions

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The BBC reports that a project is trying to teach robots to react to humans in emotional ways.   Sounds cool, though I’d suggest it’s always important to make a distinction between when a thinking mechanism can *talk* so much like a human that we can’t tell it’s a machine vs when that machine starts to *think* like a human thinks – ie it becomes conscious.

Many wrongly use this distinction to make that case that mechanisms will never attain human-quality intelligence even if we reach the point where the machines behavior (e.g. answering complex questions) is indistinguishable from human answers.    It seems likely we’ll have both, though I’m guessing consciousness for computers is at least 10 years away.

I remain wildly optimistic about the advent of *artificial consciousness*, though I think it’s possible that artificial intelligence may come to us in a sort of backwards fashion.  That is, humans will increasingly use technologies that are integrated with our biological processes until eventually we’ll realize that our intelligence has become more mechanism than biological process.

That said I think I still lean to the notion tht the human intellect and consciousness are purely algorithmic processes driven primarily by the interaction of neurons in the cortex and therefore we could have a computerized version of these processes soon.   I sure hope so because I’d like to know what they’ll recommend we do with the pressing problems of the world.

Larry Page – Artificial Intelligence attainable.

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Over at Battelle’s there is a good AI discussion. I’m always amazed by how reluctant we humans are to realize that our intellectual abilities are neat, but generally overrated. In the evolution debate you see folks unwilling to recognize the obvious fact that humans are *almost certainly* an evolutionary extension of simpler organisms. In the AI debate even many who agree that humans are the product of evolution seem reluctant to assume that machines will ever attain consciousness.

Sure, there are significant computational and possibly biological hurdles in the quest for a fully conscious machine intellect, but there’s little reason to think these can’t be overcome within at most a few decades and hopefully sooner.

Hey – maybe I’m just sucking up to the intelligent machines so they’ll like me when they start reading the internet stuff written before they were conscious. Shame on me!

Battle Robots + AI = Trouble?

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Although I’m very confident that artificial intelligences will be complimentary to humans and extremely beneficial to humanity it did give me pause today to combine the following two news items:

1) Larry Page of Google notes that he feels the brain’s algorithms are not all that complex and seemed confident that the Google folks now working on AI will have a quality intelligence developed soon.

2) Pentagon funds semi-autonomous battle robot project at Carnagie Mellon.

I wouldn’t want to have that robot’s machine gun staring down at me on the day when the robot decides humans are too irrational to deserve the planet.    Of course for this project the robot will drive itself but a human will be operating the gun.

“hey, says the battle robot, would you mind plugging me into the network jack over there … for just a few minutes ? ” 

Artificial Intelligence Optimism: Human intelligence on a computer is coming soon.

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I don’t know how I missed reading Raymond Kurzweil for so long.  He’s an amazing pioneer in a variety of innovations from music to Artificial intelligence, and his perspectives on the ongoing shift from human to machine thinking are quite brilliant. It’s too bad we miss so much of this, needing as we do our daily fix of Anna Nicole news.

Here are a couple really neat items from a recent interview with him:

KURZWEIL: We’ll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We’ll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we’re gathering about the brain every year.

… nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence—biological intelligence—is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that’s not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization‘s intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation.

Profound indeed. Look at how our modest intelligence capabilities, when applied cleverly, lead to really neat innovations, higher standards of living, better environment, etc, etc. With a *billion times* our abilities the thinking machines should be able to create a blueprint for an earthly utopia. There are plenty of resources on earth to give everybody a high standard of living- we just don’t distribute them optimally, primarily due to hopelessly ineffective economic systems and conflicts in the developing world and only modestly effective ones in the affluent sectors.

When the computers give us the blueprints for change will we choose to implement the suggestions? Will they look for ways to force us to use them? Will they value humanity as we do (which, I would argue, is not much given the state of affairs in the 3rd world and how little attention we pay to that suffering).

Kurzweil Reader

Kurtzweil Website 

Intel Teraflop chip doing one trillion mathematical calculations a second

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Intel’s new prototype computer chip could herald a new age of computing reports the New York Times today. The “Teraflop” chip is not yet ready for widespread use but the advanced capabilities represent a leapfrog over current chip technologies offered by Intel and AMD.

One *trillion* calculations per second. How many can you do? One can’t help but think these speeds and power will soon break down the barriers between human minds and mechanical ones, leading to a revolution in thought the likes of which we may not be able to even imagine… without the aid of computer enhancements to our own brains! I just hope I can use my Circuit City coupons for a new, enhanced brain.

Consciousness is cool … and Qualey?

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This USA Today article is a great summary of some of the latest thinking about …. thinking.

I had not realized how much research was going on down in La Jolla, California.  Sounds like La Jolla is the consciousness capital of the world.

My favorite insight from the article suggests that consciousness may spring from the interactions of a bunch of cell assemblies which together form something the researchers call a Quale.   The quale then is a “scene of consciousness”.

How long before computers catch up and become conscious?   About 2020 say most researchers.   I predict that the machines will be able to articulate the concept of consciousness better than we, and I’m looking forward to that conversation.