Wired for War

Nearly coinciding with the wonderful recorded rant (audio, NSFW) by Christian Bale on the set of the craptastic-looking Terminator IV comes this Wired interview with author Peter W. Singer (not to be confused with ethicist Peter Singer), on the robotics revolution in the military. It reminded me of the work of Ron Arkin, who not only builds robots but writes and consults on the ethics of their use in warfare. (And if you want evidence that we're moving gradually toward Skynet, check out this article on automating scientific discovery by Hod Lipson & co.)

Robot Video Review: 2008

Singularity Hub, a blog about longevity, nanotech, robotics, genetics, AI, the brain ..., featured a review of robot videos for the past year. Thanks to mark for forwarding the url.

Voice Search 2009

Patti Price draws our attention to Voice Search 2009, which will be held March 2-4, 2009 in San Diego, California. She says "I think it's a nice conference that tends to bridge the gap between technology and applications. And it is a good place to network." This is the second year of the conference which is organized by the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (president, TMA Associates, editor, Speech Strategy News) to address the disruptive role of speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile, Web, and call center applications. "In the past, application effectiveness was often compromised in order to aid the speech technology; today, the technology has advanced to the point where user requirements can dominate a design. The paradigm shift is having dramatic competitive impacts in many product and service categories." The conference will highlight the wide range of applications that the maturing of speech recognition and text-to-speech technology make possible.

I LEGO N.Y.

"An artist's daydream in a roomful of his kids' toys leads to a view of New York you've never seen." I LEGO N.Y. can be found in the Feb. 2, 2009 entry of Christoph Niemann's Abstract City blog in The New York Times. Thanks and a hat tip to Robert Remez for letting us know about this.

Ought Implies Kant

Joel Marks, friend, emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Haven, Yale Bioethics Center member and Yale Technology & Ethics study group participant, has a new book "Ought Implies Kant: A Reply to the Consequentialist Critique," (Lexington Books). In the book Joel provides an original defense of the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant and develops an extension of that theory's account of moral duty to include direct duties to nonhuman animals. Check it out.

Talking Heads: embodied cognition and ethics

Philip Rubin, CEO of Haskins Laboratories, Professor Adjunct of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, and IS Group co-founder, was the featured speaker at the December 3, 2008 meeting of the Yale Technology and Ethics Working Group. His presentation, "Talking Heads: embodied cognition and ethics" provided an historical overview of speaking machines and computational models of speech production. In addition, he discussed the importance of considering biological constraints on language and cognition and the ethical implications of research and technological developments related to embodied cognition.

Encoding meaning with high-dimensional random vectors

My friend/collaborator Ross Gayler sent me this link to a recent talk by our colleague Pentti Kanerva, at the Redwood Center of Theoretical Neuroscience. Pentti is a pioneer in the field of sparse distributed memory, a biologically plausible model of mental representation similar to the Multiply-Add-Permute architecture that Ross and I are working on. The presentation is very accessible and deals with the exciting and open question of what kinds of things suggested by the architecture of the brain, if we modeled them mathematically, could give some properties that we associate with mind?