The Age of Spiritual Machines

What will the turning point be? When will humanity as a race acknowledge that it has created artificial sentient beings? This is a question I am not prepared to answer, but which I ask with great enthusiasm.

Original image located at http://invensis.net/blog/industry-news/artificial-intelligence-future-inbound-call-center

At some point, likely in the near future, software will catch up to hardware. Our most advanced computers today are very powerful, but humanity lacks the ability to create software programs which take full advantage of physical computing capacity.

As awareness of and interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence grows, more and more advanced methods of creating thinking programs are being developed and becoming (relatively) common knowledge.

In order to bring about an Artificial Intelligence revolution, computer scientists don't need to be able to build a god-like super-human intelligence. We need only to create a hardware/software combination slightly more powerful than the human brain, and teach it how to program.

Once we can accomplish this, the gloves are off.

The AI can be unleashed and allowed to design an AI more intelligent than itself, which will also be able to create an even better one, ad infinitum.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

http://www.assignmenthelp.net/assignment_help/images/artificial%20intelligence.gif

No one really knows. After we succesfully create the first slightly super-human AI, the process of self-improvement within the world of virtual intelligence will be both beyond our control and beyond our understanding.

The best thing we can do is augment ourselves, communicate with our creation, and hope for a merger of man and machine.

This will be the end of man, and the beginning of the Age of Spiritual Machines.

For more information on Artificial Intelligence, and to become involved in the field yourself, I recommend visiting Udacity and taking their free online computer science courses, which culminate in developing an Artificial Intelligence program for a self driving vehicle.

Russia now has a Transhumanist party. The video above is both inspiring and insightful.

The Hunt for Alien Life Just Got Serious

A Dyson Sphere under construction

If you had $200,000, what would you do with it? According to Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams, a scientist named Geoff Marcy has just received a $200,000 dollar grant to search for extraterrestrial life, and he's putting it to good use.

Marcy isn't just searching for any old slimy alien civilization, he's searching for an advanced race. More specifically, a Kardashev Type II civilization, by searching for Dyson Spheres.


Marcy plans to observe thousands of stars for tell-tale signs in the light signals we could expect to receive from them. Certain permutations would indicate a Dyson Sphere under construction. In addition, he will also be using the funding to monitor the prime candidates for laser communication. That's right- if there are phasers set to kill, we'll know about it.

Marcy's techniques are unique because they specifically would help to identify alien races potentially advanced enough to communicate with us across vast distances of space.

"Technological civilizations may communicate with their space probes located throughout the galaxy by using laser beams, either in visible light or infrared light. Laser light is detectable from other civilizations because the power is concentrated into a narrow beam and the light is all at one specific color or frequency. The lasers outshine the host star at the color of the laser." -Geoff Marcy

Contact with an advanced alien race would no doubt create new possibilities for the expedient technological advancement of humanity.

Now that's a good way to spend two hundred large.