J. Storrs Hall's blog

A:

> p. 9, Artificial Scientist Test: Almost every human can't do this. Are you suggesting that most humans don't have human-level intelligence?? (None of us have gotten a Nobel Prize!) It is important to set the bar at a reasonable level.

There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names:

* Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as Roomba or industrial robots or automated call-center systems or dictation programs.
* Robo habilis: Rosie the housemaid robot level intelligence, able to handle service level jobs in the real world but not a rocket scientist.

The word “planet” means wanderer. The ancients, with their lives lived largely outdoors and without artificial lighting, were much more intimately acquainted with the heavens than are we moderns, unless we specialize in astronomy. They noticed that although there was a fixed pattern of stars for the most part, some of them wandered around in complicated patterns.

I suspect many readers have seen Neil Gershenfeld’s TED talk on fab labs, or read his book. In particular, notice the part where he comments that fabs are following the track of computers, currently in the minicomputer stage. You can see the same progression in my keynote for a SME meeting a couple of years ago (slides pdf), but I use the progression from film to instant to digital photography instead of computing.

I am an independent scientist and author. My most recent book is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, published by Prometheus Books.
It is about the (possibly) imminent development of strong AI, and the desirability, if and when that happens, that such AIs be equipped with a moral sense and conscience. This is an outgrowth of my essay Ethics for Machines. See the author's pages.

My previous book is Nanofuture, also published by Prometheus.
It is about real nanotechnology, i.e. molecular machines (as opposed to films and powders re-branded "nanotech" as a buzzword.)