Dear David Hanson, A good slapping would be well earned now

With love,
Your fellow roboticists.

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For reader reference, the video below is now in the process of getting cut to pieces & hugely misinterpreted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0

Seriously. Don’t we have enough people already freaking out due to the recent years’ military adoption of drone technology?

Your work is good. Amazing. The best animated dolls ever. You have more experience in robotics than I do. But this is not the way to present your work, no matter what! The shortest line that can be misunderstood when cut in the proper way will be the one circulated around. The joke was awkward even for a roboticist.

For a few minutes of fame you just made yourself and the rest of us look like irresponsible crazy scientists. It doesn’t even do you good as you scared so many people and fuelled endless conspiracy/robot-takeover/singularity theories that tips the acceptance of robots all the way to the negative scale.

We should be concentrating on making people’s lives easier, safer, more meaningful, more pleasant, whatever that is for good, not freaking them out with human-looking dolls talking BS!

Then there are already some famous & smart people who are half-educated on recent AI/Robotics talk fearful nonsense, such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and others. Do you want to join that club?

Cheers from a fellow roboticist,

Bence

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Dear non-robotics people,

Please don’t believe sci-fi level stuff you see on TV.

For a good anecdotal overview of robotics I recommend reading Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks.

They say an engineered system is only as good as the worst performance it can give. If you would like to see how the best top-level humanoid research groups failed outside of their labs:

For a full picture on the Darpa Robotics Challenge many references can be found all over the internet or if you are from the US you can watch this documentary by PBS.

Ask me questions if you have any.

Kind regards,

Bence

 

Book review: Beyond AI by J. Storrs Hall

I really liked this book. It’s clear that the author is quite literate even in philosophy and psychology. While giving a deep view into the full AI timeline he keeps reflecting back to human biology, behavior, ethics or even history. I really liked that he did not say any formal stuff about how to prove that this and that will work. Instead he gave a brief description of how should thing be implemented or described. This book is not about how to build intelligent robots nor an AI history book but a synthesis of both.

Skynet is among us!

Here is the new breaktrough in the AI development: An AI can read a game manual and be more succesful than the ordinary one. The Civilization 2 game has been tested with this AI and the result is if it reads a manual it has higher chance to win the game. I could say that today the game is the world, tomorrow the world will be the game. But ofcourse that was just a joke.

The original article can be found here