Peter Asaro Interviewed on Robots in the Military

In his continuing series of interviews regarding military robots, Gerhard Dabringer of the Institut Fur Religion und Frieden talked with Peter Asaro. While the title of the article is in German, the text is in English and can be read here:

PostDoc with Nick Bostrom at Oxford

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP IN INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE OR PHILOSOPHY

University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
Future of Humanity Institute, James Martin 21st Century School

Grade 7: £28,839 - £38,757 per annum (as at 1 October 2008)

Applications are invited for a fixed-term Research Fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute. The Fellowship is available for two years from the date of appointment.

The Future of Humanity Institute is a unique multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. It is part of the James Martin 21st Century School, and is hosted by the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy. FHI’s mission is to bring excellent scholarship to bear on big-picture questions for humanity. Current work areas include global catastrophic risks, probabilistic methodology and applied epistemology & rationality, impacts of future technologies, and ethical issues related to human enhancement.

The successful candidate will be expected to: develop and implement an independent program of research related to one or more of the Institute’s focus areas; provide research assistance to the Institute’s director, Professor Nick Bostrom; and to participate in examining and administrative duties for the Faculty of Philosophy as required.

The successful applicant will show evidence of exceptional academic research potential and outstanding intellectual capacity. Academic discipline and specialization are open but should be directly relevant to at least one of FHI’s work areas.

Further particulars, including details about how to apply, are available from the website of The Future of Humanity Institute (http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/) or from Mrs Nancy Patel (tel: +44 (0)1865 286279; email: fhi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk).

The successful candidate will be able to start as soon as possible, however there is some flexibility with the start date.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 14 October 2009.

Slime Mold Robots

No, this is not a bad horror picture or another story from The Onion News. A team at the University of the West in England (UWE) has received 228,000 pounds in funding to engineer robots from single celled organisms. The target species of Andrew Adamatzky and his team is a slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) reports an article titled, Plasmobot: the slime mould robot, online at NewScientist.

Affectionately dubbed Plasmobot, it will be "programmed" using light and electromagnetic stimuli to trigger chemical reactions similar to a complex piece of chemistry called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which Adamatzky previously used to build liquid logic gates for a synthetic brain. By understanding and manipulating these reactions, says Adamatzky, it should be possible to program Plasmobot to move in certain ways, to "pick up" objects by engulfing them and even assemble them. It should be possible to program it to move, to pick up objects and even assemble them. Initially, Plasmobot will work with and manipulate tiny pieces of foam, because they "easily float on the slime", says Adamatzky. The long-term aim is to use such robots to help assemble the components of micromachines.

Too Much Power To Robots?

The Onion News hosts a panel -- In the Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?
In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

Robots evolve to exploit inadvertent cues

IEEE Spectrum publlshed a different take on the Swiss research we posted on August 28th, in an article titled Robots evolve to exploit inadvertent cues.
Full post

The researchers set up a group of S-bots equipped with omnidirectional cameras and light-emitting rings around their body in a bio-inspired foraging task (see picture above). Like many animals, the robots used visual cues to forage for two food sources in the arena. Rather than pre-programming the robots' control rules, the researchers used artificial evolution to develop the robots' control systems. As expected, robots capable of efficiently navigating the arena and locating food sources evolved in a matter of a few 100 generations.

This is when things became interesting: Due to the limited amount of food, robots now began to compete for resources. Robots began to evolve strategies to use light inadvertently emitted by their peers to rapidly pinpoint food locations, in some cases even physically pushing them away to make room for themselves. As evolution progressed, the exploited robots were soon all but extinct. A new generation of robots ensued that could conceal their presence by emitting confusing patterns of light or by ceasing to emit light altogether.

More on Modelling Morality with Prospective Logic

Luis Moniz Pereira has sent us links for the papers he wrote together with Ari Saptawijaya on the use f propsective logic for modelling morality. As you may remember from an earlier post, the used the trolley car examples for developing a computational system that could consider the consequences of various course of action.

Click on the title if you are interested in reading these papers.

L. M. Pereira, A. Saptawijaya, Modelling Morality with Prospective Logic, to appear in: M. Anderson, S. Anderson (eds.), "Machine Ethics", Cambridge University Press, 2010.

A summary:
L. M. Pereira, Ari Saptawijaya, Computational Modelling of Morality, The Association for Logic Programming Newsletter, Vol. 22, No. 1, February/March 2009.

A shorter, conference version:
L. M. Pereira, A. Saptawijaya, Modelling Morality with Prospective Logic, in: J. M. Neves, M. F. Santos, J. M. Machado (eds.), Progress in Artificial Intelligence, Procs. 13th Portuguese Intl.Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA'07), pp. 99-111, Springer LNAI 4874, Guimarães, Portugal, December 2007.

Pereira Interview for those reader who speak Portuguese:
L. M. Pereira, Inteligência Artificial: O computador também é capaz de ter moral, Interview by Sandra Pereira, in: "Jornal i", pp. 26-27, 2 September 2009.

Interview of Noel Sharkey

In the spirit of sensationalism, NewScientist published an interview of Noel Sharkey under the title, Why AI is a dangerous dream.

Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient?

I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.