Robopocalypse Report #92

Drones:

Amazon just patented mini personal drones.

Attachments are made to transform drones into search and rescue tools.

Barbers are safe from a drone led robopocalypse.

Drones are starting to deliver blood in Rwanda.

Drones and VR were used to understand the Plain of Jars.

A drone was wirelessly powered.

FAA is being sued over the drone registry.

Intel now has its own commercial drone, the Falcon 8+.

Medical drones in Africa face challenges.

Mini folding drones!

Modular drones for kids!


The Passport selfie taking drone is ready.

Pegasus is the uber of delivery by drone.

Satellites may not be needed for next generation nav systems.

SenseFly has upgraded its agri drone.


Uber has drones harassing drivers in Mexico.

Verizon is testing drones for use as flying cell towers.


Yamaha's unmanned helicopters can now be used for agricultural purposes.

Self Driving Cars:

Will kids need to actually learn to drive in the future?  Or will it go the way of horseback riding?

Drivers who are aggressive are looking forward to self driving cars hitting the road because they think they will be easier to bully.

The Apple Car, Project Titan, appears to be dead.  However, will other companies want Apple's tech?

BMW is edging closer to self driving cars in its new 5 series.

Britain has its first self driving vehicles acting as taxis in London in a very limited fashion.

The Brits have also demoed self driving connected cars.

Easymile is getting legal permission to driverless buses in San Ramon, California and California is pushing forward with self driving cars in general.

Faraday Future's Formula E racer is interesting.

Google's self driving cars have logged over two million miles.

Iveco put forward their vision for trucking, especially self driving.

Mercedes has stated its self driving cars will save its drivers rather than pedestrians.

Renault-Nissan has started a self driving car division.

Rinspeed's Oasis self driving vehicle is being prepped for CES 2017.

Tesla has been asked to rename the Autopilot software in Germany. 

Germany has also stated Tesla drivers must pay attention.

Tesla will be shipping the self driving tech on all its cars, whether or not they are self driving.

Tesla's Musk is saying negative coverage of self driving vehicles is killing millions.

Tesla has also stated it is against the Ts & Cs of owning a Tesla to send it out to autonomously pick up people for money (aka uber).

A Tesla S just rear-ended a motorcycle while in Autopilot mode.

Toyota is very unhappy with the regulations for self driving cars in California.  In fact, all car makers and Google are stating these regs are nonsense.

Transport Systems Catapult has placed the first self driving cars in London as a trial carrying passengers.

Self driving tricycles?

A self driving uber went the wrong way on a one way street.

Uber is getting big on its autonomous plans.

3d Printing:

Australian architect Gardiner is looking to start a revolution by combining CNC, 3d printing and wax moldings.

Electric 4ekolka is the latest entrant into the 3d printed car race.

3d printed bone is coming!

And 3d printed liver!

Blue Body Labs is offering customized clothing...

Dubai announced plans for 3d printed housing.

Robotics:

The first British robot has been restored.

Chanel's fashion ... robots?

Disney researchers have created a one legged bot.

Say hello to the Ghost Minotaur bot. 

Google dumped a robotic arm project. 

Japanese bots!

Kobi is a new bot for garden work.

Micro bots directed by light?

Nilfisk teamed with CMU to produce a floor scrubbing bot.

A robo sub is being sent to investigate sonar contacts near where MH370 is suspected to have gone down.

A robot put a Cessna through basic maneuvers.

Robotics + CT scanners may be an improvement.

Soft bot tech mimics human muscles.

This surgery robot has haptic feedback.

Sweating robots?

Meet the Thorvald agricultural bot, a British agro bot.

Toyota is selling the Kirobo robot.

Zume pizza has bots to make the pizzas.

Cyborgism:

A paralyzed individual participated in the cybathalon.

The cybathalon gets profiled.

A 3d printed prosthetic was made for a violin player lacking an arm.

A robotic arm made for a paraplegic man gives him a sense of touch.

A young girl has been testing prosthetic arms.

Software Bots:

60 Minutes 'interviewed' a robot.

Can AI help farmers?

AI is now able to defeat people at Doom completely.

Amazon is hiring a number of people for its Alexa. Alexia is being integrated into Ford Focuses and to make coffee.

Apple has hired its first director of AI research.

Baidu has a voice recognition software that is supposedly more accurate than a QWERTY keyboard.

Has China eclipsed the US in AI research?

The CIA has software bots, it's so-called Syren Servers, to predict uprisings days in advance.

Google is trying to catch up to Amazon's software assistant/home automation.  What will it work with?

Google's assistant uses jokes from Pixar and Onion writers.

Google's neural network AI can now learn from its own memories and can be used to navigate the London Tubes.

IBM Watson is being used to help at hospitals.

Insilico Medicine is using a bot to ID genes associated with longevity.

Machine learning coupled with big data are increasingly impacting our lives.  Potentially in understanding bad drug interactions.

Machine learning is also being used to ID cancer cells.

Microsoft claims its voice recognition software is better than human professionals now.

Saya has crossed the uncanny valley.

Tech giants are in an AI race.

The White House is open sourcing its chat bot.

Your next nurse might be a bot.

Yahoo is open sourcing its machine learning system to classify porn!

Computer Advances:

Can neural network based chips compute more efficiently?

META:

How to build human-robot trust?

Robopocalypse has been mocked by SNL.

The Robopocalypse will make work obsolete and we will need a guaranteed minimum income.

Woz is no longer worried about the Singularity.

Dr Sebastian Thrun loves the robopocalypse.

Dr Stephan Hawking has stated AI will be the best or worst thing to happen to Humanity.

South Korea is investing $450 million in its robotics industry.

The White House has stated the robopocalypse has the potential to greatly increase American wealth, but warns not to let the robopocalypse impoverish the average person. 

Moore's Law is Definitely Dead

After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.

After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.

For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore’s Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.

link.

Robopocalypse Report #82

Drones:

Harvard's robobee can now stick to surfaces using static electricity.

First responders are hoping to improve their ability to get to disaster victims faster with drones.

Rwanda is expanding its blood delivery by drone to 20 hospitals this summer.

Janus is a new double headed drone.

Xiaomi is getting into drones.

Drones caught 70 sharks in a feeding frenzy in the Great Barrier Reef.

There are calls to minimize the impact of drones on wild life.

There's a plan to plant trees via drone.

Self Driving Cars:

Otto is a self driving truck start up.  More info.

Major automakers are using the same equipment to test their self driving cars.

Lyft & GM's self driving cars will be hitting the road in San Francisco next year & GM is already testing them out.

Uber is also going that route and their first self driving car has hit the road.

Will self driving cars make traffic infinitely worse rather than better?

Ford says self driving cars are 5 years away from changing the world.

Who owns the self driving car's data?

Meet Audi's self driving car called Jack.

Honda has developed its second self driving car.

The French have created a self driving shuttle bus.

Google received a patent to have glue on the hood of a car for when an impact takes place with a pedestrian.  For a thriller movie, I think we can see the kidnapping scene now.  For the zombie apocalypse comedy...

Tesla has updated its Summon capability for self parking on its cars.

3d Printing:

Harvard created a 3d printer that can print structures in mid air.

 HP has unveiled the Multijet Fusion.  A monster of a 3d printer.

3d printing is hitting the fashion runways.

3d printing and architecture, a combo that's coming together.

MIT has started 3d printing ... hair?

Robotics:

This robot's eye is really handy.

There's a robotic ping pong trainer.

Robots are getting smarter to deal with clutter.

And they are getting stronger, but gentler.

The Germans have come up with a soft actuator for robots.

The fire starter drone has been lighting it up in Nebraska.

An American football team has picked up a robo dummy for practice.

The Knightscope bot is working a mall in California.

Robots are being used in Australia for ranching.

Exoskeletons:

More news on the Hyundai exoskeleton.

Harvard's soft exoskeleton gets covered again.

Cyborgism:

Meet DARPA's luke skywalker.  Or at least the guy with a robo arm.

Software Bots:

Using animal training techniques for machine learning.

Machine learning is being used to run physics experiments.

Amazon is upgrading Alexa.

Google's AI efforts have gone full Vogon...for poetry.

Google has their own competitor to Alexa.

Here's Google's vision of software bot assistants.

Singularity:

Huawei is prepping for the Singularity.  Really.

Philosophy, Economics and Navel Gazing:

The Robopocalypse will render some people completely useless.

Robopocalypse Report #78

Drones:

The future of the urban lumberjack or Texas chainsaw massacre sequel?

um.  yeah.  Festo, you so weird sometimes.

The UN & Malawi are attempting to deliver HIV tests for babies using drones.

The first FAA approved urban delivery has taken place in the United States.

The FAA is predicting 7 million drones in the US by 2020.

3D Robotics attempted to take on DJI and seems to be slowly collapsing.

CNET pitted an owl vs a drone.

DJI is suing rival Yuneec over patent violation.

A drone used by a construction copy was shot down by an angry neighbor.

Using drones for landmine clearance.

How drones can improve field research?

The bigger the drone, the more fun for people trying it for the first time.

Are drones actually dangerous to airplanes?

Selfies are about to get MORE annoying.  This is what happens when you cross a selfie stick with a drone.

Self Driving Cars:

Nissan's CEO talks about self driving cars.

The CEO of Google's Self Driving Car Project talks the implications of autonomous cars.

Mitsubishi will tap its air to air missile tech for...self driving cars?

Self driving trucks are the future of Europe's highways.

3 of Daimler's self driving trucks convoyed on the Autobahn.

The Robopocalypse is coming for NASCAR with NVIDIA's brains.

Volvo wants to test its self driving cars in China.

Toyota is teaming with the world's best software company known for security for connected cars.  Note.  That's sarcasm.

Google's self driving cars are loose in Phoenix.

3d Printing:

WASP, the massive 3d concrete printer, is preparing to print a village.

The Pixelstone 3d printer is used for decorative 'brick work.'

MakerJet has debuted a human sized 3d scanner.

3d printed prosthetics are becoming more common.

A 3d printer created a life sized skull in minutes, not hours.

For the first time, scientists have 3d printed something with an active chemistry.

The Brits have made a 3d printer for pills.

General Electric is using 3d printing to revolutionize large scale manufacturing.

3d printing robots from solids and liquids are now possible.

The biopend allows for 3d printing tissue straight onto bone.

Software  Bots:

An AI in Japan wrote a novel that passed the first screening for a national literary prize.

Microsoft learned the hard way AI can be scary.  Kid s take 18 years to, hopefully, raise into well adjusted people.  24 hours seems to make AI's into crazy, people hating, Hitler apologist sex bots.  Microsoft has said the bot was just not up to the task.

Even so, MicroSoft wants to create Jarvis.

IBM has found a way to accelerate neural net learning.

Amazon has given DIYers a tutorial how to use Raspberry Pis to make their own Echoes with their Alexa software bot.

This bot will turn whatever you submit to it into a beat poem.

The Brain Project has released its first software tools.

Machine learning is being used to help diagnosticians.

Apparently people do not trust virtual assistants like Siri.

Taco Bell & Slack have an order taking bot.

BMW has a software bot for its cars coming.

Facebook is using a software bot to describe photos to the blind.

Will your car detect your mood in the future?

Looks like the robopocalypse came for Rembrandt.

Computing:

IBM's TrueNorth has been delivered (and overhyped) to LLNL.

Robotics:

A ocean monitoring robot network is getting upgraded.

This automated grocery store replaces the checker with a cell phone app.

Using robotics to create composites.

The bot climbs pipes to clean them.

It seems touching robots in certain ways can cause arousal in people.  Pervs.  ;)

Yup, sex bots are definitely coming.

Spencer brings the robopocalypse to the Schipol airport.

An octopus inspired robot can swim, grasp & crawl.

This bot delivers, at least its getting there.
 
Cyborgism:

An implantable chip can adjust the dopamine levels in the brain.  Paging Larry Niven.

A 3d printed bionic hand can now be preordered.

Economics & Philosophy:

Some are saying California's new $15/hour minimum wage will spur the coming of the Robopocalypse.

Can you trust a robot and can a robot trust you?

What should we do when the Robopocalypse comes?  A guaranteed minimum income.  huh.  Wonder where I heard that before.

Are robots taking our jobs already?

Once Again, Moore's Law is Toast

As reported at The Motley Fool, Intel’s latest 10-K / annual report filing would seem to suggest that the ‘Tick-Tock’ strategy of introducing a new lithographic process note in one product cycle (a ‘tick’) and then an upgraded microarchitecture the next product cycle (a ‘tock’) is going to fall by the wayside for the next two lithographic nodes at a minimum, to be replaced with a three element cycle known as ‘Process-Architecture-Optimization’.

Intel’s Tick-Tock strategy has been the bedrock of their microprocessor dominance of the last decade. Throughout the tenure, every other year Intel would upgrade their fabrication plants to be able to produce processors with a smaller feature set, improving die area, power consumption, and slight optimizations of the microarchitecture, and in the years between the upgrades would launch a new set of processors based on a wholly new (sometimes paradigm shifting) microarchitecture for large performance upgrades. However, due to the difficulty of implementing a ‘tick’, the ever decreasing process node size and complexity therein, as reported previously with 14nm and the introduction of Kaby Lake, Intel’s latest filing would suggest that 10nm will follow a similar pattern as 14nm by introducing a third stage to the cadence.

link.

2nd link.

Intel's Annual Report (PDF).

Couldn't Come Fast Enough

My name is Barnabus Chow. I'm a detective, Thirteenth Precinct, Greater Silicon Valley. I am the run of the mill gumshoe in an era when almost no one chews gum anymore.

My nose has me on a trail and I have to follow it to its end: there's something new and nasty in the Valley and we don't have a handle on it. There's a drug aimed right at the sort that have been coming here since long before I was born.

AnSenseScence. We don't know what it does, just that it sends the schmuck who takes it into a coma. A coma they never come out of. One that makes them the ultimate burden on the state: they cannot be restarted, rebooted or brought out of whatever or wherever junkies take it. No one has come back. I doubt anyone ever will.

AnSenseScence is not the first code drug, but it seems to be aimed at everyone. It spreads like wild fire and tempts the cybernetic, adult or teen, and especially the intelligent. I don't get that: they really ought to know better. We advertise the consequences, broadcasting the latest find of comaphiles (official name) or what we call them, the ASShats.

We've never found a dealer. We have even trolled the deepest bowels of the darknet. We never ever seem to find someone dealing. Yet it crops up, comas out and disappears again with far too much regularity. Its becoming the top threat to Silicon Valley. It even took out a Boogler heir.

I'm on my way to Sad Sack, Sacramento. Its that hunch, that scent of a trailer that's leading me there. I thought, what if we are looking n the wrong place. What if the AnSenseScence source was just outside, close enough to infect, to make intrusions, but far enough away that we cannot get a finger on them.

We'd even checked and rechecked through all the gobs and schmobs of data. Big data was nuthin compared to what we have now. Privacy was taken out back and shot by its owners, just like a real people ought to with their sick dog. Or so I'm told. Shooting a dog in this era would send up state for twenty to life: you're not their owner, but their companion. Remember that, you don't own animals these days and the plant rights groups are on the rise, so enjoy your salad while you can.

No, I doubt they have anything to do with that. I'd hit Berkeley and its Cyborg Free Zone before I did that: cops are exempt, but my paint and clothes would need a new update. Eggs get everywhere and don't come out easily.

The trip to Sad Sack ought to take 20 minutes, but aircars are banned in Old Cali. Too many rich, dumb bastids falling from the sky in the early days, so traffic it is. On the ground. I'd take the train, but the smell. geez. High speed trains are free, but Almighty Dollar, I can't take the bums. They commute these days, from Sad Sack to San Francisco where they get their benefits. Who can prove they live local? They carry no tech outside of Frisco and no one goes into the tent city in the old financial district. Occupy City they call it, but I don't care enough to ping Oraclapedia.

My Boogler car will get me there, eventually.

There's a guy who knows a guy in Sad Sack who says he knows where AnSenseScence comes from. The nose knows and it says this is something. Maybe not what I think it is, but if someone is claiming to know sumthin then, it'll be the first.

As I enter the city limits, I ping my presence, intent and duration to the local PD. Territorial claims are as strong now as they were when Humans threw sticks at each other and waved our genitals in the air like male chimps. The words used are different, but the genitalia is still gets the same treatment. Even the bag to the balls at the end. No need to get into dick waving with the locals.

Finally, the Boogler drops me off. Its a 90s cafe: in a crack house theme. Hate these places. A nasty place form a nasty time and they celebrate a nasty habit in the nastiest ways. A Fooker meets me at the door: a faux hooker, really the maitre d. Dressed in how it was imagined to be. I broadcast my contempt and badge number and she sniffs and tells me to go to the back.

She's a fleshy, so she probably barely catches all the layers of my disgust. She hasn't upgraded as much as the Valley Boys do. Whatever floats her boat, just keep her dirty bio parts off of me.

Patrons as sprawled everywhere in a mocumentary style for 90s cafe. Sprawled and high on sumthin. I'm queasy. Not from the drugs. Who gives a rats so long as they can get them, don't harm anyone and get a Boogler home. its the fact they are biologicals. dirty, nasty things. Grow up already and cyber up, damnit kids.

There's two sitting there at a console, a really, REALLY old school game console playing some italian game. Or so I think. I'm curious but I don't want to show any interest in anything other than my objective. Who knows what I might catch. My final op to remove my last bio bit was in two months. Then I can be bio queasy free. Sorta. I'll never lose my distaste for them I think.

I push my way through the last door. The Back. In back. So fakkin 90s.

There's a woman sitting there. She'd be stunning if not for the fact she was a bio. gah. Get excited and then WHAM, something nasty like that.

She looked up and demanded to know who I was.

"Barnabus Chow, GSVPD, 13th Precinct. You are Sadie Mist? I was told you were a woman to talk to, Ms Mist about AnSenseScence."

She affirmed and despite being a bio, she sent me cyber credentials, a block bit with her records and birth, and then encryption keys. That impressed me. I sent my public back. She might have data worth reducing if she wanted to keep it encrypted. Someone might know we'd talked, but not what. Not since the Iranians had unleashed the QuantVirus that ripped the heart out of any Quantum Computer that even touched contaminated data.

She started streaming. Names, dates, actions, time stamps, blockchain links, people, places, things. The torrent went on and it didn't stop. I was shocked and surprised: she was a bio and shouldn't have that capability. Then I remembered she was a bio and her shit was in my head now. I grew grew. Good thing the blushing bit was turned off in my body. I'd be embarrassed and grossed out.

I signaled I'd be back after I reduced the data. She nodded. She seemed appropriately neutral and blank. I made it to the door, when pain shot through me. I jerked and fell. My servos spasmed and I flopped around on the floor. The part of me that was not terrified and in pain was appalled I was on the floor where bio crap had been. I mean, dude, shoes.

I flipped and flopped and stopped.

She walked over.

"Detective, thank you for coming. I've been looking for the right host. The one that would allow me to infect Silicon Valley and roll back the cybernetic stranglehold. You ARE that perfect host. You go everywhere. You are unchallenged. You have root access on so much, being effectively GSV's security admin. You are a geek's wet dream. If that geek was try to hack the world.

"I'm sorry though. In my quest to save Humanity's soul, I'm going to have to crack a few eggs. One of them is you. We'll be starting with your free will and I hope that'll be enough. Don't worry. You'll enjoy it. Everyone who takes AnSenseScence loves it. Its your perfect simulated life. We'll just remove those inconvenient memories and wallah. You'll have solved the case and get the promotion, even the last bioectomy. All in your mind.

"You body though. It will go around sharing AnSenseScence, to each and every over cyberred ASS HAT, like the nickname by the way, and in turn, with your credentials, they'll spread it, too. The ones who were the trial runs will join you, your body in helping you spread it. They'll never know they were helping either.

"The other police and whatnot first. Then we'll spread it by net and plane. China? Japan? I'm sure AnSenseScence will mutate at some point. Just imagine the shambling masses spreading it. Only we bios are safe. Too bad, so sad, look and see what you could have had. As they used to say in the 90s, before this sick thing took hold of us.

"Hold still, Detective Chow. Oh, wait, you can't move. I'll make sure it won't hurt. Promise. Good bye, Barnabus."

And then I woke up. I was at home and there was a knock at my door. I shivered. That bioectomy couldn't happen fast enough.

Moore's Law is Dead: Get Over it

Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.

A rule of thumb that has come to dominate computing, Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every two years or so — which has generally meant that the chip's performance will, too. The exponential improvement that the law describes transformed the first crude home computers of the 1970s into the sophisticated machines of the 1980s and 1990s, and from there gave rise to high-speed Internet, smartphones and the wired-up cars, refrigerators and thermostats that are becoming prevalent today.

None of this was inevitable: chipmakers deliberately chose to stay on the Moore's law track. At every stage, software developers came up with applications that strained the capabilities of existing chips; consumers asked more of their devices; and manufacturers rushed to meet that demand with next-generation chips. Since the 1990s, in fact, the semiconductor industry has released a research road map every two years to coordinate what its hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers are doing to stay in step with the law — a strategy sometimes called More Moore. It has been largely thanks to this road map that computers have followed the law's exponential demands.

Not for much longer. The doubling has already started to falter, thanks to the heat that is unavoidably generated when more and more silicon circuitry is jammed into the same small area. And some even more fundamental limits loom less than a decade away. Top-of-the-line microprocessors currently have circuit features that are around 14 nanometres across, smaller than most viruses. But by the early 2020s, says Paolo Gargini, chair of the road-mapping organization, “even with super-aggressive efforts, we'll get to the 2–3-nanometre limit, where features are just 10 atoms across. Is that a device at all?” Probably not — if only because at that scale, electron behaviour will be governed by quantum uncertainties that will make transistors hopelessly unreliable. And despite vigorous research efforts, there is no obvious successor to today's silicon technology.

The industry road map released next month will for the first time lay out a research and development plan that is not centred on Moore's law. Instead, it will follow what might be called the More than Moore strategy: rather than making the chips better and letting the applications follow, it will start with applications — from smartphones and supercomputers to data centres in the cloud — and work downwards to see what chips are needed to support them. Among those chips will be new generations of sensors, power-management circuits and other silicon devices required by a world in which computing is increasingly mobile.

link.

I Smell BS: New Startup Aims to Start the Singularity by Uploading *YOU* Into an Android Bot

As advancements in technology continue at an ever-increasing pace, will there ever come a day when we’ll be able to use science to cheat death? Australian startup company Humai seems to think so; it claims to be working on a way to transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body after they’ve died.

“We want to bring you back to life after you die,” says Humai CEO Josh Bocanegra on the company’s website. “We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out. This data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial body with the brain of a deceased human. Using cloning technology, we will restore the brain as it matures.”

In an interview with Australian Popular Science, Bocanegra said: “We'll first collect extensive data on our members for years prior to their death via various apps we're developing.” After death, the company will cryogenically freeze members’ brains until the technology is fully developed, at which point the brains will be implanted into an artificial body.

link.

Wait.  I think Tom Scott already posited this one.  

You Will NOT be Uploaded: a Most Excellent Rant about The Human Brain Project

This is a guest post [on a blog I am linking to, ed] by a neuroscientist who may or may not be a graduate student somewhere in Massachusetts.

You asked me about the Human Brain Project. Well, there is only one way to properly address that topic: with a rant.

Henry Markram at EPFL in Switzerland was the leader of the “Blue Brain” project, to simulate a brain (well, actually just one cubic millimeter of a mouse brain) on an IBM Blue-Gene supercomputer. He got tons of money for this project, including the IBM supercomputer for the simulations. Of course he never published anything showing that these simulations lead to any understanding of brain function whatsoever. But he did create a team of graphics professionals to make cool pictures of the simulations. Building on this “success”, he led the “Human Brain” EU flagship project into being funded by some miracle of bureaucratic gullibility. The clearly promised goal was simulating a human brain (hence the name of the project). Almost everyone in Europe publicly supported the project, although in private the neuroscientists (who, if they have done any simulations, know that the stated goal is completely absurd) would say something more like “hey, maybe it’s crazy, but it’ll bring a bunch of money.”

Now, some simple observations must be made, which are true now, and will still be true in ten years’ time, at the conclusion of this flagship project

link.

Simulating ~31,000 Neurons, .21% of a Rat's Brain Required a Supercomputer

Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry

Authors:

Markram et al

Abstract:

We present a first-draft digital reconstruction of the microcircuitry of somatosensory cortex of juvenile rat. The reconstruction uses cellular and synaptic organizing principles to algorithmically reconstruct detailed anatomy and physiology from sparse experimental data. An objective anatomical method defines a neocortical volume of 0.29 ± 0.01 mm3 containing ∼31,000 neurons, and patch-clamp studies identify 55 layer-specific morphological and 207 morpho-electrical neuron subtypes. When digitally reconstructed neurons are positioned in the volume and synapse formation is restricted to biological bouton densities and numbers of synapses per connection, their overlapping arbors form ∼8 million connections with ∼37 million synapses. Simulations reproduce an array of in vitro and in vivo experiments without parameter tuning. Additionally, we find a spectrum of network states with a sharp transition from synchronous to asynchronous activity, modulated by physiological mechanisms. The spectrum of network states, dynamically reconfigured around this transition, supports diverse information processing strategies.

A bit old but Good Tom Scott: When Facebook Resurrected the Dead

Moore's Law: Stick a Fork in it! Its Done!

It may be time for another revision to Moore's Law, if Intel's recent troubles keeping pace are any indication.

In a conference call on Wednesday, Intel confirmed that its upcoming generation of processors, codenamed Cannonlake, will not launch until the second half of 2017 -- nearly three years after the previous generation was made available. To bridge the gap, Intel plans to launch the third iteration of its current-generation processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in the second half of 2016.

link.

We've already broken the 18 month cycle.  We've already slipped to 30 months and counting for the next iteration.  The Singularity, sir; its done.

 

Don't Buy it, but...: Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain

Randy McDonald links to an article about the possible psychology of a Matrioshka Brain.

I don't buy it. And we're very, very sure there's none out there, at least within our observable space.  However, some may find the vision of the ability to run around 4* 10^17 human minds within a Dyson sphere enthralling. 

Head-desk: The Singularity is Waiting for Us...OUT THERE!

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

“Most people have an iconic idea of aliens as these biological creatures, but that doesn’t make any sense from a timescale argument,” Shostak told me. “I’ve bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it’ll be artificial life.

link.

TIme to Talk Intelligently About AI: “Watson doesn't know it won Jeopardy!”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk worries it is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, “AI could be a big danger in the not-too-distant future.” Fear mongering about AI has also hit the box office in recent films such as Her and Transcendence.

So as an active researcher in the field for over 20 years, and now the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, why am I not afraid?

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals, and have its own will, and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game. It assumes that with intelligence comes free will, but I believe those two things are entirely different.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations. A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets, or keeping up to date on medical research. Like calculators, AI tools require human input and human directions.

Now, autonomous computer programs exist and some are scary — such as viruses or cyber-weapons. But they are not intelligent. And most intelligent software is highly specialized; the program that can beat humans in narrow tasks, such as playing Jeopardy, has zero autonomy. IBM’s Watson is not champing at the bit to take on Wheel of Fortune next. Moreover, AI software is not conscious. As the philosopher John Searle put it, “Watson doesn't know it won Jeopardy!”

Anti-AI sentiment is often couched in hypothetical terms, as in Hawking’s recent comment that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” The problem with hypothetical statements is that they ignore reality—the emergence of “full artificial intelligence” over the next twenty-five years is far less likely than an asteroid striking the earth and annihilating us.

So where does this confusion between autonomy and intelligence come from? From our fears of becoming irrelevant in the world. If AI (and its cousin, automation) takes over our jobs, then what meaning (to say nothing of income) will we have as a species? Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we have been afraid of mechanical men, and according to Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, we will probably become even more afraid as mechanical men become closer to us, a phenomenon he called the Frankenstein Complex.

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Alva Noë: Worry About the Singularity When Machines Match the Agency and Awareness of Amoeba

One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeapordy! with Watson. We used "it" the way we use clocks.

Philosophers and biologists like to compare the living organism to a machine. And once that's on the table, we are lead to wonder whether various kinds of human-made machines could have minds like ours, too.

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Tip Toeing to the Robopocaylpse With IBM

A million spiking-neuron integrated circuit with a scalable communication network and interface

Authors:

Merolla et al

Abstract:

Inspired by the brain’s structure, we have developed an efficient, scalable, and flexible non–von Neumann architecture that leverages contemporary silicon technology. To demonstrate, we built a 5.4-billion-transistor chip with 4096 neurosynaptic cores interconnected via an intrachip network that integrates 1 million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses. Chips can be tiled in two dimensions via an interchip communication interface, seamlessly scaling the architecture to a cortexlike sheet of arbitrary size. The architecture is well suited to many applications that use complex neural networks in real time, for example, multiobject detection and classification. With 400-pixel-by-240-pixel video input at 30 frames per second, the chip consumes 63 milliwatts.

pop sci write up.

Human Brain Project: the European Attempt to Model the Human Brain

The machines might be getting smarter, but they're still a long way off from emulating the dizzying complexity of the human brain. We don’t even understand how our own brains work yet. But the Human Brain Project, which is funded by the EU and was launched towards the end of last year, plans to work on both of these simultaneously.

It aims to build a model of the complete human brain “in silico,” or on a supercomputer, in order to give neuroscientists a new tool to understand how the brain functions, as well as informing technologies that could emulate the brain’s computing power. According to its vision statement, “The goal of the project is to build a completely new ICT infrastructure for neuroscience, and for brain-related research in medicine and computing, catalysing a global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its computational capabilities.”

Basically, they want to build a virtual brain.

link.

a Ted Talk Refuting the Singularity...by an AI Researcher

The Singularity can NEVER Happen?!

Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory

Authors:

Maguire et al

Abstract:

In this article we review Tononi's (2008) theory of consciousness as integrated information. We argue that previous formalizations of integrated information (e.g. Griffith, 2014) depend on information loss. Since lossy integration would necessitate continuous damage to existing memories, we propose it is more natural to frame consciousness as a lossless integrative process and provide a formalization of this idea using algorithmic information theory. We prove that complete lossless integration requires noncomputable functions. This result implies that if unitary consciousness exists, it cannot be modelled computationally.