Lifeboat Foundation

What follows is a work of transhumanist poetry by the Anglo-Polish lawyer, Veronika Lipinska, Lifeboat Foundation advisory board member and Steve Fuller’s co-author of The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave, 2014). The Polish sources of transhumanism remain underexplored, but they range across theology and literature. The ‘Polish Brethren’ were a radical 16–17^th century Protestant sect who hosted the heretic Fausto Sozzini — the model for Faust — who laid the theological groundwork for such characteristic Enlightenment religious doctrines as Unitarianism and Deism, both of which posited a more immediate connection between the human and the divine than the established churches found comfortable. In more recent times, most transhumanists will be familiar with the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem, but still more recently the 1980 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Czeslaw Milosz, has penned a poem, ‘After Enduring’, dedicated to cosmologist Frank Tipler’s efforts to infer Christian eschatology from the physics of the Singularity. This poem is a modest follow-up for a new generation.

Virtually human

He played with my head
Got me hardwired
Connected me to the world
And now I can see everything

Continue reading “Virtually Human -- A Transhumanist Poem by Veronika Lipinska” »

Humans evolved over millions of years into today’s upright, bipedal walkers. Now, the evolution of some robots is on a similar track. Only the pace is much faster. In recent decades, we’ve gone from stationary robots performing repetive tasks to wheeled and four-legged robots. And now, bipedal bots are on the rise.

Boston Dynamics has famously engineered some of the most advanced bipedal bots in recent memory (e.g., Petman and Atlas). But they aren’t the only lab working on two-legged robots that can walk like us.

Read more

“If robots are going to reduce how much we work, the humanities will help us fill time that we are not working in constructive ways. Wouldn’t that be great? If the 21st century became famous for an explosion in great works of art, paintings that changed the way we see the world, symphonies that make us weep, and plays that touch the soul? Robots might one day be able to help make such art, too.”‘ Read more

“It is a reflection of the ever-increasing ability of computers to search and do pattern recognition in an ever-increasing store of data. The concept of AI reflects this burgeoning power of the computer to cope with stuff. Each step on the way, each computerised victory over humans in checkers, or chess, or Jeopardy, looks like a material step towards the ultimate — machines that are as intelligent in every way as are we mortals.” Read more

Lorraine Luk | The Wall Street Journal

“While the company has automated more manufacturing processes for components and established some lights-out, or workerless, factories, replacing dexterous human hands that pack tiny flexible parts into the tight structure of consumer electronics remains challenging” Read more

Amir Mizroch | Wall Street Journal

“Facebook’s AI research is currently being used in image tagging, predicting which topics will trend, and face recognition. All of these services require algorithms to sift through vast amounts of data, like pictures, written messages, and video, to make calculated decisions about their content and context. Facebook has a big advantage over university campuses who have toiled for decades in the field. It can vacuum up the reams of data required to ‘teach’ machines to make correlations.” Read more

Scott Andes & Mark Muro | Brookings Institute

“The substantial variation of the degree to which countries deploy robots should provide clues. If robots are a substitute for human workers, then one would expect the countries with much higher investment rates in automation technology to have experienced greater employment loss in their manufacturing sectors…Yet the evidence suggests there is essentially no relationship between the change in manufacturing employment and robot use.” Read more

Can an emotional component to artificial intelligence be a benefit?

Robots with passion! Emotional artificial intelligence! These concepts have been in books and movies lately. A recent example of this is the movie Ex Machina. Now, I’m not an AI expert, and cannot speak to the technological challenges of developing an intelligent machine, let alone an emotional one. I do however, know a bit about problem solving, and that does relate to both intelligence and emotions. It is this emotional component of problem solving that leads me to speculate on the potential implications to humanity if powerful AI’s were to have human emotions.

Why the question about emotions? In a roundabout way, it has to do with how we observe and judge intelligence. The popular way to measure intelligence in a computer is the Turing test. If it can fool a person through conversation, into thinking that the computer is a person, then it has human level intelligence. But we know that the Turing test by itself is insufficient to be a true intelligence test. Sounding human during dialog is not the primary method we use to gauge intelligence in other people or in other species. Problem solving seems to be a reliable test of intelligence either through IQ tests that involve problem solving, or through direct real world problem solving.

As an example of problem solving, we judge how intelligent a rat is by how fast it can navigate a maze to get to food. Let’s look at this in regards to the first few steps in problem solving.

Continue reading “Robotic EQ” »

Kyle Vanhemert | WIRED
“Your computer isn’t a person, but as psychological studies have shown, you often can’t help but treat it like a one. “ Read more