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A.I. and Robotics Take Another Wobbly Step Forward
CWmike writes to tell us that artificial intelligence and robotics have made another wobbly step forward with the most recent robot from Stanford. "Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing. "It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the 'hype cycle' popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance."
nt
"Here is your stapler," says Stair, handing it to the man. "Have a nice day."
The generals population of AI is the Data, or Terminator. Some how superior to us humans who will not make mistakes. However real AI the computer makes a lot of Mistakes, and learns from them. But being that a standard computer has the brain power of a bug, it isn't surprising that AI meets the hype.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Get him a cell-phone!"
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Bearing in mind that this new robot is called STAIR, does that mean it is using gradient descent algorithms ?
It's Flexible Frank!
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
This article both points out the problems of over-hyped advances in robots, while also claiming this robot has transitioned away from narrowly defined domains?
The voice recognition & language processing component alone would be years ahead of anything else if it worked well outside of a "narrow, carefully defined domain". It seems like they are yet again over-hyping new research.
They should call it MASTER. At least they will when it enslaves us all. :(
From the article: "Because these small [software] agents don't have a complete representation of the world, they are uncertain about their actions. So they learn to understand the probabilities of various things happening, they learn the preferences [of users] and costs of outcomes and, perhaps most important, they becoming self-aware."
I sure as hell hope they left out the lip-reading module.
Sounds like a few humans I can think of (politicians?) Well, except for that "solid accomplishment and acceptance" part.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
We are missing the point! As soon as these robots touch the porn industry, the last thing you want is A.I.! Please leave emotions to the side, if I wanted that, I would have gotten out of this basement and got a girlfriend long time ago!
I for one welcome our new learning, seeing, navigating, manipulating, planning, reasoning, speaking, and natural language processing Stair overlords.
Barack? Is that you?
-- Michelle
Recent articles on robots.
If you squeeze its chest, does it slap you? If not, they'll just have to take this one back to the drawing board. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l6buDfU9AY
As an undergraduate Computer Engineer who intends to major in AI I would be really interested in knowing if anyone knew whether the companies mentioned in this article (Google, Walmart etc...) actually do hire people with a specialization in AI? And if so how do u get recognized?? Or is it all just copied and pasted from researchers who work in all the Universities they mentioned?
I guess the root of my question is, by pursuing AI are you pushing yourself into becoming an academic for the rest of your life?
It's interesting to note on the third page of the article that advances have come mainly from computer science breakthroughs, and not biological/neurological ones, and that the wall between the two sciences is coming down. It seems that building these AI programs has become part of furthering our understanding of our own brains. With this trend in mind, along with the eventual goal to have humanoid robots, especially ones that are "as intelligent as we are", is there a capacity for something like emotion? What would it mean to have feeling machines that are as smart as we are?
These guys are pretty wobbly too...not sure how smart they are, tho'.
PUGBot Huey-02
"Stair, please click the 'Print' link so I don't have to see only a third of the short article squeezed into 1/5 of the space on the page," says the man seated at a conference room table. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, standing nearby, replies in a nasal monotone, "OK, but the print version still wastes most of your screen with white background."
I will like to know how is better than Asimo, or by the way, of any of the advanced Japanese robots
How is this robot better than Asimo or by the way any of the advanced Japanese robots?
And this happens when? On slashdot, I think this last part of the cycle is purely hypothetical.
Currently hooked on AMP
We are still waiting for V.R. to reemerge from the Hype Cycle.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing,
IOW walk and chew gum at the same time. Heck, I know people who can't pass that test.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing.
Because LVNMPRSLP doesn't make such a catchy algorithm.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
> Bearing in mind that this new robot is called STAIR, does that mean it is using gradient descent algorithms?
I don't know, you'll have to ask the pusher robot or the shover robot if you want more details.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs; they level the building.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dear AC,
You're just a wannabe who couldn't post a real GNAA troll is his life depended on it.
1. A real GNAA post takes the form of a press release, which is used to parody a recent issue in the news - it works best if it's recently been the subject of a story on /.. An example might be one entitled GNAA Announces Website Partnership with Barak Hosni Mubarak Saddam Hussein Obama Campaign and purporting to bear news of an agreement to allow the Obama campaign to use GNAA's botnet (triggered by Last Measure, which is to replace the current Obama Campaign home page) to inject Hillary "God, I wish I'd married a real man like Anal Cox" Clitdong and John MacOSXPain (and all their heterosexually brainwashed followers) with Holy Gay Nigger Seed via the intarwebs, etc., etc.
2. A successful GNAA post is a first post that's posted non-anonymously.
All you've done is post (most of) the standard GNAA coda as an AC, which is pathetic. It's not like there aren't heaps of examples at gnaa.us to get you started.
Have you even watched the movie? Geez.
I'm building a robot soldier. It will have a pistol in one hand, and a club in another, so it can club a bunch of people, and shoot the rest, because the pistol will be fed by 2000 rounds stored in its arm. It will weight 400lbs. Build 500,000 of these things, and we won't have to worry about hearts and minds. We'll just unleash fire breathing metal terror on our enemies, and they to us, and all that will be left is a bunch of robots running in circles until they run out humans and batteries. But hey, I'll get tons of government money to do research.
This is my sig.
Disclosure: I am a Hofstadterian, so I am biased here.
There are basically three types of AI-peoples: The neverlands, the hype masters, and the hope monks. The neverlands, like Searle, deny that intelligence is a product of information-processing. Searle has made it into a sport the claims that AI will never happen because it does not have the "causal powers of the brain".
Then there are these types, like those reported here. Hypeware at its best. Look, it's alive, it's (F*CKING GASP) becoming self aware, etc hype hype hype ad-nauseum. But look at its innards _very_ closely, and it's pretty empty in there.
There are so many pitfalls involved that it's impossible to mention all faulty premises involved in each project. But just for starters, consider this: when we program a machine to deal with the number 2, it usually goes into binary form 10 and there it stays, ready for manipulation. But how plausible is this psychologically? NOT AT ALL! When _we think_ of a "2", hordes of disparate, subliminar images come to mind, such as the gestalt of the digit, the sound of it, the fact that it's a prime (if you're math inclined), a couple (if you're a therapist), even-ness, odd-ness, the words "two" "too", and a huge number of semi-visible mental imagery.
Whenever you see a hyped AI project, just consider how it deals with the numeral 2. Most likely it's a _fake_. The process through which it goes through is not psychologically plausible. Which means that it will fail to understand human concepts.
Some projects with machine learning actually make it a habit of finding _meaning_ in highly correlated words (i.e., words that tend to occur together in documents). That is a _joke_. Meaning NEVER comes from correlation. If it did, "lawyer" and "telephone" would have much more to do than "lawyer" and "vampire", or "politician" and "scumbag".
Sorry for the rent, but I work hard to understand fucking hard issues and to see these folks being slashdotted with nothing to show for just begs for a rant. If you want to see really serious research, take a look a Douglas Hofstadter's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" and/or google for Kemp's MIT thesis.
Interesting ... from the picture, looks like STAIR is built on a Segway base, but they've hacked onto it a caster wheel for stability. Go figure.
Ok, I'll probably be modded to oblivion for beeing too lazy to register, for spelling and grammar errors and a plethora of other things only a slashdotter would notice. =P
Still, I have to throw this out there, for all you smart, gifted people to (hopefully) reply to.
Why is it that whenever we see a new "A.I. bot zomg shiny flashy distracting me brain!" with some sort of amazing-looking intelligent/human/animal like behavior, it basically boils down to more or less preprogrammed behavior with some cool but hardcoded and in no way intelligent feature like dynamic balancing, artificial vision stuff or more lifelike bipedal walking?
In my humble and rather uneducated opinion, I think the focus should be on a general pattern finding system. You know.. like.. the brain? No, I'm not saying we should try to simulate neurons! Artificial neural networks are cool playthings and have their applications, but the overhead of using one powerful system in an effort to simulate the worlds largest parallel processing unit makes that a pretty ass-backwards approach to A.I.
Why not try to make an agent that takes raw sensor input along with it's current outputs and a positive (mmmm, doughnuts) or negative (dive down stairs, DO'H!) feedback value decided by an "instinct"-layer and stores it, then crunches some fancy math to find patterns? Something I suppose a computer could do much more naturally than simulating 3 billion neurons.
Apply this to a simple game of tic-tac-toe where the board and rules make up the "world", input/output is "what human did"/"what I will do", win/loose makes up the feedback to the agent ("instinct": loosing is bad, winning is good), add some pattern crunching magic and voilÃ, you have a learning tic-tac-toe player!
Apply the same agent to a complex robot where it is allowed to interact freely with the world, motivated by it's base instincts for what is good and what is bad... would be interesting to see in action!
Bah, I suck at this writing and explaining stuff! My point is, what possible A.I. related value does beeing able to pick out objects in a video stream using hard coded algorithms have? Is this stuff cool? Damn straight! Is it useful for true learning A.I.? Can't imagine it is.. Why? Because like the brain, an A.I. agent needs to accept ANY raw input/output and in a while learn how it corresponds with it's other inputs and outputs.
Does anyone know Stair's postal address?
Sarah Connor
I find the term "Artificial Intelligence" to be absurd. Intelligence can neither be "artificial" or "natural" or "ogranic." Intelligence is intelligence regardless of how it came about. We speak of "human intelligence," and, thus, we should speak of "machine intelligence."
On a side note, I personally welcome out machine overlords, but that is a different post altogether.
There's a BBC documentary "Where's my robot" out since 16 dec 2008 with STAIR and others in it.
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