Face Recognition Study - FAQ. Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn't Near. Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities.
They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they’ll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever.
It’s heady stuff. The AI Approach. Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic. Google has stated on its official blog that it has developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.
“Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard,” said Sebastian Thrun, Distinguished Software Engineer at Google and also Professor of Computer Science and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. “We’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe.
All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.” (Yes, they also have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can “take over as easily as one disengages cruise control,” and a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software.) Siri Meets Eliza. Since I got my iPhone 4S, I’ve been intrigued, fascinated and alarmed by Siri’s fast-growing capabilities.
I thought it would make sense to introduce her to my psychotherapist, Eliza. ELIZA was one of the first (and longest) BASIC programs I typed into my then brand-new 16K Apple II in 1979. Originally created at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, this pioneering natural-language-processing simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist impressed my family and friends every bit as much as Siri does now. I was curious to see how they would get along. Here is a transcript of their first encounter. Hello, I am Eliza. Hi. How are you today? I’m fine. How long have you been fine. Hmm... Do you doubt you?