12/21/97
- Moravec Mulls Mind
My comments on roboticist Hans Moravec's famous 1988 book, Mind
Children.
12/14/97
- The Matter of Mind (3)
Roger Penrose (The Large, the Small and the
Human Mind) looks to quantum brain processes to explain mind.
12/07/97
- The Matter of Mind (2)
Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (The End of Certainty)
in a sense takes up where Stewart and Cohen leave off, and proposes a way
into the complex phase spaces representing the growth and behavior of mind
and other emergent phenomena, using leading-edge mathematical tools from
Complexity Theory.
11/30/97
- The Matter of Mind (1)
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Figments of Reality
presents a joint biological/mathematical view of mind as an emergent,
complex phenomenon fundamentally off-limits to standard reductionist
methods of inquiry.
11/23/97
- I Ask the Questions
Not one of my regular essays; just some brief comments,
and a request for help.
11/16/97
- How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker approaches the study of mind from a psychology
perspective and concludes (wrongly, in my view) that we must remain cognitively
closed to a complete understanding of mind.
11/09/97
- Bioengineering
Parts of android—and cyborg—evolution. Artificial brains,
hearts, lungs, kidneys, ears, eyes, noses, skin, bone, muscle, blood .
. . . Where does it all end?
11/02/97
- AI and the Future of the Internet 3
Smarter. This last of a three-part series looks briefly
at a couple of ways in which growth of the Net forces it to become more
intelligent.
10/26/97
- AI and the Future of the Internet2
Bigger. This second of a three-part series examines the
growth of the Internet, and two attendant problems.
10/19/97
- AI and the Future of the Internet 1
Better, Bigger, Smarter. This first of a three-part series
examines past and future progress for the better.
10/12/97
- Nanotechnology
Intelligent machines from Lilliput.What gets K. Eric
Drexler all excited.
10/05/97
- The Morality of Intelligent Machines
Will Machina sapiens be naughty, or nice? Probably
nice, but it’s not a sure thing.
09/28/97
- Machina sapiens and Human Morality
What effect do intelligent machines have on our own morals
and behavior? Good and bad.
09/21/97
- Bots
Software robots (agents, spiders, etc.) What they are,
what they do, where they came from, where they are going.
09/14/97
- Moral Meme Machines
An introduction to two future features on Human and Machine
morality. This feature outlines the memetic evolution of morality in general.
09/07/97
- Life of Riley
Cultural Evolution and Memetic Machines.
Machines don’t have genes for biological evolution,
but they do have memes for cultural evolution.
08/30/97
- Life Insurance
A look at algorithms and heuristics, the fundamental
processes of nature, evolution, computers, AI, life, the universe, and
everything.
08/24/97
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Revisited
A second review of the first desktop
software for automatic speech recognition capable of handling continuous
speech. This time, I used a better sound card, and the review reflects
that fact.
08/17/97
- More AI History 3
Neural networks and the connectionist school of AI.
08/10/97
- More AI History 2
Early expert systems: DENDRAL, MYCIN, XCON, and the rule-based
systems approach to AI.
08/03/97
- More AI History 1
From the beginning of the discipline in the 1950s, to
the arrival of industrial-strength expert systems.
07/27/97
- Automatic Speech Recognition Comes of Age
A review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking continuous-speech
ASR software.
07/06/97
- People vs. Machina
sapiens. Trial Part Three--Deliberations
The jury (me) considers the implications
of having an intelligent machine on the loose.
06/29/97
- People vs. Machina
sapiens. Trial Part Two--The case for the defense
Having dismissed prosecutors' argument
that an intelligent machine is impossible, the defense outlines its case
for when the deed will be done.
06/22/97
- People vs. Machina
sapiens. Trial Part One--The case for the prosecution
Dreyfus, Searle, Penrose maintain
vigilance against AI hype.
06/15/97
- Let your Coffee Do the Computing
Quantum computing can be done and is being done. It’s
only a matter of time before we have access to unlimited computing power.
06/08/97
- Darwin Among the Machines
Notes and comments on George Dyson’s evolutionary history of AI.
06/01/97
- Free Will
Statement from the Machina sapiens
Liberation Front. The reasons why autonomous, self-conscious
intelligent machines cannot but have free will.
05/25/97
- Get Alife! Artificial Life,
That Is
Can you be alive and not know it?
Artificial life is, and doesn't. Yet.
05/18/97
- A Robot to Call Your Own
Real (not toy) robots ranging from
US$100 to US$33,000. A sample of what you can buy off the shelf today.
05/11/97
- The Body of Machina sapiens
We’ve examined parts of the mind;
now let’s focus on the body. What can it see? What can it hear? What can
it do?
05/04/97
- Emotion and Machina sapiens
Drawing on Antonio Damasio's book, Descartes'
Error, we examine the need for, possibility of, and implications of
emotion in AI systems.
04/27/97
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Emergence of Machina sapiens
Teilhard's noosphere provides a biological and evolutionary
framework for predicting and explaining the emergence of a genuine non-human
intelligence.
04/20/97
- Machine Learning: Body and Soul of AI
A lay-oriented summary discussion of what machine learning
means, how it is being implemented in practice, and where it is leading.
04/13/97
- The Writing on the Wall
A slew of millenium books pays scant heed to
the coming wonders of AI. Freeman Dyson, Bill Gates, Nicholas Negroponte,
et al.
04/06/97
- Automatic Speech Recognition
ASR is the Next Big Thing in interface
development, and a crucial component of AI. Where is it at today, and where
will it be tomorrow?
03/30/97
- The Field of AI
There’s more to AI than computer
science. Much more. Just what are the aspects of human inquiry and endeavor
that go into making up this field?
03/23/97
- The Electronic Brain Revisited
USC professors give new life to an old term in
seeking to implant computer chips between your ears.
03/16/97
- Happy Birthday, HAL
The intelligent machine in Arthur Clarke's 2001:
A Space Odyssey was born in January this year. What can we expect of
him by the year 2001?
03/09/97
- AI and God: An Interesting Question
Will a non-human intelligence replace Mankind
as God's representative on Earth? This article merely poses the question,
in the context of a Jesuit's views about modern scientific discovery.
03/02/97
- MISTIC: Educating the Infant Machine
How do you educate an infant artifical intelligence?
How do you give it the millions of bits of general knowledge we each have
crammed inside our (heads?)? A Canadian group of MISTICs think they know
how.
02/23/97
- New "Electronic Brain" Solves Computer Problems
Neural net software for Help Desks, ISPs, and
others. A case of an AI application making it in the marketplace.