Life Among The Machines

Behold! Utopia!

lifeamongthemachines — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:16:52 +0000

Utopia (will be) a (K)Ubuntu based distro, which has, at it’s heart. Transhumanism.

Something’s coming…

lifeamongthemachines — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:40:55 +0000

Something…is coming….

Something powerful…something fast…something easy…

The future of mobiles?

lifeamongthemachines — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:03:37 +0000

As a transhumanist, I beleive in what is known as The Singularity.

An idea in which technology’s ‘evolution’ increases at an increasingly rapid pace, until we reach the point of Singulairty, where what we regard as breakthroughs nowadays happen on a daily basis (indeed, it’s name was chosen to reflect that we cannot really predict what will happen in the near future, so you could argue that the Singulairty is a moving target, though one whose benefits will most definatly be visible)

Anyway, I’m going off topic.

Mobile phones have had an interesting history; they first started out as a HUGE microphone and speaker…THING…connected to something that weighs (and looks) very much like a car battery.

Jumping forward a bit, we had black and white (ok, black and green) screens, monotone ringtones and a huge antenna.

Nowadays we have made huge improvments, the antenna is safely tucked inside the unit, a good deal of phones can use GPS, battery life is quite long and memory storage increased from about 640k on the early ‘smartphones’ to as much as 160gb (which I beleive is currently the biggest storage unit in SD format.) Did I also mention the colour screen, most audio formats as ringtones, bluetooth, wi-fi, video calls, etc?

Many recents advancements have brought something to my attention, however.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/SSD-Stamp-NAND-Flash-Toshiba,9656.html

A one terabyte SSD, the size of a postage stamp.

Good bloody god.

Couple this with increased development with minute CPU’s and we are seriously looking at the phones coming to us in the next 10 years to be as powerful as a desktop today.

Also couple it with the use of open-source items like Android and the recently re-announced pairing of Moblin and Maemo (MeeGo) then we have a very interesting situation…

The Transcendant Man

lifeamongthemachines — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:09:33 +0000

Ray Kurzwiel’s new film;

Ray K is an interestig individual, but I gotta say, his prediction about 2029 being the year machines attain self-awareness is not impossible. There’s a lot of effort and we’re closing in on a big breakthrough which all it takes is a little bit more work and a much better computer.

The Biggest Thing Since Heart Transplants

lifeamongthemachines — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:52:15 +0000

I admit it, AI/AGI is a part of transhumanism, but so is just about every advancd in science and culture which brings us closer to a Utopia. Hence, I wonder off my chosen path to tell you about The Biggest Thing Since Heart Transplants.

I’m pleased to report on a breakthrough in Medicine which is very rewarding, but to understand it, let me give you a short lesson;

Neurons are us (or at least, a very important part of us) but over time, they degrade, they fall victim to Parkinsons and other diseases that wreck the individual mind and destroy the person you once knew and loved. Or perhaps, an accident of some description severs the neural pathways allowing the brain to control the body, leaving them disabled.

Well, my dear readers, that is no longer the case; the aformentioned breakthrough means this no longer needs to continue. Human neurons have been created by stem cells (after much controversy about using them) that work in every respect to other neurons. We have now got, ladies and gentlemen, a cure for Parkinsons; for your disabled loved ones.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

http://machineslikeus.com/news/inexhaustible-source-neural-cells

The atypical computer user

lifeamongthemachines — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:58:00 +0000

Let’s face it, unless you’ve spent a good few years learning about computers, and £60 each month keeping up to date, your going to know bugger all about these mystical black boxes that sit on your desk, letting you buy and sell, read the news and watch TV.

Case in point; I’ve just been round my neighborhood, looking for someone who owns the wireless connection ‘Free Porn :>’ , it’s a Belkin wireless system thats become infected, it’s got no encryption and from what I saw, it’s spewing out porn (of the hardcore and paedophilic variety) and a virus which attacks all computers in local meatspace every half hour. I’ve narrowed it down to 6 suspect houses, but I’ll need to check later.

Second case in point: After the above, I went round to another neighbors house, he himself has little use or knowledge of a computer and his children are…well, thick when it comes to machines.

He only uses eBay, but his kids use Bebo, Limewire, and a few other programs which promise free games. On top of that, he’s got an HP taskbar for printers (which makes no sense as he’s using a Cannon printer), the virtual keyboard, MSN messneger and whatnot keep popping up at startup, he’s using Internet Explorer, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Microsoft Office, no anti-virus (because he installed a demo of Norton 360, which leaves behind crap after it’s been uninstalled preventing anything other then a Norton product being installed) and to add the cream to this shit-cake of a computer; he’s running Vista.
Which means he has a computer quite capable of running Crysis just so he has special effects running. All the while, his beefy machine is struggling to keep up with it, often requiring five minutes to do an action after it’s been started.

At this point, ladies and gentlemen, I’m banging my head agaisnt the wall, quite sure I’m in the ‘geek’ department of Guantanomo.

But, eventually I;

Installed Firefox
Installed VLC
Put Frostwire in place of Limewire
Got rid of BootyBox and other such rubbish

And the computer operated a bit faster.

*phew*

I, like many others, wish that people would take care of their computers.
The truth is, the computers need to take care of their people.

Ve Live In Interesting Times…

lifeamongthemachines — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:12:00 +0000

Last year, one Ray K, a famous and perhaps optimistic futurist, made the prediction that AI would be here by 2029 (or at least, an AI with human-comparable ability)

Well, two events this month have forced me to think that it might just happen;

1. A robot designed to navigate in a similar way to the human brain.

As you can see, the robot moves in a more natural and faster way then eariler such machines, which often took quite a while to navigate and could not cope with changing conditions.

a2i2, a company which has created an open-domain speech recog system (and oddly, attached the label of AGI to this system) is one example of current speech/conversational recognition systems. It can ask open-ended questions and otherwise make talking to a help-desk or a sales-droid much more natural, which leads to lower customer frustration and lower costs for the company in question.

(Reader’s tip: Should you encounter one of the current generation of bots, those designed for recognizing touch tones, or with speech recognition, and you don’t want to be hassled by it and wanna get to a human operator quickly; swear. Most systems detect it and will route you through to a human operator.

Game AI review: Left 4 Dead.

lifeamongthemachines — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:39:00 +0000

Valve has always been a game developer corporation close to my heart. From the early days of my childhood running scared through Half Life’s laboratory complex to the more complex Half Life 2 Saga.

Now, of course, they’ve released another game called Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead, as you might tell by the picture, is a horror, a survival horror. Now, I’m not a big fan of these kind of games, because normally I play to be entertained, not play to later require a change of underclothes.

Even worse, it’s a cliché; you and three other people have to shoot down hordes of zombies in order to escape from the zombie infection.

But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, Valve has developed a system they call the ‘AI Director’. This Director controls where the zombies spawn, what kind of zombies they are and how many there are. It also controls what items spawn and where. Everything aside from the terrain and the survivors are controlled by the AI Director.

“A gasp, a scream…and all was silent, I crept up to the window and looked through it, a good thirty zombies where there; lying on the ground, against the wall, vomiting, stumbling…

I got into position around a half broken door, I brought my hunting rifle’s scope up to my eye and looked around. I fired , one zombie dropped; her…it’s… brains scattered a good two yards across the concrete, another came into view, eyeing up a potential meal; another shot, and it goes down as well.

A sickly cough, and my heart raced. A Smoker! I located it on the roof of the opposite building, staring right through me. It’s tounge was hidelosuly long, and it spat it out. It wrapped around Zoey’s neck and the Smoker pulled…dragging Zoey with it, kicking and screaming.

Francis ran after her, I focused on the Smoker and fired…but missed.

“Get it off me, get it off!!” Shouted Zoey, the long sickly tounge choking her.

I shot again, and hit it, we called it a smoker for a reason, it gave out a huge cloud of smoke then fell, it’s tounge limp now that the head was no longer attached to it’s body.

Too late, screams all around us, Zoey’s cry had awoken the horde.

We assumed positions, I kept watching the street, Bill was watching my back. Zoey and Francis were back to back on the street below. A growl and Francis was down, hit by a hunter. I had already targeted the hunter and shot it, but the damage was done, a huge gaping hole in his adobmen.

The horde drew closer, running, screaming, eager for food. Zoey had her duel pistols out, shooting at this massive steamroller collection of Zombies, one grabbed her from behind, I took aim…but was covered in bile. I turned around and saw a Boomer, a huge monstroity of flesh whose liquidised and oddly voilitile innards attracted these beasts. Bill was down, his skull caved in. I pushed the boomer away and fired again. An explosion and I’m covered in even more bile.

I look down and see Zoey free of her captors, of course, they love boomer bile and wouldnt miss the oppotunity to eat boomer bile along with some rare meat.

I take Bill’s assult rifle and fire into the horde, they drop but are as quickly replaced. I throw one ofmy pipe bombs and the horde can’t resist a beeping stick. They gather around it, trying to pick it up and shoving others out of the way.

‘BOOM’

I jump down to meet Zoey, she asks about Bill and I tell her.

“…Goodbye, old man” she says to Bill’s body.

A Roar, and we both look to our left; a Tank, a massive bastard whose simple goal in life is to pound everything to little pieces. It lifts up a car and flings it, I push Zoey out the way and try to move myself…too late, the car’s bonnet hit’s me…

…I awake and watch as Zoey empties her last clip into the tank, no effect. The Tank runs up to her and punches her, sending her 20 feet away. She dosent get up.

Then a light catchs my eye, a medkit, a god-damn medkit! I crawl to it with my one good arm and start patching myself up. Getting ready to face that Tank.”

-Louis

The AI Director’s goal is to make sure the player has a challenge, it will not be hard on the player if it detects the player isnt coping well, and will provide ammo and other supplies. However, should the player go fully into ‘shoot everything’ mode and push the game, the game will push back just as hard.

I only wish all games had this system…

Once…

lifeamongthemachines — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:14:00 +0000

…I loved snow, it is beautiful, it’s quiet…now, however, it’s going to be impossible, with my council running out of salt for the roads, I’m going to be effectively ‘snowed in’.

Fun.

Language 101

lifeamongthemachines — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:09:00 +0000

Stop, and think for a second…

What exactly ‘is’ language?

Imagine there is a fellow who can only say one word; no inflection, no meaning, just one word; Gotcha.

There’s no meaning behind it, because there is no meaning behind words, there is only meaning behind a collection of words. I-Am-Going-To-The-Park makes sense, but the words individually have no sense unless related with the memory of a park, or you know what ‘I’ is.

Rather odd, really, we can only make sense using things that don’t make sense. By understanding them more and more, specifically, in their context and use, do they make sense.

Consider when you learn a new word, like ‘Articulate’. You would not understand if you didn’t understand more basic, related terms like ‘spoke’ and nor would you use it unless you were regulariy exposed to objects and a society that uses such words.