The qualifiers for the DARPA Urban Challenge started on October 26, with 35 teams competing for 20 slots in the finals, which will start November 3rd. If you’re not familiar with the DARPA Grand Challenge series, the first successful one took place in 2005. It was an off road race for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile stretch of rugged Mojave desert terrain. The vehicles used GPS, cameras, lasers, and a ton of complicated software to navigate themselves over the course, and in the end, three of them made it. You can watch an awesome hour long NOVA program on the race online here. The next challenge, taking place this year, places the robot cars in an urban environment, where they will have to contend with speed limits, stop signs, and other cars. The vehicles will have to traverse the 60 mile environment in less than 6 hours with no human intervention to win the $3.5 million prize, and they’ll have to obey all California state traffic laws along the way, which is something that most people probably can’t pull off. Danger Room has some excellent coverage of the first few, uh, fatalities. The final will be webcast live on November 3rd, check the DARPA website for details.

[ DARPA Urban Challenge ]

People already love their robots. People already have sex with robots. It’s no stretch of the imagination, therefore, to see humans falling in love with and marrying robots in a few decades, argues David Levy in his Ph.D thesis entitled “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners.” Levy explains that humans are already getting quite comfortable interacting with non-human objects, and when you examine the psychological reasons for both love and sex, there’s no real reason why they wouldn’t apply equally to human-human relationships as well as human-robot relationships. His thesis was based on some 450 papers on psychology, sexology, sociology, robotics, materials science, artificial intelligence, gender studies, and computer-human interaction. If the current trends in robot development continue (both in software and, uh, hardware), sooner or later you’re going to end up with a robot that looks and acts arguably just like a human. And even if it’s not just like a human, that may not make a substantial difference when it comes to relationships.

This is basically just what I argued in the article I wrote a few weeks ago about one of the Arse Elektronika talks I attended. It’s funny… A lot of readers were unhappy with the subject matter presented at Arse Elektronika. But when you repackage the concepts that the Arse Elektronika conference was about into an academic format like a Ph.D thesis, it somehow becomes legit. In a lot of ways, the porn industry is way ahead of the game, if for no other reason than they have substantial financial motivation to make sex with robots a mainstream reality. It’s going to happen to society at large at some point in the future, but it’s going to happen FIRST (probably sooner than you might think) in the porn industry, and that’s where we’re going to see the ethical issues initially emerge.

One way or another, it’s gonna be interesting.

[ Daily Mail Article ] VIA [ Crave ]

Natasha from the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference has just let us know that a new talk by Hod Lipson on self aware robots is now available for viewing on their website. You can check out the video here (and it is worth watching), but basically Lipson discusses two robot self-modeling projects of his. One of them is the Starfish quadruped robot that’s able to teach itself to walk (we wrote about it a few months ago), and the other project is the Golem Project, which some of you may remember from back in 2000. Read more after the jump. (Read more…)

Believe it or not, I didn’t sign up for Arse Elektronika just for performances like Friday night. No, I’m exploring deep epistemological (or whatever) issues relating to the interactions between robots and humans, and it just happens that in this case, those issues are being explored via the most primal of mediums: sex.

There were quite a few talks at Arse Elektronika between Saturday and Sunday (you can read all the abstracts here), but I’m going to focus on the presentation that was the reason I decided to spend my weekend there. It was entitled “Pornomechanics: Sex Robots and the Mechanisms of Love.” I’ll be using some mildly naughty words in this post, but nothing explicit, so read on.

(Read more…)

From the people at Cognitive Code comes this artificial intelligence platform, named SYLVIA.(Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) They are hailing it as a “fundamental conceptual breakthrough in artificial intelligence.” Their goal is to make it easier for people to interact with their computers and mobile devices. It allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways, by building context and meaning from the user’s input through speech, text, and other methods. The idea is that you can communicate with the platform as if it were just another person. It seems like it would be pretty easy to implement and the framework includes a complete set of GUI tools for “developing intelligent entities” for specific applications.

The days of Science Fiction past, where people talked to faces on their devices is now one step closer to reality.

[Cognitive Code] VIA [EnGadget]