Two designers talk about why they make robots, and how they plan to give their machines social skills.
http://www.thestory.org/stories/2012-10/robot-needs-hips-lean-and-listen
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A Robot Needs Hips To Lean And Listen | The Story
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Spark 177 — March 25, 2012
This week on Spark: We find out all about Angelina, the AI program that designs simple video games from scratch. Also, how to make robots more lovable, how a Roomba can work in harmony with your cat, and whether humans are tempted to destroy robots if given the chance. More robot fever, on Spark!
Michael Cook is a PhD student at Imperial College, and he’s fascinated by video games. He’s also fascinated by artificial intelligence, and he’s fascinated by creativity. And so, he’s found the perfect research – exploring whether Angelina, an artificial intelligence program he’s created, can design video games from scratch.
We know that human beings attach emotions to robots. We tend to think of them as anthropomorphic, even if we know they’re not alive. Young designer Julia Ringler wanted to know if humans would actually hurt robots, given the chance and how humans would feel about doing it. She engineered an experiment to find out.
As we move towards a future with robots and smart devices everywhere, the focus is usually on designing these objects to be as smart as people. But what if we created them instead to be as smart as a puppies? That’s a design philosophy Matt Jones embraces. He’s a principal at a design company called BERG and he wondered if it was possible to develop user interfaces to be well, a little more loveable. He calls his design theory “Be as smart as a puppy” (or BASAAP) – instead of designing for “artificial intelligence” we should emphasize “artificial empathy”.
Carlos Asmat is a young Montreal engineer with an idea for a social networking service: a social network for robots. As we get more and more ‘smart’ objects in our environment – from sensors to Roomba robots – what would happen if you could connect those objects so they can share updates and data?
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Robots and the Illusion of Free Will
Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and the director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning and philosophy of science. He is the author of over three hundred scientific papers and three landmark books in his fields of interest: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000). His current interests are artificial intelligence and knowledge representation, probabilistic and causal reasoning, nonstandard logics and learning strategies. Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in February 2002, "to continue Daniel’s life-work of dialogue and understanding and to address the root causes of his tragedy."
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The Speculist: The Technological Singularity
The World Transformed, Part 9
What is the Singularity? Is it the biggest transformation of all or wishful thinking on the part of nerds looking to have their very own "geek rapture?"
Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcome futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil to discuss how accelerating technological change will soon alter our world beyond recognition…and why that’s a good thing!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/2009/08/19/The-Technological-Singularity
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Scales by Alastair Reynolds
Fresh from signing a £1m deal with Gollancz, the science fiction author Alastair Reynolds has penned a story for the Guardian which follows a new recruit sent out to battle in an interstellar war.
Nineteen years after his first short story appeared, and nine years after the first of his eight novels was published, Scales is Reynolds’ first foray into militaristic SF. In it, he explores the transformations war imposes on soldiers as his hero Nico’s mission evolves into something stranger than he could have possibly imagined.
Reynolds is best-known for his mastery of space opera – the SF sub-genre in which the stakes are high and the aliens deadly – but, after 16 years working for the European Space Agency, he brings a scientist’s rigour to the genre’s high drama.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/19/alastair-reynolds-scales-short-story
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Are We Alone: Robots Call the Shots
Dr. Robot, I presume? Your appendix may be removed by motor-driven, scalpel-wielding mechanical hands one day. Robots are debuting in the medical field… as well as on battlefields. And they’re increasingly making important decisions – on their own. But can we teach robots right from wrong? Find out why the onslaught of silicon intelligence has prompted a new field of robo-ethics.
Plus, robo-geologists: NASA’s vision for autonomous robots in space.
Guests:
- P.W. Singer – Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
- Wendell Wallach – Chair of a technology and ethics working group for Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the co-author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong
- Pablo Garcia – – Principal engineer working on medical robotics at SRI International, Menlo Park, California
- Robert Anderson – Planetary geologist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Robyn Asimov – Daughter of author Isaac Asimov