And I should have added this to the blog long ago:

http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/robot-emotions.jpg thx kb

one giant leap for robotkind: robot successfully opens doors, plugs own power cord No matter how fast they can think or how many things they can process at once, robots will be infinitely more useful if they’re independent. That includes being able to overcome obstacles – such as the nigh-immovable hindrance we call “The Door” – and more importantly, be able to feed itself, which obviously translates into recharging. thx Lally

And for the kids, who we are clearly raising to become wizards:

Resident colleague Ben links to the following article: The Philosophical Significance of Twitter: Consciousness Outfolding In Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life, an exquisitely written and astonishingly insightful book, Richard Grossinger writes about ‘infoldedeness’, stating that “the universe is comprehensible only as a thing that has been folded many times upon itself.” Reversing Grossinger’s idea: the outfolding of the human mind, the collective sharing of our thoughts, myriad thoughts from the inane to the mundane to the profound, enabled by technology, is changing our perception of reality and thus changing reality itself. Surely technology is changing the world (the closest thing I know to ‘reality’), since technology is precisely in the business of changing the world. And certainly the internet as a medium for social interaction has profoundly influenced the course of this change. However, our thoughts are by their very nature shared and collective. Technology has at best expanded the scope of the collective itself. In other words, minds haven’t changed. We have. To mistake this change for a new global consciousness is precisely to miss the trees for the forest. You must first understand what we are doing before you can understand the networked superorganism we have become, and above all else this requires settling reference of the paradoxical first person plural pronoun ‘we’. Daou argues that Twitter represents something like a global, networked manifestation of collective human consciousness, implying that we have somehow become singular and unified through our connected technologies. I think this is the wrong way to think about social media, mostly because of the unnecessary emphasis on ‘humanity’. If anything, the global collective is represented as much by the technology itself as its human operators. When we learned to ride horses, it would have been improper to note that man […]

Apparently my blog update changed some of the rss settings. People using an RSS reader should direct their feeds to http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/?feed=rss in order to see full posts and not just summaries. I dont know if there is some way of changing that on my end, but I know this change will work.

thx Lally

Iran’s Web Spying Aided by Western Technology (WSJ) The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren’t fully displayed — until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said. “We didn’t know they could do this much,” said a network engineer in Tehran. “Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.” Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds. In Iran’s case, this is done for the entire country at a single choke point, according to networking engineers familiar with the country’s system. It couldn’t be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection. All eyes have been on the Internet amid the crisis in Iran, and government attempts to crack down on information. The infiltration of Iranian online traffic could explain why the government has allowed the Internet to continue to function — and also why it has been running at such slow speeds in the days since the results of the presidential vote spurred unrest. Users in the country report the Internet having slowed to less than a tenth of normal speeds. Deep packet inspection delays the transmission of online data unless it is offset by a huge increase in processing power, according to Internet experts. Iran is “now drilling into what the population is trying to say,” said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He […]

Jon links to Forbes’ special edition on AI. I’ll go through most of these, commenting when appropriate. For instance: Dumb Like Google While the switch to “stupid” statistically based computing has given us tools like Google, it came with a steep price, namely, abandoning the cherished notion that computers will one day be like people, the way early AI pioneers wanted them to be. No one querying Google would ever for a minute confuse those interactions with a Q&A session with another person. No matter how much Google engineers fine-tune their algorithms, that will never change. Google is inordinately useful, but it is not remotely intelligent, as we human beings understand that term. And despite decades of trying, no one in AI research has even the remotest idea of how to bridge that gap. … Since AI essayists like to make predictions, here’s mine. No one alive as these words are being written will live to see a computer pass the Turing Test. What’s more, the idea of a humanlike computer will increasingly come to be seen as a kitschy, mid-20th-century idea, like hovercraft and dinner pills on The Jetsons. This is basically what I’ve been saying for a decade, with a few caveats. First, I don’t think we can make much sense of the ‘unbridgeable gap’ lamented in the first paragraph, as if intelligence were a single-dimensional spectrum with a large black void somewhere near the top. Thats a silly little antiquated picture, and revising the picture makes Gomes’ thesis that much stronger. Intelligence is task-specific; computers, humans, animals, and everything else are good at solving certain kinds of problems, and bad at solving other kinds of problems. Since solving some problems does not necessarily imply success at other problems (even when those problems are closely related), then intelligence […]

There are some pretty major holes in this presentation, and it has an unusually Eurocentric focus, but its pretty and slick and worth showing. thx kyle