VIDEO: 17-Year Old Ray Kurzweil Appears On TV’s “I’ve Got A Secret” (1965)
A young Kurzweil demonstrates his invention: an "electronic computer" that composes music.
Via the New York Times
Software That Cares
“I was impressed how powerful a response (by viewers of demos . . . and of users themselves) is evoked by the caring shown by the system.”
NY Times article here.
Teaching Robots the Rules of War
[Dr. Ronald C.] Arkin’s “ethical controller” is a software architecture that provides, “ethical control and reasoning system potentially suitable for constraining lethal actions in an autonomous robotic system so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Geneva Conventions, the Laws of War, and the Rules of Engagement.”
[The robots] can be designed without a sense of self-preservation and, as a result, “no tendency to lash out in fear.” They can be built without anger or recklessness and they can be made invulnerable to what he calls “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ ” that causes people to absorb new information more easily if it matches their pre-existing ideas.
A montage of very well-armed robots:
The Next Big Thing in Entertainment, A Half-Time Update
From (let's face it) a much better Singularity-related blog, a preview of radical advances in entertainment in the near future.
This is kind of impressive, although knowing Microsoft is behind this I wouldn't be surprised if Milo hangs himself.
And, I see we are still climbing out of the Uncanny Valley:
The Singularity Summit at Stanford
Ray Kurzweil's keynote address at The Singularity Summit at Stanford sponsored by the Singularity Institute in May 2006.
There are links to parts 2 and 3 from part 1.
Transcendent Man (Starring Ray Kurzweil)
Hello, and welcome to singularity.org ("Asymptote Now"). This is the first post, a movie trailer for Transcendent Man: