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There has been much recent talk about a possible robot apocalypse. One person who is highly skeptical about this possibility is philosopher John Searle. In a 2014 essay, he argues that "the prospect of superintelligent computers rising up and killing us, all by themselves, is not a real danger".

The post Does the ‘Chinese room’ argument preclude a robot uprising? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Can a robot be conscious? I will try to discuss this without getting bogged down in the rather thorny issue of what consciousness –– really is. Instead, let me first address whether robot consciousness is an important topic to think about. At first sight, it may seem unimportant. Robots will affect us only through their outward behavior, which may be more or less along the lines of what we tend to think of as coming along with consciousness, but given this behavior, its consequences to us are not affected by whether or not it really is accompanied by consciousness.

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There is a widely held conception that progress in science and technology is our salvation, and the more of it, the better. This is the default assumption not only among the general public, but also in the research community including university administration and research funding agencies, all the way up to government ministries. I believe the assumption to be wrong, and very dangerous.

The post Let us not run blindfolded into the minefield of future technologies appeared first on OUPblog.

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From mechanical turks to science fiction novels, our mobile phones to The Terminator, we’ve long been fascinated by machine intelligence and its potential — both good and bad. We spoke to philosopher Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, about a number of pressing questions surrounding artificial intelligence and its potential impact on society.

Are we living with artificial intelligence today?

Mostly we have only specialized AIs – AIs that can play chess, or rank search engine results, or transcribe speech, or do logistics and inventory management, for example. Many of these systems achieve super-human performance on narrowly defined tasks, but they lack general intelligence.

There are also experimental systems that have fully general intelligence and learning ability, but they are so extremely slow and inefficient that they are useless for any practical purpose.

AI researchers sometimes complain that as soon as something actually works, it ceases to be called ‘AI’. Some of the techniques used in routine software and robotics applications were once exciting frontiers in artificial intelligence research.

What risk would the rise of a superintelligence pose?

It would pose existential risks – that is to say, it could threaten human extinction and the destruction of our long-term potential to realize a cosmically valuable future.

Would a superintelligent artificial intelligence be evil?

Hopefully it will not be! But it turns out that most final goals an artificial agent might have would result in the destruction of humanity and almost everything we value, if the agent were capable enough to fully achieve those goals. It’s not that most of these goals are evil in themselves, but that they would entail sub-goals that are incompatible with human survival.

For example, consider a superintelligent agent that wanted to maximize the number of paperclips in existence, and that was powerful enough to get its way. It might then want to eliminate humans to prevent us from switching if off (since that would reduce the number of paperclips that are built). It might also want to use the atoms in our bodies to build more paperclips.

Most possible final goals, it seems, would have similar implications to this example. So a big part of the challenge ahead is to identify a final goal that would truly be beneficial for humanity, and then to figure out a way to build the first superintelligence so that it has such an exceptional final goal. How to do this is not yet known (though we do now know that several superficially plausible approaches would not work, which is at least a little bit of progress).

How long have we got before a machine becomes superintelligent?

Nobody knows. In an opinion survey we did of AI experts, we found a median view that there was a 50% probability of human-level machine intelligence being developed by mid-century. But there is a great deal of uncertainty around that – it could happen much sooner, or much later. Instead of thinking in terms of some particular year, we need to be thinking in terms of probability distributed across a wide range of possible arrival dates.

So would this be like Terminator?

There is what I call a “good-story bias” that limits what kind of scenarios can be explored in novels and movies: only ones that are entertaining. This set may not overlap much with the group of scenarios that are probable.

For example, in a story, there usually have to be humanlike protagonists, a few of which play a pivotal role, facing a series of increasingly difficult challenges, and the whole thing has to take enough time to allow interesting plot complications to unfold. Maybe there is a small team of humans, each with different skills, which has to overcome some interpersonal difficulties in order to collaborate to defeat an apparently invincible machine which nevertheless turns out to have one fatal flaw (probably related to some sort of emotional hang-up).

One kind of scenario that one would not see on the big screen is one in which nothing unusual happens until all of a sudden we are all dead and then the Earth is turned into a big computer that performs some esoteric computation for the next billion years. But something like that is far more likely than a platoon of square-jawed men fighting off a robot army with machine guns.

If machines became more powerful than humans, couldn’t we just end it by pulling the plug? Removing the batteries?

It is worth noting that even systems that have no independent will and no ability to plan can be hard for us to switch off. Where is the off-switch to the entire Internet?

A free-roaming superintelligent agent would presumably be able to anticipate that humans might attempt to switch it off and, if it didn’t want that to happen, take precautions to guard against that eventuality. By contrast to the plans that are made by AIs in Hollywood movies – which plans are actually thought up by humans and designed to maximize plot satisfaction – the plans created by a real superintelligence would very likely work. If the other Great Apes start to feel that we are encroaching on their territory, couldn’t they just bash our skulls in? Would they stand a much better chance if every human had a little off-switch at the back of our necks?

So should we stop building robots?

The concern that I focus on in the book has nothing in particular to do with robotics. It is not in the body that the danger lies, but in the mind that a future machine intelligence may possess. Where there is a superintelligent will, there can most likely be found a way. For instance, a superintelligence that initially lacks means to directly affect the physical world may be able to manipulate humans to do its bidding or to give it access to the means to develop its own technological infrastructure.

One might then ask whether we should stop building AIs? That question seems to me somewhat idle, since there is no prospect of us actually doing so. There are strong incentives to make incremental advances along many different pathways that eventually may contribute to machine intelligence – software engineering, neuroscience, statistics, hardware design, machine learning, and robotics – and these fields involve large numbers of people from all over the world.

To what extent have we already yielded control over our fate to technology?

The human species has never been in control of its destiny. Different groups of humans have been going about their business, pursuing their various and sometimes conflicting goals. The resulting trajectory of global technological and economic development has come about without much global coordination and long-term planning, and almost entirely without any concern for the ultimate fate of humanity.

Picture a school bus accelerating down a mountain road, full of quibbling and carousing kids. That is humanity. But if we look towards the front, we see that the driver’s seat is empty.

Featured image credit: Humanrobo. Photo by The Global Panorama, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

The post Nick Bostrom on artificial intelligence appeared first on OUPblog.

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Zynga is launching a stand-alone platform on Zynga.com (for fans that want to play its games outside of Facebook. The move isn’t a complete break from the social media giant, though — users will still buy in-game items using Facebook... Read the rest of this post

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My year so far widget it lies... I don't have fourteen short stories out with editors, I have nine. I'm going through a period of ripping apart every rejected story and composing something new and (hopefully) something better.

So far 'Name Carved on Empty Space' has survived the process and has crawled (postal sub) back out into the world, and now I am working on 'Kodak Dragons'... Only it isn't called that anymore.

KD was a straight science-fiction story with a cheery ending. What was I thinking? During the rewrite it's turned into something darker. Although still set in the near future, it's now a story about old photographs and souls and stalking and drugs and how we are no longer who we used to be.

Or at least that's the plan.

Current word count: 3008 words and counting

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This week First Book is sharing stories about science and engineering from some of our friends at Lockheed Martin. Today’s guest blogger is Sarah Brown, a systems engineer with Lockheed Martin in Syracuse, New York.

I was exposed to engineering from an early age because both my parents are software engineers. But I never really understood what an engineer did beyond sit at a computer.

My freshman year of high school, I joined the FIRST Robotics team at my high school because I thought robots sounded really cool. Little did I know I was about to go through an intense start-to-finish engineering design project. After six weeks of staying late after school sanding drive rods and coming in on weekends to debug our roller mechanism, we had a complete robot that could actually drive around and pick up soccer balls. At that moment, seeing our idea finally come to fruition, I knew I wanted to be an engineer when I grew up.

Now, nine years later, I’m a third-year ELDP working as a systems engineer on a ground-based radar program. While our design cycles are a little longer than the six weeks we had on the robotics team, I still love being an engineer. Every day brings with it a challenging new problem, whether it be designing a new algorithm, debugging a problem in the lab, or dealing with a requirements change from the customer.

I’m always amazed at the new and exciting applications we find for our technology. For example, here at MS2 in Syracuse we’ve applied the signal processing techniques we use to detect targets with radar and sonar to the Mine Communication System (MCS), which helps trapped miners communicate with the surface in case of emergency.

If you’re a student, what do you think of Sarah’s job? What do you like (or dislike) about studying science and math in school?

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By Dennis Baron

A computer at Carnegie Mellon University is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge, by soaking it all up and figuring it out in our heads.

People’s brains work better some days than others, and eventually we will all run out of steam, but the creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, want it to run forever, getting better every day in every way, until it becomes the largest repository imaginable of all that’s e’er been thought or writ.

Since the first “electronic brains” began to appear in the late 1940s, it has been the goal of computer engineers and the occasional mad scientist to fashion machines that think and learn like people do. Or at least machines that perform functions analogous to some aspects of human thought, and which also self-correct by analyzing their mistakes and doing better next time around.

Setting out to create an infinite and immortal database is a big task: there’s a lot for NELL to learn in cyberspace, and a whole lot more that has yet to be digitized. But since NELL was activated a few months ago it has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74% which, to put it in terms that any Carnegie Mellon undergraduate can understand, is a C. In contrast, I have no idea how to count what I’ve learned since my own brain went on line, and no idea how many of the things that I know are actually correct, which suggests that all I’ve got on my cerebral transcript is an Incomplete.

NELL’s programmers seeded it with some facts and relations so that it had something to start with, then set it loose on the internet to look for more. NELL sorts what it finds into categories like mountains, scientists, writers, reptiles, universities, web sites, or sports teams, and relations like “teamPlaysSport, bookWriter, companyProducesProduct.”

NELL also judges the facts it finds, promoting some of them to the higher category of “beliefs” if they come from a single trusted source, or if they come from multiple sources that are less reliable. According to the researchers, “More than half of the beliefs were promoted based on evidence from multiple [i.e., less reliable] sources,” making NELL more of a rumor mill than a trusted source. And once NELL promotes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief: “In our current implementation, once a candidate fact is promoted as a belief, it is never demoted,” a process that sounds more like religion than science.

Sometimes NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labeled “right posterior” as a body part. NELL proved smart enough to call ketchup a condiment, not a vegetable, a mislabeling that we owe to the “great communicator,” Ronald Regan. But its human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is. Alex Trebek would be happy to know that, unlike Sean Connery, NELL has no trouble classifying therapists as a “profession,” but the computer trips up on the rapists, which it thinks could possibly be “awardtrophytournament” (confidence level, 50%).

NELL knows that cookies are a “baked good,” but that caused the computer to assume that persistent cookies and internet cookies are also baked goods. But that’s not surprising, since it still hasn’t learned what metaphors are—NELL is only 87.5% confident that metaphors are “tools” (plus, according to NELL, there’s a 50-50 chance that metaphors are actually “book writers”).

Told by its programmers that Risk is a board game, NELL predicts w

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By Bram Vermeer

Science can create a better world. We are no playthings in the Earth’s fate. Here are my personal top 10 breakthroughs that are badly needed to ensure our future.

1. Smart irrigation

When farmers irrigate their land, they usually water it 100 percent of the time. But isn’t it silly for farmers to ignore the rain? Often they have no alternative, as reliable rain forecasts are not available. Ethiopia, for example, has only a dozen weather stations that report online. But nowadays many farmers own a cell phone. Google.org came up with a simple, yet brilliant idea: let farmers text their own weather observations to a central computer. That will allow experts to make a forecast and text an irrigation advice to the farmers. This is only the beginning for how information technology can revolutionize farming.

2. New energy from the earth

This century we will probably say goodbye to oil. I have great hopes for deep geothermal energy, but it doesn’t feature in many energy scenarios. Planners usually base their ideas on existing technologies. A breakthrough may make it possible to tap the heath of the Earth. If we can really learn how to drill 5 to 10 kilometers through hard rock, we can make many artificial geysers. That would make large amounts of energy available within the next 20 years. A few trials are already underway. If they succeed, we’ll have to completely revise our energy future.

3. Solar cells printed on rollers

For solar energy to provide 5 percent of the world’s energy needs, we would need to cover a surface as large as California with solar cells. We have no way of doing that with current solar cell technology, except if we start using plastic or other thin materials that can be processed on rollers. That means you can use printing techniques, which allow for faster production. Plastic solar cells have progressed over the past decade from a scientific curiosity to a promising breakthrough technology. But we need to improve their lifespan and efficiency.

4. A factory in a shoebox

Size matters. Modern electronics makes it perfectly viable to minimize the size of a chemical plant without sacrificing efficiency. So why not reverse the trend of sizing up installations and start shrinking the equipment? You can miniaturize all the vessels, pipes, and distillation columns that make up a chemical plant—down to the size of a shoebox. The local supermarket could produce your washing powder. No logistics required.

5. Personal genetic profile

Long before 2030, all parents in the US will probably be able to afford to have their baby’s DNA sequenced. Knowing the details of the DNA will make it easier to predict the effects of pharmaceuticals. And it will generate a mass of significant data for scientific research, which will further accelerate progress. Probably we’ll learn that nurture may compensate for our genetic nature. When DNA tells us where our weaknesses lie, we’ll probably start training to improve on that. Learning from DNA will make us less dependent on our genetic fate.

6. Fertilizer factories in Africa

Africa currently imports most of its fertilizers. So why not produce them locally? This would reduce the hassle of transportation on bad roads and connecting to international markets. It would bring the benefits of the Green Revolution to rural communities. Technically, we ‘would have to scale down the chemical installations to meet the local requirements, but new developments in chemistry will make that possible.

7. Antidote for the real pandemic

Not much happened in the 2009 pandemic. But we learned that 85 percent of the world’s population has little

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Hello, I am Dr. Ray Johnson, the Chief Technology Officer for the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

I have a great job that allows me and the 70,000 Lockheed Martin scientists and engineers to explore and discover the wonders of science. We engineer solutions and use new technologies to protect people and improve their lives, and we constantly look for new and exciting ways to be innovative.

Technical careers rely on an educational foundation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). My colleagues and I also rely on these technical disciplines. We are deeply concerned about the shortage of scientists and engineers here in the U.S. and about the need to reinvigorate future generations to pursue technical careers. We recognize the importance of these areas of study, and through our company’s support, we are involved in a number of initiatives to encourage students to get involved in STEM-related activities.

One initiative Lockheed Martin supports, and that I am greatly excited about, is the upcoming USA Science and Engineering Festival that will be held in Washington, D.C. from October 10-24, 2010. As the Festival Host, we hope to have a million people participate; the best part—it’s free. The event culminates with a two-day Science Expo on the National Mall featuring more than 1,000 exhibits spanning an incredible array of technical fields: aerospace, green energy, medicine, biotechnology, climatology, robotics, nanotechnology, and so many more.

The Festival will be an incredible experience for any student. We hope to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to invest in their future and America’s future by studying science, technology, engineering, and math at their schools.

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Joan Frye Williams and I did 2-1/2 hours on the changes in the library world this morning at the Buena Vista Branch of the Burbank Public Library. We had some terrific discussion, especially when a trustee from one of the area public libraries challenged us about dumbing down libraries.

After Joan and I wrapped up, six local librarians talked about some initiatives their institutions were taking.

Erin Pawlus of the Burbank Public Library talked about the very entertaining blog she and some of her colleagues have done. She also included some principles her team put together for what and why they would blog.

Terri Maguire from the County of Los Angeles Public Library discussed a consultancy Paco Underhill (author of Why We Buy and The Call of the Mall) is doing for the library. Watch for the results of this work to be published: it could be incendiary. One key finding: only 9% of library users ever use the OPAC there.

David Campbell from Palos Verde Library District talked about a staff training opportunity the library had launched. Everyone who completes the training gets an MP3 player and is entered into a drawing for a digital camera, an iPod or a Wii. The training consists of 10 exercises, including starting a blog, posting a photo album to Flickr, and create an RSS feed.

Nanette Schneir of the Santa Monica Public Library demonstrated the Vocera communication system her library uses. It is extremely cool---it allows staff to range throughout the building while still being able to handle reference calls or back up the desk.

Karen Schatz described the new Help Desk that replaced the old reference desk at the Oxnard Public Library. It's staffed by trained (but not-MLS) employees, it's placed in a very visible, highly strategic location, and it allows the reference librarians to provide more quality and quantity time with customers who really need help.

Finally, Danis Kreimeier and John Legree (whom Danis referred to as her library's "IT Bad Boy") talked about some of the outstanding innovations they have added to the Yorba Linda Public Library web site. The "Book Feed" is includes a constantly updated list of the books that have been returned to the library, the list of the Top 10 requested items in the collection, and a real time list of materials on order, for example. They also have a section where teens can review books, and a dynamic reader's advisory system.

So I learned a heck of a lot more than I taught today. A fine finish to my too brief visit to Southern California. (Photos of San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point coming as soon as I can dump my photos to the album.)

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