The Future Is Here Today...Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

Bionic Limbs With Artificial Intelligence

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by Aaron Saenz on August 27th, 2009

That little blue box is one of the world's smartest knees.

That little blue box is one of the world's smartest knees.

They won’t give you superhuman strength, and they definitely don’t cost six million dollars, but the artificial limbs from Ossur can think to help you walk better. The Rheo Knee, Power Knee, and Proprio Foot prosthetics all carry onboard artificial intelligences that help amputees use their bionic limbs with security and accuracy. Not only do the limbs move in a natural way and provide the strength to climb stairs foot over foot, they learn the user’s gait. Overtime, the bionic limbs will know how you walk better than you do. Check out a French demonstration video of the Power Knee after the break.

Based in Reykjavik, Iceland Ossur is a global leader in prosthetics, braces, and orthopedic education. The founder developed some of the first artificial limbs by testing them on his daughter. The new wave of bionic limbs may be drastically better than older models, but this isn’t enough for current CEO Jon Sigurdsson. His goal is to create limbs that are as good or better than the real thing. Certainly the knees and feet with artificial intelligence go a long way to helping amputees walk and run as well as their peers

Both the Rheo knee and Proprio foot (shown in image above) contain onboard computers that perform minute changes to the prosthetic to help it respond to variations in movement. The Proprio flexes to match terrain, and adjusts the ankle to fit different slopes. The Rheo adjusts actuators to control leg swing. Together, this provides the user with increased security. The embedded AIs can learn an amputees gait in just 15 steps, but continues to adjust as the user grows accustomed to the devices.

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War 2.0 – Rise of the Robots

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by Aaron Saenz on June 1st, 2009

The face of war is changing, and it may no longer be a human one. Developing new technology has always been a cornerstone of a successful military force, but now those technologies are steadily moving human soldiers from combat to management positions. Virtually every major military power is working on robotic weapons. In short, we’re outsourcing more and more of war into the hands of robots and computers. Even the conventional foot soldier has robotic and biological augmentation in his/her future. Today, Singularity Hub is taking a wide-angle look at these changes and how they will change the nature of war and our world.

robots-in-war

Release the Drones

Forget the future for a moment, and just consider our present. The U.S. military employs more than 7000 unmanned drones in operations all over the world. Even just 15 years ago, the number of active drones was just a few dozen at most. Now, the use of Predator drones is regularly covered by major media outlets. The Predator, an unmanned, remotely flown drone capable of delivering explosive payloads, is able to seek out and destroy hostile targets thousands of miles from the soldier controlling it. A Raven drone, another Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), is capable of short range reconnaissance and lightweight enough to be carried into the field by a foot soldier. See the video after the break.

These UAVs are just the tip of the drone iceberg. Besides specialized anti-munitions drones, defense turrets, and surveillance drones already in use, the U.S. military is developing rolling ground vehicles, water surface vehicles, and remote bombers that could all see action in the next few years. There are several competing models for each category, but the Crusher (ground), X-45 (air), and USV (water) are advanced enough to have videos available on the web. Each of these drones would be piloted by controllers many miles away from the field (eventually even from the other side of the world). Closer to home, pocket sized reconnaissance drones may become a part of every soldier’s arsenal  (like the Ember from iRobot we talked about recently) , allowing them to explore dangerous areas without risking their own skin.

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Create an AI on Your Computer

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by Aaron Saenz on May 28th, 2009
Intelligence Realm is seeking to build the first AI using distributed computing.

Intelligence Realm is seeking to build the first AI using distributed computing.

If many hands make light work, then maybe many computers can make an artificial brain. That’s the basic reasoning behind Intelligence Realm’s Artificial Intelligence project. By reverse engineering the brain through a simulation spread out over many different personal computers, Intelligence Realm hopes to create an AI from the ground-up, one neuron at a time. The first waves of simulation are already proving successful, with over 14,000 computers used and 740 billion neurons modeled. Singularity Hub managed to snag the project’s leader, Ovidiu Anghelidi, for an interview: see the full text at the end of this article.

The ultimate goal of Intelligence Realm is to create an AI or multiple AIs, and use these intelligences in scientific endeavors. By focusing on the human brain as a prototype, they can create an intelligence that solves problems and “thinks” like a human. This is akin to the work done at FACETS that Singularity Hub highlighted some weeks ago. The largest difference between Intelligence Realm and FACETS is that Intelligence Realm is relying on a purely simulated/software approach.

Which sort of makes Intelligence Realm similar to the Blue Brain Project that Singularity Hub also discussed. Both are computer simulations of neurons in the brain, but Blue Brain’s ultimate goal is to better understand neurological functions, while Intelligence Realm is seeking to eventually create an AI. In either case, to successfully simulate the brain in software alone, you need a lot of computing power. Blue Brain runs off a high-tech supercomputer, a resource that’s pretty much exclusive to that project. Even with that impressive commodity, Blue Brain is hitting the limit of what it can simulate. There’s too much to model for just one computer alone, no matter how powerful. Intelligence Realm is using a distributed computing solution. Where one computer cluster alone may fail, many working together may succeed. Which is why Intelligence Realm is looking for help.

The AI system project is actively recruiting, with more than 6700 volunteers answering the call. Each volunteer runs a small portion of the larger simulation on their computer(s) and then ships the results back to the main server. BOINC, the Berkeley built distributed computing software that makes it all possible, manages the flow of data back and forth. It’s the same software used for SETI’s distributed computing processing. Joining the project is pretty simple: you just download BOINC, some other data files, and you’re good to go. You can run the simulation as an application, or as part of your screen saver.

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The Quest For Human Level Artificial Intelligence: AGI-09 and Ben Goertzel

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by Keith Kleiner on February 12th, 2009

The second conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is set to convene in Arlington, Virginia on March 6-9, 2009.  The conference stands uniquely as one of the few (only?) conferences that focuses solely on the ambitious goal of creating true human level artificial intelligence.

The conference, dubbed AGI-09, comes on the heels of last year’s successful conference in 2008, AGI-08.  The schedule for the conference is intense, offering attendees a three day lineup of keynote speeches, workshops, moderated discussions, and presentations.

Singularity Hub has negotiated a 10% discount on admission to the conference to the first five readers that signup. The discount only applies to regular price admission (it cannot be added on top of an AAAI discount or student discount).  To take advantage of this discount, simply be one of the first 5 people to mention Singularity Hub when you register.

The Hub’s Keith Kleiner recently had a chance to speak with AGI-09 creator and conference chair Ben Goertzel to ask him about the conference and the field of AI in general.  Below is a short bio on Goertzel, followed by a summary of Kleiner’s discussion with Goertzel:

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Jeff Hawkins: Recreating Human Intelligence

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by Keith Kleiner on January 16th, 2009

If you are at all interested in artificial intelligence and understanding how the human brain works then following the work of Jeff Hawkins (pictured right: source) is an excellent place to start.  Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, was the visionary that spawned the development of the palm pilot, the treo, and the grafiti writing language.  Although hugely successful in the field of mobile computing, Hawkins’ lifelong passion and current efforts focus entirely on creating a complete theory and reproduction of human level intelligence.

Today at the Hub we present a “spotlight on Jeff Hawkins” post in which we will familiarize you with his work and highlight some material for exploring what it will take to truly recreate human intelligence.

At the very core of Hawkins’ work is a theory that human intelligence can be defined as the ability to see patterns and predict outcomes based on previous experiences.  Our brains build a model of the world from our experiences and based on this model we are able to make theories and predictions about the future. In essence the brain is a prediction machine. More on this later in the post, but first a must see video of Jeff Hawkins presenting his ideas at the TED conference in 2003:

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Videos From Singularity Summit 2007 Posted to SIAI Website

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by Keith Kleiner on July 26th, 2008

The SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) recently posted the videos from its Singularity Summit 2007 on their website. These videos offer an amazing perspective on the singularity from the biggest names in the field (Ray Kurzweil, Peter Norvig, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Barney Pell, and more). I am still working my way through all of the videos, but already one of my favorites is the discussion with Ray Kurzweil:

http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007/raykurzweil

Logo from SIAI Website

Major European Effort to Develop Robots With Emotions

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by Keith Kleiner on July 22nd, 2008

The Feelix Growing Project is a $2.5 million euro initiative funded by the European Union to foster research in the development of robots that can detect and mimic human emotion. The project started in December 2006 and has already been cited by numerous outlets such as Gizmodo.

Euronews, a major European news outlet, recently aired this interesting 8 minute video clip documenting the project:

euronews – futuris – Robots learn to express emotions

IEEE special report on the singularity

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by Keith Kleiner on July 16th, 2008

IEEE produced a special report on the singularity in its June 2008 issue located here:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/singularity

This is a comprehensive report, representing many diverse views about the singularity from a selection of tech luminaries and scholars in singularity related fields. It is a must read if you are at all interested in the singularity. In a few separate posts I will be highlighting some of the cool insights to be found within this report.

Image from the cover of the report

Add air hockey to the list of things that computers can do better than humans

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by Keith Kleiner on July 13th, 2008

The Short:
The EE Times reports that a computer has been built that can beat the world’s best humans at the game of air hockey.  Check out this video of the air hockey robot putting another wimpy human in his place:

The Long:
It is interesting to note how easy it was to build a robot that could outperform a human in air hockey because of the increasing capability of modern processors. The designers admit that they intentionally did not optimize the code when they could have in order to demonstrate the effect of going from an 8-bit to a 32-bit processor. The designers state:

“We could have optimized the 8-bit code, but we wanted to run the exact same program to show the difference in processors.”

And here are a few good quotes:

“So far, the robot has defeated every human opponent running in 32-bit mode, averaging three times as many goals as human players”

“A video system that tracks the puck’s position sends coordinates to the
board every 10 milliseconds. In 32-bit mode, the recalculation time
could keep up with the puck position. In 8-bit mode, the longer
recalculation time caused the robot to miss the puck.”

The day when computers equal and then surpass us is not as far away as many think…

Numenta Is Imitating Your Brain

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by Keith Kleiner on July 11th, 2008

Decent piece in BusinessWeek profiling Jeff Hawkins’ startup Numenta. Numenta is building artificial intelligence that attempts to replicate the function of the human neocortex to solve hard problems. The software specializes in recognizing patterns within massive streams of data.

I am a big fan of Jeff Hawkins…here is a short plug about him:
After inventing the Palm Pilot Jeff Hawkins left the tech industry to pursue his dream to unlock the secrets of the brain.  His book On Intelligence is a fabulous read for those looking for a straightforward introduction to the inner workings of the brain that doesn’t require a neuroscience degree to understand.

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