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...
Category: Mind and machines
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...
Humaness redefined
During 2005 and 2006, I was national facilitator for Greece, in the European project «Meeting of Minds. European Citizens Deliberation on Brain Sciences», a pioneering project in science governance, first of its kind in Europe, where citizens from 9 countries discussed the impact of brain sciences in society. Their recommendations...
Cyborgs and free will
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...
Downloading consciousness
Frank Tipler, in his new book “The Physics of Christianity” makes a number of interesting – some would even say amusing - claims with regards the “end of days”, as he sees it. I would like to focus on two of those claims, predictions in fact, which Tipler estimates that...
The AI Singularity
The AI Singularity has been defined as a future point in history when machine intelligence will surpass human. A technological transition event of this magnitude has been compared to a cosmological "black hole" with an "event horizon" beyond which it is impossible to know anything. The idea of the AI...
The word machine of Lagado
Jonathan Swift published the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and since then it has never been out of print. In Book III, Gulliver is abandoned by pirates on the continent of Balnibarbi. After a visit to the flying islandof Laputa, he is taken to the Academy of Lagado, where “useless projects” are...