Rodney Brooks

You are currently browsing articles tagged Rodney Brooks.

“We Cannot Possibly Imagine What It Will Be Like”

June 23, 2017 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article in which a raft of scientists and futurists are questioned about the ETA of conscious machines and their potential impact. Notably, nobody says such a development is impossible nor does anyone suggest pursuit of such has a good chance to extinct us.

Robin Hanson, author The Age of Em, sticks to his previous prognostication that our increasingly technological future may bring us an economy that doubles every month, which might seem inviting to a society in stagnation, but a world that could potentially “turn over” so quickly would be a shock to the system to anyone not gradually eased into it.

Marthine Rothblatt, the Sirius founder turned Transhumanist and developer of “consciousness software,” believes robots will largely be “good,” saying that she’s “confident the computers will be overwhelmingly friendly since they will be selected for in a Darwinian environment that consists of humanity. There is no market for [a] bad robot, no more than there is for a bad car or plane. Of course, there is the inevitability of a DIY bad human-level computer, but that gives me even more reason to welcome human-level cyberintelligence, because just like it takes a [thief to catch a thief], it will take a human-friendly smart computer to catch an antihuman smart computer.”

There’s also no market for terrorism or for genocide, but those things happen. We can’t avoid far stronger tools because of the human capacity to cause chaos, but we have to at least consider the possibility that our own doom is embedded in these advances.

Rodney Brooks is perhaps the most sober of all the participants. In Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, the roboticist famously says that in tomorrow’s world of intelligent machines, humans might not be necessary. Brooks, who has since backed off that statement (“You can’t expect me to stand by something I said during a long day of filming 20 years ago!”), now mocks what he believes to be reckless conjecture about the future.

An excerpt:

Question:

When will we have computers as capable as the brain?

Rodney Brooks:

Rodney Brooks’s revised question: When will we have computers/robots recognizably as intelligent and as conscious as humans?

Not in our lifetimes, not even in Ray Kurzweil’s lifetime, and despite his fervent wishes, just like the rest of us, he will die within just a few decades. It will be well over 100 years before we see this level in our machines. Maybe many hundred years.

Question:

As intelligent and as conscious as dogs?

Rodney Brooks:

Maybe in 50 to 100 years. But they won’t have noses anywhere near as good as the real thing. They will be olfactorily challenged dogs.

Question:

How will brainlike computers change the world?

Rodney Brooks:

Since we won’t have intelligent computers like humans for well over 100 years, we cannot make any sensible projections about how they will change the world, as we don’t understand what the world will be like at all in 100 years. (For example, imagine reading Turing’s paper on computable numbers in 1936 and trying to pro­ject out how computers would change the world in just 70 or 80 years.) So an equivalent well-grounded question would have to be something simpler, like “How will computers/robots continue to change the world?” Answer: Within 20 years most baby boomers are going to have robotic devices in their homes, helping them maintain their independence as they age in place. This will include Ray Kurzweil, who will still not be immortal.

Question:

Do you have any qualms about a future in which computers have human-level (or greater) intelligence?

Rodney Brooks:

No qualms at all, as the world will have evolved so much in the next 100+ years that we cannot possibly imagine what it will be like, so there is no point in qualming. Qualming in the face of zero facts or understanding is a fun parlor game but generally not useful. And yes, this includes Nick Bostrom.•

Tags: , ,

“Brooks Puzzled About How He Might Create His Own AI”

April 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

brooks-1

Speaking of psychodrama, the theatrical therapy is mentioned briefly in John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace, in a passage about the nascent career of of roboticist Rodney Brooks, who became widely known from the Errol Morris documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Even though the connection in this case is glancing, it’s a good metaphor for how low- and high-tech attempts to understand consciousness overlap historically.

The passage:

Hans Moravec, an eccentric young graduate student, was camping in the attic of SAIL, while working on the Stanford Cart, an early four-wheeled mobile robot. A sauna had been installed in the basement, and psychodrama groups shared a lab space in the evenings. Available computer terminals displayed the message “Take me, I’m yours.” “The Prancing Pony”–a fictional wayfarer’s inn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings–was a mainframe-connected vending machine selling food suitable for discerning hackers. Visitors were greeted in a small lobby decorated with an ungainly “You Are Here” mural echoing the famous Leo Steinberg New Yorker cover depicting a relativistic view of the most important place in the United States. The SAIL map was based on a simple view of the laboratory and the Stanford campus, but lots of people had added their own perspectives to the map, ranging from placing the visitor at the center of the human brain to placing the laboratory near an obscure star somewhere out on the arm of an average-sized spiral galaxy.

It provided a captivating welcome for Rodney Brooks, another new Stanford graduate student. A math prodigy from Adelaide, Australia, raised by working-class parents, Brooks had grown up far from the can-do hacker culture in the United States. However, in 1969–along with millions of others around the world–he saw Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Jerry Kaplan, Brooks was not inspired to train like an astronaut but was instead seduced by HAL, the paranoid (or perhaps justifiably suspicious) AI.

Brooks puzzled about how he might create his own AI, and arriving at college, he had his first opportunity. On Sundays he had solo access to the school’s mainframe for the entire day. There, he created his own AI-oriented programming language and designed an interactive interface on the mainframe display. Brooks now went to writing theorem proofs, thus unwittingly working in the formal, McCarthy-inspired artificial intelligence tradition. Building an artificial intelligence was what he wanted to do with his life.•

Tags: ,

“Some People Remain Nervous About The Growing Role Of Robots”

November 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Rethink_Robotics_Baxter_Sawyer_1200

Rodney Brooks still thinks the future will be fast and cheap, but perhaps not out of control. 

In Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary, the roboticist famously says that in tomorrow’s world of intelligent machines, humans might not be necessary. In a BBC piece written by Regan Morris, Brooks backs off that statement (“You can’t expect me to stand by something I said during a long day of filming 20 years ago!”), and also explains why he doesn’t fear technological unemployment or appreciate “cute” robots.

Brooks is certainly right that AI handling rote, backbreaking tasks is a good thing in the big picture, though distribution of wealth is a sticky point. And the work that disappears won’t only be of the blue-collar variety.

An excerpt:

Some people remain nervous about the growing role of robots.

Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots, says robots will change the global economy in drastic ways beyond manufacturing. White collar jobs, are equally susceptible and likely more at risk, he says.

“I think it’s inevitable that robots will displace a lot of jobs, if you have a PhD in science and engineering, you’re probably safe. But that’s not many people,” Ford says.

“We can’t stop it. We can’t educate ourselves out of it. Top level, highly creative, highly skilled jobs will survive. But most people do average stuff. Even if we tried we couldn’t educate every person to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon.”

Baby boomers need bots

Mr Brooks is less concerned. He thinks fears of robots taking over jobs are overblown and that robots will improve people’s lives.

“I think there’s a misconception amongst the wealthy people in the bubble that there are endless rows of people wanting dull, boring jobs in factories. It’s not true,” Mr Brooks says, adding that robots will become more pervasive in society as baby boomers age and require more self-driving cars and home healthcare.•

 

Tags: , ,

“AI Guru Marvin Minsky Refers To Humans As ‘Meat Machines'”

November 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Zentralbild-Biscan bgm-Zi 13.8.1964 "Aufgeblasene Männer" für den Transport Garderobenformer, wie sie in Färbereien, Reinigungsanstalten, und Kleiderfabriken benötgt werden,produziert die mit staatlicher Beteiligung arbeitende Fa.Horst Gessner KG in Güsten, Kreis Staßfurt. Jürgen Stein ist gerade bei der Montage und Erprobunmg einer Bügelpuppe. Mit diesen Dampf-,und Bügelpuppen, die von innen mit Dampf und Luft aufgeblasen werden, dauert das Bügeln von Mänteln, Kleidern und Sakkos nur noch etwa zwei Minuten.Dieser Betrieb wird in diesem Jahr für 400000 Mark mehr Erzeugnisse produzieren als vorgesehen und hat bereits 3-4 des Exportsplanes erfüllt."

Theologians and technologists have their similarities, with both believing in a magical higher power of sorts and sometimes showing a lack of fondness for humans beings. Bishop John Fisher argued in 1535 that a person is merely a “satchel full of dung.” Compared to that epithet, Marvin Minsky defining us as “meat machines” in nearly a compliment. 

Ari Schulman’s Washington Post opinion piece asks the question, “Do we love robots because we hate ourselves?” If that’s so, I would say humans have a higher degree of self-awareness than I’ve given us credit for. An excerpt:

Even as the significance of the Turing Test has been challenged, its attitude continues to characterize the project of strong artificial intelligence. AI guru Marvin Minsky refers to humans as “meat machines.” To roboticist Rodney Brooks, we’re no more than “a big bag of skin full of biomolecules.” One could fill volumes with these lovely aphorisms from AI’s leading luminaries.

And for the true believers, these are not gloomy descriptions but gleeful mandates. AI’s most strident supporters see it as the next step in our evolution. Our accidental nature will be replaced with design, our frail bodies with immortal software, our marginal minds with intellect of a kind we cannot now comprehend, and our nasty and brutish meat-world with the infinite possibilities of the virtual.

Most critics of heady AI predictions do not see this vision as remotely plausible. But lesser versions might be — and it’s important to ask why many find it so compelling, even if it doesn’t come to pass. Even if “we” would survive in some vague way, this future is one in which the human condition is done away with. This, indeed, seems to be the appeal.

It’s not exactly a boutique idea, either.•

Tags: , ,

“Building An Artificial Brain…Is Possible In Principle”

May 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Singularity isn’t near, not really. It isn’t theoretically impossible if humans continue to exist for eons more, but it’s not rapidly approaching. Immortality isn’t around the corner, either, nor a-mortality. Almost everyone reading this–and writing this, gulp–will die at some point in the 21st century.

Weak AI is causing disruption right now and that will probably increase to uncomfortable levels in the coming decades, which may create a huge societal challenge, a shock to our economic system, but these won’t be thinking machines capable of posing an existential risk. We should be considering the ramifications of conscious AI but not living in fear of it.

From an Economist article about Deep Learning and neural networks:

Better smartphones, fancier robots and bringing the internet to the illiterate would all be good things. But do they justify the existential worries of Mr Musk and others? Might pattern-recognising, self-programming computers be an early, but crucial, step on the road to machines that are more intelligent than their creators?

The doom-mongers have one important fact on their side. There is no result from decades of neuroscientific research to suggest that the brain is anything other than a machine, made of ordinary atoms, employing ordinary forces and obeying the ordinary laws of nature. There is no mysterious “vital spark,” in other words, that is necessary to make it go. This suggests that building an artificial brain—or even a machine that looks different from a brain but does the same sort of thing—is possible in principle.

But doing something in principle and doing it in fact are not remotely the same thing. Part of the problem, says Rodney Brooks, who was one of AI’s pioneers and who now works at Rethink Robotics, a firm in Boston, is a confusion around the word “intelligence.” Computers can now do some narrowly defined tasks which only human brains could manage in the past (the original “computers,” after all, were humans, usually women, employed to do the sort of tricky arithmetic that the digital sort find trivially easy). An image classifier may be spookily accurate, but it has no goals, no motivations, and is no more conscious of its own existence than is a spreadsheet or a climate model. Nor, if you were trying to recreate a brain’s workings, would you necessarily start by doing the things AI does at the moment in the way that it now does them. AI uses a lot of brute force to get intelligent-seeming responses from systems that, though bigger and more powerful now than before, are no more like minds than they ever were. It does not seek to build systems that resemble biological minds. As Edsger Dijkstra, another pioneer of AI, once remarked, asking whether a computer can think is a bit like asking “whether submarines can swim.”•

Tags:

“Will It Be Directly In The Brain, As Other Science Fiction People State?”

February 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

robotheadcovering7

Rodney Brooks, the roboticist featured in Errol Morris’ great documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is interviewed by Joanne Pransky of Robotics Business Review about the future of AI. A few exchanges follow:

Joanne Pransky:

Let’s assume that your life is only 50 per cent complete. What groundbreaking challenges do you think you’ll be working on 25 and 50 years from now?

Rodney Brooks:

Twenty-five years from now: getting into and out of bed. Fifty years from now: going to the bathroom. I think robotics for eldercare and homecare are going to be important because of demographic inversion, and that’s going to be the big market for robots going forward. In one of my talks, I put up a picture of a Mercedes-Benz 2014 S-Class, and I asked the audience, “What is this?” And they say, “Oh, it’s a car. Oh, it’s a Mercedes”. And somebody said it’s an S-Class. I said, “It’s an eldercare robot”. Because what it’s going to do is let me drive much longer and safely, before my kids pry my keys from my “cold, dead hands”, so to speak. This is an example of a technology which is going to allow the elderly to have dignity and independence longer, and we baby boomers are going to be demanding those as we get older, as there aren’t going to be enough young people to serve our elderly needs.

Joanne Pransky:

If you could wave a magic wand, what technological item would you give to the world?

Rodney Brooks:

There’s two: a technological hand like a human, and object recognition like a child. We have image-based object recognition, but we don’t have the category recognition that a child can do.

Joanne Pransky:

How far away do you think we are from that vision recognition?

Rodney Brooks:

When I did my PhD on that topic in 1977, I thought we were a long way away and it’s still a long way away. We can now do vision a lot better using different techniques, but not in the same “general” way that people can do it. That may take a long time. We’ve had airplanes for over a hundred years. It’s only in the last few years that people have gotten model airplanes to land on branches. We are just understanding STOL (short takeoff and landing) now, which birds use all the time, for flying machines. That took a hundred years.

Joanne Pransky: 

And what do you think the future human–robot interface (HRI) will be like? Will it be directly in the brain, as other science fiction people state? Will it be with our eyes?

Rodney Brooks:

I saw my first touch screen probably around 1988/1989 at CMU and I thought, “That’ll never work.” When I go to some of the academic human robot interaction conferences, I like to characterize some of the papers as, “Well, we tested this variation on that variation, and 60 per cent of people preferred Method A, and the other two preferred Method B.” I think that’s “want-to-be” scientist stuff. It’s asking questions at the wrong level. I think we haven’t invented it. I think a university should be inventing wild HR interactions and seeing what sticks, instead of, “Oh, well, should it be displayed this way or should I have this?” They haven’t invented this interface yet, whatever it’s going to be. That’s what people should be doing, trying different things, most of which will fail. But everyone wants the paper that just gets accepted, just enough science. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but things will change.•

Tags: ,

“We Will Need Robots To Help Us Deal With This Reality”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological progress has historically meant more jobs, but is the new normal of potential mass automation the first exception to that rule? Maybe, maybe not. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the focuses of Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, believes we won’t see a net loss. From Brooks at the Harvard Business Review:

“Over the next 40 years, we are going to see a dramatic drop in the percentage of working-age adults across the world. And as baby boomers reach retirement age, the percentage of folks in retirement is going to change dramatically in the opposite direction. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services, and fewer working people available to deliver those services to them.

We will need robots to help us deal with this reality, doing the things we normally do for ourselves but that get harder to do as we get older. Things like getting groceries, driving cars to visit people, and helping us move around more safely and efficiently as physical ailments settle in.

Before you dismiss this vision for a highly automated society, think about it the next time you put a load of laundry into your washing machine or hit the start button on the dishwasher as you head off to bed. These are tools that have automated unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of our lives, and given us more free time to pursue more productive or pleasurable activities.

A generation ago, these machines were looked at with skepticism and sometimes ridicule. Today, they are staples of modern life that most of us would be hard-pressed to live without. I hope and fully believe we will be saying the same thing about robots a generation from now.”

Tags:

“That’s A Massive Change In The Robotics Landscape”

May 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In much the same way that we don’t travel by flying car, we also aren’t waited on by robotic servants. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the central figures in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is disheartened with what he sees as the sector stalling out. Of course, the same thing was said many times about personal computing, that it hadn’t sealed the deal, until, of course, it began to, dramatically. And just because all our sci-fi dreams haven’t come to fruition that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved has been miniscule. From Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:

“Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, acknowledged Brooks’ points about the state of robotics today, but said big positive changes could come soon via research being pushed by major companies like Google.

‘He’s right that there are lots of things that we haven’t done yet that we had expected to do right now. The early promise was that we’d have robots everywhere by now,’ said Tedrake. ‘Look at Google’s purchase of robotics companies. That’s a massive change in the robotics landscape. The number of companies that are starting robotics and asking how they can work with robots is extremely exciting.’

Will many homes have their own robot that will babysit the kids, make dinner and clean the windows any time soon?

Probably not, according to Tedrake. However, we may have something similar.

‘Maybe we’ll have several small, special-purpose robots instead of one general-purpose robot,’ he said. ‘They might clean your house, cook dinner and mop the floor. Maybe we’ll call them appliances instead of robots.'”

Tags: , ,

“In Our March To The Future, We Somehow Left Robots Behind”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Rodney Brooks essay in the Futurist about the next wave of manufacturing by robotics, which will bring both good and bad things to the world:

“The first industrial robot developed in the United States went to work in 1961 in a Ewing, New Jersey, GM factory. Called the Unimate, it operated with a die-casting mold placing hot, forged car parts into a liquid bath to cool them. At the time, you couldn’t have a computer on an industrial robot. Computers cost millions of dollars and filled a room. Sensors were also extremely expensive. Robots were effectively blind, very dumb, and did repeated actions following a trajectory.

If you’ve watched the evolution of industrial robots over the last 50 years, you haven’t actually seen much innovation since the Unimate. These machines perform well on very narrowly defined, repeatable tasks. But they aren’t adaptable, flexible, or easy to use. Nor are most of these machines safe for people to be around.

Today, 70% of the industrial robots in existence are in automobile factories. They’re either in the paint shop or the body shop. Go to a car factory in Japan or Detroit, you’ll see a body shop full of robots, but with no people. Go to final assembly and you’ll find all people, no robots. Industrial robots and people don’t mix.

These machines are often heralded as money savers for factory owners and operators. But the cost to integrate one of today’s industrial robots into a factory operation is often three or five times the cost of the robot itself. It’s a job that demands programmers, specialists, all sorts of people. And they have to put safety cages around the robots so that the robots don’t strike people while operating.

Unlike human workers, who can detect when they’re about to hit something with their eyes, ears, or skin, most of these machines have no sensors or means to detect what is happening in their environment. They’re not aware. All of this speaks to a larger and fundamental flaw with the way factory bots are built today.

In an increasingly interconnected world, industrial robots have not followed the information technology revolution. In our march to the future, we somehow left robots behind. Some colleagues and I decided to change that.”

Tags:

“He Then Went On To Build A Very Simple Robot That Remained In His Mother’s Garden Shed For The Next 30 Years”

April 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From an article by David L. Chandler on Physorg, a capsule of the early education of Rodney Brooks, the robotics experts from Errol Morris’ great film, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control:

“The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built a very primitive computer, using vacuum tubes, that had a total random access memory capacity of 64 bits (or 8 bytes) and took a year and a half to build. He then went on to build a very simple robot that remained in his mother’s garden shed for the next 30 years, he said.

After seeing the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, he became intrigued by HAL, the movie’s intelligent, responsive computer. ‘He was a murdering psychopath,’ Brooks quipped — but nonetheless an impressive portrayal of machine intelligence.

Brooks’ first exposure to the Institute came when he read that an MIT professor named Marvin Minsky had been a consultant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick; he immediately decided he wanted to attend MIT.

That dream took a while to realize: Brooks was turned down for graduate school at MIT, and turned down again — twice — for faculty positions after earning his doctorate at Stanford University. ‘Rejection is not the end,’ he advised the students, saying that it’s important to persevere in pursuit of one’s dreams: ‘Persistence pays off.'”

••••••••••

Rodney Brooks, roboticist:

Tags: ,

Classic DVD: Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control (1997)

January 18, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Made in the wake of the chaos theory entering into public consciousnes, Errol Morris’ unorthodox 1997 documentary focuses on a quartet of men in disparate professions–a wild-animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a mole-rat specialist and a roboticist–trying in their own way to do what the chaos theorists were also attempting to accomplish–find the underlying sense of unity in ostensible disorder.

Gardener George Mendonςa uses his hedge clippers to transform bushes into leafy elephants, giraffes and bears. These painstaking creations take years to grow and can be undone by one severe rainstorm or snowfall. “You’re fighting the elements,” he says, “trying to get them to do what you want them to do. It’s a constant battle.” Also battling is zoologist Raymond A. Mendez, who puzzles over how to create a secure captivity for African mole-rats, whose teeth can chew through concrete. MIT robot scientist Rodney Brooks has to somehow make machines obey his wishes, realizing that every success he enjoys may be helping silicon-based life eventually supplant carbon-based humans.

While these three men eagerly face their challenges and are largely willing to embrace the future, lion trainer Dave Hoover isn’t quite so cheerful about the the old guard being lost in the shuffle of new ideas: The chaos he faces isn’t only that unpredictable, maned creature in the cage with him, but also a more sophisticated world that isn’t quite so awed by a traveling circus. He pines for his mentor, Clyde Beatty, the legendary animal trainer, and the simpler days when the big top was greeted with a sense of wonder because people weren’t as connected to information and one another. Hoover knows that the accepted order has been undone, disproved and abandoned, to never return. New order, if it exists, must be discovered, and it may never be as grand.•

Tags: , , , ,

“The Fruits Of The AI Revolution Are Now All Around Us”

January 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Roomba can't intellectualize vacuuming, but it gets the job done. (Image by Larry D. Moore.)

Steven Levy has an excellent piece, “The AI Revolution Is On,”  in the current Wired. In it, Levy points out that artificial intelligence has turned out to be markedly different than what science in the ’50s and ’60s predicted. The reason is because yesterday’s scientists tried to make machines emulate the human brain. But since we still don’t really know how that organ operates, researchers threw away the playbook during the ’80s and have since focused on allowing computers to be “themselves.” An excerpt:

“AI researchers began to devise a raft of new techniques that were decidedly not modeled on human intelligence. By using probability-based algorithms to derive meaning from huge amounts of data, researchers discovered that they didn’t need to teach a computer how to accomplish a task; they could just show it what people did and let the machine figure out how to emulate that behavior under similar circumstances. They used genetic algorithms, which comb through randomly generated chunks of code, skim the highest-performing ones, and splice them together to spawn new code. As the process is repeated, the evolved programs become amazingly effective, often comparable to the output of the most experienced coders.

MIT’s Rodney Brooks also took a biologically inspired approach to robotics. His lab programmed six-legged buglike creatures by breaking down insect behavior into a series of simple commands—for instance, ‘If you run into an obstacle, lift your legs higher.’ When the programmers got the rules right, the gizmos could figure out for themselves how to navigate even complicated terrain. (It’s no coincidence that iRobot, the company Brooks cofounded with his MIT students, produced the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, which doesn’t initially know the location of all the objects in a room or the best way to traverse it but knows how to keep itself moving.)

The fruits of the AI revolution are now all around us. Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence. ‘If you told somebody in 1978, ‘You’re going to have this machine, and you’ll be able to type a few words and instantly get all of the world’s knowledge on that topic,’ they would probably consider that to be AI,’ Google cofounder Larry Page says. ‘That seems routine now, but it’s a really big deal.'”

Tags: , ,