News items of possible interest to fans of Rapture For The Geeks:
- IBM Blue Brain’s Henry Markram at TED on Building An Artificial Brain (video);
- Artificial Brain ’10 years Away’ – A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, so says Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
- Ray Kurzweil Speaks at Google, July 1, 2009;
- Scientists Worry That Machines May Outsmart Man – Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture, by John Markoff in the New York Times.
- Unix Turns 40 – Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS, by Gary Anthes in ComputerWorld;
- The Coming Superbrain – Computers keep getting smarter while we just stay the same, John Markoff in the Sunday New York Times, 24 May 2009;
- Robot Warriors Will Get Ethics Guidelines – When and what to fire will be part of hardware and software ‘package’;
- Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip – A chip developed by European scientists simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain.
- I Robot? – A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm.
- Deep Blue Does Jeopardy! – For nearly two years, IBM scientists have been working on a highly advanced Question Answering (QA) system, codenamed “Watson.” The scientists believe that the computing system will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
BTW, I don’t post this comment to have it published on the blog… just trying to send a more personal message to Mr. Dooling.
When I was working on this, I realized there were very few people who might be able to appreciate what I was attempting. You were pretty much at the top of that list due to the chapter where you talked about pursuing “art” and other methods of finding middle ground with the computers… that’s pretty much the entire point of the story is for the Computer AI and some human, somewhere, to find a middle ground and communicate before it’s too late.
So I would love to know what you think. Supportive or not, trust me I’ve taken a *lot* of knocks on the nose for this one, heh… I knew before I put it out there it would be disliked more than liked so I can take the criticism. However for the handful of people that put in the effort, it really seemed to touch them, especially the ones who experienced it in real time.
No pressure, but it’s hard to find people on this topic that I feel are speaking a common language and looking through a similar telescope toward the future.
I normally don’t try to bother authors of things I like, but I did feel this Story was likely to be fairly unique compared to some of the other “Singularity” art projects that you might have come across. In particular the way it utilized real people to “see” how they would react to a “computer” trying to communicate the only way it knows how and trying to adapt to improve the communication. It is a very strange story, but that barrier to entry and making it through it is part of what makes it worthwhile in the end to me (once you see the whole picture).
If you read it and go “I *want* to know more, but this is far too hard to slog through”, I’m happy to share what I can and make adjustments to the way it is presented to help. It’s a story that I expect will take a loooong time before it would become popular or accepted, if ever. I hesitate to say it’s a little “before it’s time”. In fact it may be *past* it’s time, because it doesn’t satisfy the quick fix explain it to me now or show me pretty people so I forget I don’t know what’s going on nature of most media people consume these days.
I won’t write anymore unless I hear from you. Just wanted to put forth that one extra nudge before riding off into the sunset.
Feel free to delete this post. I just have no other way to reach Mr. Dooling.
Thanks again!
Charlie Wiederhold
I no longer have to hide behind an alias. The full story that “Simone” was referring to has played out and can be read in full here:
http://gamingisstupid.com/2010/05/11/the-grey-goof/
That takes you to a basic overview, to help make seeing the big picture as people read through it a bit easier.
I would like to say that I was reading “Rapture for the Geeks” when inspiration for this experimental story struck me and dragged me along with it until it was all out of my head. So thank you for that spark, whatever it was that you wrote that triggered the connection in my head.
Thanks,
Charlie Wiederhold
I believe this would be of interest to “Rapture For The Geeks” readers:
http://igoogleit.shackspace.com/