Advocates of the concept called singularity envision a future in which humans and technology fully converge, but a keynote speaker at the World Future Society conference voiced skepticism about the idea, citing the complexities of the human mind.
Proponents of singularity claim that in 20 years, nanotechnology implanted in people will repair wounds and advanced robots will assist with daily tasks. The concept ultimately calls for people to transcend the limits of biology by using technology to develop into something more advanced and intelligent than human genetics allows.
Wendell Wallach, a scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, supports technology but labels himself a “friendly skeptic” on this marriage of people and machines.
While he is “excited by where the science will take us,” Wallach, who spoke Thursday at the World Future Society in Boston, is a “skeptic because we don’t know enough about humans to pull it off.”
Wallach’s critique of singularity focused on areas including understanding the intricacies of the mind, the complexities of developing robots with morals and the question of who is responsible when a robot’s morals prove problematic.
The singularity movement holds that the evolution of the computer will lead to further development of the human mind, since that is also a computer.
Wallach countered that the brain is engaged in massive parallel thinking and that researchers do not fully grasp how this part of the body operates. He compared this ability to a computer, in which “one bit is out of place and Windows locks up,” he said.
He also said that computers face barriers in dealing with vision, language and locomotion.
“We don’t know which of these challenges we’ll master in 20 years. Some will be ceilings,” he said.
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But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
But the big story this week in Nature is that we might have been wrong all along in estimating something very basic about the humble proton: its size. A team from the Paul-Scherrer Institute in Switzerland that’s been tackling this for a decade says its arduous measurements of the proton show it is 4 percent smaller than the previous best estimate. For something as simple as the size of a proton, one of the basic measurements upon with the standard model of particle physics is built, 4 percent is a vast expanse that could shake up quantum electrodynamics if it’s true.
If the [standard model] turns out to be wrong, “it would be quite revolutionary. It would mean that we know a lot less than we thought we knew,” said physicist Peter J. Mohr of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. “If it is a fundamental problem, we don’t know what the consequences are yet” [Los Angeles Times].
Simply, the long-standing value used for a proton’s radius is 0.8768 femtometers, (a femtometer equals one quadrillionth of a meter). But the study team found it to be 0.84184 femtometers.
NASA chief Charles Bolden told senators Wednesday that sending astronauts to Mars is still the ultimate goal for U.S. human spaceflight, as he defended the agency’s new space plan against criticism in a heated budget hearing.
NASA chief Charles Bolden told senators Wednesday that sending astronauts to Mars is still the ultimate goal for U.S. human spaceflight, as he defended the agency’s new space plan against criticism in a heated budget hearing.
“Mars is what I believe to be the ultimate destination for human exploration in our solar system”, Bolden told the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee.
But NASA will likely not have the technology to send astronauts to Mars for at least the next 10 years, he said.
“There are too many capabilities that we don’t have in our kit bag”, Bolden said.
That’s where the NASA’s 2011 budget request comes in, Bolden said. It sets the stage for future manned spaceflights to the moon, asteroids and Mars, by focusing on the technologies needed to explore beyond low-Earth orbit faster, he added.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity has already been tested and confirmed to a degree as a true picture of reality by scores of experimenters, ever since he proposed it to the world nearly a century ago.
In the immediate decades after the theory’s publication, legend had it that only 12 people in the world could understand it, although physicists have long revered it.
Even today, relativity remains an arcane subject for most of us, but it does have relevance to all science and even to everyday life – for meticulous timekeepers, for space explorers, for astronomers studying black holes and even for anyone driving a car with a Global Positioning System device navigating around the Bay Area’s tricky freeway mazes.
One basic prediction from Einstein’s theory is that the tug of gravity makes clocks slow down.
In conjunction with manufacturing partner General Motors, the space agency has unveiled the latest generation robotic astronaut, dubbed Robonaut 2. NASA says that the robot is designed to work side by side with people; its leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions.
“This cutting-edge robotics technology holds great promise, not only for NASA, but also for the nation,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “I’m very excited about the new opportunities for human and robotic exploration these versatile robots provide across a wide range of applications.”
NASA points out that the first generation of the robot was built by the software, robotics and simulation division at Johnson in a collaborative effort with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) 10 years ago. That generation was designed to be controlled by astronauts inside the International Space Station using a virtual reality interface: helmets and gloves wired to record their motions and immediately transfer those intentions and actions to robots outside the station.
Robonaut B, the second generation model unveiled in 2004, was built with human-like hands and television camera eyes, and gained the option of rolling around Earth on a modified two-wheeled Segway scooter or grappling the International Space Station (ISS) with what researchers call a “space leg.”
“We’re looking at other lower bodies for the moon, with a four-wheel or six-wheel base,” Robert Ambrose, Robonaut project lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston,Texas told SPACE.com in 2004. “We’re not going to take a Segway to the moon, but it’s a good way to emulate the idea on Earth.”
NASA and GM, with the help of engineers from Houston’s Oceaneering Space Systems, developed and built R2, the latest generation of the androids. It’s faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced than the first generation creations.
Posting video of Ares DM1 5-segment booster test just because it’s really cool and something we will see in use in the future. If video doesn’t show up just refresh page.
“When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron (sic), moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence,” explains the English-language section of the Cyberdyne Web site. “At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. ‘HAL’ catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer.”
Cyberdyne says the HAL-5 model weighs about 50 pounds, though it supports its own weight, and increases the wearer’s strength up to 10-fold. It runs on battery power and can go nearly 3 hours before needing a recharge.
The U.S. military has been trying to develop robotic exoskeletons for decades to help soldiers carry heavy loads or move at high speeds.
But at a suggested retail price of about $4,000 (for Japanese residents only, and not yet available), the HAL “robot suit” may be the first aimed at civilians.
Cool. Get that working with rocket boosters and I’ll one day be one bad octogenarian. I got your bingo right here!
NASA engineers will be holding their breaths Sunday, as a digging robot attempts a precarious landing on Mars’ surface.
NASA’s Phoenix Lander was launched in August and has traveled 122 million miles to Mars. It is a $457 million robotic spacecraft — equipped with a backhoe, cameras and a compact chemistry lab — that will attempt to find out whether the cold, forbidding surface of Mars could once have been warm enough for microbial life to exist on the planet.
Phoenix is scheduled to land Sunday evening at 7:38 p.m. ET. It must first separate from its rocket and then survive a harrowing seven-minute descent at 12,600 mph. It will then slow down to 5 mph to land in one piece on the planet’s unexplored north pole.
Mars has attracted more space missions than the rest of the solar system’s planets, but nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way.
I’ve read or heard somewhere that the 2/3 value is true but the encompasses more than just the American attempts, whereas the American attempts are more of a 50-50 shot, still not the average you’d have high hopes for but better than 33%.