Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Man-3, Robot-0

In a competition between the 49er's placekicker, Joe (awesome name) Nedney, and Ziggy, a super-heavyweight pneumatic flipper robot, man came out on top. After Ziggy failed to hit a 45-yard field goal twice, Nedney was declared the winner.

Although this may initially seem overly lighthearted, man vs. machine has been a serious competition since the legend of John Henry. Although John Henry prevailed against the steam-powered drilling machine, most recently, humans have been losing this competition. In 1997, Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer from IBM, beat the world champion at the time, Garry Kasparov. And in 2001, IBM researchers determined that robotic commodoties traders made more money than humans in a test. And most recently, the game of checkers was "solved", meaning that there is now a computer that is impossible to beat. No, not just computer-chess-impossible; it will actually beat a human every time. More and more, computers and robots are playing a huge role in our lives. Beyond board games and the like, computers and AI controlled robots are necessary for almost any industry. I think people remember in "Roger and Me" when that show at Autoworld had a factory worker singing "Me and My Buddy" to his robotic replacement.

In fact, humans themselves may be largely machine in the not so distant future. There is a movement in the science community that believes that there will be a "singularity" (named after the superdense center of a black hole) in the near future where, "we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining."
The above quote comes from the Singularity Hub, a website founded by Mr. Kleiner of Aragon (and Google) fame. The Hub describes itself as "a blog and news network covering the latest in robots, genetics, longevity, artificial intelligence, aging, stem cells, and more."

I would recommend that you all check it out. It's really impressive what we are actually capable of. Eat your heart out, iPad.

2 comments:

mcchan92 said...

While the advances in technology never cease to amaze me, I wonder if becoming such a technology dependent society will have a backlash on us. Something like robots taking over the world seems unlikely, such as the movie IRobot, but we rely on technology so much that I wonder what will happen if it one day crashes? Will we be prepared for such a disaster? Or will everything be lost?

Also, I'm a little scared about us becoming machines. Yes "transcend[ing] current intellectual and biological limitations and initiat[ing] an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining" sounds great. However achieving such great heights puts us so close to perfection that I feel like we will no longer make those same flaws or have those same imperfections that makes us human.

Joe Seiden said...

While it is possible that there will be a SkyNet-like catastrophe, the current state of cutting-edge AI is to the point where we can create a bug that can figure out how to walk, and that's about it.

And maybe it's not the imperfections that make us human, but the strive to perfect them.