Category: Nanodot

Foresight advisor Ray Kurzweil has responded to a critique of his views on machine intelligence by Scientific American: "If you do the thought experiment of considering the implications of multiple generations of technology, the availability over the next several decades of enormous increases in the capacity of our computational andcommunication tools, the advent of molecularnanotechnology, and far greater insight into the principles of operation of the human brain, I believe that our perspectives will converge.
Ray is always so polite…Note that SciAm's views on Bjorn Lomborg were recently (and vehemently) overturned by the Danish Minstry of Science. This is not the SciAm we remember from our youth.–CP

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes "The Singularity Institute has released a draft of the paper "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence", to appear as a chapter in "Real AI: New Approaches to Artificial General Intelligence" (Goertzel and Pennachin, eds., forthcoming). A flat-file version is available (382K).

Everyone has been patiently waiting for science to cough up a general theory of intelligence. This paper contains the Singularity Institute's shot at the problem. The paper's goals are to describe intelligence as a complex supersystem of interdependent, internally specialized subsystems; to structure our understanding of cognition using levels of functional organization; and to integrate our understanding of general intelligence with our understanding of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory. The final part of the paper also includes a discussion of recursive self-improvement and seed AI."

Two recent articles describe a project at the University of California at Berkeley to develop 'smart dust' ó sensor-laden networked computer nodes that are just cubic millimetres in volume. While hardly nanoscale, such work is likely to provide useful experience when it comes to developing cooperative swarms of nano-scale devices in the future.

• "Network in a dust storm", by Luke Collins, 5 April 2002, in the UK edition of EE Times. As the article notes, "As [the Berkeley researchers] develop the various elements of smart dust, researchers are also creating new units of measurement, where data transfer and computing performance will be measured in nano or even picoJoules of energy consumed per bit handled. The smart dust project envisions a complete sensor network node, including power supply, processor, sensor and communications mechanisms, in a single cubic millimetre."
• "Computing with a pinch of sand", 9 April 2002, from ZDNet News, provides additional detail.

Similar work by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was noted in a Nanodot post from 20 December 2001.