just trying to think down to your level. "
-- Marvin The Robot, "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy"
Today in robot news...
Robot scientists can think for themselves
By Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) - Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.
Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker's yeast.
"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview.
"People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."
Their next robot, Eve, will have much more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.
…
And while mankind's mythos isn't exactly chock full of fables of this sort of thing
ending well
at least now we have a counterbalance to the Creationist Robot;
something that won't scream “’Cause sweet baby Jebus sez so!” in answer to every question on a Turing Test.
5 comments:
Ahh; the good ol' days; when mysterious science took place in a theatre. . .
"Robot scientists can think for themselves"
As. if. any "human" robot scientist knows what a "self" is.
As. if. any "human" robot scientist knows what a "self" is.
Phft. Sure. What kind of bullshit religious argument is that? The "self" is the emergent properties of the biochemical and bioelectrical workings of the brain. We already know it doesn't even have to be a human brain, because there are lots of animals that are self-aware. Shit, man, I know that much, and I'm not even a scientist, just someone who keeps up with a lay interpretation of the state of the art in neuroscience.
I would, on the other hand, argue that even this sophisticated AI is not self-aware, because it likely does not have the software sophistication to display the kind of emergent behaviour we refer to vernacularly as "consciousness" or "self."
These are splendid developments.
mankind never learns
but can they sing like Gunther?
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