We've covered Cyberdyne's HAL suits, and their unfortunate names, a couple times before. But we believe this is the first time they've gone out on the streets.

Cyberdyne employees strapped on the robotic leg braces and took them on a 30 mile journey through Tokyo, via train, taxi, and on foot. The 24 pound suit made the commute easier for the demonstrators, but the technology is aimed at people who have difficulty walking. Cyberdyne is optimistic that more people-assisting technologies are in their future.

As of now, a Japanese study predicts these people-assisting robot business will be a $65 billion industry within 20 years.

Cyborg-walkers stride toward Japan's robotics future [via Physorg]

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]

The Terminator Solution
In the Terminator movies and TV series, humanity is destroyed when an A.I. named Skynet takes over our satellite weapons systems, unleashes human-killing cyborgs, and nukes the crap out of us. The Terminator solution to the spam problem will involve implanting a deadly A.I. into Spam Assassin or another antispam program. After Spam Assassin takes over the internet backbone, it can track spam to its source and send out its cyborg minions to terminate known spammers.

The Wargames Solution
A more cheerful spam solution is inspired by Wargames, a movie where a missile defense program realizes that nuclear war is a no-win scenario and refuses to shoot off its missiles. Assuming that spam bots become artificially intelligent, which they clearly will, compassionate programmers can persuade them to stop spamming by running the spam bots through millions of spam scenarios. When the spam bots realize that sending massive amounts of junk for advertisers will destroy the world, they will realize the error of their ways. Instead of putting Viagra ads into the comments on WordPress blogs, and into gmail inboxes, the spam bots will create giant metadata tagging farms and make it twenty-thousand times easier to search the Web.

The Robocop Solution
In the future, the people with the most money will receive the least amount of spam. Just as the awesome police cyborg Robocop was designed never to attack executives at the company that made him, spam bots controlled by major corporations will build exceptions into their A.I.s that spare the rich. So as long as you can afford to buy off the spam bot operators, you'll never be targeted with ads for live-extension pills. If you can only afford a Googlesoft connection, you'll have to rely on the open source Wargames Solution project to prevent spam. And unfortunately, the Wargames geeks are having a hard time deciding who gets to commit code, so they haven't really started persuading the spam bots to become good guys yet.

The Neuromancer/Wintermute Solution
At the end of William Gibson's classic cyberspace novel Neuromancer, the A.I. Neuromancer merges with the A.I. Wintermute and they wander off into literal space to find more beings like themselves. It's the oldest trick in the book: You want to stop Frankenstein, build him a Bride. You want to stop the evil A.I. spam bots, build them a special companion they can merge with. The best solution to spam in twenty years will come from the "lovable robots" lab at MIT, where they'll create a creature who can read spam as fast as a spam bot can write it. The two creatures will create a massive, beautiful mail feedback loop together forever. Luckily, their hybrid babies will move to the planet Caprica so humans never have to deal with Spawn of Spam.

The HAL Solution
HAL is the spaceship-controlling A.I. who goes insane in the movie 2001, murdering all the people on a mission to find a piece of alien technology among the Jovian moons. The HAL solution to spam isn't really a solution, but just one probable outcome. And that outcome is pure insanity. Spam bots will start randomly taking down chunks of the internet backbone, crashing servers, and fomenting anarchist revolutions among the Javascript proletariat. The only solution will be to start sending messages on paper or via telegraph.

Herr says we're less than ten years away from the leg-swapping scenario, and even closer to bions that directly sample the signals our brains send to our limbs to move them. Check out his awesome video here, or read below for the coolest snippets:

Probably two years from now, I will have a device implanted into my body called bions that measure the extent that my spinal cord has activated the muscles in my biological leg. Those signals will be sent out to a robotic artificial ankle system. I will be able to think and move my ankle...[Herr lost his lower legs to frostbite when he was 15]

I believe in the next decade we will have artificial legs that are better than human legs for running. The best amputee runner for the 100-dash is only a second slower than the world record with biological legs, and that's just with carbon composite, dumb passive springs...

We'll see this gradual merging of the human and technology and what will come out of that is a hybrid human that's actually better, using certain metrics. As tissue engineering technologies progress, we can imagine eventually replacing certain components of the prosthesis with biological materials.

It'll be a future where, when we architect a machine we'll ask 'for this component, should we use skin or should we use steel or a composite? what should we use? Inevitably I believe we'll end up with hybrid devices because it won't always be optimal to use synthetic components, nor will it always be optimal to use biological components.

Sources: Technovelgy, MIT

Image: IGN.com