The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.
“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”
Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.
This idea, called “ready-to-hand,” has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.
Wired Science: Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
(via Cole Tucker)
Open Sailing is… well, just look at a list of their projects and check out their site:
- Instinctive_Architecture : an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself.
- Energy_Animal : an independent module that generates energy from the waves, wind and sun, providing continuously off-grid energy and being a node for environment and data mesh networking.
- Nomadic_Ecosystem : engineering a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.
- Openet.org : forum to formulate a global standard for a purely civilian internet, an internet moderated by its users, not by the governments nor the industries nor the militaries.
- Life_Cable : a simpler unified standard for energy, water, waste, information in a complex built structure.
- Swarm_Operating_System : a customizable decision assisting software, using real-time data about global threats or personal interests.
- Ocean_Cookbook : making the experience at sea not of a survival quality but a truly yummy experience.
- Open_Politics : think tank about a possible internal organization for a new oceanic urban structure.
Open Sailing
(Thanks Nova)
A team led by Northwestern University chemistry professor Bartosz A. Grzybowski has shown that an acidic droplet can successfully navigate a complex maze.
“I personally find most exciting that such a simple system can exhibit apparently ‘intelligent’ behavior,” Louisiana State University chemistry professor John A. Pojman comments. “This approach may be useful as a pumping method for microfluidics or a way to convert chemical energy to mechanical motion in small devices. I am eager to see if they can generalize it to other types of gradients,” he says.
Chemical and Engineering News: Acidic Droplet Solves Maze
(via Fadereu)
A single-celled slime mould mindlessly foraging for food can create a network as efficient as the Tokyo rail system, researchers say.
A team of Japanese and British researchers say the behaviour of the amoeba-like mould could lead to better design of computer or communication networks.
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum grows to connect itself to food sources as part of its normal behaviour.
The mould “can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner,” wrote Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University and his colleagues in this week’s issue of Science.
The researchers noticed that the slime mould spreading to gather scattered food sources organizes itself into a gelatinous network that interconnects the sources and looks somewhat like a railway system.
CBC: Slime mould mimics Tokyo’s railway
(via Social Physicist)
Yeesh, how do you think public transit planners feel right about now? “A single celled slime mould could do a better job than you!”
See also: Conway’s Game of Life Generates City.
If robots are allowed to evolve through natural selection, they will develop adaptive abilities to hunt prey, cooperate, and even help one another, according to Swiss researchers.
In a series of experiments described in the journal PLoS Biology, Dario Floreano of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne reported that simple, small-wheeled Khepera and Alice robots can evolve behaviors such as collision-free movement and homing techniques in only several hundred “generations.”
The robots were controlled by a neural network that mutated randomly, with input information from the robots’ sensors. In an imitation of natural selection, the robots with the best maneuvering abilities were allowed to foster a new generation. Furthermore, selected robots were “paired” by having their neural net connections mixed and passed to a new generation.
CNET: Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting
The PLoS paper cited
(via Chris Arkenberg)
Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind – not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play was written by Shakespeare – some bits are incredibly Bard-like, but others don’t resemble his style at all. The verdict, according to one expert: the play is likely a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, another popular playwright of his time.
Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, came to his conclusion after using plagiarism-detection software – as well as his own expertise – to compare writing patterns between Edward III and Shakespeare’s body of work. Plagiarism software isn’t new; college professors have been using it to catch cheats for more than a decade. It is, however, growing increasingly sophisticated, enabling a scholar like Vickers to investigate the provenance of unattributed works of literature. With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare’s other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings. “With this method we see the way authors use and reuse the same phrases and metaphors, like chunks of fabric in a weave,” says Vickers. “If you have enough of them, you can identify one fabric as Scottish tweed and another as plain gray cloth.” (No insult intended to Kyd.)
Time: How Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play
(via Jorn Barger)
The software used, Pl@giarism, is free (as in beer, not open source).
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 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site.
Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker’s reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker’s U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.[1]
Fascinating. It’s named after The Turk:
The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk”, a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this ‘machine’ was not an automaton at all but was in fact a chess master hidden in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren’t suited for.
There’s also some criticism that Amazon Mechanical Turk constitutes a sort of virtual sweatshop.
Wikipedia: Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk page
See also: For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU
Two years since its demise, the spectre of Microsoft’s animated paperclip, Clippy, still haunts anyone hoping to develop a virtual assistant to help people get things done. Few have tried to push virtual assistants to the public since.
But Clippy’s unpopularity hasn’t deterred the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from spending an estimated $150 million on its own virtual helper.
And although intended to ease the US military’s bureaucratic load, an artificially intelligent helper based on the project is heading the way of consumers later this year.
Begun in 2003 the CALO, for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, project involved over 60 universities and research organisations and is the largest ever non-classified AI project. It ends this Friday and has produced a virtual assistant that can sort, prioritise, and summarise email; automatically schedule meetings; and prepare briefing notes before them.
New Scientist: Talking paperclip inspires less irksome virtual assistant
(via Matthew Godwin
Galactic Arms Race is a free computer game created by University of Central Florida’s Evolutionary Complexity Research Group. It appears to be a traditional sci-fi blaster game, with a twist: the various “power-up” weapons are created by the game, based on actual user behavior.
For example, the “Ultrawide” (above) “fires a wide pattern that is good for blocking incoming projectiles and is hard to evade.”
Galactic Arms Race
(via Chris 23)
No offense to anyone left off… these just happen to be the 5 that I find to be absolute “must reads” right now.
Brainsturbator – Of the sites on this list, this one is probably the one of most interest to readers of this site. The occult, mad science, fringe culture. Best of all, this is not a link blog, practically post is a substantive original article.
Election Central – Since Joshua Marshal seems to be mostly dedicated to posting links to other parts of his TPM Empire, the TPM site Election Central has emerged as my favorite progressive blog. Election Central tracks the minutia of not just the 2008 presidential election, but all US elections of note.
Hit and Run – Reason Magazine’s blog has perhaps the best coverage on the ‘net of the ever expanding police state and the erosion of civil liberties. You may have noticed that quite a lot of my links here come from Hit and Run.
OVO blog – a new blog, from Trevor Blake. Trevor’s been publishing the OVO zine for something like 2 decades, and has been blogging on American Samizdat for a few years as well. The OVO blog features extensive coverage of the damage done by religion, and the occasional old school fringe culture gem.
Robot Wisdom – Jorn Barger, the proprietor of Robot Wisdom, coined the word “web log” and his is the first, and possibly still best. Every time I visit I find something worth while. Jorn’s links run the gamut from celebrity gossip to artificial intelligence to James Joyce scholarship.
“In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.”
Podcasts from the Singularity Summit 2007
By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?
These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute’s chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.
Full Story: Reason Magazine.
Buy The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Buy Bailey’s Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution .
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.
Here are the results from the 2012 poll. Now that the synchronicity buzz has worn off, I’m less convinced anything out of the ordinary will happen in 2012. But it’s still fun to speculate.
What do you think will happen in 2012?
Nothing (25%)
All of the above (10%)
Catastrophic climate change (10%)
Alien/interdimensional/god contact (9%)
Other catastrophe (6%)
Quantum computing (5%)
Nuclear holocaust (5%)
Human cloning break through (5%)
Other scientific break through (5%)
Time travel (2%)
Teleportation (2%)
Apocalyptic disease outbreak or bioterrorism (2%)
True AI (2%)
Affordable consumer space travel (1%)
Telepathy drug (0%)
Brain back-ups (0%)
Catastrophic water shortage (0%)
Humans attain immortality (0%)
Matter Fax (0%)
134 total votes
Via a Key 23 post I’ve found an old article on Transhumanism by Sauceruney I forgot to read. Sauceruney connects the dots between AI, immortality, and your blogging and Amazon purchasing habits:
Immortality. It?s a key element in the periodic table of Transhumanism. The Internet can be seen as a limited means of reaching this goal, yet the alchemy required to turn it into virtual gold lies in the occulted regions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dumping your brain onto the Internet in textual form, you?re fashioning a crude personality construct. How accurate or tailored this online persona is to that which exists as flesh and bone, is up to you, the creator. Long after you?re dead and gone, if not sooner, your LiveJournal emoting, political screeds, MeFi and /. posts? even your drunken party pictures may lie dormant in a digital archive, awaiting the day it?s ultimately devoured by a growing AI that?s coming to grips with its own existence. The world?s leading governments and corporations may already have virtual personality constructs for some of you, awaiting the day when computers are inexpensive and powerful enough to model each and every person from birth to death, in an attempt to simulate reality in the achievement of elusive (inter)National Security objectives. In the charge to preserve the perceived systems of existence, our random and unpredictable humanity may be destroyed. This form of Transhumanism is an inevitable conclusion of sufficiently funded bureaucratic paranoia. It?s up to free-thinking individuals to ensure the system remains full of exploitable holes. What fun is immortality if you?re stuck in someone else?s idea of Heaven?
Link.
Read the rest of this entry »
And speaking of Dick, Slate reviews the past, present, and future of Philip K. Dick’s work in film. I’m bursting with anticipation for Minority Report; I actually like Tom Cruise, and I thought AI was Spielburg’s best film in years.
Link.
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
AI is now out. A link to the story it was based on has been circulating. Here’s a thoughtful review of the film from Flak Magazine. And on slightly related note, someone has posted the entire 80 issue run of the Transformers comics online (and some of the UK issues and mini-series as well).
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