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Strong AI and the Imminent Revolution In Robotics
An anonymous reader writes "Google director of research Peter Norvig and AI pioneer Judea Pearl give their view on the prospects of developing a strong AI and how progress in the field is about to usher in a new age of household robotics to rival the explosion of home computing in the 1980s. Norvig says, 'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s, where you could buy a PC kit and if you were an enthusiast you could have a lot of fun with that. But it wasn’t a worthwhile investment for the average person. There wasn’t enough you could do that was useful. Within a decade that changed, your grandmother needed word processing or email and we rapidly went from a very small number of hobbyists to pervasive technology throughout society in one or two decades. I expect a similar sort of timescale for robotic technology to take off, starting roughly now.' Pearl thinks that once breakthroughs are made in handling uncertainty, AIs will quickly gain 'a far greater understanding of context, for instance providing with the next generation of virtual assistants with the ability to recognise speech in noisy environments and to understand how the position of a phrase in a sentence can change its meaning.'"
Weren't we all supposed to be enjoying 5 months of vacation by now....
Well, we are, even more that 5 moths. Except.. it is called unemployement.
by that measure the advancement of robotics probably won't benefit human lifestyle either. Somehow we'll all end up as slaves to the machines.. if we aren't already!
Slave yes.. not to the machines, but to the banks... and, quite frequent, this include the machines/robots owners.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
And humans have never failed the frame problem? It seems to me in our quest for strong AI, we're setting the bar higher than ourselves. We fail too and yet we're the metric by which strong AI will be judged.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
This is a problem that has hit a number of slave-owning societies and is currently a problem for China. An imbalance between production and consumption is unsustainable, irrespective of the direction. It was also one of the causes of the US civil war: the south was production-heavy, which was making it hard for workers in the north to compete with cheap imports, which the south needed to keep supplying because they didn't have a large enough local consumer base.
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Of course, AI robots by themselves do not solve the problem of resource scarcity.
Asteroids do.
And people will continue to grow exponentially
Don't worry, they don't and aren't.
so on a fixed earth, you'll always reach a point where not everybody gets a basic standard of living.
Its quite doable. And if you look at population trends in societies nearing post scarcity status, like Western Europe, it becomes clear that the best way to head off any such hypothesised difficulties is to provide a decent standard of living to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
Robots are starting to work in unstructured situations. I was there at the moment when this was recognized - the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge at the California Motor Speedway in Fontana, CA. That's when everything changed.
The 2004 Grand Challenge, remember, was a pathetic joke. No vehicle got further than 7 miles, and that was CMU's. The CMU approach at the time wasn't even really autonomous. Entrants got the route on a CD an hour or so before the start. CMU had imagery of the whole area and tried to plan obstacle avoidance manually just before the start, using a huge team of people in a semitrailer full of workstations. Didn't work; the DoD people in charge had moved some obstacles during the night. And that was the best result. One vehicle came out of the gate, turned hard, and ran back into the starting gate. One flipped over. The big Oskosh entry demolished a SUV parked as an obstacle to be avoided. The whole thing was embarrassing.
DARPA was very displeased with the performance by the universities that had long been receiving DARPA funding for robotics. It was quietly made clear to some major CS departments that their performance had to improve or funding would be cut off. That's why entire CS departments were suddenly devoted to the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.
In 2005, things were completely different. Everybody who got that far had already been through an elimination, and every vehicle at the 2005 challenge was better than any of the 2004 entries. There was considerable press coverage, and at first, the press treated it as a joke. But suddenly there were over 20 vehicles running around autonomously, and they weren't crashing into stuff. When multiple vehicles finished the course, it was viewed as a triumph.
Finally, the state of the art had reached the point that money and determination would get problems solved. That wasn't true in the 1980s. NASA threw over $100 million at the Flight Telerobotic Servicer project, and got nothing that worked.
Now check out the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. (There's much dreck about this on blogs and in the popular press. Read the DARPA announcement instead.) They have an approach that's likely to work, and demand simulated demos (in their simulator) in 9 months, with demos on real hardware in 18 months. I personally think they'll get something able to do most of the mobility tasks and some of the manipulation tasks in that time. Useful humanoid robots will be a lot closer in two years.
Price will still be a problem. But not an unsolveable one. These things could be brought down to the price of an SUV, if not lower, through production economies alone. The parts count is probably lower than that for an SUV.