God created man in his own image. Man created AI in his own image. Once again, with footnotes. God created man in his1 own image.2 Man3 created AI in his3 own image. At least that is how it started out. But figuring out what our selves are, as machines, is a really difficult task. We … Continue reading [FoR&AI] Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here

Past is prologue1. I mean that both the ways people interpret Shakespeare’s meaning when he has Antonio utter the phrase in The Tempest. In one interpretation it is that the past has predetermined the sequence which is about to unfold–and so I believe that how we have gotten to where we are in Artificial Intelligence … Continue reading [FoR&AI] The Origins of “Artificial Intelligence”

[An essay in my series on the Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.] We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. There is hysteria about how powerful they will become how quickly, and there is hysteria about what they will do to jobs. As I write these words on September … Continue reading [FoR&AI] The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI

[An essay in my series on the Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.] Much of the recent enthusiasm about Artificial Intelligence is based on the spectacular recent successes of machine learning, itself often capitalized as Machine Learning, and often referred to as ML. It has become common in the technology world that the presence of … Continue reading [FoR&AI] Machine Learning Explained

[An essay in my series on the Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.] Friday March 11th, 2011, was a bad day for Japan. At 2:46pm local time a magnitude 9.1 earthquake occurred 72 kilometers offshore, east of the Oshika Peninsula which is in the Tohoku region of Japan. A great tsunami was triggered with maximum … Continue reading [FoR&AI] Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

Perhaps through this essay I will get the bee out of my bonnet that fully driverless cars are a lot further off than many techies, much of the press, and even many auto executives seem to think. They will get here and human driving will probably disappear in the lifetimes of many people reading this, but … Continue reading Edge Cases For Self Driving Cars

Megatrends are inexorable, at least for some decades, and drive major changes in our world. They may change our planet permanently, they change the flow of money within our society, they drive people to move where they live, they kill some people and cause others to be born, they change the fortunes of individuals, and … Continue reading Megatrend: The Demographic Inversion

This is the first post in an intended series on what is the current state of Artificial Intelligence capabilities, and what we can expect in the relative short term. I will be at odds with the more outlandish claims that are circulating in the press, and amongst what I consider an alarmist group that includes … Continue reading What Is It Like to Be a Robot?

I have been working on an upcoming post about megatrends and how they drive tech.  I had included the end of Moore’s Law to illustrate how the end of a megatrend might also have a big influence on tech, but that section got away from me, becoming much larger than the sections on each individual … Continue reading The End of Moore’s Law

Many new technologies have unexpected impacts on the physical or social world in which we live. When the first IMPs for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in 1969 at BBN in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would … Continue reading Unexpected Consequences of Self Driving Cars