Before the memristor, it would have been impossible to create something with the form factor of a brain, the low power requirements, and the instantaneous internal communications. Turns out that those three things are key to making anything that resembles the brain and thus can be trained and coaxed to behave like a brain. In this case, form is function, or more accurately, function is hopeless without form. [...]

A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that’s applied to it. But here’s the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power. That’s different from a dynamic RAM cell, which requires regular charge to maintain its state. The upshot is that thousands of memristors could substitute for massive banks of power-hogging memory. Just to be clear, the memristor is not magic—its memristive state does decay over time. That decay can take hours or centuries depending on the material, and stability must often be traded for energy requirements—which is one of the major research reasons memristors aren’t flooding the market yet. [...]

A biological brain is able to quickly execute this massive simultaneous information orgy—and do it in a small package—because it has evolved a number of stupendous shortcuts. Here’s what happens in a brain: Neuron 1 spits out an impulse, and the resultant information is sent down the axon to the synapse of its target, Neuron 2. The synapse of Neuron 2, having stored its own state locally, evaluates the importance of the information coming from Neuron 1 by integrating it with its own previous state and the strength of its connection to Neuron 1. Then, these two pieces of information—the information from Neuron 1 and the state of Neuron 2′s synapse—flow toward the body of Neuron 2 over the dendrites. And here is the important part: By the time that information reaches the body of Neuron 2, there is only a single value—all processing has already taken place during the information transfer. There is never any need for the brain to take information out of one neuron, spend time processing it, and then return it to a different set of neurons. Instead, in the mammalian brain, storage and processing happen at the same time and in the same place.

That difference is the main reason the human brain can run on the same power budget as a 20-watt lightbulb. [...]

To build a brain, you need to throw away the conceit of separate hardware and software because the brain doesn’t work that way. In the brain it’s all just wetware. If you really wanted to replicate a mammalian brain, software and hardware would need to be inextricable. We have no idea how to build such a system at the moment, but the memristor has allowed us to take a big step closer by approximating the biological form factor: hardware that can be both small and ultralow power. [...]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0

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http://cleverbot.com

Turing test: http://cleverbot.com/human

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test )

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Goertzel on Artificial General Intelligence, Transhumanism, Open Source http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dr-ben-goertzel-artificial-intelligence.html
+

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dr-ben-goertzel-artificial-intelligence_1.html

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David J. Chalmers: The Singularity – A Philosophical Analysis http://consc.net/papers/singularity.pdf

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“There is a danger that time is running out, is the technological genie already out of the ethical bottle, embarking us all on an incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality?”

The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems – Joint Doctrine Note 2/2011 http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/DDE54504-AF8E-4A4C-8710-514C6FB66D67/0/20110401JDN211UASv1WebU.pdf

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Breakthrough to bridge the gap between man and machine: a research team has developed a technique for mapping both the connections and functions of nerve cells in the brain https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1104/11041102

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Alonzo Fyfe

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“One plausible scenario for the next few centuries is that we build an AI as smart as we are at designing AI, which means it could improve its own intelligence very quickly, which means it would soon become a superintelligent machine, with almost unlimited power to accomplish whatever it desires.

So we need to consider carefully how to program its desires, so that it doesn’t kill us all.

Presumably, this is a matter of ethics. Which ethical theory should we use to program the goal system of a future superintelligence?” Desirism and Friendly AI http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=14505

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BBC

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Oxford: Computer Science and Philosophy, a new degree, cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2148460

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Intelligence test for AIs: “[...] we face the challenge of constructing the first universal, formal, but at the same time practical, intelligence test. The key issue is the notion of “anytime” test, which will allow a quick convergence of the test to the subject’s level of intelligence and a progressively better assessment the more time we provide. If we succeed, science will be able to measure intelligence of higher animals (e.g. apes), humans and machines in a universal and practical way.” http://users.dsic.upv.es/proy/anynt/

“The most direct application of this study is in the field of artificial intelligence. Until now there has not been any way of checking whether current systems are more intelligent than the ones in use 20 years ago, “but the existence of tests with these characteristics may make it possible to systematically evaluate the progress of this discipline”, says Hernández-Orallo.

And what is even “more important” is that there were no theories or tools to evaluate and compare future intelligent systems that could demonstrate intelligence greater than human intelligence.” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/f-sf-oth012711.php

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“The rise of artilects (artificial intellects, i.e., godlike massively intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level) in this century makes the existence of a deity (a massively intelligent entity capable of creating a universe) seem much more plausible. [...]” http://www.kurzweilai.net/from-cosmism-to-deism

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Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence “Abstract A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is. The problem is especially acute when we need to consider artificial systems which are significantly different to humans. In this paper we approach this problem in the following way: we take a number of well known informal definitions of human intelligence that have been given by experts, and extract their essential features. These are then mathematically formalised to produce a general measure of intelligence for arbitrary machines. We believe that this equation formally captures the concept of machine intelligence in the broadest reasonable sense. We then show how this formal definition is related to the theory of universal optimal learning agents. Finally, we survey the many other tests and definitions of intelligence that have been proposed for machines.”

“[...] We call this the universal intelligence of agent p. Consider how this equation corresponds to our informal definition. We needed a measure of an agent’s general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. [...] The definition is very general in terms of which sensors or actuators the agent might have as all information exchanged between the agent and the environment takes place over very general communication channels. Finally, the formal definition places no limits on the internal workings of the agent. Thus, we can apply the definition to any system that is able to receive and generate information with view to achieving goals.” p. 415

“Response to Common Criticisms” pp. 435-40

https://robots.l2f.inesc-id.pt/wiki/images/2/21/Universal_Intelligence.pdf

Cf. http://hutter1.net/

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-Algorithmic-Probability/dp/3642060528/

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Have them and us use the same institutions: “I’m not saying we have nothing to fear from robots, nor that their values make no difference. I’m saying the natural and common human obsession with how much their values differ overall from ours distracts us from worrying effectively. Here are better priorities for living in peace with strange potentially-powerful creatures, be they robots, aliens, time-travelers, or just diverse human races:

1. Reduce the salience of the them-us distinction relative to other distinctions. Try to have them and us live intermingled, and not segregated, so that many natural alliances of shared interests include both us and them.

2. Have them and us use the same (or at least similar) institutions to keep peace among themselves and ourselves as we use to keep peace between them and us. Minimize any ways those institutions formally treat us and them differently.” http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/seek-peace-not-values.html

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