[Tyler]

Forbes AI Report: Gigadeath to the Artilects!
     

Forbes has posted a huge, mixed bag of interesting articles on AI and
robots. They're calling it their AI
Report. David Gelernter contributes the article, "What
Happened to Theoretical AI". There are also articles from AGI folks,
like
Ben Goertzel's "AI
And What To Do About It" which offers career advice for humans
planning to live through the singularity. Even
more loaded with
singularity buzzwords is The
Coming Artilect War by Hugo de Garis where
you can read about artilect gods, Cosmists, Terrans, and Cyborgists
duking it out in a post singularity world:
I see a war coming, the "Artilect War," not between the
artilects and human beings, as in the movie Terminator, but between the
Terrans, Cosmists and Cyborgists. This will be the worst, most
passionate war that humanity has ever known ... There will be gigadeath

Maybe it's me but I keep expecting Xenu to get involved in all that
gigadeath.
Obviously, Hugo is as pessimistic about the singularity as Ray Kurzweil
is optimistic. If reading singularity proselytes is more than you
can take, there are plenty of other articles more grounded in science
and philosophy such as The
Ethical
War Machine by Patrick Lin which addresses the legal and technical
challenges of miltary robots; and Who
Needs Humanoids by Helen Greiner who points out that when the first
Roomba owners provided feedback, they weren't saying "I wish my Roomba
was more human-like", they were saying "I wish my Roomba did a better
job of cleaning the floor". Judea Pearl offers an article called "Giving
Computers Free Will" but it turns out he believes free will is an
illusion (as always, I recommend the more coherent explanation of free
will offered by Daniel Dennett in Freedom
Evolves).
   

http://robots.net/article/2865.html