Essentials
theDiagonal is a personal blog by Mike Gerra, skeptic, technologist, psychologist, artist, humanist, collector of grand, eclectic ideas.theDiagonal blog connects the dots across multiple disciplines for inquisitive, objective and critical thinkers, exploring the vertices of big science, disruptive innovation, global sustainability, illuminating literature and leftfield art. It is on this diagonal that creativity thrives, big ideas take flight and reason triumphs.
Tag Archives: artificial intelligence
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Google’s AI
The collective IQ of Google, the company, inched up a few notches in January of 2013 when they hired Ray Kurzweil. Over the coming years if the work of Kurzweil, and many of his colleagues, pays off the company’s intelligence may surge significantly. This time though it will be thanks to their work on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and (very) big data.
From Technology Review:
When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged artificial intelligence, big data, brain, Google, Ray Kurzweil
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Friday, March 9, 2012
Turing Test 2.0 – Intelligent Behavior Free of Bigotry
One wonders what the world would look like today had Alan Turing been criminally prosecuted and jailed by the British government for his homosexuality before the Second World War, rather than in 1952. Would the British have been able to break German Naval ciphers encoded by their Enigma machine? Would the German Navy have prevailed, and would the Nazis have gone on to conquer the British Isles?
Actually, Turing was not imprisoned in 1952 — rather, he “accepted” chemical castration at the hands of the British government rather than face jail. He died two years later of self-inflicted cyanide poisoning, just short of his 42nd birthday.
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Posted in Idea Soup, Technica
Tagged artificial intelligence, bigotry, computing, Turing, Turing Test
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Saturday, January 14, 2012
Games of Skill: Humans Versus Computers
Computers have already surpassed humans at checkers, scrabble and chess. But will they ever hold sway of humans at Go or Snakes and Ladders? A fun infographic courtesy of xkcd:
Image courtesy of xkcd.com.
Send to KindleMonday, January 2, 2012
Morality and Machines
Fans of science fiction and Isaac Asimov in particular may recall his three laws of robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Of course, technology has marched forward relentlessly since Asimov penned these guidelines in 1942. But while the ideas may seem trite and somewhat contradictory the ethical issue remains – especially as our machines become ever more powerful and independent. Though, perhaps first humans, in general, ought to agree on a set of fundamental principles for themselves.
Colin Allen for the Opinionator column reflects on the moral dilemma. He is Provost Professor of Cognitive Science and History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
...read moreFriday, December 9, 2011
A Serious Conversation with Siri
Apple’s iPhone 4S is home to a knowledgeable, often cheeky, and sometimes impertinent, entity known as Siri. It’s day job is as voice-activated personal assistant.
According to Apple, Siri is:
… the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, and it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.
It knows what you mean.
Posted in Technica
Tagged Apple, Arthur C. Clarke, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Siri
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Monday, September 6, 2010
Google’s Earth
From The New York Times:
“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?
From The New York Times:
“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”
This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?
Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.
...read moreThursday, February 18, 2010
The Chess Master and the Computer
By Gary Kasparov, From the New York Review of Books:
In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.
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Posted in Arts and Letters, Literature
Tagged artificial intelligence, chess, IBM, Kasparov
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Monday, February 15, 2010
The Man Who Builds Brains
From Discover:
On the quarter-mile walk between his office at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the nerve center of his research across campus, Henry Markram gets a brisk reminder of the rapidly narrowing gap between human and machine. At one point he passes a museumlike display filled with the relics of old supercomputers, a memorial to their technological limitations. At the end of his trip he confronts his IBM Blue Gene/P—shiny, black, and sloped on one side like a sports car. That new supercomputer is the centerpiece of the Blue Brain Project, tasked with simulating every aspect of the workings of a living brain.
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