Machines Like Us – Science News

The rise of superintelligent machines, the transfer of humans' consciousness into computers, and the birth of machine consciousness are all points on the spectrum of the singularity. Between the fervent believers--the singularitarians--and the extreme skeptics lies a wide area of hotly debated theories and coolly pursued technologies.

Like a good gambler, Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities. There is, however, nothing uncertain about her impact.

Building robots with anything akin to human intelligence remains a far off vision, but European researchers are making progress on piecing together a new generation of machines that are more aware of their environment and better able to interact with humans.

Stoxpoker.com (http://www.stoxpoker.com), an international leader in online poker training, will be hosting the second Man vs Machine Poker Challenge at the Gaming Life Expo in the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on July 4th through July 6th. The matchup will pit the world's best artificial intelligence (AI) poker program against a host of Stoxpoker coaches, who are some of the biggest winners in poker today.

In 1987 Apple computer developed concept videos depicting a hypothetical Knowledge Navigator computer. In these groundbreaking films a "personal butler" software agent converses with and assists the operator using natural language.

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression is currently being developed by an international team including the Belfast university.

Artificial intelligence (AI) being used at the European Space Operations Centre is giving a powerful boost to ESA's Mars Express as it searches for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) being used at the European Space Operations Centre is giving a powerful boost to ESA's Mars Express as it searches for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet.

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen’s University Belfast.

We’re getting better at making robots that look like us, and move creepily like us, but attempting to program our perception and reasoning is proving to be an order of magnitude harder.

Robots are nothing new. Even bionics has become a bit passe. But imagine building a robot that can not only use sensory perception but also learn from its environment and adjust its actions to suit. Australian researchers are not just imagining it -- they are taking the first steps to create it, through a unique collaboration of scientific disciplines, universities and ideas.

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen’s University Belfast.

Emotions are an intrinsic part of communications. But machines don’t have, perceive or react to them, which makes us -- their handlers -- hot under the collar. But thanks to building blocks developed by European researchers, machines that ‘feel’ may no longer be confined to science fiction.

By Peter Hankins

Chris Chatham has gamely picked up on my remarks about his interesting earlier piece, which set out a number of significant differences between brains and computers. We are, I think, somewhere between 90 and 100 percent in agreement about most of this, but Chris has come back with a defence of some of the things I questioned. So it seems only right that I should respond in turn and acknowledge some overstatement on my part.

Joseph Weizenbaum, who died last month, was one of the computer scientists who changed the way we think. Unfortunately for all of us, he didn't change it in the way he wanted to. His family was driven from Germany by the Nazis in 1936, and by the early 1960s he was a professor at MIT, part of the first wave of brilliant programmers to whom it sometimes seemed that there was nothing that computers could not do. Contemporaries like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky confidently predicted the emergence of "strong" human-like artificial intelligence (AI). Then, in 1965, Weizenbaum demonstrated artificial stupidity, and the world has never been the same since.