Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Brittlestar Skeletons

14:28 / 22.08.01

Just because that sounds cool. Anyway, my thesis that the arrival of artificial intelligence recognizable to us as such will coincide with the "d'oh" moment as we realize that it's a biological organism exactly resembling a human child.

On this front, I provide a simplistic correlative but still very cool article.

quote:Rows of tiny crystals that armor the skeleton of a certain kind of starfish act as an array of microscopic lenses that would be difficult for even the best engineer to duplicate, researchers say.

The lens design could prove especially useful for optical computers -- machines which use changes in light to store data instead of movement of electrons across a silicon wafer or circuit, according to another researcher. Light comes in packets of energy called photons.

"At some point we'd like to have optical computers, but to get to that point we have to move photons with the sophistication we now move electrons, and we aren't able to do it yet,"

Biology is the pinacle of technology, or something. (R)evolve.

Lazlo Woodbine [some call me Laz]

15:35 / 22.08.01

Now the tricky thing about creating AI is that we have yet to understand the blob of grey jelly within our own heads, but a computer would surly be able to moniter all it own funcions, know it a machine, know its limitations and its abilities and realize it does not need us "Biologicals" any more, our undoing. What is the point of creating something unaware as we are, if it can tell us nothing, surly we create something that knows itself to teach our selves.
We'er doomed either way

15:52 / 22.08.01

Its really fascinating when you think about how many technological advanes come from nature. Velcro was created based on some plant, the guy who created the eifle tower go tthe idea after studying the laticework within bones, R.Buckminster Fuller came up with the geodesic dome concept after looking at soap bubbles. I think the best way for science to proceed is through the imitation of nature and not in its subjugation.

17:36 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Kosh:
Now the tricky thing about creating AI is that we have yet to understand the blob of grey jelly within our own heads, but a computer would surly be able to moniter all it own funcions, know it a machine, know its limitations and its abilities and realize it does not need us "Biologicals" any more, our undoing. What is the point of creating something unaware as we are, if it can tell us nothing, surly we create something that knows itself to teach our selves.
We'er doomed either way

That's only the case if you look at it from the point of view of "we humans" and "those AI creatures." It would be analogous to saying some other race doesn't need "us white folk" or that women don't need men. If computers develop and are designed for a world in which human beings exist, it is pretty darned likely that there will be a strong interdependence.

Molly Shortcake

18:14 / 22.08.01

Albert Wesker says: buy Umbrella stock.

[ 22-08-2001: Message edited by: Ice Honkey/Grim Rapper ]

Red Cross Iodized Salt

04:21 / 24.08.01

quote:Originally posted by [YNH]:
Biology is the pinacle of technology, or something.

There has been a lot of enthusiasm over the last couple of years about the use of evolutionary computation in design. One of the most hyped topics is Darwinian genetic algorithms (formulas which apply Darwinian principles to arrive at optimal solutions). The best aspects of existing solutions (which correspond to a parent's genes) are taken as the starting point. These 'genes' are then linked together in different ways, with the best child solutions kept and improved on through further mutation.

When NASA needed a new kind of support arm for satellites that carried extremely low vibrations, they used genetic algorithms to come up with a design that looked way more organic than anything previously considered.