Category: Technology

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Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine

I have always been fascinated with the study of Artificial Intelligence.  I began my interest as many computer science majors by simulating intelligence through maze solving LISP automated mice.  These are brute force methods that appear to be intelligent by recursively exploring every possible solution.  This is not intelligence.  It is merely programmatic problem solving.

What is Artificial Intelligence?  How do we copy the creation that is the human mind and intellect, and impress that upon silicon and wires?  Is it even possible? 

Book

Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine
by J. Storrs Hall

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now advancing at such a rapid clip that it has the potential to transform our world in ways both exciting and disturbing. Computers have already been designed that are capable of driving cars, playing soccer, and finding and organizing information on the Web in ways that no human could. With each new gain in processing power, will scientists soon be able to create supercomputers that can read a newspaper with understanding, or write a news story, or create novels, or even formulate laws? And if machine intelligence advances beyond human intelligence, will we need to start talking about a computer’s intentions?

This book contemplates several interesting topics related to artificial intelligence, including the consequences of actually creating a systems that is intelligent.  A lot of what is intelligence appears to be search and pattern matching.  It seems that we build complex associations that help us grapple with our environment and interact with others in an intelligent fashion. 

What is intelligence?  I believe that we will continue to see progress in developing artificial minds.  Predictive expert systems already provide a sense of “smarts” but they are not creating anything new.  Attempts to build systems that take inputs, learn and even postulate solutions (as in mathematical proofs) have been limited in their success.  It seems that these intelligent systems hit a “glass ceiling” beyond which they are unable to produce anything new.  

Tools, Programs and Links

SHRDLU is a program for understanding natural language, written by Terry Winograd at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1968-70. – http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

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Bob Iger on Disney Technology

Bob Iger, CEO of TWDC, talks about the emphasis of Disney on online technologies…

Transcript:

We’re not really embracing technology, we’re embracing consumers. Consumers are using technology in order for us to be relevant to them. We have to keep the consumer in mind and use technology to make the product either more valuable or more accessible or just better.

On the social networking side, it’s an experience online that you’re either entertaining yourself with others or participating in social networking experiences. Social networking is not just among Gen X and Gen Y, but even younger people. We saw a company called Club Penguin that was doing it quite well. It’s an online gaming world that you can do with others, and you can use your success or lack thereof in games to acquire currency and create a better life for yourself.

We bought Club Penguin and are using the creative team and technology to build other online virtual worlds and social networking experiences for other Disney franchises. We have a coterie of rich franchises, and people want to engage with or as part of them. This will allow them to be immersed even more in their franchise world.

We’re doing it with Pirates Online, and we’re going to do it with the new franchise we’re developing called Fairies. We’re also doing it with Princesses, and you can see that happening with a number of other Disney properties. We’re embracing the consumer and using technology to do so.

This is a little laboratory of a business for us. It’s a billion-dollar business that generates digital revenue at the company. It’s not just domestically but globally, we’re rolling out versions of Disney Calm in the UK, Japan, China, Australia, and France. This will not only grow revenue but also grow the brand in the association.

In three years, the 1 billion-dollar business will be much bigger. It will create a fair amount of growth for us, and some of that will be cannibalistic of current business, but a lot of it will be incremental. We’re going to reach more people in more ways, and as people spend more time engaging with entertainment on a global basis and more money, that’s a great thing for us.

Social media for us will continue to grow, but the business that will do online or digital equations will come in from many different revenue streams, such as subscription services, direct sale video on demand, micro payments, and advertising. We’ve spent a lot of time developing ways that we can enable advertisers to reach people with our product in new platforms.

Social media is not just about the 20-year-old or the 25-year-old or the 18-year-old going on Facebook or MySpace. It’s about kids using their computers and broadband-enabled computers for entertainment much more than the generations before them. We believe that the broadband-enabled computer will be a primary source of entertainment for kids in the years ahead.

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Nano Technology

What is the future of Nano Technology? 

In 1959, a scientist named Richard Feynman predicted the future of nanotechnology. He predicted what needed to be done and how it might be done, all before anyone had really seen an atom with a microscope. Feynman looked into the future and predicted how technology might make things smaller and smaller. He didn’t know the exact size of atoms, but he did know that computing machines are very large and fill rooms. He wondered if it was possible to make them very small, making them little wires, little elements. By little he meant little for instance the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter today the smallest parts inside a computer chip are about 100 nanometers. What’s a nanometer one billion of a meter that means if you laid 1 million of these computer parts side-by-side they would measure only one inch across. He wondered if in the future, these parts will be only a few atoms computers will be hundreds of times faster. He also considered the final question as to whether ultimately in the great future we can arrange the atoms the way we want. In 1989, Don Eichler and his colleagues at IBM did just that, they moved individual atoms to spell out IBM 40 years after Fineman predicted the future. Today, scientists are using nanotechnology and making things smaller and smaller.