[ted id=2015] In his March 20, 2014 TED talk Ray Kurzweil suggested that in a couple of decades from now we will be able to increase our neocortex's power many-fold at an instant by accessing the processing power of the cloud. He suggested that this will be possible thanks to...
Category: Mind and machines
Interview with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. This is an edited transcript of an interview I took from Steven on April 2004 in Tucson, AZ, during the World Conference on Consciousness....
Sex with robots: loving the mecha
This is a summary of a more extended article published on Aeon magazine on March 26th 2013. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, delivers us Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor who carves the ivory statue of a perfect woman. He names her Galatea, the "one as white as milk". The statue is so life-like that...
Can robots reproduce?
It is rumored that when Descartes left France to work as the tutor of young Queen Christina of Sweden he was asked by his royal student what could be said of the human body. Descartes answered that one could regard as a machine; whereby the Queen pointed to a clock and ordered...
Darwin and the robots
Darwin’s theory of evolution, reinterpreted after the discovery of genes, states that successful genes survive and propagate across generations of living beings. Success is measured by the frequency of genes per generation which is a reflection of how well these genes adapt to – or are selected by - the...
Super Turing machines and oracles: the making of a artificial mind
A major theoretical - as well as philosophical - problem in Artificial Intelligence is incomputability. Although there are many formal definitions of the concept of incomputability, it really boils down to this: there are many things that the human mind does which cannot be expressed in an algorithmic fashion. The most...
The woman who remembered everything
Human memory is different from computer memory in many important ways. Computers store information in specific locations. While there are ways of storing meta-data with each piece of information, computer memory is very limited when it comes to context. For example, the stored image of your boyfriend may be given...
The Zen of machine intelligence
A recent paper in Science reports an interesting experiment carried out at Princeton using fish and exploring the dynamics of crowd intelligence. Researchers used golden shiners, a strongly schooling fish. They trained a large number of groups to swim toward a blue target, while smaller groups were trained to follow their natural...
Victorian scientific romance and robot apocalypse
The 1800s must have been a great time to live. They mark the beginning of many things we take for granted today; most notably democracy, technological and scientific innovation, globalization and international trade. The British Empire was at its height, people started moving with steamships and trains across continents, and...
Pandora: the first android
Hesiod recounts in Theogony how Zeus became angry with Prometheus for giving the gift of fire to humans, that he decided to take revenge upon the humans by creating the first woman. Here’s a retelling of the story by using some more familiar terms. Zeus commanded Hephaestus, the god-engineer, to make the...