From the Lack of Imagination Department: But it seems some expect the perfect person to come in synthetic form as 15% of us in the North East believe robots will be a fully integrated part of our lives within 20 years. They cited the robot from Will Smith’s futuristic film I Robot and Spielberg’s AI (Artificial Intelligence), which stars British actor Jude Law, as the sort of creatures they expect to be sitting in our offices in coming years. Blade Runner characters the Replicants and Robocop were also seen as possible indicators of how our machine helpers may look in the future, but only a handful thought Star Wars robots C3PO and R2-D2 could be brought to life. |link|

China is holding a huge artificial intelligence expo in August to commemorate the 50th anniversary of AI. The Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence (which seems to lack any web presence) is sponsoring the event, and kicking it off with a battle royale between Xiangqi masters and ‘robots’.

ICANN is in the news again, this time because China is fragrantly dismissing its authority. From Ars technica: China gives itself its own top-level domains In a move that could have enormous ramifications for how the Internet works, the government of China has decided to bypass ICANN altogether and set up its own set of TLDs and domain name servers. In addition to the .cn TLD, China will have three new Chinese-character TLDs equating to “dot China,” “dot com,” and “dot net.” The Ministry of Information Industry describes the changes this way: Under the new system, besides “CN”, three Chinese TLD names “CN”, “COM” and “NET” are temporarily set. It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of [ICANN] of the United States. Ah, another nation clawing its ways out from under the icy clutches of American imperialism!

(Click for big) The primary visual cortex is normally understood as being a direct map from the retinal image onto the brain. Apparently we were wrong. From Nature Neuroscience: Perceived size matters Using retinotopic mapping to delineate primary visual cortex, Murray and colleagues examined whether the size of activation patterns in V1 differed when subjects looked at either the front or back spheres. Remarkably, when the sphere that subjects were looking at was perceived to be bigger (due to the contextual cues), activity in V1 spread over a larger area than when it was perceived to be smaller, even though the size of the retinal image produced by the spheres was identical. Activity at the earliest stages of cortical processing does not therefore simply reflect the pattern of light falling on the retina. Somehow the complex three-dimensional cues present in the scene can be integrated to take into account perceived depth in the representation present in V1. There has been work suggesting as much before, but this provides clear evidence. The article goes on: This work is not the first to show that V1 activity can be strongly linked to conscious perception rather than to physical (retinal) stimulation. It is also clear that neural processing in V1 reflects not just feed-forward signals but also feedback influences from higher areas. However, this work not only provides a particularly clear and compelling example of these properties but also, for the first time, clearly links the spatial extent of what we perceive (rather than, for example, contrast or direction of motion) to the spatial extent of activity in V1. More fundamentally, these findings force us to re-evaluate the notion of a ‘hard-wired’ retinotopy in V1. The finding that V1 contains a topographic map of the retinal projection of the visual field has been […]

1. Constraining, impelling; powerful, forcible. b. esp. Having power to compel assent or belief; argumentatively forcible, convincing. c. with dependent phr. – OED

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The always astute Bellman posted a link to a nice little story on Atwood’s new machine for remotely autographing books. It is a good and far less artificial example of the deep confusion we have of how to treat the technology that continually interferes and intervenes in our lives.I’ll let the discussion continue over there, but I had to post the following: Ms Atwood insists that the device is not a hoax. “It’s real. Trust me. You need to have more faith.” Its easy to say that how we treat the contributions of machines to our practices is just ‘a matter of convention’, but that presupposes that our conventional intuitions are informed by principles that extend nicely to novel cases. Convention breaks down when our intuitions and practices are confused and confusing, and we need some way of sorting this mess out before we can even start to assess the situation.

I’ve introduced a new feature on this page, since I have the webspace and bandwidth to spare. The Academy‘ is for the philosophers sick of the problems with the Social list serve to have a place to discuss upcoming parties and poker and such, and to generally fuck off. But don’t let that stop anyone else who wants to post whatever for the benefit of us all.

From The Gaurdian: Slime mould used to create first robot run by living cells Dr Zauner grew a star-shaped sample of the slime mould and attached it to a six-legged robot (with each point of the star attached to a leg) to control its movements. Shining white light on to a section of the single cell organism made it vibrate, changing its thickness. These vibrations were fed into a computer, which then sent signals to move the leg in question. Pointing beams of light at different parts of the slime mould means that different legs move. Do it in an ordered way and the robot will walk. Lets assume for this example that animal agency is different in kind from robotic or otherwise artificial agency, such that the slime mold’s behavior here is closer to genuine ‘original action’ than to mechanical ‘derivative action’. This is not to import any cognitive or otherwise mental phenomena to the slime mold. Its just a slime mold. The point is simply that its behavior is properly attributed to it, since there are no designers or other actors influencing the cyborg’s behavior. But the mold also moves around a robot, with some sophisticated machinery backing it up. Here’s the problem: the slime mold is essentially just a photo cell for responding to light. We have plenty of those same sorts of cells, artifiically constructed, that can behave in a much more complex fashion with respect to incoming light. From an engineering perspective, the slime mold is rather superfluous, and this sort of example is more show than actual science. But lets look at it from the perspective of our discussion on robotic agency. The robot moves because the slime mold reacts to the light. The cyborg (slime mold + robot) here could reasonably be described […]

Consider the oft-cited case from the early 80s of Aldo Cimino, the resident expert of Campbell Soup’s cooker system. Occasionally, serious problems arise that require the services of an expert who understands the gritty details of the design, installation, and operation of the hydrostatic sterilizer. If this sterilizer is not working, bacteria will eat through the cans and plant operations would be seriously disrupted. If the problem cannot be solved in a few minutes, it may be necessary to throw away many thousands of cans of food. Unfortunately, there are few human experts that understand the cooker systems well enough to handle any problem that may arise. Campbell Soup relied primarily one individual, Aldo Cimino(who had 45 years of experience), to deal with the toughest problems. Sometimes, a hydrostatic sterilizer had to be shut down until Mr. Cimino could be flown to a particular plant to work on this problem. |link| Cimino is clearly an expert, and because of this epistemically privileged position he served an extremely valuable role within the business’ practices. But experts are like the Sith: there is always a master and an apprentice. Unfortunately, is was almost impossible to train anyone to Cimino’s level of expertise. Enter the machine: Although programming an expert system to replicate the work of Aldo Cimino seemed near impossible due to the amount of knowledge and intuition he has gained through 45 years of experience, the power of artificial forever changed the way things were done at Campbell… The diagnostic system, with 150 heuristical rules built in, was completed in several months, and then tested in select factories for seven months until it was finally implemented in all of Campbell’s canneries a year later. It took roughly two years to develop and implement this expert system that could be mass produced, […]