superconcepts

Are you ready? If you thought the Social Media fueled era of narcissism, fake news, and attention economy was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. When it first came out, we had high hopes for Social Media and its ability to democratise thought. In many ways, it has delivered - but in the end, the nefarious forces who run the world bastardised it for their own advantage. Now, social media is a negative force, fueling addiction, abuse, and manipulation. We could rid the world of Social Media today and we would be no worse off. AI has finally, after many false starts, made its splash into the world - yet this is only the beginning. As with Social Media and the Web before it, we have no idea of the potential that it could unleash, though we all know it’s going to be big, and it’s going to change all our lives. So why do I automatically assume it’s going to be a negative force? Is it because I’m scarred by the impacts of Social Media and the Web? Well, they have certainly shown me how human...

Every day seems to see new reports about incredible robots being developed. Robots that carry stuff for soldiers, robots that perform surgery, and robots that play football. It's all very exciting, but what we really need are robots to make our lives easier. To give us more time to do what we want. To do the mundane jobs and free us up to take on more creative work that robots can't do. But how do we go about this? How do we bring robots and automation into our everyday lives, unless robot intelligence is significantly improved? Well, while this intelligence is improving at a rapidly accelerating pace, there is a huge potential for solving problems using simple, task repeating, programmable robotics. The key is to standardize everything . We have to "put it on rails". As an example, let's look at making an automated dish washing system. We have dishwashers, but we still need to load and unload them. We need to develop 2 things. Firstly, we need a robot tha...

Kurzweil and his proponents seem to be unshakable in their belief that at some point, Advanced Artificial General Intelligence, Machine Sentience, or Human Built Consciousness, whatever you would like to call it,  will happen. Much of this belief comes from the opinion that consciousness is an engineering problem, and that it will, at some point, regardless of its complexity, be developed. In this post, I don't really want to discuss whether or not consciousness can be understood, this is something for another time. What we need to be aware of is the possibility of our endeavours to create Artificial Intelligence stalling. Whatever happened to...Unified Field Theory? It seems sometimes, the more we learn about something, the more cans of worms we open, and the harder the subject becomes. Sometimes factors present themselves that we would not have expected to be relevant to our understanding. Despite nearly a century of research and theorizing, UFT remains an open line of...

One of the main challenges in creating a greater-than-human Artificial Intelligence is ensuring that it's not evil. When we "turn it on", we don't want it to wipe out us out or enslave us. Ideally, we want it to be nice. The problem is how we can guarantee this. Trap it Some have suggested limiting the Artificial Intelligence by "trapping it" in a virtual world, where it could do no damage outside the confines of this environment. While this might be a safe solution it could limit the AI to only function within the limits and reality of the virtual world. Ok, so we might be able to program a perfectly realistic and isolated virtual world, but would this happen? Is there a parallel project to create such a "virtual prison" alongside AI research? And what if AI was to evolve or emerge from existing systems (such as the internet or a selection of systems within it) before we could develop such a prison? Then of course there is the possibility o...

The first decade of the 21st century could well see the rise of the affordable and useful domestic mobile robot. The Open Automaton Project aims to provide some of the building blocks that could make this possible. The purpose of the project is to engineer modular software and electronic components, from which it is possible to assemble an intelligent PC-based mobile robot suitable for home or office environments. http://oap.sourceforge.net/