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ROBIN BAUMGARTEN, MSc
The SciFi article
Site of the
Week said
Humanity loves its gadgets — be they iPods, cell phones, or
GPS
trackers — but
it is an affection tempered with unease, a concern that our own
creations may one day supplant us. This anxiety has increased as
computers have become better, smarter, and faster — and nowhere has
this
emotional friction been more apparent than in the SF
field.
Evil robots and intelligent computers gone bad have been a mainstay of
the genre since the advent of the electronic age — and the stories,
like
the machines they are about, have only increased in sophistication. Take
1984's
The Terminator, which offered filmgoers a terrifying glimpse
of a
future where humans are hunted by robots. Two decades further along
The
Sarah Connor Chronicles brings that same world to ever more
detailed
life on the small screen ... its dark vision realized, ironically, by a
revolution in special effects powered by improvements in computer
graphics.
Little surprise, then, that the Internet has spawned a blog called
AI Panic, which tracks the likelihood of a takeover of the Earth by
artificially intelligent machines. Following the development of
everything from military robots to artificial "love" companions, the
site gives each of its posts a rating that either adds to or subtracts
from the overall level of
AI Panic. (This level is currently sitting
near a 30 percent probability of a Terminator-style Judgment Day
event — too soon to really worry, according to the blog's owner,
Robin
Baumgarten, who consciously strives to avoid unnecessary
"scaremongering".)
Robin Baumgarten, MSc is a
PhD
student at Imperial College London, UK, where he studies the
classification of user behaviour in video games using artificial
intelligence. He is involved in research in affective computing,
combined machine learning, and computational bioinformatics.
Robin is the author of the blog AI
Panic, where he researches and unveils the perils, imminence, and
probabilities of a hostile takeover of the world through artificial
intelligence. He beliefs that a "naive" artificial intelligence would almost
certainly be evil, and thus awareness for this problem has to be
raised, maintaining a counterbalance to the Kurzweilian
Singularity-optimism.
He authored
Zombie
AI,
Go AI Beats Professional 5th Dan Grade Master - A Little Bit,
Universities March Towards Uncanny Valley,
Anti-Landmine Group Campaigns Against Autonomous War Robots, Wired
Thinks That's Stupid,
Last Week Wrap-Up: Suicide-Bots, Kurzweil, Thoughts On Friendly AI,
A.
C. Clarke,
Scared Robot Teaches Children How To Like Scary Robots,
Researchers Create Smartest AI, Say Adult Level Intelligence Very Far
Away,
U.S. Army Demonstrates Armed Robot, Tries To Dispel Concerns By
Hiding Trigger, and
Japanese Nanobot Brain To Control The Goo.
Robin did his undergraduate study in mathematics and computing at
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany from
2003 to
2006,
then changed to Imperial College London to earn his Master of Science
diploma (with Distinction) in Advanced Computing in 2007. He did his
graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence, with the dissertation being
Combining
Artificial Intelligence Methods: Automating the Playing of
DEFCON.
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