So botjunkie have been subsumed by the IEEE and I didn’t know! Shame on me for not visiting them more often. But seriously… do you not quake in your boots when you behold this (even just a little bit?!!):
Don’t forget to check out their new automaton blog here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics
The Jaron Lanier interference pattern was bound to ripple its way back into my awareness, sooner or later. I blame this squarely on how long I stared at the pages in the giant black+white coffee-table photobook ‘DREADS‘… in which his was one of the portraits. And one of my favourite writeups, I have to say.
I immediately latched on to his picture / profile in the book because he was the first person I knew of who openly called himself a Renaissance Man. It was the first time I’d seen someone “confessing” to being a generalist / polymath… a way of being very close to my heart. So I think I have prolly had a thing for Jaron ever since then, subconsciously…
On a serendipitous jaunt to Coles bookstore at lunchtime recently, I found a book that resonated with me and after flicking through it a bit, I flipped it over and saw a thumbnail of the author. I kept thinking, where have I seen this guy? Why does he look so familiar…! :o)
Anway… Jaron Lanier is none other than the author of You are not a gadget, a book in which “The Blankness of Generation X never went away, but became the new normal” is actually the title of a section. (ouch). My main gripe about the book though is that Canada didn’t get the cool UK cover… Continue reading
I saw this vid on botjunkie, a site that I (and you) really should visit a lot more often. Have a looksee (you need to watch till the very end):
I came across a fascinating article at the Communications of the ACM site about negotiation agents. Continue reading
[updated : 2009-12-19]
The only thing that’s interesting about the copenhagen climate summit is the strategies that nations employ to wriggle out of real and tangible cuts in emissions.
The interconnectedness of environmental and other systems on our planet has made us turn, naturally, to network theory for gaining useful insights. This is becoming more so with regard to how we manage the environment.
The first weapon drawn from the network theory arsenal is almost always economic theory… which – I feel – is just a narrower, more specialised type of network theory. Economics seems to be a set of stripped down routing games that focus on monetarily-quantifiable payoffs.
I was doing some research on bots (specifically androids/gynoids) to help get me back into this short story I was writing. I love anything to do with bots, even if I have problems with some of the actual, real-life ones we’ve built so far (yeah i know – sorry, Fritz Lang’s golden gal and Terminator’s borged-ed up Summer Glau – at left – sadly are not the subject of this post)…
[updated 2009-12-06] : more cool bot links and vids, restructured.
Imagine that the ever-densifying network of devices that we know and love as the internet becomes sentient. Ish. Or aware or whatever:
Dangling upside down via an umbilicus to its humbler origins, and having its ass spanked by Lady The Phenomenon of Emergence herself, will the quasi-conscious intelligence that gulps down it’s first breath be a babbling baby spurting meaningingless, screeching white noise, or will it be a grown thing, whose first words will be more like ‘I am Zod. All must bow before me!!” ? Continue reading
Sooner or later, everyone will have met their tin foil dude (I don’t know why, but it’s never a dudette)… a man convicted of the ‘truth’ that Big Brother is interfering with all our thoughts, and that we’d all better start wearing tin foil inside our hats. Continue reading
Nosing through @tmbchr’s post on the WIRED post about humans augmenting AI, I have only 2 things to say:
1) humans being a helpful extension sounds like a nice idea… especially as presented in the article, but
2) Those “helpful” tasks stand a high chance of being crappy, drudge-filled exercises of boredom.
Picking out ‘what’s beautiful’ from a series of images (the example given) is one out of a gazillion learning tasks we can help our fledgling AIs with, and one which happens to be amusing / pleasant. I can think of countless others that aren’t / won’t be. As I keep saying, smarter machines will only leave smaller and smaller islands of finnicky complexity for their fleshier counterparts (that’s you and me, compadre) to deal with. Until they master those islands themselves and sink them completely. Hopefully by then we’ve found new uses for ourselves, cos those AIs sure aren’t going to have any for us.
But I do love the idea of people augmenting machines (see, I’m not all doom n gloom)… I just doubt its panning out as painted. Some other way, maybe…
Actually I had set out to draw a simple robot, after getting my hands on ‘50 robots to draw and paint‘ by Keith Thompson (publisher Barron’s). But I’ve since veered a bit off course and my better half says this is actually a cyborg, not a bot.
Right off the bat, I must confess that I stole the knees from the bot on the back cover of the afore mentioned book. Oh and the thighs are a rip-off of the ‘SUBHUNTER’ bot in that same book too. As it happens, both of these items are by one Kevin Crossley. But I made up the rest… Continue reading