Conscious Machines by Marvin Minsky We humans do not possess much consciousness. That is, we have very little natural ability to sense what happens within and outside ourselves. In short, much of what is commonly attributed to consciousness is mythical — and this may in part be what has led people to think that the problem of consciousness is so very hard. My view is quite the opposite: that some machines are already potentially more conscious than are people, and that further enhancements would be relatively easy to make. However, this does not imply that those machines would thereby, automatically, become much more intelligent. This is because it is one thing to have access to data, but another thing to know how to make good use of it. Knowing how your pancreas works does not make you better at digesting your food. So consider now, to what extents are you aware? How much do you know about how you walk? It is interesting to tell someone about the basic form of biped locomotion: you move in such a way as to start falling, and then you extend your leg to stop that fall: most people are surprised at this, and seem to have which muscles are involved; indeed, but few people even know which muscles they possess. In short, we are not much aware of what our bodies do. We’re even less aware of what goes on inside our brains.

From Aramis, or the Love of Technology by Bruno Latour By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase. This tautology frees the analysis of technologies from the burden that weighs on the analysis of the sciences. As accustomed as we have become to the idea of a science that “constructs,” “fashions,” or “produces” its objects, the fact still remains that, after all the controversies, the sciences seem to have discovered a world that came into being without men and without sciences. Galileo may have constructed the phases of Venus, but once that construction was complete her phases appears to have been “always already present.” The fabricated fact has become the accomplished fact, the fait accompli. Diesel did not construct his engine any more than Galileo built his planet. Some will contend that the engine is out of Diesel’s control as much much as Venus was out of Galileo’s; even so, no one would dare assert that the Diesel engine “was always already there, even before it was discovered.” No one is a Platonist where technology is concerned… This rejection of Platonism gives greater freedom to the observer of machines than to the observer of facts. The big problems of realism and relativism do not bother him. He is free to study engineers who are creating fictions, since fiction, the projection of a state of technology from five or fifty years in the future to a time T, is part of their job… They’re novelists. With just one difference: their project– which is at first indistinguishable from a novel– will gradually veer in one direction or another. Either it will remain a project in the file drawers […]

Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen @ MSNBC.com, filed under ‘Innovation’. via /. At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, “but once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” Levy said.

Love in the digital age @ blogs.NYT.com. Thanks, Michele! HTEC LIVES! Communication has been streamlined by the Internet, and something essential to the process of falling in love has been lost. We can type up carefully crafted statements rather than go face-to-face and improvise from the heart, thereby risking embarrassment, vulnerability or Oscar-worthy dialogue. We can Google our way into the museums of each other’s identities — and fall in love there. If we get up the nerve to e-mail or IM our love interests, we can correspond at a comfortable pace (i.e., however long it takes us to come up with witty, well-crafted messages). They will assume we’re taking our time to respond because we’re busy fighting off that parade of knights in shining armor who are begging to be listed with us in a Facebook relationship. They don’t know we’re staring longingly at that one picture that pops up when we Google them, and we don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re staring longingly back! (Bonus: No one has to deal with that awkward “who’s paying?” question.) Flirting has been transformed into a digital process. We don’t even have to touch each other to “hook up.” We can just hook up to the Internet. The difficulty of negotiating what happens in each arena of reality probably explains why the word “awkward” has shot to the top of my generation’s lexicon. My classmates and I charade our way through first dates, trying to keep track of what’s been said versus what’s been read on the Internet ahead of time. We have to fake it through “Where are you from?” conversation, and if we let something slip that reveals we’ve done our research, it’s awkward. I think the article is fundamentally mistaken. Nothing essential has been lost in […]

Of the Force of Imagination, Montaigne There was lately seene a cat about my owne house, so earnestly eyeing a bird, sitting upon a tree, that he seeing the cat, they both so wistly fixed their looks one upon another, so long, that at last the bird fell downe as dead in the cat’s pawes, either drunken by his owne strong imagination, or drawne by some attractive power of the cat. Those that love hawking, have haply heard the Falkner tale, who earnestly fixing his sight upon a kite in the aire, laid a wager that with the only force of his looke, he would make it come stooping downe to the ground, and as some report did it many times. The histories I borrow, I referre to the consciences of those I take them from. The discourses are mine, and hold together by the proofe of reason, not of experiences: each man may adde his example to them: and who hath none, considering the number and varietie of accidentes let him not leave to think, there are store of them. If I come not well for my selfe, let another come for me.

xkcd via dc

via oocc

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Awesome new vid by the creator of The machine is us/ing us. Link via BoingBoing. This works perfectly to counteract the arguments Dreyfus uses in his On the Internet.

Concerning the recent robot killing spree: But contrary to some reports, the tragic accident was not the result of an automated or robotic weapon going out of control… the incident is more likely the result of a simple mechanical failure. link via dc. more