In 1954, Alan Turing devised the Turing test as a way of verifying machine intelligence.
The Turing test is a proposed a situation in which a human judge talks to both a computer and a human through a computer terminal. The judge cannot see the computer or the human, but can ask them questions via the computer. Based on the answers alone, the human judge has to determine which is which. If you're curious as to what constitutes a human poem, and what constitutes a computer poem, go to the submit page for the criteria or the what is computer poetry page for examples.
The Sociable Machines Project develops an expressive anthropomorphic robot called Kismet that engages people in natural and expressive face-to-face interaction. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolution, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver and to learn from them, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges.
"api.ai equips developers with a simple way to make their products listen, understand, and talk to users. The api.ai platform combines natural language understanding with speech recognition and synthesis, enabling speech interfaces to be easily added to any solution."
"Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network ™"
"Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network ™"
'To catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.'
I read an interesting article this morning from the Burlington Free Press
featuring the work of Josh Bongard, hired by the University of Vermont
as an assistant professor of computer science. The article focused much
of its attention on Bongard's self-aware robot, Black Starfish.
You've all heard the metaphor, right? Boiling a frog? Gradually
increasing the temperature of the water so the frog gets used to it
until it's hot enough to boil? Yes, that one. Apart from the sad
conclusion of the analogy, the idea of gradual change not being very
noticeable fits the way that accelerating technological change will be
accepted by humans.
I almost said "alive," but we're not there yet. In an announcement that's eerily reminiscent of Terminator, PublicTechnology.net reported Friday that the UK's latest military satellite, dubbed Skynet 5A, is now in service.
For those of you who are new to the concept of the coming technological
singularity, this NPR podcast, featuring Vernor Vinge (pronounced
vin-gee), a retired San Diego State University Professor of
Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author, will be
well worth your time. In it, he talks about AI as refering to
"amplified intelligence" rather than artificial intelligence, among
other highly visionary predictions.
It is believed that supercomputers will achieve the computational power
of human brains by about 2020, personal computers just a few years
later, so figuring out the details of the brain's structure and
functioning needs to keep pace. A major challenge in this has been the
limits of MRI resolution, which is why the news of a major breakthrough
has such significance.