The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) is one of the most influential science-fiction visionaries of all time. Mostly known for his novel Solaris (1961), which was later made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, Lem has been prolific in his fiction, often blending social satire with engineering fantasy. Space travel, human contact with alien...
Month: October 2012
Animism and AI
Animism transcends all human culture. It is considered the proto-religion of our species, the first explanation we humans had about the workings of the world. Animism comes from our cognitive inability to distinguish between our psyche and the external world of animate and inanimate objects (read my post of Piaget’s...
Ghosts in the machines
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget noted that in children’s’ minds there is an implicit understanding of the world in which all events are the product of consciousness or intention. Things happen for a reason and never by chance. Piaget’s discovery has tremendous repercussions in the way we understand ourselves and our relationship...
Dreaming of electric sheep
Renown neurobiologists Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi recently suggested an alternative Turing Test to examine whether an intelligent machine is conscious or not: instead of having a human-machine conversation they propose a psychological test where the machine decides through a dialogue if a series of photographs are “right” or “wrong”. Their strategy assumes that...
Brain-like computers
Most digital computers are built on a simple, albeit revolutionary, principle suggested by Alan Turing in 1936 whereby data and instruction sets (the “programs”) are stored together (in your “Hard Disk”) whilst information processing takes place separately (in your “RAM memory”). This is what a “universal Turing machine” does; most...
Making machines intelligent
The goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is usually described as the making of intelligent machines. This may seem like a well-defined goal however AI has been plagued with misunderstandings and misgivings since its modern reinvention in the 1950s. The word “intelligence” is laden with cultural, philosophical and political frustrations, and...
Cyborg evolution
Augmenting physical ability by making use of techno-prostheses is as instinctive to primates as the sticks that some chimpanzees use to extract termites from their nests. The whole edifice of technological civilization has been exactly that, to implement knowledge collected on natural processes in order to achieve supernatural ends. It...