Should we love our robots or are robots going be smarter than we are? TED’s 2014 All Stars Session 5: The Future is Ours (maybe)

Rodney Brooks seems to be a man who loves robots, from his TED biography,

Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. The goal: a robot who can figure things out.

MIT professor Rodney Brooks studies and engineers robot intelligence, looking for the holy grail of robotics: the AGI, or artificial general intelligence. For decades, we’ve been building robots to do highly specific tasks — welding, riveting, delivering interoffice mail — but what we all want, really, is a robot that can figure things out on its own, the way we humans do.

Brooks makes a plea for easy-to-use (programme) robots and mentions his Baxter robot as an example that should be improved; Brooks issues a challenge to make robots better. (Baxter was used as the base for EDI introduced earlier in TED’s 2014 Session 8 this morning (March 20, 2014).

By contrast, Sir Martin Rees, astrophysicist has some concerns about robots and artificial intelligence as per my Nov. 26, 2012 posting about his (and others’) proposal to create the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk. From his TED biography,

Martin Rees, one of the world’s most eminent astronomers, is a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity in the cosmos.

Sir Martin Rees has issued a clarion call for humanity. His 2004 book, ominously titled Our Final Hour, catalogues the threats facing the human race in a 21st century dominated by unprecedented and accelerating scientific change. He calls on scientists and nonscientists alike to take steps that will ensure our survival as a species.

Rees states that the worst threats to planetary survival come from humans not, as it did in the past, nature. While science offers great possibilities, it has an equally dark side. Rees suggests robots going rogue, activists hijacking synthetic biology to winnow out the population, and more. He suggests that there is a 50% chance that we could suffer a devastating setback. Rees then mentions the proposed Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk and the importance of studying the possibility of human extinction and ways to mitigate risk.

Steven Johnson, writer, was introduced next (from his TED biography),

Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.

A dynamic writer and speaker, Johnson crafts captivating theories that draw on a dizzying array of disciplines, without ever leaving his audience behind. Author Kurt Anderson described Johnson’s book Emergence as “thoughtful and lucid and charming and staggeringly smart.” The same could be said for Johnson himself. His big-brained, multi-disciplinary theories make him one of his generation’s more intriguing thinkers. His books take the reader on a journey — following the twists and turns his own mind makes as he connects seemingly disparate ideas: ants and cities, interface design and Victorian novels.

He will be hosting a new PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) series, ‘How We Got to Now’ (mentioned in Hector Tobar’s Aug. 7, 2013 article about the PBS series in the Los Angeles Times) and this talk sounds like it might be a preview of sorts. Johnson plays a recording made 20 years before Alexander Graham Bell ‘first’ recorded sound. The story he shares is about an inventor who didn’t think to include a playback feature for his recordings. He simply didn’t think about it as he was interested in doing something else (I can’t quite remember what that was now) and, consequently, his invention and work got lost for decades. Despite that, it forms part of the sound recording story. Thankfully, modern sound recording engineers have developed a technique which allows us to hear those ‘lost’ sounds today.

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