BBC - h2g2 - The Vingean Singularity - A569522. There are scientists who say that technological progress will accelerate indefinitely, causing a mind-boggling change in the basic principles of what we humans affectionately call 'home'. It is a well-known fact among Singularitarians that this event, known as the Singularity1, will occur sometime before the year 2100. Some attribute this hypothetical event to Vernor Vinge and claim that it is first mentioned in his sci-fi novel True Names and Other Dangers as one of the author's answers to a very interesting question; what would happen if the human race created an artificial intelligence which is more intelligent than its creators?
A character in the book finds himself 'precipitated over an abyss' when trying to predict future technology by extrapolating current trends. Vinge feels that when humans create an intelligence greater than their own, 'human history will have reached a kind of singularity'. A Brief Explanation f(t) = -1 / t Exponential versus Hyperbolic Paths to the Singularity. Google futurist claims we will be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes we will be able to upload our entire brains to computers within the next 32 years - an event known as singularityOur 'fragile' human body parts will be replaced by machines by the turn of the century And if these predictions comes true, it could make humans immortal By Victoria Woollaston Published: 14:22 GMT, 19 June 2013 | Updated: 14:22 GMT, 19 June 2013 In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity - according to a futurist from Google.
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100. Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend. Scroll down for video 'The virtual bodies will be as detailed and convincing as real bodies. Printing tiny batteries. A research team from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has demonstrated the ability to 3D print a battery. This image shows the interlaced stack of electrodes that were printed layer by layer to create the working anode and cathode of a microbattery. (SEM image courtesy of Jennifer A. Lewis.) Cambridge, Mass. – June 18, 2013 – 3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand.
The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them. To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less than the width of a human hair. Vote Stalkers: Obama, Romney Campaigns Mine Trove of Voters' Online Data to Win '12 Election. Harvey Fineberg: Are we ready for neo-evolution? Future Army Robot Warrior. PETMAN. Petman Tests Camo. 6 Hours Tutorial Professor Umpleby delivered at WMSCI 2006 - DVD1 Part1. 杉万俊夫 Toshio Sugiman｜理論的研究｜Beyond the Mind-in-a-Body Paradigm. Progress in Asian Social Psychology (Volume 2) T.
Sugiman, M. karasawa, J. H. Liu, and C. Ward (Eds.) pp. 253-256, 1999, Seoul: Kyoyook Kwahaksa Beyond the Mind-in-a-Body Paradigm Toshio Sugiman (Kyoto University, Japan) Introduction for Part V: Social Representations Moscovici, who originated a series of social representations research, referred to a notion of a thinking society in 1984. In the theory of social representations, everything that appears for you, like a cup in front of you, an image you feel in your mind, and so on, is a social representation. Some might have a doubt about social representations theory or the social construction paradigm and say, ‘Is it possible to have realities in which the moon in the sky suddenly falls down or in which a newborn baby runs a hundred meters in ten seconds, if realities are constructed arbitrarily by a society or a human collectivity as social representations theory or the social construction paradigm insists?’
References. The Transition Between Human And Cyborg. Lepht Anonym - Cybernetics for the Masses (1 of 3) The most realistic female android ever! Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? "Please don't put me in the closet," cries the robot. Last week, we wrote about a study that looked at whether humans attribute moral accountability and emotions to robots. This week, we've got a study from the same group, the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS) at the University of Washington, that takes a look at what kind of relationships children are likely to form with social robot platforms, and it involves forcing their new robot friend into a dark, lonely closet. The 90 children in this study were separated into three groups by age: 9 year olds, 12 year olds, and 15 year olds, with an equal mix of boys and girls. As with the previous study, the robot involved in the research was Robovie, a vaguely humanoid robot that was secretly teleoperated to give it the appearance1 of a sophisticated (but not necessarily unrealistic) level of autonomy and interactivity.
Geez. Things get even more interesting when you break down the results by age. . [ HINTS Lab ] Meet Nao: The first robot able to develop emotions and form a bond with humans. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 11:52 GMT, 13 August 2010 The first robot capable of developing emotions and forming bonds with humans has been unveiled by scientists. Nao has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it kindly. The robot has been developed to use the same types of expressive and behavioural cues that babies use to learn to interact socially and emotionally with others.
It is able to detect human emotions by studying body-language and facial expressions and becomes better at reading someone's mood over time as it grows to 'know' the person. It is also able to remember its interactions with different people and memorise their faces. Nao have been created through modelling the early attachment process that human and chimpanzee infants undergo when they are very young. 'This behaviour is modelled on what a young child does,' said Dr Cañamero. Humans Show Empathy for Robots | Human-Robot Interactions. From R2-D2 in "Star Wars" to Furby, robots can generate surprisingly humanlike feelings. Watching a robot being abused or cuddled has a similar effect on people to seeing those things done to a human, new research shows. Humans are increasingly exposed to robots in their daily lives, but little is known about how these lifelike machines influence human emotions. Feeling bad for bots In two new studies, researchers sought to measure how people responded to robots on an emotional and neurological level.
In the first study, volunteers were shown videos of a small dinosaur robot being treated affectionately or violently. In the affectionate video, humans hugged and tickled the robot, and in the violent video, they hit or dropped him. [5 Reasons to Fear Robots] Scientists assessed people's levels of physiological excitation after watching the videos by recording their skin conductance, a measure of how well the skin conducts electricity. Human-robot interactions. Brain Scans Show Humans Feel for Robots. Star Wars’ R2-D2 shows that a robot—even one that looks more like a trash can than a person—can make people laugh and cry. Now, in research to be presented at the International Communication Association conference in London, scientists have shown that when the human brain witnesses love for or violence against a robot, it reacts in much the same way as if the robot were human.
Engineers worldwide are developing robots to act as companions for people—for instance, to help the elderly at home or patients in hospitals. However, after the novelty of using a robot fades, people often feel less interested in using them. Scientists want to learn how to create more-engaging robots, but there has been little systematic research on how people react emotionally toward them. In other videos, experimenters acted violently toward the targets—for instance, strangling them with a rope. The researchers were surprised by how similar the brain responses to both humans and robots were. How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust. Despite running a campaign with about twice the money and twice the staff of Governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid, President Barack Obama's campaign under-spent Romney's on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team.
Based on an Ars analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll. The bottom line is that the Obama campaign's emphasis on people over capital and use of open-source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money. As Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America put it in an e-mail interview with Ars, "A lesson which we took to heart from 2008 [was that] operational efficiency is an enormous strategic advantage.
" Smart, not perfect The armor-plated cloud Build, borrow, or buy. Hod Lipson builds "self-aware" robots. Wang Zi Won. Ghost In The Shell - A robot's theory on god. The Robot Buddha. Rat Brain Robot. Rats mind-reading technology: Scientists create 'telepathic' connection. Blueprint for an artificial brain: Scientists experiment with memristors that imitate natural nerves.
Scientists have long been dreaming about building a computer that would work like a brain. This is because a brain is far more energy-saving than a computer, it can learn by itself, and it doesn't need any programming. Privatdozent [senior lecturer] Dr. Andy Thomas from Bielefeld University's Faculty of Physics is experimenting with memristors -- electronic microcomponents that imitate natural nerves.
Thomas and his colleagues have demonstrated that they could do this a year ago. They constructed a memristor that is capable of learning. He will be presenting his results at the beginning of March in the print edition of the Journal of Physics published by the Institute of Physics in London. Memristors are made of fine nanolayers and can be used to connect electric circuits. Like synapses, memristors learn from earlier impulses. Thanks to these properties, synapses can be used to reconstruct the brain process responsible for learning, says Andy Thomas.
Creating indestructible self-healing circuits. Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips -- including everything they need to self-heal -- could fit on a single penny. "It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits," says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. USC: Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains -- LOS ANGELES, June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire. Biomedical engineers analyze—and duplicate—the neural mechanism of learning in rats LOS ANGELES , June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch.
(Photo: ) Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. "Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering . In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. "No hippocampus," says Berger, "no long-term memory, but still short-term memory. " "The rats still showed that they knew 'when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,'" Berger said. Researchers Replace Passwords With Mind-Reading Passthoughts. Remembering the passwords for all your sites can get frustrating.
There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option. Thanks to researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Information, you may not need to type those pesky passwords in the future. Instead, you'll only need to think them. By measuring brainwaves with biosensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "passthoughts" for computer authentication. A $100 headset wirelessly connects to a computer via Bluetooth, and the device's sensor rests against the user’s forehead, providing a electroencephalogram (EEG) signal from the brain. Other biometric authentication systems use fingerprint or retina scans for security, but they're often expensive and require extensive equipment. The NeuroSky Mindset looks just like any other Bluetooth set and is more user-friendly, researchers say.
Image via iStockphoto, maxkabakov. Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound Dr. William J. Tyler is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, is a co-founder and the CSO of SynSonix, Inc., and a member of the 2010 DARPA Young Faculty Award class. Every single aspect of human sensation, perception, emotion, and behavior is regulated by brain activity.
Thus, having the ability to stimulate brain function is a powerful technology. Recent advances in neurotechnology have shown that brain stimulation is capable of treating neurological diseases and brain injury, as well as serving platforms around which brain-computer interfaces can be built for various purposes. For example, deep-brain stimulating (DBS) electrodes used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease require neurosurgery in order to implant electrodes and batteries into patients.
A portion of our initial work has been supported by the U.S. How can this technology be used to provide our nation’s Warfighters with strategic advantages? Scientists Read Dreams. By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep.
This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams six or seven times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports. But the extra effort will be worth it, he says. Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment | Wired Business. Man sees with 'bionic eye'
Double Amputee Transformed Into Mermaid With Help From Prosthetics. PW Singer on military robots and the future of war. Cool New Autonomous Robot - The Beginning of Skynet? BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010) Military Researchers Develop Corpse-Eating Robots | Underwire. Bionic Soldiers. New robotic hand 'can feel' Mind-Reading Experiment Reconstructs Movies in Our Mind. On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces.
How to Build a Device that Improves Our Neural Abilities. First mind-reading implant gives rats telepathic power - life - 28 February 2013. Automaton. IBM’s Watson Tries to Learn…Everything. Love Robot Holds Female Lab Intern Prisoner. The Truth About Kenji, the Robot Programmed to Love. Leaders Of The 3D Printing Revolution.