MetaFilter posts tagged with ai and science

"How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?"

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:46:05 -0800

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. From the NYT: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.

a pink sliver of rat brain sat in a beaker

kliuless — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:21:07 -0800

The simulated brain - "The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years... Dr. Markram began by collecting detailed information about the rat's NCC, down to the level of genes, proteins, molecules and the electrical signals that connect one neuron to another. These complex relationships were then turned into millions of equations, written in software. He then recorded real-world data -- the strength and path of each electrical signal -- directly from rat brains to test the accuracy of the software." Is it possible to digitally simulate a brain accurately? Can it only be analog? And are there quantum effects to be considered? (previously 1 2 3 4) + some other AI/brain robot projects:

Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram's approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions... Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets. The Chinese government has provided about $1.5 million to a team at Xiamen University to create artificial-brain robots with microcircuits that evolve, learn and adapt to real-world situations. Similarly, Jeff Krichmar and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, Calif., have built an artificial-brain robot that learns to sharpen its visual perception when moving around in a lab environment, another form of emergent behavior, a form of spontaneous self-organization. And researchers at Sensopac, a project backed by a grant of €6.7 million ($9.3 million) from the European Union, have built part of an artificial mouse brain.

BONUS MEMRISTORS - Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence - New Memristor Makes Low-Cost, High-Density Memory - Spintronic Memristors - The Mysterious Memristor - Understanding Memristors - "in which the memristor would be used as an analog device"*

Deep Geek: Understanding Memristors

NortonDC — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:54:57 -0800

The coming memristor revolution in electronics and how it works. The newly created memristor, only the fourth fundamental fundamental type of passive circuit element, has the promise of computing advances both prosaic (faster, cheaper and "bigger" flash drives) and momentous (relatively effortless mimicry of brain cells and their activity). This is the story of the memristor's genesis, told by R. Stanley Williams, the leader of the team that created the device. Being deeply geeky myself, I've read about memristors before, but reading this article and sidebar finally let me understand how the memristor works and what happens inside it. And that felt pretty damn good. The article is fantastic, but it does leave one key connection unmade. To create a practical memristor, the team "needed [a] mechanism by which we could change the effective spacing between two wires in our crossbar by 0.3 nm. If we could do that, we would have the 1000:1 [variation in conductivity] we needed... Where would we find a material that could change its physical dimensions like that?" They did create a way to vary that spacing, in a controllable, repeatable, and extremely fast-acting manner, but Williams doesn't directly explain how the internal actions of the switching layer meet that requirement. The payoff for that setup is missing. When electrical current pushes the conductive impurities in the layer of titanium dioxide toward the other wire, the conductive portion of the layer grows toward the other wire, and the insulating portion of the layer thins. That thinning is described, but the article never tells the reader that expansion of the conductive layer is that long-sought means of moving the wires. If you read the article and made that connection before I described it, then you might have felt as smug about it as I did. Williams gets to feel more smug.

Blue Brain

homunculus — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:42:02 -0800

Out of the Blue: "Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?"

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years

MetaMonkey — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:24:03 -0800

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?

The Simulacrisation of Technology into Life

0bvious — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:09:26 -0800

As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process? Technologically engineered life is here to stay. Its not far fetched to speculate that simulacra may become all there is.

I'm blue, da boo dee, da boo die...

reflection — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 17:51:05 -0800

Blue Gene bears Blue Brain beats Deep Blue. Dr. Henry Markram answers questions in the FAQ. Neurons are beautiful. Blue Gene/L is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. IBM Research rocks. Deep Blue beat Kasparov almost a decade ago. F e e l i n g B l u e ?

The concept of the Transhuman: human, the self, consciousness and their effects on the law

0bvious — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:43:01 -0800

The first Transhuman Conference On the Law of Transhuman Persons: Whether or not you believe humans are set to evolve into gods, or AI is destined to achieve self-awareness the idea of the Transhuman is a thought provoking concept. Philosophers have debated the nature of the self, of the human for millennia. Is it time to start drafting new laws to govern all possible sentient beings on this planet? or is it all just a science of fiction? a comfortable humanist illusion?