The Singularity
I .The NOW , 2010-2019 , today plus or minus 5 years
2nd D R A F T

The Rise of A.I. video overview, 6 minutes

Singularity is a point where parallel lines meet. The technological singularity is where humans achieve enhanced capabilities and computers develop more human characteristics. At some point these two lines meet. This mathematical concept has been borrowed to represent the point that human and artificial intelligence meet.

Factories run without lights, but depend on human management to make improvements, not self teaching

When I worked in Europe, one could see many dumb things they did. On return, one could see many dumb things we do.
An AI viewpoint may see things more clearly than we do. Robots are unlikely to wear ties or high heels. The Associated Press now uses story-writing software to produce U.S. corporate earnings stories. Would you believe that a company in Durham, NC generated 100,000 automatically written sports articles for towns not covered by journalists. Sports scores are not stimulating prose, but are entirely undetectable as not by a human. "Bobcats down West Marshall 20 to 14 in a home game."

A significant point is this discussion is accelerating progress. Each step forward brings more steps forward. Additional money and manpower are attracted. So we are running, then flying.

I.A. ROBOTICS

The DARPA Robotic Challenge preliminaries were last December ; I watched it online. The tasks were sparked by the Fukushima disaster. The idea was to have a robot perform the steps necessary to shut down a nuclear power plant that had exploded, like Fukushima . The well advertised Japanese dancing robots didn't even enter the DARPA challenge, just as they were worthless in the live incident. However, a new Japanese company did enter and won the trials. The Challenge sounded exciting. However, it was actually pretty dull with eight fixed tasks, fully defined. Drive to a site, walk over debris, open three types of doors, remove debris, climb a stair, break through a concrete wall, turn off three different types of valves, connect a fire hose to an outlet. Each test was prosaic. The finals in June 2015 might be more lively and rewarding to see. Eventually, all will be put together --, much as specific AI agents will be integrated in an artificial general intelligence. [ Interesting, after the development and before the public test, the winning robot company was bought by Google in a buying spree of eight robotic companies. ]

A 2014 Mercedes has an option for hands free driving under almost any highway condition. Limitation, one must touch the steering wheel every 15 seconds to confirm who is in charge.

The Google Self-Driving Car is a project called Google Chauffeur. Developed by the team that won 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Autonomous cars are legal in three states, England, and Germany, that I know of, On May 28, 2014, Google presented a new prototype of their driverless car that had neither steering wheel nor pedals.

Japan is hosting the 2020 Olympic and wants to include Robotic Events.

I.B. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial intelligence today is just good programming with feed back loops of data and increasingly large memory and fast and faster speed of recall. This is called weak AI as used for decision support services. I learned on a computer with a pattern of lights that would convey an error code. We progressed through teletype, to words on a screen, to voice, to voice with tone, style, and accent to describe errors and offer solutions. Inputs were once plugging in wires, then flipping switches, then punch cards, then keyboards. and we now have voice actuation. When voice input and output are equal to that of human-to-human interaction, we have reached the Singularity. Once that point is reached, then ongoing improvements will cause a machine that is smarter than its maker.

The annual Turing Test to see if remote interactions were made by a human or a machine was declared this year as having been achieved. We all know about ELIZA (1966) the automated chat robot that would rearrange your comment into a response." And Alice (2000), the robot psychologist that responded to your comments with "And how do you feel about that?" I think this year's test was inadequate. The humans were told the other party was a 14-year old Ukrainian boy, thus the humans made too many allowances for age and unfamiliarity with English. I also think the rules should include video of a virtual person with speech, not just teletype. Opps, such a test and prize exists, Loebner Prize Gold, and has never been won. But ... it will come.

Have you seen the ads for Siri, an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator with a voice-interface by Apple. Or the newer Cortana from Nokia. This year an award winning movie, "Her", has a man fall in love with his digital assistant who proves to be constantly available, always curious and interested, supportive and undemanding.

CHATBOTS:
http://www.zabaware.com/ (31-day free trial)
http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f5d922d97e345aa1 -- the famous ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) ($39/year)
    Q - What will the singularity mean for mankind?
    A - What do you think it will mean?

SPEECH.
Lets look at Text To Speech. Micro$oft Narrator comes with Windows. FireFox has a featured add on: // Here is one of the better free software downloads. http://www.naturalreaders.com/ Here is a commercial package, cost $200-300 range. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir9iLfuWvGY Now that is pretty good.//

We all have emergency weather radios. When the Emergency Management people handed these out, I wondered why they had a foreigner reading the weather announcements, I assumed it was a real person. A couple years later they announced they were changing the software and introduced a nearly perfect voice. The only clues I detect are some of the pauses where the text must have comma, semi-colon, colons, hyphens or such which indicate it is not a real person, to me anyway.

The flip side of this is Speech Recognition in which you speak into a microphone. I have never tried any of these. A fellow at Fisher was learning to use Dragon to convert speech to documents and had to read certain text so that computer could learn his pronunciation patterns. Each year Dragon advertises shorter learning times and higher levels of accuracy. Why ? Speaking is faster than typing and it frees hands. This feature has superseded the need for a stenographer with shorthand.   Dragon , $75 home edition., $50 street price.
    A realtor was showing a house one day in which the husband was blind and working away on his computer, telling it what to do and listening to the results. Some of this Software is free on the web.. LG smart TV accept voice commands. And GPS provides hands off mapping in the car.
    Translation: has come a long way, but can still produce humorous results. I have written a 48,000 word translation dictionary from full standard English into the limited Basic English lexicon. I admire Google translation from virtually any language to any language. Misinterpretations are something to smile at, no longer something to laugh at. A human translator of a U.S. president's speech in Poland was poorly received. People can give silly results, too.

Motion as input to computer games. I don't have grandkids, so know nothing about this except what I see on Big Bang Theory. Ski, golf, archery all detect your motions.

Virtual Reality. You wear glasses and walk around a room that seems real. There is a company in Marshalltown that makes this. VR is significantly used in Flight simulation where emergencies can challenge a pilot without risking a real plane and passengers. Think Star Trek holodeck.
Google Glass is a pair of glasses with a built in camera, projector, and link to the internet. The camera not only records, but can connect to facial recognition, among other things. The projector shows results before your eyes. Initial response was to look up all information of people you might want to meet in a bar. GG was immediately outlawed in casinos as they have card counting forever.

I.C. Augmentation / Genetics / Eugenic

I.C.1. HUMAN AUGMENTATION
Human enhancement is an attempt to overcome the limitations of the human body through natural or artificial means to alter human characteristics and capacities. Techniques include:
Effecting individuals
Plastic surgery
Performance-enhancing drugs
Prosthetics and powered exoskeletons
Medical implant (e.g. pacemaker, organ replacement)
Mental enhancing drug
Embryo selection.
Emerging technologies
Human genetic engineering
Neural implants
Nanomedicine
Brain-computer interface
Immortality has been a goal of men for millennia
Issues
Personality changes
Inequality
Life expectancy : insurance; population growth (birth rate)
May effect succeeding generations

I.C.2. GENETICS.

Genetics, Eugenics, Transhumanism
There are two sides of genetics. (1) Improve offspring and   (2) Reduce the number of defects.
What is desired and what is a weakness is often a social decision. Sickle cell anemia kills American Negros but offers resistance to malaria in Africans.
Elimination of hemophilia and Huntingtons' disease seem less ambiguous. Yet any useful discussion of Eugenics since the time of Hitler has been curtailed.
Transhumanism is safer for discussion, possibly because it sounds like science fiction to defuse social alarmists.
    I thought I was the only one who cautioned that the world IQ, particularly American, was falling by way of over-procreation by the dumb and less than replacement rates of reproduction by college graduates. Seems all social researchers know it, too. The downward trend is supported by social welfare, plus modern sanitation and medicine to contribute to dysgenics rather than to eugenics.
    There is a DNA micro array that tests 1,500 genetic traits at once that may soon allow selection for or against specific traits. Gene therapy to modify parts of the selected DNS might offer the promise of "designer babies." Well that already exists. An entire genetic scan prior to invitrio fertilization is performed in 16 clinics for about $1000. Gene manipulation for sex selection comprises 50% of their work. This is illegal in Western Europe. Pros and Cons?

Or, post-birth development as cyborg or transhuman enhancement. However, the transhumanists are ripe with social justice influences. If it exited, who would get the implants : rich people (who by definition are evil) or the deserving poor? The transhumanist "Longevity Party" is less controversial and generally supported. (Note, long life comes after the child creating years and can have no genetic influence on future generations. It is the mad young folks that generate the next generation.) Transhumanism is often considered a branch of secular humanism. (My letter to the editor was once printed as the front page essay of "American Humanist".)

In this study I had hoped to find that a scanner would find all defective genes (it exits) and use nanotechnology to repair (it is possible), thus both reducing defects and raising potential. But I am also finding that genetics is wrapped up in arguments of philosophy, ethics and religion, I gave up the review for a modern genetics portion of this report. Yet, hoping that the research is ongoing.

If the genetic people ARE doing something, and if the laws of accelerating advancement applies, there is still time to let mankind catch up with robots.

Man shall always strive to invent the next thing until he reaches doom or paradise.

I.D. NANOTECHNOLOGY

NanoTechnology is manipulation of matter at the molecular level. Quantum mechanical effects are important at this level. Areas of interest include : phase intersections (surface technology), organic chemistry, molecular biology, semiconductor physics, microfabrication, and developing new materials with direct control of matter on the atomic scale.   That included gene manipulation. I am an engineer and live in a Newtonian world of physical things. I am not qualified to discuss molecular biology.

* New this month: nanoparticles can form faster blood clots after blast trauma

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