This Science Daily article seems to agree to a small degree.

For several decades many AI researchers have told us that artificial intelligence is around the corner, with the dream to put a robot in every home. Do our menial and dirty jobs for us, while waiting on us hand and foot. I have had a few discussion with Deans World readers on AI and am usually outnumbered. But it seems to me that the goal posts on the definition of AI keep getting moved until a wristwatch or hand calculator qualify as AI.

We see all kinds of robot projects with the goal to mimic human behavior. IBM's Deep Blue is certainly impressive defeating world Chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But Deep Blue is a computer program and database that harbors no intelligence artificial or otherwise. It only follows preprogrammed instructions on how to make the next move. It does not ponder a move nor do a wit of thinking.

True AI would be something like Arthur C. Clarke's HAL9000 in Space Odyssey. I don't doubt that real AI is possible and I'm sure some day we will see it, but I've seen little substantiative progress in the last couple of decades.


Honda's Asimo Robot can run, jump up and down, climb up and down stairs and other impressive feats as this short clip shows. But he has no rudimentary intelligence of his own. The intelligence is in the expert programming. The life-like appearance due to mechanical expertise combined with programming to give canned life-like appearances. In the clip the robot stopped and looked at himself in the mirror, stopped and admired another robot on display simply because the programmers programmed to do so. He had no curiosity nor inner compulsion to do it on his own. Heck he has no thought process to know what he is looking at.


Developers of iCub robots want to develop leaning the way children do. By developing ability to understand and interact with their surrounding world through experiences. Six projects across Europe are working on six different aspect of the learning process.


This whole project causes my eyes to roll. I've a feeling that they will learn little if anything about AI. Like Honda's Asimo and Sony's Quro this project will, in the end, be a project to see how closely human behavior can be mimicked.

The cart is before the horse here. We won't learn about, and produce AI (which again I think is entirely possible) by making robots that act like humans. We are getting closer to reverse engineering the human brain. That is the direction AI needs to pursue. When we understand intelligence and what it is, then, and only then will be have the foundation to build machines and robots with artificial intelligence. We are making robots with the ability to move like humans. Rudimentary abilities to classify objects and recall them (although without thought). But no amount of classifying their surroundings and recalling them will be more than a database: one without curiosity or intelligence.

First lean precisely what intelligence is, then apply it to machine systems. When that happens AI will truly be "Child's Play."

Globe-gobbling Black Holes?


Legitimate worry, or more political driven science? I think the latter. Anything that man can create isn't new, but unknown. If it could happen, I think that it would happen in nature without man's interference.

Most snowflakes are armed with a surprise before they ever fall to the earth. Normally for a snowflake to form the moisture needs a so-called nucleator to cling to. More often rather than a particle of dust or other matter these nucleators are bacteria.


Fortunately the bacteria appear to be more harmful to plants than people, but it isn't known whether getting rid of the bacteria would decrease precipitation amounts. There's more to read, click the link above.

Cutting men out of the picture? Say it isn't so!


Not so fast, it works both ways.



Well not quite. They still need a female surrogate mothers womb.


Other caveats.


Via Kurzweil.AI

 
Well I sure hope so and without the tragically fatal explosion that killed three people the last time. While interested in space technology and what's going on, I've no interest in a trip to space myself.

Here is a clip that assess the problems of Virgin Galactic's space venture.




The competition: EADS Astrium, no stranger to space inovation, builder of satellites and satellite engines plans to start a one stage tourism system this year that will take people into space. Unlike Virgin Galactic this one stage system will take off and land from an airport. If started on schedule, the first commercial flight would be possible by 2012. However Virgin Galactic has a few years head start on Astrium.

Via Dean's World

Forget megapixels, how about 3 billion pixels (I guess that would be 3000 mexapixels).


The article goes on to say that Google will be mapping the universe as they now map the Earth. The downside is that it isn't scheduled for completion until 2014.

I may even still be around.

Via KurzweilAI

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. A couple of System Engineers noted that bees and servers had similar barriers to efficiency.


I wonder if bees would recognize a DOS attack?

This is rather cool not to mention a boon for travelers.

 
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds many technologies in their quest for new military might. One being this race by autonomous vehicles (no human control). The Department of Defense wants military supply vehicles which one day will drive themselves.

The DARPA third-annual "Urban Challenge" was held sunday at a ghost town in California. The vehicles traveled autonomously through traffic for six hours and 60 miles. An autonomous car or truck as defined by DARPA is: any vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned.

This autonomous driving is by no means perfect yet but the progress so far is quite impressive. In spite of the vehicles having been well instrumented and programmed, the off-road part of the course can be perilous There is no lane or shoulder markings to verify that the vehicle on the road as the clip below shows. Still while traveling at a slow pace this SUV called "The Boss" makes it through without incident.

In the Dirt


The NQE testing on these autonomous vehicles include: Ability to handle situations at four-way stops by determining which vehicles at the intersection have precedence and then taking its turn. Ability handle cross traffic and oncoming traffic and to make safe left turns across moving traffic. Find gaps and choose opportunities to enter and cross traffic.

More information about this years winner, "The Boss," and several clips at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

 
With the US and NASA concentrating on Mars and moons of other planets, I thought interest in the moon was waning.

Apparently not.


Via Kurzweil.AI