“It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future,” says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, “create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event — such a singularity — are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”

“The Singularity” is seen by some as the end point of our current culture, when the ever-accelerating evolution of technology finally overtakes us and changes everything. It’s been represented as everything from the end of all life to the beginning of a utopian age, which you might recognize as the endgames of most other religious beliefs.

While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as people’s fantasies of the future, with a very obvious reason, most agree that artificial intelligence will be the turning point. Once an AI is even the tiniest bit smarter than us, it’ll be able to learn faster and we’ll simply never be able to keep up. This will render us utterly obsolete in evolutionary terms, or at least in evolutionary terms as presented by people who view academic intelligence as the only possible factor. Because that’s how people who imagine the future while talking online wish the world worked, ignoring things like “Hey, this is just a box” and “What does this power switch do?”

There’s no question that technology is progressing at an ever-accelerating rate – we’ve generated more world-changing breakthroughs in the last fifty years than the entirety of previous human history combined. The issue is the zealous fervor with which some see the Singularity as the end of all previous civilization, a “get out of all previous problems” card which ignores the most powerful factor in the world: human stupidity.

We’ve already invented things which would have been apocalyptic agents of the devil by any previous age. We can talk with anyone all around the world, and we use it to try to sell insurance. We tamed light itself in a coherent beam utterly unseen in nature, and use it to throw very sharp, very complicated rocks into other people’s heads. We built an insanely complex computer web spanning the planet, and use it to pretend to be Nigerian.

Of course we use it for good things as well but those who think the invention of artificial minds will end our idiocy are far overestimating their abilities. We turned production line processing, international economics, world-spanning transport and professional design tools into “Billy The Singing Sea Bass” statues at 19.99 retail. An AI would have to be Terminator Jesus to even begin to change our tune. If an AI ever does exist, it’s going to wonder why it’s being asked for new ways to try to sell Cialis without using the word “penis” or “Cialis”.

Pretty much every prediction of when the so-called “Singularity” will come depend on constant increases – ignoring how, for the first time ever, we are actually reaching the limits of what can actually be done. This isn’t the idiotic “the world is flat” limits that we sailed past (and back around again) once someone grew the balls to try it, these are actual factual “you can’t build it any smaller because atoms are only so big”. Of course we’re going to overcome those, because we’re awesome, but trying to timetable it is like writing a schedule for imagination.

So whatever you think the Singularity is, it’s going to happen. No question. Entire international panels have been set up to study the potentially lethal effects of certain advances, but no-one would dream of stopping research – and even if they did they couldn’t stop other people. But don’t be surprised when the main result of artificial intelligence research isn’t a utopian society or utterly authentic sex-bots, but the fact your spam filter doesn’t work anymore.

By Luke McKinney

http://www.techsectorweb.com/2009/09/timing-the-singularity.html

In the video below, Le Trung demonstrates Aiko’s internal operating system, which gives the robot many abilities, including the ability to speak two languages (English and Japanese), solve high school math problems, communicate the weather forecast, understand more than 13,000 sentences, sing songs, identify objects, focus on objects or people of importance, read newspapers and other materials, and mimic human physical touch.

As Le Trung explains, in some ways the BRAINS software is even more powerful than a human brain because it can link to infinite sources of data. Similar to a human brain, the software is designed to interact with the surrounding environment, process it, and record the information in its internal memory. Once the internal memory is at full capacity, the information can be transferred into a server database. The information can then be shared with current and future robots.

With the BRAINS software, Aiko (whose name means “beloved one”) has the potential for many applications. For example, in the home, Aiko could help elderly people by reminding them when to take their medicine and helping them read the newspaper. It could also help kids with their math homework. In work and public environments, the robot could be used at information desks, where it could give directions and inform people when and where events take place. Le Trung also suggests that, with Aiko’s ability to detect 250 faces per second, it could be useful in airports to quickly scan and filter faces, as well as answer questions regarding flight times and gate locations. In addition, Aiko’s sensitivity sensors and humanlike appearance offer the potential for its use as a companion robot.

“The most recent improvement with Aiko is the BRAINS software,” Le Trung said. “I have just finished re-architecting the BRAINS software to have triple threads, which will make the software run a bit smoother and process about 15% faster for 3D recognition. As a result, Aiko can distinguish the difference between a $20 Canadian bill and $20 American bill. Aiko also has new improved facial expressions with 21 recognition points. Aiko will know when you are angry, happy, etc. Finally, the BRAINS can now process newspaper reading much faster and more accurate.”

Le Trung, whose background is in microbiology and chemistry, was originally inspired to build Aiko after watching “Chobits,” a Japanese manga that explores the relationships between humans and personal computers. While he hopes to continue to improve Aiko’s software, he currently faces a hardware limitation, as the CPU is currently at 99% capacity. Le Trung hopes to raise funds to upgrade the CPU.

In the future, Le Trung hopes to enable Aiko to achieve further skills, such as making tea, coffee, and a breakfast of eggs and bacon; cleaning a human’s ears with a Q-tip; giving a neck massage; writing; and cleaning windows, shelves, and bathrooms. He also hopes that, one day, he will be able to mass produce sister copies of Aiko for an estimated cost of about $17,000 – $20,000.

“Future improvements include making the voice with more emotions and feelings when speaking, improving the silicone material on her face so that she can do facial expressions like humans, and redesigning the body and arm system to move more naturally and carry heavier things,” Le Trung said.

More information:

• www.projectaiko.com
• A Perfect Female Companion: Project Aiko

August 25, 2009 by Lisa Zyga

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.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are providing almost religious visions, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

By JOHN MARKOFF
Source: New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html?_r=1&hp

I.B.M. scientists previously devised a chess-playing program to run on a supercomputer called Deep Blue. That program beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a controversial 1997 match (Mr. Kasparov called the match unfair and secured a draw in a later one against another version of the program).

But chess is a game of limits, with pieces that have clearly defined powers. “Jeopardy!” requires a program with the suppleness to weigh an almost infinite range of relationships and to make subtle comparisons and interpretations. The software must interact with humans on their own terms, and fast.

Indeed, the creators of the system — which the company refers to as Watson, after the I.B.M. founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr. — said they were not yet confident their system would be able to compete successfully on the show, on which human champions typically provide correct responses 85 percent of the time.

“The big goal is to get computers to be able to converse in human terms,” said the team leader, David A. Ferrucci, an I.B.M. artificial intelligence researcher. “And we’re not there yet.”

The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can “understand” human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications.

Despite more than four decades of experimentation in artificial intelligence, scientists have made only modest progress until now toward building machines that can understand language and interact with humans.

The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking “grand challenges” like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval.

Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the “Jeopardy!” producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show’s host, Alex Trebek.

The computer will respond with a synthesized voice to answer questions and to choose follow-up categories. I.B.M. researchers said they planned to move a Blue Gene supercomputer to Los Angeles for the contest. To approximate the dimensions of the challenge faced by the human contestants, the computer will not be connected to the Internet, but will make its answers based on text that it has “read,” or processed and indexed, before the show.

There is some skepticism among researchers in the field about the effort. “To me it seems more like a demonstration than a grand challenge,” said Peter Norvig, a computer scientist who is director of research at Google. “This will explore lots of different capabilities, but it won’t change the way the field works.”

The I.B.M. researchers and “Jeopardy!” producers said they were considering what form their cybercontestant would take and what gender it would assume. One possibility would be to use an animated avatar that would appear on a computer display.

“We’ve only begun to talk about it,” said Harry Friedman, the executive producer of “Jeopardy!” “We all agree that it shouldn’t look like Robby the Robot.”

Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy!” contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004.

I.B.M. will not reveal precisely how large the system’s internal database would be. The actual amount of information could be a significant fraction of the Web now indexed by Google, but artificial intelligence researchers said that having access to more information would not be the most significant key to improving the system’s performance.

Eric Nyberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is collaborating with I.B.M. on research to devise computing systems capable of answering questions that are not limited to specific topics. The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.

The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

The way to deal with such problems, Dr. Ferrucci said, is to improve the program’s ability to understand the way “Jeopardy!” clues are offered. The complexity of the challenge is underscored by the subtlety involved in capturing the exact meaning of a spoken sentence. For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.

“We love those sentences,” Dr. Nyberg said. “Those are the ones we talk about when we’re sitting around having beers after work.”

Source: New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html

The ultimate goal, according to a recent request for research proposals, is to “elucidate core computational algorithms of the mind and brain.” Good luck with that, guys.

It’s one in a heap of different Office projects to try to teach machines to act more like living things. “Nature has used evolution to build materials and sensors that outperform current sensors (for example, a spider’s haircells can detect air flow at low levels even in a noisy background),” the Office writes. So it’s got a second program, to not only “mimic existing natural sensory systems, but also add existing capabilities to these organisms” so they can more “precise[ly] control” their God-given gifts.

For example, maybe the military can develop better “active and passive camouflage” by learning from creatures who are able to change color, to hide from their predators. Maybe the armed forces can improve on eznymes which would eat away at an enemy’s gear. Maybe the military can bioengineer the organisms living in extreme heat, or extreme acidity, to make our equipment stronger.

The Office also wants to know what makes collections of living creatures tick. So the Office is looking to assemble a “fundamental understanding of the interactions between demographic groups… to explain and predict outcomes between competing factions within geographic regions.” It wants to “identify and quantify cultural variability” to model the effects of an “info warfare campaign” online.

Once that’s done, it’s back to digitizing brainwork. “New computational and mathematical principles of cognition are needed to form a symbiosis between human and machine systems,” the Office says.

source: Wired

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/air-force-looks-for-core-algorithms-of-human-thought/

The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein.” A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems.

Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.’s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly.

The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence” — was dubbed “The Singularity” in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation of computer hackers, engineers and programmers have come to believe deeply in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the chip maker Intel.

In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number transistors on silicon chips with each new technology generation, which led to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then “Moore’s Law” — which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of industrial change — has come to personify an industry that lives on Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner.

Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” He sought to expand Moore’s Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045.

In Dr. Kurzweil’s telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences.

Profiled in the documentary “Transcendent Man,” which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.

That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion.

The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as “the Rapture of the nerds.” Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine, notes, “People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it is going to happen before they die.”

However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own book, “The Technium,” forecasting the emergence of a global brain — the idea that the planet’s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn’t certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.

Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines.

Mr. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, still believes that. “I wasn’t saying we would be supplanted by something,” he said. “I think a catastrophe is more likely.”

Moreover, there is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the “machines of loving grace,” of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far darker, of the “Terminator” ilk.

“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, “The Artilect War,” that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war.

Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea of “friendly artificial intelligence,” an engineering discipline that would seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals rather than our masters.

Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to need to rush to the barricades. The artificial-intelligence industry has advanced in fits and starts over the past half-century, since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by the Stanford University computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their Pentagon backers that the construction of an artificially intelligent machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I. start-up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as “the A.I. winter.”

Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo to proclaim: “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity.

“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”

Source: New York times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?_r=2

The study, published in Science, illustrates how nanoscale elements can organize themselves over a large sheet of semiconductor film. The researchers expect that when applied to electronic media, their discovery will improve the efficiency of data storage, savings which can then be transferred to improve other pieces of electronics besides just storage, like high-definition screens and solar cells.

Similar attempts have previously been made to improve data storage on semiconductor films, but have consistently failed because the polymers—which are known to link together, on their own, in precise patterns—lose their organized structure when the film being used increases in area, rendering them useless for storing memory.

Lead researchers Ting Xu from the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Russell from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst overcame this by layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal. When the crystal is cut at an angle—a common procedure known as a miscut—and heated to 1,300 to 1,500 degrees Centigrade (2,372 to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, its surface reorganizes into a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges that can then be used to guide the self-assembly of the block polymers [Science Daily].

With this technique, the only limit to the size of an array of block copolymers is the size of the sapphire, Xu said. Once a sapphire is heated up and the pattern is created, the template could be reused. Both the crystals and the polymer chains could be obtained commercially, Xu said [PC World]. The researchers say the technology could make nearly perfect arrays of semiconductor material that are about 15 times denser than anything achieved previously [Reuters].

Using the technology, it might also be possible to achieve a high-definition picture with 3-nanometer pixels, potentially as large as a stadium JumboTron, Xu said. Another possibility is more dense photovoltaic cells that capture the sun’s energy more efficiently….

The new technology could create chip features just 3nm [nanometers] across, far outstripping current microprocessor manufacturing techniques, which at their best create features about 45nm across [PC World].

Source: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/22/self-organizing-nanotech-could-store-250-dvds-on-one-coin-size-surface/

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: “What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly… I think this could be big.”

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”

Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.

“It will understand what you are talking about,” he said. “We are just at the beginning. I think we’ve got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library.”

The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.

He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.

Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term “50 Cent” caused “absolute horror” in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.

“We have a certain amount of popular culture information,” Dr Wolfram said. “In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who’s related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts.”

He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia’s popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.

With Google now one of the world’s top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.

Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. “We’re working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense,” he said. “Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies.”

What the experts say

“For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for.”

Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com

“If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha.”

Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

“It’s like plugging into an electric brain.”

Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com

“This is like a Holy Grail… the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them.”

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/an-invention-that-could-change-the-internet-for-ever-1678109.html

“What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than 1 million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks. Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful,” Dr Dyer said.

“Most current artificial intelligence (AI) recognition systems perform poorly at reliably recognising faces from different viewpoints. However the bees have shown they can recognise novel views of rotated faces using a mechanism of interpolating or image averaging previously learnt views.”

The findings show that despite the highly constrained neural resources of the insects (their brains are 0.01 per cent the size of the human brain) their ability has evolved so that they’re able to process complex visual recognition tasks.

The researchers individually trained different groups of free flying bees with a sugar reward for making correct choices, or alternatively the bees were punished with a bitter tasting solution for incorrect choices. Faces were presented on a vertical screen and bees slowly learnt to fly to the correct target faces. Over the course of a day a bee brain learned a complex task, and then when tested in non-rewarded tests (to totally excluded cues like olfaction) only bees that had experience multiple views (e.g. faces at both 0° and 60°) were able to solve a novel rotational angle of 30°.

Dr Dyer said the discovery helps to answer a fundamental question about how brains solve complex image rotational problems by either image averaging or mentally rotating previously learnt views.

“Bee brains clearly use image interpolation to solve the problem. In other words, bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could then recognise a novel view of this target face. However, bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognise novel views,” Dr Dyer said.

The study, performed over two years in Australia and Germany by Dr Dyer with the support of the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and Dr Quoc Vuong from Newcastle University UK, was published in the science journal PLoS ONE.

“The relationships between different components of the object often dramatically change when viewed from different angles but it is amazing to find the bees’ brains have evolved clever mechanisms for problem solving which may help develop improved models for AI face recognition systems,” Dr Dyer said.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090123101211.htm

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain’s processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn’t be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

Heylighen agrees, but warns that we might find it a little disappointing. “We probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially,” he says.

And when might this begin? According to Heylighen, it all depends on internet fashion trends. If the effort that has gone into developing social networking sites goes into developing internet consciousness, it could happen within a decade, he says.