image | above
by artist Gerd Altmann
— essay —
essay title: Testing if artificial intelligence has become self-aware
deck:
author: by Susan Schneider PhD
author: by Edwin Turner PhD
date: August 2017
— introduction —
by Susan Schneider PhD + Edwin Turner PhD
Every moment of your waking… read more
By David Brin
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell
What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: “Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century.”… read more
By Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith University
It made headlines recently when the Doomsday Clock was shifted on January 26, 2017 from three minutes to midnight to a new setting of two and a half minutes to midnight.*
That is the nearest the clock has been to midnight for more than 50 years. The body responsible for the clock said the probability of global… read more
by Ariel Conn
Just about everyone found something to dislike about 2016, from wars to politics and celebrity deaths. But hidden within this year’s news feeds were some really exciting news stories. And some of them can even give us hope for the future.
Though concerns about the future of AI still loom, 2016 was a great reminder that, when harnessed for good, AI can… read more
By Susan Schneider
Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer.
The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades.… read more
By Martin Archer, Space Plasma Physicist, Queen Mary University of London
I’m very excited about seeing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which tells the tale summarised in the original Star Wars’ opening crawl. This is the story of how the rebels stole the plans to the original “Death Star” – a space station the size of a small moon with a weapon powerful enough to destroy… read more
By Brent Ziarnick, Peter Garretson, Everett Dolman, and Coyote Smith
President-elect Donald Trump often says that Americans no longer dream and must do so again. Nowhere can dreams be more inspiring and profitable than in space. But today, expanding space enterprise is not foremost on the minds of Americans or military strategists. As a recent CNN special showed, defense thinkers feel embattled in space, focused on protecting our… read more
By Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology
The latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One [opens Friday Dec. 16], introduces us to a new droid, K-2SO, the robotic lead of the story.
Without giving away too many spoilers, K-2SO is part of the Rebellion freedom fighter group that are tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star, the… read more
On June 8, 2014, The University of Reading announced that a computer program “has passed the Turing test for the first time.”
University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick, PhD, described it this way:
“Some will claim that the test has already been passed. The words ‘Turing test’ have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However, this event involved more simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently… read more
Originally published in 2005 with the launch of The Singularity Is Near.
Questions and Answers
So what is the Singularity?
Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated… read more
How the properties of quarks and gluons can be used (in principle) to perform computation at the femtometer (10^-15 meter) scale.
I’ve been thinking on and off for two decades about the possibility of a femtotech. Now that nanotech is well established, and well funded, I feel that the time is right to start thinking about the possibility of a femtotech.
You may ask, “What about picotech?”… read more
I decided to write this article after I found that many colleagues and participants whom I spoke with at the recent Humanity+ (ref. R.A. Koene, 2010b) and Transvision (ref. R.A. Koene, 2010a) conferences were struggling with personal and strategic decisions when they considered what sort of future to strive for.
We are hampered by a historical dearth of attention to the very fundamentals that could support… read more
This essay argues that the exponential rate of technical progress will create within 40 years an Internet that is a trillion times faster than today’s, a global media, a global education system, a global language, and a globally homogenized culture, thus establishing the prerequisites for the creation of a global democratic state, “Globa,” and ridding the world of war, the arms trade, ignorance, and poverty. Whether Globa can cope… read more
The rise of artilects (artificial intellects, i.e., godlike massively intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level) in this century makes the existence of a deity (a massively intelligent entity capable of creating a universe) seem much more plausible.
There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that… read more