My new article “How Your Computer Will Read You Like A Book – And Then Sell You Stuff” is up at Fast Company’s Futurist Forum. In it, I talk about ‘affective computing‘ – systems that read, interpret and even simulate human emotion. This is going to change our relationship with […]
I’m beginning a short series at Psychology Today about the ongoing advances being made in machine intelligence. I’d originally thought about using “The Ascent of Machine” for the series title — after Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful work, “The Ascent of Man”, which I found so inspiring when it first came out. […]
Earlier this week, Charles Stross posted his thoughts on why he doesn’t think the Technological Singularity will happen. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Technological Singularity is defined as that point in the future when a self-improving artificial general intelligence (AGI) achieves superintelligence. As Stross recommends, if you’re […]
On January 13, 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer competed in a practice round of Jeopardy, the long-running trivia quiz show. Playing against the program’s two most successful champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson won the preliminary match. Is this all a big publicity stunt? Of course it is. But it […]
A number of recent stories illustrate the rapid progress that’s being made in many different fields linked to artificial intelligence: Europe’s four-year AMARSi project (Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills) could lead to humanoid robots that quickly acquire skills from human co-workers as well as their environments. AMARSi project […]
Listen to this original piece of music before reading this post: This music was composed by a prolific, young composer named Emi. During a brief career, Emi created thousands of works, many of them in the style of famous composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin. These compositions have been […]