HAL 9000 (credit: Warner Bros.) Is it possible to develop moral autonomous robots with a sense for right, wrong, and the consequences of
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luiy's curator insight,
November 3, 2013 2:00 PM
For graduate student Deven Vignali of Libby, the three-dimensional data visualization center at Montana Tech has made his life easier. He’s using the $60,000 state-of-the-art software and tracking system to conduct research for his master’s thesis. He’s proving that passive seismic acquisition techniques can be used to monitor geo-thermal resources, as in hot springs. It’s the fastest high-performance computing system within Montana academia, said Jeff Braun, head of the Tech computer engineering and software engineering departments. Consider Vignali’s perspective: “It reduced my simulation model run time from about 18 hours to about three hours, so it positively affected my project,” said Vignali. The system has 10 teraflops of theoretical speed and 1.5 terabytes of memory. Translation: It is equal to between 200 to 400 times the memory of a typical home laptop computer.
Mlik Sahib's curator insight,
October 30, 2013 1:48 PM
"C’est évident. Sans forcément apprendre à coder, nous devons assimiler le langage des machines et savoir ce qui passe dans la boîte noire des systèmes. Où vont les données ? Qu’est-ce qu’un algorithme ? Comment fonctionne le back-office ? Il est fascinant de constater que plus l’interface homme-machine se simplifie, plus l’ergonomie devient fluide, plus la machinerie qui se cache derrière l’écran devient complexe et insondable. Dans ces immenses lieux de mémorisation des comportements que sont les data-centers [centres de stockage de données, ndlr], c’est le règne de l’opacité, et le citoyen est totalement absent. Or, c’est par la connaissance des choses que nous resterons libres de nos choix face cette nouvelle forme de souveraineté technologique. C’est l’apprentissage d’une conscience active à l’égard de notre environnement numérique qui devrait être enseigné dès maintenant à l’école."
luiy's curator insight,
November 1, 2013 6:21 AM
Mais quand le PDG de Google dit : «Nous voulons devenir le troisième hémisphère de votre cerveau», c’est inquiétant, non ?
Oui et non. Google s’inscrit dans ce courant transhumaniste qui consiste à vouloir augmenter l’humanité, à réparer nos déficiences originelles, à améliorer nos capacités physiques et cognitives. Pour Google, Apple, IBM et les autres, il ne s’agit pas de nous dominer façon Big Brother, mais de monétiser la maîtrise technologique en privilégiant la conception d’agents intelligents. Il faut se défaire une fois pour toutes de l’opposition binaire entre technophiles et technophobes. Le temps est à la complexité. Il s’agit aujourd’hui de saisir, dans chacune des situations nouvelles, les perspectives qui s’ouvrent autant que les risques qui pointent. C’est ce travail de «cartographie multicouche» que je m’efforce de développer dans mes livres. |
luiy's curator insight,
March 19, 2014 10:22 AM
Today, effective brain-machine interfaces have to be wired directly into the brain to pick up the signals emanating from small groups of nerve cells. But nobody yet knows how to make devices that listen to the same nerve cells that long. Part of the problem is mechanical: The brain sloshes around inside the skull every time you move, and an implant that slips by a millimeter may become ineffective.
Another part of the problem is biological: The implant must be nontoxic and biocompatible so as not to provoke an immune reaction. It also must be small enough to be totally enclosed within the skull and energy-efficient enough that it can be recharged through induction coils placed on the scalp at night (as with the recharging stands now used for some electric toothbrushes).
luiy's curator insight,
January 8, 2014 1:55 PM
Augmented Reality past and future
luiy's curator insight,
November 3, 2013 11:07 AM
The first modern experiments with tDCS came in fits and starts. In 1981, Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, reported that by applying extremely low doses of direct-current electricity — one-third of a milliamp, not enough to power a hearing aid — to the heads of healthy volunteers, he could speed their response on a simple test of reaction time. The Italian neurophysiologist Alberto Priori began his own experiments in 1992, applying just a tiny bit more electricity, about half a milliamp. He found that enough of the electricity crossed through volunteers’ skulls — electrons flowing from the cathodal electrode to the anodal electrode — to cause brain cells near the anodal to become excited. Despite repeating the experiment multiple times to be sure of the results, it took Priori six years to get his findings published in a scientific journal, in 1998. As he told me, “People kept telling me it can’t be true, it’s too easy and simple.” |
Is it possible to develop “moral” autonomous robots with a sense for right, wrong, and the consequences of both?
Researchers from Tufts University, Brown University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute think so, and are teaming with the U.S. Navy to explore technology that would pave the way to do exactly that.
“Moral competence can be roughly thought about as the ability to learn, reason with, act upon, and talk about the laws and societal conventions on which humans tend to agree,” says principal investigator Matthias Scheutz, professor of computer science at Tufts School of Engineering and director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory (HRI Lab) at Tufts.
“The question is whether machines — or any other artificial system, for that matter — can emulate and exercise these abilities.”
But since there’s no universal agreement on the morality of laws and societal conventions, this raises some interesting questions. Was HAL 9000 (HAL = (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) moral? Who defines morality?