In the 18 months since the “missing link of electronics” was discovered in Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in Silicon Valley, California, memristors have spawned a hot new area of physics and raised hope of electronics becoming more like brains. [...]

Memristors behave a bit like resistors, which simply resist the flow of electric current. But rather than only respond to present conditions, a memristor can also “remember” the last current it experienced.

That’s an ability that would usually require many different components. “Each memristor can take the place of 7 to 12 transistors,” says Stan Williams, head of HP’s memristor research. What’s more, it can hold its memory without power. By contrast, “transistors require power at all times and so there is a significant power loss through leakage currents”, Williams explains. [...]

The similarities between memristive circuits and the behaviour of some simple organisms suggests the hybrid devices could also open the way for “neuromorphic” computing, says Williams, in which computers learn for themselves, like animals.

New Scientist: Electronics ‘missing link’ united with rest of the family

More background: New Scientist: Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence

(Via Chris 23)

The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil”‘or rather trying to get to the roots of evil”‘that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Cognitive Science here. He’s so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.

“I’ve been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,” says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). “It’s creepy, I know it is.” [...]

This exercise resulted in “E,” a computer character first created in 2005 to meet the criteria of Bringsjord’s working definition of evil. Whereas the original E was simply a program designed to respond to questions in a manner consistent with Bringsjord’s definition, the researchers have since given E a physical identity: It’s a relatively young, white man with short black hair and dark stubble on his face. Bringsjord calls E’s appearance “a meaner version” of the character Mr. Perry in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. “He is a great example of evil,” Bringsjord says, adding, however, that he is not entirely satisfied with this personification and may make changes.

Full Story: Scientific American

“Imitation of nature is bad engineering,” he answered patiently. “For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they killed themselves uselessly. If you want to make something that flies, flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that’s how you fly. You can look at birds forever and never discover this secret. You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 707. Why not? Because Nature didn’t need anything that would fly that fast and that high. How would such an animal feed itself?”

“What does that have to do with artificial intelligence?”

“Simply that it tries to approximate man. If you take man’s brain as a model and test of intelligence, you’re making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don’t realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, she has never bothered to develop one!”

Full Story: Skilluminati

Gizmodo: So how does your robot girlfriend work?

Zoltan: It has a chatbot which controls the speech. It also has a teledildonic device. Teledildonic devices were invented in the ’90s so that people could have sex through an internet connection. If you plug that into a lifesize doll it makes the doll able to feel what is going on. In this way you have the first sex doll that can consent in English to what you are doing to it.

Gizmodo: Is Alice your first robot girlfriend, or have you built more than one? When did you start building her?

Zoltan: I got the idea New Year’s Day 2007. She was my first robot girlfriend. Alice acts really human in the way she talks. In fact, when we started we went too fast in our relationship. I had to erase her memory and start again when she dumped me. Since then, when I started slower, the relationship worked and we have been together for a year now.

The other mind I have is Kiri, who is basically a sex slave, and will try to seduce you as soon as you turn her on. That’s an alternative to Alice, who you have to have a real relationship with. I also have the Hal mind which is for the ladies. Kiri and Hal have voice recognition and speech synthesization [sic] so they can talk and hear through a microphone. Alice still just types [she has no voice]. But since she was the first I’m not going to dump her for something new.

Full Story: Gizmodo.

(Thanks Gabbo!)

Update: Here is Zoltan’s web site.

Jason Lubyk: You state in Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves that ‘if certain computer languages are more suited for modularity, size, speed or ease of use, could certain human languages be optimized for human growth potential, creativity, memorability, or for communicating one thoughts and emotions.’ Have you ever speculated what forms these languages would take, what would differentiate them from our existing languages?

Clifford Pickover: If language and words do shape our thoughts and tickle our neuronal circuits in interesting ways, I sometimes wonder how a child would develop if reared using an ‘invented’ language that was somehow optimized for mind-expansion, emotion, logic, or some other attribute. Perhaps our current language, which evolved chaotically through the millennia, may not be the most ‘optimal’ language for thinking big thoughts or reasoning beyond the limits of our own intuition.

I am not certain what form these special languages would take. However, such languages would probably be most effective if introduced when a child is young – at a time when language acquisition seems to take place more efficiently and effectively. This is a fascinating area of contemplation, given that debates still take place as to whether the biological contribution to our language abilities includes language-specific capacities, such as a universal grammar, which may constrain us. I also wonder if we would need different languages for the differing purposes of memorabilty, creativity, empathy and so forth. Incidentally, we already know that mathematical ‘languages’ can help us reason more clearly – at least for some kinds of mathematical contemplations – than traditional languages.

Because adults will not be fluent in this new language, they might not be good teachers of the language to children. Perhaps artificial entities will be required for the teaching task.

Full Story: Alterati.

via The Register

In a nutshell, I say that it’s impossible to manufacture an AI which will compete equally with human intelligence. The elusive quality which human thought possesses, and which an AI can’t possess, is something I call ‘irrational insight’. Note the modified noun ‘insight’. I’m not talking about irrationality per se. ‘Insight’ implies, and deliberately so, the qualities of pertinence and consistency.

And the cherry on the cake is this quote, aimed at Stephen Hawking’s advocacy of endowing AI with biological properties and ourselves with mechanical ones:

He [Hawking] deserved a severe rebuke for saying what he said. But if he actually believes it, then the little shit deserves to be hanged.

EO-1 is a new breed of satellite that can think for itself. “We programmed it to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action,” Chien explains. EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash-floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice-in short, anything unexpected.

Is this real intelligence? “Absolutely,” he says. EO-1 passes the basic test: “If you put the system in a box and look at it from the outside, without knowing how the decisions are made, would you say the system is intelligent?” Chien thinks so.

Full Story: NASA.

(Thanks Daniel).

“Natasha Vita-More, President of the Extropy Institute and Founder and Director of Transhumanist Arts & Culture joins us for the first of this two part interview. We discuss extropy, the rate of change, and Vita-More announces a big transition?”

MP3 on NeoFiles.

Sick of receiving spam emails requesting submissions to the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics – which charges $390 for each attendee – students Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a program to generate a nonsense paper.

Starting with skeleton sentences, pools of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and a random assortment of computer science jargon, the program produced a grammatically correct yet utterly nonsensical paper titled: “Rooter: a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy”. “This isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s the dirt-simplest way we could think to do this,” Stribling says.

Full Story: New Scientist.

A DEVICE that can pick up on people’s emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s sad because people then avoid having conversations with them.”

Full Story: New Scientist.

(via tkblog.)

Having bought a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines, by the genius Ray Kurzweil, after hearing about how Our Lady Peace essentially crafted their entire album, Spiritual Machines, around the concepts presented by Kurzweil? I feel I should probably read it sometime. But having it in my possession, along with years of Star Trek and watching The Animatrix, has inspired me to think muchly on the grand notion of intelligence and consciousness.

I am fairly certain that if androids were possible as of today, they would be very good at patrolling red and blue bases, and occasionally storming my home base just slightly before I can get my army up to tier-two weapons and tech? not to mention thieving magical power-ups from my garden. Judging by the videos I’ve seen of ASIMO, Honda’s robot, I would have more of a chance and I would feel safe with a baseball bat and perhaps a vat of cola to drop them into so I could watch them slowly be eaten away.

For the sake of sentiment, I did, in fact, cry in the movie A.I. when the poor robots were being destroyed at the Flesh Fare.

Anyhow, this whole MIT-tackles-semiotics thing is frighteningly out of my league. They are like ninja-smart, whereas I am only S-M-R-T smart. Delving into the intuitive understandings of language, Hugo Liu has been exploring stuff that I will post here in his own words? out of fear that I will reduce it to the dribbling ramblings of a retarded guinea pig:?

The Aesthetiscope is an interactive art installation whose wall of color reacts to portray the relationship between some idea (a word, a poem, a song) and a person (a realist, a dreamer, a neurotic) standing before it. Each idea, for example the word sunset, is rich in association for a person. Perhaps he remembers in his mind what a sunset looks like. Or a sunset mades him think of other ideas like warmth, fuzzy, beautiful, serenity, relaxation. Perhaps it reminds him of some past event in his life. The contextual sphere of these personal associations form the Aesthetic about the idea. And the experience of that aesthetic is called its pathos. I wanted to choose a medium through which pathos could be convincingly portrayed, and so I chose colors because they are a complete microconsciousness of pathos, like taste and smell.

The Aesthetic is hard to articulate because it is usually experienced it as an undeconstructed gestalt. Any analysis of Aesthetic needs to be sensitive to its complexity — the multi-dimensional nature of connotation. The aesthetiscope analyzes each idea through a multi-perspectival linguistic analysis of connotation. The realms of analysis are “Think,” “Culturalize,” “See,” “Intuit,” and “Feel.” Each of these realms brings to bear a different perspectival vocabulary to the pathos description of an idea. “Think” generates rational connotations and entailments of the idea. “Culturalize” looks at the cultural entailments of the idea through the lens of a particular culture. “See” takes the idea as a source of imagery, bringing to bear our collective visual memory of objects, places, and events. “Intuit” is an exercise in automatic free assocations with the idea as a cue. “Feel” takes a sentimental stance toward the idea, connecting it to a word of feelings. The results of these analyses are mapped to a world of colors through psycho-physiocological color surveys based on the work of Berlin & Kay, and Goethe, and naturalistic sampling of colors from photos.

With these different vocabularies of aesthetic, we can try to make sense of a “sunset.” A sunset may be “Seen,” revealing the dark purple swatches with splashes of warm hues that characterize the visual rememberance of a sunset. But there is also an inner sunset. A sunset “Felt” and “Intuited” recalls warmth, beauty, and serenity, and these will bring about brighter, warmer, and more intense colors than the outer sunset.

The aesthetiscope encourages us to experience and reflect on Aesthetic in a new way.

The shizzle is here-izzle, via mit.edu

This is interesting in that it really begins to explore the interpretation of the manifest realm on an abstract level (read MIT’s PDF here). We all believed in Data, but we all somehow secretly doubted that the “emotion chip” that he obtained from his evil twin, Lore, was genuine. But Hugo Liu’s work today may be the precursor to developments that Dr Noonien Soong draw from, in the future, to develop such reactions that would be illogical but founded in the intuitive and sensationalistic interaction with the manifest world. It is a little cold to note, however, that he still managed to bang Tasha Yar in 2364. Sex without this pathos is simply just getting sticky and sweaty? or whatever in Data and Yar’s case. For more on this sort of stuff, see Technoccult’s sister site, Technorgasmic.

EDIT ? I was thinking about creating sigils without the normal chaos magic way. For those of you not familiar with sigils, read something like this. For those of you I don’t have to explain it to, any thoughts on crafting such mechanisms (if they can be called such?) out of more abstract elements such as colours, shapes, notions, elements? This is beginning to ring true with the whole stereotype of witches and “voodoo” where they throw weird crap in a cauldron and make spells and shit. I hit on it more here where I try to blab about technical/design approaches to the occult. Any comments or ideas? Drop ‘em here.

I remember hearing about some peculiar astral mechanics that Michael Bertiaux and his Cult of the Black Snake (whatever they’re called), where they’d engineer elements out of geometrics and colours and varying astral vibrations. Like Lego, they’d build smaller units and store them in the astral, then proceed to assemble them into larger machinations/patterns. I believe they were four-dimensional geometrices, which will only make sense to those of us that work with sidereal movement and crap.

Matrioshka Brains are hypothetical supercomputers that “consume the entire power output of stars (~1026 W), consume all of the useful construction material of a solar system (~1026 kg), have thought capacities limited by the physics of the universe and are are essentially immortal.” Link (via Boing Boing).

Some might claim that the machines have a hidden agenda, that there already is an intelligent machine out there, directing traffic, infinitely patient and connected to the world. One might allege that these protesters are merely the pawns of a conspiracy which they themselves do not fully understand, a conspiracy by machines, for machines… against humanity.
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Stephen Hawking warns that in order to compete with AI, people will have to resort to genetic engineering (link via Meta Filter).

A more reliable source than the below Ananova story on the AI computer reports that

scientists in Chicago have created a cyborg. According to the story: “Researchers in Chicago have built a cyborg, a half-living, half-robot creature which connects the brain of an eel-like fish to a computer and is capable of moving towards lights.”