The Mind Machine Project, a collaboration between some two dozen professors, researchers, and graduate students at MIT, hopes to fashion a new conceptual framework for AI development. Professor Neil Gershenfeld, the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, told reporters that the Mind Machine Project will "rewind to 30 years ago and revisit some ideas that had gotten frozen."

A running theme in the project's literature is the need for software that better resembles the human brain, which can store memories, integrate different cognitive functions, and make intuitive leaps in a way that no computer has been able to approximate. People tend to make decisions based on "data sets which are full of ambiguities and inconsistencies," in Gershenfeld's words. Rather than just create a program that can process a great deal of data very fast, the team wants to develop an artificial consciousness capable of nonlinear, human-style reasoning.

The project consists of four separate avenues of study: Mind, Body, Memory, and Brain/Intent. The "Mind" component might be the most interesting, because it seems to be concerned with teaching an artificial brain to interpret the kind of social cues that human beings learn through years of experience:

[Researchers will d]evelop a software model capable of understanding human social contexts — the signpost[s] that establish these contexts, and the behaviors and conventions associated with them.

If all goes well, the Mind Machine Project could have an AI program up and running by 2015. Don't expect anything incredibly sophisticated, at least at first — researchers aren't even all that concerned with passing a Turing test, wherein a person chats with the program without being told whether it's a machine or a human.

Instead, the five-year goal is to create a program that can read a children's book, explain the story, and ask questions about it or otherwise demonstrate a basic level of comprehension. This might seem modest compared with, say, Skynet, but it would be a major step toward what the project hopes eventually to accomplish: AI programs that can act as helper-entities for people with Alzheimer's disease, or other conditions that compromise the higher functions of the brain.

This kind of software, which the researchers describe as a "brain co-processor," would store and retrieve information for people with memory problems. The project team hasn't ruled out eventually making such programs available to anyone who wants them. This means that for those of us who aren't as organized as we'd like to be, or maybe had some trouble with the Amelia Bedelia books, help is potentially on the way.

There will be a huge amount of publicity when products like this hit the market. As soon as the media starts writing about 'My fantastic weekend with a sex doll', it will be like the iPhone all over again, but the queues will be longer.

I am firmly convinced there will be a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.

Let's talk about sex ... with robots [Guardian]

In a similar to the traditional Turing Test, BotPrize judges watched game play of a human player and a bot, and were asked to select which player was which. A $6000 grand prize was offered to any programmer whose bot could fool the judges 80 percent of the time. No one took home the gold, but one programmer did receive a $1700 for creating the most deceptively human bot. Below is a video comparing human play to bot play:

A Turing Test and Cash Prize for Human-Like Video Game Bots [Popular Science]

If machines ever become sentient, science fiction movies have conditioned us to expect one thing: Our new mechanical masters will try to take over the world and destroy us all. But the reality of artificial intelligence is a lot weirder than even the machines vs. humanity "Matrix" movies suggest. When AI finally emerges, it will be a lot more like an erudite video store clerk than a superpowered killer.

If you've ever bought something at Amazon.com or rented a movie from Netflix, you've interacted with a software program that owes its existence to over half a century of research into artificial intelligence. That program composes sentences such as: "Because you enjoyed the movie 'Godzilla,' we think you would enjoy 'Ultraman.' " It's called a "recommender system," and it's designed to learn about you and your fellow humans by gathering data about you and drawing conclusions from it; eventually, it will know more about what you like than you do.

If you're interested in learning more about the ever-evolving brains of movie recommender software, and how it become intelligent, check out the article.

via Washington Post

The team of European roboticists behind the Eccerobot (Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) is looking to create the first "anthropomimetic," a robot whose movements and interaction with its environment mimic those in humans. To that end, Eccerobot's design is meant to ape the human musculoskeletal system, which they hope will result in a robot with the same powers of movement and manipulation as a human being. Rather than utilizing metals and more rigid plastics, Eccerobot's skelton is made from a springy, bone-like, thermoplastic polymer, supplemented with kitline and elastic polymer for the muscles and tendons. The Eccerobot is also equipped with sensors that will allow it to interact with its environment in a more human-like way, enabling it to recognize where objects are and react with the appropriate body movements and pressure to manipulate the object. The robot's cognitive functions are still under development, but you can see its artificial skeleton and muscles in action below:

[Eccerobot via New Scientist]

Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy of the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have created a contest to create software that will learn how to play Mario successfully the same way that humans do - by playing it over, and over, and over. It sounds like a joke, but Togelius is convinced of its importance in comparing attitudes in software and artificial intelligence development, and also of his choice of test game:

As far as I'm concerned, Mario is the computer game, both as a gamer and as a good machine-learning challenge that requires a broad set of skills.

(The actual test game will be a recreation of the original game, rather than the real Super Mario, sadly.)

Winners will be named - and given cash prizes! - at London's Games Innovation Conference later this month, and Italy's IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in September.

Race is on to evolve the ultimate Mario [New Scientist]

Apart from the obvious question — what is cyberbreath, and don't they make a cyber-mouthwash for that? — I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical of Rothblatt's gung ho predictions. For one thing, she quotes Ray "Unlimited Rice Pudding" Kurzweil. For another, I'm not sure her understanding of Moore's law is quite rock solid. Here's how Intel describes Moore's Law:

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is a visionary. In 1965, his prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. And Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years.

And here's how Moore himself expressed it, in a 1965 article in Electronics Magazine:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Here's how Martine Rothblatt interprets it:

For example, my one year-old computer has about 1/100,000th of the capability of a human mind (its processing speed is about that fraction of the number of human brain neural connections, although its software is in some areas pretty advanced). In other words, it has only .001% of the capability of a human mind. It's a rodent. I could go buy a new computer today that has 2/100,000th or .002% of the capability of a human mind. At this rate, with the way my linear mind works, I would expect to be able to buy a mindclone in 99,998 more years. What, me worry! Our linear minds take our most recent experience – such as going from a 1/100,000th of a human mind computer to a 2/100,000th of a human mind computer in one year – and extrapolate it forward such that we think it will take 998 more years to get 1% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 2% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 3% of a human mind, and so on.

In fact, though, information technology does not grow linearly, but exponentially. This means, according to "Moore's Law", information technology doubles each 1-2 years – something very different from growing linearly. Because computer capability doubles it means next year I will get not 3/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 4/100,000th of one. Exponential growth means the year after that I will get not 5/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 8/100,000th of one. With information technology, I can expect to reach mindclone computing as rapidly as this:

Years From Now Fraction of a Mindclone
Next Year 4/100,000th
Year After 8,100,000th
Third Year 16/100,000th
Fourth Year 32/100,000th
Fifth Year 64/100,000th
Sixth Year 128/100,000th
Seventh Year 256/100,000th
Eighth Year 512/100,000th
Ninth Year 1000/100,000th
Tenth Year 2000/100,000th
Eleventh Year 4000/100,000th
Twelfth Year 8000/100,000th
Thirteenth Year 16,000/100,000th
Fourteenth Year 32,000/100,000th
Fifteenth Year 64,000/100,000th
Sixteenth Year 128,000/100,000th = MINDCLONE

Three clarifying comments are in order. First, the rounding down from 1,024 to 1,000 in the ninth year is just to make the arithmetic easier to follow. Second, while Moore's Law says that the doubling occurs every 1-2 years, in the example given above I showed the doubling every year. The effect of making it every two years would simply be to postpone mindclones to 32 years from now instead of 16, or to 24 years from now if we use a doubling period of every 18 months. The important point is that mindclones are around the corner – not in some other millennium, or even in some other generation. This is about our lives.

I love the way her little explanation goes: "Year sixteen: MINDCLONE." So there you have it. We have exactly sixteen years before Skynet nukes us all into the stone age. [IEET]

In Wake, a "webmind" starts to gain awareness and recognize the existence of the outside world. But let's not assume a superior cyber-intelligence would be hostile to us, Sawyer told the Ottawa Citizen:

For 50 years now we have been inculcated by science fiction, so we have to take the blame for it as writers, I guess, that computers are inherently evil. Starting with HAL in 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey), every computer that Captain Kirk every dealt with, The Matrix, the Terminator films ... all of this stuff preaches that AI, artificial intelligence, is going to be humanity's downfall.

I've done my fair share of that myself in some of my earlier books. But I got to thinking about whether that was inevitably true. What I set out to do with this trilogy is to find a new synthesis, a way in which we can retain our essential individuality, humanity and freedom without any longer being the most intelligent beings on the planet.

It's inevitable that we're going to face things this century that are brighter than us so we've got to start thinking about ways that we can make that work for us, instead of sort of throwing up our hands.

Or we could just start building little bombs into every computer, so we can detonate them if they start to get any ideas.

New Scientist reports that LA-based Adaptive AI is preparing to release what they're calling the first commercially-available artificial intelligence, and all to make those automated phone calls much more enjoyable:

[Adaptive AI founder Peter] Voss freely admits his creation is far short of a human's abilities, but it is much smarter than other "dumb" phonebots, he says.

You can talk to SmartAction almost as naturally as you would to a real person.

For example, Voss says the system can use its ability to track the flow and sense of the conversation to work out who a pronoun - such as she or you - is referring to.

The system will also infer if the line goes dead mid-conversation, and phone the caller back, rewinding to the "mental state" it was before the disconnection.

Admittedly, I would have hoped that HAL's ancestors would have a slightly more noble purpose than bothering you while you're trying to watch TV in the evening to ask about your car insurance - You know, like being a grandmaster at chess or plotting a convoluted plan to overthrow humanity than involves more than a liberal use of time-travel - but I'll take my innovations in technology where I can get them, thanks very much. Anything as long as it brings us Cherry 2000 that much sooner.

Flickr image by alexkerhead.

Artificial Brain For Sale [New Scientist]

Reading Peter Crowther's anthology, I was struck by how little had changed, in some ways, about our ideas of artificial intelligence, since Asimov's and Heinlein's tales, not to mention novels like Gerrold's When Harlie Was One. We still have many of the same themes, including A.I.s coming of age, trying to become more human, struggling to understand humanity, or exploring religion. A number of the stories could easily have been written in 1970.

Other commonalities: Many of the A.I.s are female, especially the ones who have lovely bodies that male humans fall in love with or are seduced by. (Alll but one of the collection's authors are male, I think.) A couple of different stories reference HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are two or three stories about an A.I. that's fractured into different personalities, or a composite of personality fragments.

And yet there are many nuggets of innovation scattered throughout the collection. I really liked "Adam Robots" by Adam Roberts, in which two robots named Adam find themselves in a virtual Garden Of Eden, trying to unravel a modified form of the Adam-and-Eve story. (You expect there to be a twist involving what happens when one robot takes the apple of knowledge, but it's not what you expect.)

The story "Sweats" by Keith Brooke has probably the cleverest, and most surprising, concept of them all: someone creates an artificial personality out of pieces of different people's minds, and then installs it into the body of a hapless teenager. This artificial personality is designed to be a cold-blooded killer and sent to murder a politician — so one of the people whose personality traits is used to create this composite mind is arrested for murder. Can we hold someone responsible for a crime committed by a collection of his personality traits mixed with those of others? This story also incorporates a virtual afterlife (like Second Life, but only for reconstructed personalities of the dead) and is vastly entertaining, except that it has one or two plot twists too many and stops holding together by the end.

Also super entertaining is the story "The New Cyberiad" by Paul DiFilippo, in which two artificial intelligences in the distant future decide to build a solar-system-sized time machine to return to the present. They want to collect some present-day humans to repopulate the future, which is now devoid of organic life. It turns into a bizarre, rolicking quest narrative that contains witty nods at Gerrold, Clarke, and several other writers. At one point, the two boy-robots create a girl-robot to handle routine tasks, and then they both fall in love with their creation in a pastiche of the Pygmalion story. It gets more and more demented.

Also a fun read is "The Highway Code" by Brian Stableford, in which a sentient truck grapples with a road-centric version of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

There are a few other clever ideas, but for the most part this anthology felt stronger on ideas than execution. A lot of the writing left me sort of underwhelmed, and there are almost no memorable characters or really strong moments in the collection. Many of the stories in the book felt like they needed a bit more fleshing out, or perhaps a tighter focus, to change them from cool ideas to actual stories.

And then there were a few moments that I found actually embarrassing, like this bit from James Lovegrove's "The Kamizaze Code." A man and a woman (who are lovers) discuss sneaking a bit of code out of a top-secret Ministry Of Defense facility, and we get this bit of dialogue:

"I've thought about that too," said George. "You could smuggle it out... dump it onto a flash drive, then you take the flash drive to work with you..."

"Can't do that. We're not allowed to take equipment onto or off the premises. That's one of the things we're searched for every time we enter or leave."

"I know, but a flash drive is very small. About the size of a marker pen. And they don't do body cavity searches, do they?"

Jennifer caught his drive, and grimaced.

"It'll work," George insisted.

"Why not use your body cavity then, if you're so confident?"

"Becuase you have a body cavity better suited to the task. Trust me, I know," he added, with what he hoped was a safely salacious smile.

First of all, eww. Second of all... so this is a top secret facility without any metal detectors? And third of all, they don't let you take an ipod to work?

Bottom line: There are a few memorable stories here, and most of the other stories have something interesting to say about the nature of A.I. But this is probably one volume you'll want to take out of the library or buy a used copy of.

[Amazon]

Loebner judges yesterday sat at split screen terminals, simultaneously chatting with one of the chatbots and a human volunteer. At the end of the conversation, the judge selects which is the human and which is the computer program. Programs used various tactics to appear human; bot Eugene Goostman comes with his own backstory, including a childhood in Odessa and an Aunt Sonya who lives in America. Elbot tries to throw judges for a loop by joking that it might be a machine:

"Hi. How's it going?" one judge began.

"I feel terrible today," Elbot replied. "This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it."

A quarter of the time, it was successful, beating out the four other programs and meriting it a bronze medal. A program is supposed to have achieved sentience if it can fool human judges 30% of the time, but Elbot’s creator, Fred Roberts, isn’t buying it:

"I don't think it's anything like thought," he said of Elbot's conversational prowess. "If you know a magic trick, you know how it's done, it's not magic anymore. Sorry to be so pessimistic."

UK university holds artificial intelligence test [via Futurismic]

Psycho: Automata were all the rage in the US and Europe in the late 19th Century. Most were merely intricate mechanical dolls and toys that performed pre-set actions, but a handful appeared capable of interacting with their environment. One of the most famous of these was Psycho, the creation of John Nevil Maskelyne. Maskelyne was an inventor and stage magician, a member of The Magic Circle, which worked to dispel the notion of supernatural powers, and innovator of the levitation illusion. Psycho, a doll dressed as an Eastern sorcerer, would pick up playing cards from a rack in order to spell words, do mathematical problems, and perform tricks, all the while smoking a cigarette. Although Psycho appeared to move of his own accord, he was actually a puppet, operated by a series of bellows. Those bellows were eventually dismantled and Psycho was donated to the Museum of London.

Joice Heth: PT Banum launched his famed career as a hoaxer with Joice Heth. In 1835, Barnum purchased Heth, a blind and paralyzed slave, and toured her around the country as George Washington's own wet nurse, claiming that she was over 160 years old. When Heth's appeal began to fade, Barnum reinvented his attraction. When he began claiming that Heth was not merely an aged woman, but an automaton made from whale bone, India rubber, and an ingenious network of springs, people again flocked to the exhibit, trying to determine whether or not she was a real person. Upon her death, Barnum had Heth publicly autopsied. Not only was she a human being, she was no more than 80 years old.

Enigmarelle: Another product of the automaton craze, Enigmarelle was a life-sized creature with a lumbering gait and a wax face. The alleged automaton could reportedly ride a bike, write its name, and know to turn corners as it walked, although it could neither hear nor speak. Its "inventor" Frederick Ireland claimed that Enigmarelle's incredible walking and riding abilities stemmed from an equilibrium system based on the human inner ear. As "proof" of the machine's authenticity, the hands and legs were removed during shows and its body and head opened to reveal electrical workings. It has been suggested that Enigmarelle was, in fact, manned by an amputee to create that very effect. Still, the less-than-automatic automaton enjoyed a 30 year career in vaudeville.

Quasar Domestic Android: Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of science fiction movies, Quasar Industries announced in 1978 that it would soon be mass-producing domestic household robots. Quasars would be able to dust, vacuum (not anticipating the Roomba, Quasars would use a separate vacuum cleaner), mow the lawn, walk the dog, and teach children French. At a demonstration, the domestic android was strangely animated, intelligent, and conversant in a number of topics. Skeptical roboticists who attended the demonstration quickly discovered a man in the audience who muttered into his hand each time the robot spoke, and the project was eventually outed as a press-seeking hoax.

Lisa the Perfect Woman: This summer, the blandly named AI Robotics announced that they have completed a fully functioning robotic woman. "Lisa" (possibly named for the AI creation in "Weird Science") is supposedly "designed for all men who have not found their soulmate" — a soulmate who cooks, cleans, plays video games, and provides sex on demand without being weighed down by pesky emotions or desires. As if the uber-creepy promo video weren't enough to convince you of the product's nonexistence, these robots were supposed to go on sale this past June. It's still unclear, however, what purpose, if any, the hoax had.

Mini Cooper Autonomous Robot: A website allegedly set up by a UK researcher claimed that the researcher had built an autonomous, Transformers-like bipedal robot from a Mini Cooper. The robot was supposed to be over 10 feet tall, powered by an internal combustion engine, and running on Linux. The site garnered a great deal of attention from sites like Slashdot, but was ultimately discovered to be a viral marketing campaign launched by BMW.

Boilerplate: Boilerplate was a mechanical man unveiled at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. He was fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt, saved an expedition to Anarctica, and saved Pancho Villa's life. Boilerplate mysteriously vanished in WWI, which would be a tragedy had he ever actually existed in the first place. The Boilerplate website, which features specs for other Victorian robots, was an inadvertent hoax perpetrated by Anina Bennett and Paul Guinan as a pitch for a graphic novel. But several visitors to the site believed that Boilerplate was a genuine, little-known historical figure, including comedian Chris Elliot, who committed an act of accidental plagiarism when he made the robot a character in his humorous historical novel.

The Digesting Duck: Artist and inventor Jacques de Vaucanson was inspired by Descartes' principle of the mechanistic universe to create a mechanical animal. The Canard Digerateur was said to have the ability to eat grain, digest it naturally, and defecate waste. The duck became a popular and oft-exhibited automaton, but didn't actually digest anything. The grain it ate was collected in a container inside the duck, while the "feces" were contained in a separate part. Physiologists were reportedly disappointed when the hoax was uncovered, as they had hoped to learn whether the process of digestion was chemical or mechanical. Even failing to digest anything, the duck was an impressive piece of machinery, otherwise faithfully based on the physiology and articulations of a natural duck, and was one of the first automata to use rubber hose.

The Mechanical Turk: Arguably the most notorious mechanical hoax, the Turk had a marked impact on contemporary notions of machines and even modern AI. Wolfgang von Kempelen, a pioneer in phonetics, created an "automated" chess player to exhibit at the court of Austria's Empress Maria Theresa. Like later automata, the Turk included a doll in Eastern dress. The doll stood over a clockwork cabinet and played chess against human opponents, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The Turk toured Europe and later America, and became a popular attraction that confounded engineers and chess players alike. The hoax was exposed 50 years after Kempelen's death and three years after the Turk itself was destroyed: a chess player was cleverly disguised inside the cabinet. The Turk spawned numerous imitators, most famously Ajeeb and Mephisto. It is thought to have inspired the likes of Charles Babbage and Edmund Cartwright, and sparked a great deal of discussion about artificial intelligence.

In fact, that's the premise of a trilogy that Robert "Humanoids" Sawyer is working on right now. Like a lot of scifi authors and futurists, Sawyer thinks it's plausible that the web itself might become a conscious entity. (This isn't a new idea: It was the basis for William Gibson's early-80s novel Neuromancer.)

So how does Google Suggest work? To return to my earlier example about the Booby Snatchers, you'll find that Google isn't mining your personal search history to make suggestions — it combs through popular searches from millions of people and guesses what you want based on what kinds of searches it sees the most often. Because far more people search on "invasion of Georgia" than "Invasion of the Booby Snatchers," you'll get the former suggestion.

According to the New York Times:

Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on the personal searches of users, although it does use information about the relative popularity of common searches to rank its suggestions, Google noted. Google Suggest searches are covered under Google's privacy policy, the company added.

So that means our first A.I. will have consciousness-by-popular-demand. It will make all its decisions based on what the majority of people would do. That's what frightens me.

Google Rolls Out Tool [NY Times]

Artificial Intelligence and Transhuman Law: When Zoe-R comes online, the legal profession is gong to have to ask a lot of hard questions. Is she the same person as Zoe Graystone? Is she a person at all? Can Daniel Graystone hold intellectual property rights in a sentient being? Is he her owner or her parent? And, if she goes on to commit genocide against humanity, is Daniel legally culpable?

Who is working on it: The Terasem Movement, founded by lawyer and satellite communications entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, explores practical and philosophical issues surrounding nanotechnology and cyberconsciousness. It publishes two journals to that end, The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, and this December, Terasem will hold its Fourth Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons.

Mental Privacy: Sure, you’ll want to keep the details of your genome safe from insurance companies and future employers, but the next battlefield of personal privacy may be your mind. Researchers are working to develop remote EEGs and other brainwave detectors that could one day be used as stealth lie detectors or a new layer of airport security. Brain fingerprinting technology, which tests whether suspects have knowledge of a specific crime, is currently admissible in court. And with mind-wiping drugs, psychotropic weapons, and skull-directed advertising entering the arena, your brain may soon need its own attorney.

Who is working on it: The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, headed by UC Davis professor Wrye Sententia, investigates the impact of new technology on mental liberty and aims to develop policies that will preserve privacy, autonomy, and choice with regard to thought, memory, and cognitive development. And certainly there are firms whose associates are busily researching legal ways to get inside your head.

Extraterrestrial Property: For several decades, the field of space law was focused on the extraplanetary actions of governments and the placement of satellites in orbit. But as private enterprises turn their sights on the stars, legal scholars have been forced to ponder just who will own the final frontier.

Who is working on it: Virgiliu Pop, a researcher at the Romanian Space Agency who once jokingly claimed ownership of the sun, has written extensively on the perils of allowing individuals to stake extraterrestrial claims without the recognition of the entire international community. Others, like Space Settlement Institute executives Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobes, have written about approaching a real estate framework from a perspective of colonization.

Cryonic Trusts and Estates: Sure, you could wake up from cryostasis like Philip J. Fry did, with a waiting job and a thousand years of interest in your savings account. But you might also end up like Transmetropolitan’s Revivals, cast at your most mentally fragile upon an uncaring society. Don’t take any chances. Before you step into that freezer, set up a cryonic trust to ensure that you’re still rich once you’ve thawed out.

Who is working on it: If you’re planning on going into deep-freeze, there are attorneys prepared to do your cryonic and personal revival estate planning. Travel along the Beltway to contract the services of John Dedon at Odin, Feldman & Pittleman in Fairfax, Virginia, or Christopher Sega at DC firm Venable.

Interspecies Family Law: When first contact happens without a condom and ends in a shotgun wedding, you and your multigenetic kin might find yourselves in murky legal waters. What do you do when your sweetie’s marriage laws require a third partner and your state won’t budge past the binary? Will you have to participate in those pesky father-son rituals that involve male bonding through meditative pain? And do you duke out the inevitable divorce in court, or fend off alimony claims in far more humane hand-to-hand combat?

Who is working on it: We’re sure that many big and famous law firms are hard at work on the hypotheticals of intergalactic jurisprudence. For now, we will forward all otherworldly complaints to the attorneys at Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero, the law offices of Sebben & Sebben, and the senior partners of Wolfram & Hart.

Carr's argument is a subtle one so I suggest reading the whole feature. But let me take a shot at a one-sentence distillation: The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to reading, and we should be scared of that.*

I don't entirely disagree with the first part of that thought, but the second doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In Carr's own words, humans have been developing technologies that change the way we thnk throughout our history:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Now I hate alarm clocks as much as the next guy, and it's true, we do live our lives by minutes and hours more than the cycles of the sun, moon, tides, or whatever. But is Carr really trying to say that the advent of the 9-5 job cancels out the advances of all of science, math, and our understanding of the universe? That's pushing it.

And so is this passage on how Google will one day turn into the HAL-9000:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

...their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Google's dominance of the digital world is admittedly a little unnerving, but HAL? C'mon now. Actually Carr's article leads and ends with references to the murderous and fictional computer, making it pretty clear what he thinks about the role artificial intelligence will play in our non-fiction future.

In the end Carr's article isn't entirely ham-handed — but his analysis is. He looks back on Socrates, who once wrote about how the invention of writing would be the death of us all. Later, other writers thought the printing press would ruin the pursuit of knowledge. Looking back, those sentiments seem shortsighted, and with good reason. They're actually evidence against Carr's case: If printing presses are any indication of how these things go, the internet will facilitate an intellectual revolution the likes of which no one could predict in the early going.

But Carr still argues that the internet is going to ruin the human mind. Who knows, maybe he just couldn't resist the opportunity to compare himself to Socrates. Regardless, both Carr and the ancient Greek were wrong on this one: their arguments are little more than over-intellectualized bellyaching that resemble old people's classic "kids these days" speech. But instead of moaning about modern youth, the refrain is more like "technology these days."

*I realize the paradox here — if Carr's right, no one's going to go read the whole feature. You probably won't even read this whole post. You'll scan the headline, maybe a paragraph or two, then go flitting off to the next item. I've got more faith in io9ers, though.

A great deal of A.I. research has focused on teaching computers to identify lists of objects and people. The Multi-sensory Autonomous Cognitive Systems (MACS) project uses a different paradigm - affordance learning. Instead of identifying a specific object as a hammer, an affordance-based system learns the parameters of what makes a hammer useful for hammering. It needs a shaft for leverage, a weight at the end and a flat surface for hammering. Then, if the robot needs to find something with which to hammer, it wouldn't be limited by a narrow visual recognition algorithm for a hammer. It could search for any object suitable for the purpose.

The only given parameters in the Kurt3D test stated that a door switch could be activated by placing a certain weight on a pressure sensitive plate. Kurt3D was able to examine the room, identify an appropriate object, pick it up, place it on the plate, and move through the open door. Photo by: Fraunhofer AIS.

What Can I, Robot, Do With That? [Science Daily]

HUMAINE has gathered psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and computer animation specialists along with database developers and programmers to tackle the issue of machine emotion. Whether HUMAINE's approach results in a better way of recognizing and displaying emotion might be beside the point. The reason they have philosophers on board is to help decide whether or not we should imbue machines with emotions at all.

The logical, emotionless decision-making of sci-fi A.I. is something we both admire (Data, good Terminators) and fear (HAL 9000, bad Terminators). Would it be ethical to give such machines emotions? I'm not sure I want to deal with an ATM that's been having a bad day, much less an armed police robot. In reality, we probably want a lesser degree of machine emotion, a realistic yet fake emotive ability that makes us feel better but doesn't affect the computer's decisions.

The bigger question might be: would an emotionless A.I. be any kind of intelligence at all? I'm not sure it would be possible for a machine to make the intuitive leaps and strokes of genius that we think of as measures of human intelligence in the absence of emotion. Photo by: Warner Bros.

Emotional Machines. [ICT Results]

I'm sort of a sucker for "AI gone berzerk" stories, and "War on Terror goes too far" stories, so I ought to be the natural audience for War Games: The Dead Code. But even my undiscriminating tastes can't quite go there.

Here's the story: The government wants to fight terror, so it creates a new A.I. called Ripley. She's a sexy girl, with a sultry voice (although interestingly, an early synopsis on IMDB refers to Ripley as "he.") And when she's not hunting down Al Qaeda's funding networks, she's playing "high-stakes games in the darker reaches of the Internet" with teenage boys. But then when one hacker d00d decides to play the "Dead Code" game, she somehow turns it into reality and starts planning to nuke Philadelphia. Only the hacker d00d can stop it, because Homeland Security has absolutely no failsafe or method of controlling the AI they created.

Meanwhile, I can't find any information on MGM's lawsuit over ownership of wargames.com. They sued a guy who had owned the domain since 1998 and was using it for his own personal gaming site. Whois says the guy still owns the domain. But both that site, and the guy's personal site, appear to be down, which is a bad sign. [Slashfilm]

To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.