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You might be interested to know that there's two different kind of posts on this blog: "Thought of the Day" and "Normal". The "Thought of the Day" category is a once-a-day random tidbit, usually a funny video or picture, and the "Normal" is just what you'd expect from a blog like this:

Unicorn-Butterfly Soup.

--Kyle

p.s. the subscription options to the left (psst! <---- that way) reflect the same content options

“The Rise of Skynet”

This is my first guest post on a “real” blog… “The Rise of Skynet” on The Inquisitr.

Excerpt:

The reality is that Skynet is quickly becoming a reality, whether we like it or not.  And since I haven’t heard of Sarah Connor blowing up buildings, killing people, or traveling through time to avoid robots… I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.

Go check it out.

AI, The Singularity, and Me

I’ve been thinking alot about AI and The Singularity recently. It started with reading “Glasshouse” by Charles Stross, continued with “Accelerando”, and peaked with the IEEE Spectrums’ most recent special issue on Singularity (as applied to technology and human development/evolution).

The reason I wrote this post is to say two things:

  1. You should really pickup a book or two from Stross, and read the IEEE stuff (even if it’s online). Both are very detailed and interesting.
  2. All that thinking has given me some ideas. Stay tuned.

Using AI to Determine Writers’ Intent

An article over at Wired talks about how the government is supposedly developing (or perfecting) a form of AI that crawls the internet in order to find articles that “sound” like a terrorist.

Interesting. I wonder: if you write an anti-Bush post on your blog, but in a non-combative fashion, do you appear on the list of “terrorist” authors? How does it determine, exactly, the voice, tone, and intent of the author? Tone is sometimes hard to understand in written form, by humans, so how is an AI program going to do any better?

Robot
A future friend?

On the other side of the coin, could this be a step towards “true” AI? Meaning, artificial intelligence that actually learns, adapts, and acts based on a dynamic set of self-created methods and instructions… like, for example, the central computer in the movie “iRobot” with Will Smith.

Government funded projects have a habit of trickling down to the general public, after being declassified, and becoming large fixtures in modern technology and every day life. Just look at the microwave, satellite radio, GPS, regular radio, the Internet, etc. I can imagine, in the near future, a library you can use in your own code (much like the standard C libraries) that allows your program to learn, adapt, and rewrite itself as necessary.

And who says the American government is evil?