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Biotech
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0. I Compute Therefore I Am
1. Computer Guides Automated Evolution of a Robot
2. Muscular Robots 4 Mars
3. Computers That Run Without Electricity
4. Team Links Brain Cells with a Robot
5. Advanced Cell Technology
6. Cloning Technology : What's cloning ? Why clone ?
7. Why build a human-like robot? Why not just simulate it?
8. Artificial Intelligence Hasn't Peaked (Yet) |
- I Compute Therefore I Am
Everyone shouts at their computer. But in 40 years' time, the computer could be answering
you back.
A leading expert in artificial intelligence has predicted that it is only a matter
of time before computers will be able to interact on a personal level and talk problems
over just like another human.
In 40 years' time you'll be used to using conscious computers and you wouldn't buy
one unless it was conscious, it would probably use language and be quite responsive
to vision, so you could show it things you're describing. The big change is that
a conscious computer might answer a problem by saying, `I see what you mean, but
I think we should do X, Y or Z'.
It could conceivably disagree and argue with you. When a computer starts using the
word I in that context then we'll know that it's fully conscious. It was already
demonstrated a degree of computer consciousness using a machine called Magnus modelled
on the neural network of the human brain. The aim of the research is to give a computer
an understanding of its surroundings, with experimentation is focused in the recall
of sensory experience.
For example, the computer is shown a kitchen table and asked to identify if there
is a spoon present, and if so, how many.
Magnus has shown that to some extent it can feel the quality of things, such as "redness"
or "ballness" when visualising a red ball.
The prospect of conscious machines is a mainstay of many science fiction films. Perhaps
the most well-known is HAL, the homicidal computer in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey.
The ethical problem of "killing" a conscious computer by switching it off
would not arise.
The machine would not feel threatened by such action.
A conscious computer would be so different from a conscious living thing.
- Aping Biology, Computer Guides Automated Evolution of a Robot
For the first time, computer scientists have created a robot that designs and builds
other robots, almost entirely without human help.
In the short run, this advance could lead to a new industry of inexpensive robots
customized for specific tasks. In the long run -- decades at least -- robots may
one day be truly regarded as "artificial life," able to reproduce and evolve,
building improved versions of themselves.
Such durable, adaptive robots, astronomers have suggested, could someday be sent
into space to explore the galaxy or search for other life.
But the quest to create artificial life also revives concerns that computer scientists
could eventually create a
robotic species that would supplant biological life, including humans.
"Some things we probably can do we shouldn't do," said Bill Joy, chief
scientist at Sun Microsystems, who wrote a recent article warning of the power of
emerging technologies. "Just like we can kill things with DDT, but we shouldn't."
For now, the robotic manufacturing system -- a computer hooked up to a machine that
builds plastic models -- in the laboratory of Dr. Jordan B. Pollack and Dr. Hod Lipson
at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., cannot create anything nearly as complicated
as itself. Instead, it produces eight-inch-long contraptions of plastic bars and
ball joints.
When a motor and microchip are added, the automatons have one, and only one, ability:
to crawl slowly. The fastest can scuttle along at a few inches a second.
"They look like toys," Dr. Pollack, a professor of computer science, said.
But, he added, "They were not engineered by humans, and they were not manufactured
by humans."
Dr. Pollack and Dr. Lipson, a research scientist, report their results in today's
issue of the journal Nature.
"This is the first example of pretty much 100 percent automated evolution of
a machine," said Dr. Philip Husbands, a professor of artificial intelligence
at the University of Sussex in England. "It's a rather primitive example, but
it's the first step to something that could be quite significant."
In the future, the technique could be used to design robots that assemble parts in
factories, clean up chemical spills or vacuum a home.
Because computers cost much less than human engineers, "It opens for the first
time a more economical approach to robotics," Dr. Pollack said. "We can
now essentially design for free and build for a few thousand dollars."
The cost of designing a robot today typically runs from hundreds of thousands of
dollars to millions of dollars, Dr. Pollack said.
The computer in the Brandeis system had no idea what a successful design might look
like. Instead, it was merely given a list of possible parts it could work with, the
physical laws of gravity and friction, the goal of moving on a horizontal surface
and a group of 200 randomly constructed, nonworking designs.
Mimicking biological evolution, the computer added, subtracted and changed pieces
in the designs. At the same time, the computer similarly mutated the programming
instructions for controlling the robot's movements. After each step, the computer
ran simulations to test the designs, keeping the ones that moved well and discarding
the failures.
After 300 to 600 generations of evolution and fine-tuning, the computer sent the
design to a prototyping machine, used by manufacturers to build test models of product
designs, to build the robot. Then, in the step that required human help, the researchers
installed the robot's motor and microchip and downloaded the robot's programming
instructions.
Changing the initial configuration of the robot parts produced a different design
and a different approach to locomotion. One pushes itself along. "It's kind
of like an accordion," Dr. Pollack said.
Another one "walks something like a crab," Dr. Lipson said. "It looks
like it's crawling on the floor. It's quite surprising the diversity of solutions
we get."
In earlier work, other researchers used similar evolution-inspired algorithms to
evolve imaginary creatures that existed only in virtual computer worlds or to design
the programming instructions.
The robots' evolution is currently a dead-end, as the designing computer never learns
how well its designs work in the real world. The simple robots also have no ability
to improve their performance. According to the researchers, the robots currently
have the brainpower of bacteria. "We hope to get up to insect level within a
couple of years," Dr. Pollack said. "There's no danger of Commander Data
walking out of our fabricator anytime soon," he said, referring to the android
character in "Star Trek."
In future research, the Brandeis researchers intend to add sensors to the robots
and improve the design programs.
Future robots may also be able to exchange information among each other and learn
from each other's experiences.
As computer chips speed up and fabrication machines become more sophisticated, the
robotic designers will produce robots that are more and more complex. Some have wondered
what will happen when a robot can design and build something as complex as itself.
For example, Dr. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
Calif., has suggested that researchers listening for radio signals from alien civilizations
are more likely to first come across intelligent machines created by aliens.
In an article in the April issue of Wired, Mr. Joy argued that scientists should
perhaps deliberately steer themselves away from research that would create self-replicating,
evolving, autonomous robots.
With forethought, he said, computer scientists should be able to tap into most of
the benefits of the emerging technology while avoiding the dangers.
"This doesn't have enough of the pieces to be by itself dangerous," Mr.
Joy said about the Brandeis work. But, he added, "We're on the road to somewhere
where there's big issues down the road."
Others working in the field are not as worried, even if technological advances make
such devices possible. Dr. Ralph C. Merkle of the nanotechnology firm Zyvex and an
adviser to the Foresight Institute, said that high costs would probably prevent the
design of dangerous robots. Rather, robots would continue to be designed for specific
tasks with little or no ability to evolve and adapt.
"It looks like having a device to work at all is hard," Dr. Merkle said.
"There is no desire to add additional complexity. Those systems do not look
like they would be dangerous."
The Brandeis researchers find the speculation premature. "Really, it's so far
removed from anything dangerous," Dr. Lipson said about their work. "There
are many other things to worry about before this."
- Muscular Robots 4 Mars
Robots with legs powered by artificial muscles are being developed to explore
Mars.
A prototype of the machine - called a Birod (Biomorphic Robot with Distributed power)
- has been built at the University of Arizona.
It moves using wires and springs which contract like muscles when electricity is
passed through them.
The Birods would be able to move across terrain restrictive to wheeled robots, and
carry up to 17,000 times their own weight.
-Four Legs Good
The prototype is a box supported by two legs with stabilising wheels at the back.
The working models, however, would have four legs to enable them to step over obstacles.
Birods are much simpler than robots seen in the past.
The lack of complex machinery makes the Birod light andreliable - ideal for space
missions.
They are also less likely to have their workings damaged by dust, and take up less
space and payload weight on spacecraft.
Cat-Like Machine
Everything doesn't depend on central control, so if one leg stops working everything
doesn't jam
up and freeze. Birods can limp along on the other legs.
The Birod would be able to take "cat naps", able to rest and regain energy
before springing to life when action was called for.
Robots with this kind of capability can hop over an obstacle, turn over a rock, or
crush a mineral sample. These are things that today's robots can't do.
- Computers That Run Without Electricity
Powerful computers that run without electric power could be possible in the future.
Research shows that computer circuits can be built to work without electricity. A
tiny initial charge is all that is
needed. The new "logic gates" exploit the charge of captured electrons
to set off a domino-like cascade of change in stored information.
They have been developed by scientists at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana,
USA.
Most experts believe that standard computer processors can only be miniaturised so
far, before classical physics fails and strange quantum effects take over. This new
technology could be a replacement as it can in theory be shrunk to the molecular
scale.
"It is very nice work to show that you can make a gate using single electrons
which move around. This has the advantages of switching very quickly and using very
low power."
Quantum Dots
The key to the new technology is a cell with four tiny dots of material which can
capture electrons. They are arranged as a square. When two electrons are put into
the cell, they repel one another and end up positioned across one diagonal or the
other.
These two positions correspond to the binary "0" and "1" used
in computing. Today's computers use on and off transistors for zeroes and ones.
By placing another quantum-dot cell next to the first, the repulsive electrical charge
of the electrons allows the information to be passed on without needing an electrical
current.
Possible In Principle
Chains of the cells would be the "wires" in the new computers and could
be arranged to make logic gates. The researchers at Notre Dame built a simple type
of gate to show that the principle of this kind of computing is sound.
However other research shows you probably have to control the size of the quantum
dot which holds your electron to such tiny resolution that it may well turn out to
be rather impractical.
But there is a chance that the same architecture might work with something other
than electrons, such as tiny magnets.
In addition to these, another major obstacle will need to be overcome. At the moment,
the circuits only work at -272.9 degrees Centigrade, just above absolute zero.
- Team Links Brain Cells With a Robot
In another triumph of the scientific imagination, researchers have created a fish
on wheels. Actually, they took part of the brain of a lamprey, an aquatic parasite,
and connected it to a mobile robot, producing what they call an "artificial
animal."
It was the first time, researchers said, that animal brain cells and a robot had
communicated in two directions.
An associate professor at the Northwestern University Medical School, and a team
of researchers from universities in the United States and Italy say that they were
able to control the motion of a two-wheeled robot by connecting it to the brain stem
of the sea lamprey.
Research could lead to things like better prosthetics for humans
The scientists removed the lamprey's brain stem and part of its spinal cord and placed
them in a salt solution.
Electrodes were then attached to the brain stem and connected to the robot. The lamprey's
brain cells received a
signal from light sensors in the robot, and the cells sent signals back to the robot.
Depending on the placement of the electrode on the brain tissue, the robot moved
toward or away from the light, or in a circle.
The aim of the research is to untangle the mysteries of brain signals and to see
how the brain's circuits change and adapt to different stimuli. The method, however,
is unquestionably eerie. It has echoes of a literary kind"
.
Linking a life form and a machine may make some people squirm, but the system may
have practical benefits, like better prosthetic devices for humans. "Our goal
is not to construct a cyborg, our goal is to create a tool that will hopefully help
us understand how the brain works."
"People are sometimes fearful that artificial life research will reduce us all
to machines and explain away our souls," "On the contrary, I believe it
will give us a new understanding and a new respect for ourselves, as the most sublime
machines in the known universe."
- ADVANCED CELL TECHNOLOGY REPORTS PUBLICATION OF RESULTS OF HUMAN SOMATIC CELL
NUCLEAR TRANSFER AND PARTHENOGENESIS
-- Important Milestone in Therapeutic Cloning--
Worcester, MA ñ November 25, 2001 ñ Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT) today announced
publication of its research on human somatic cell nuclear transfer and parthenogenesis.
The report, published in todayís Journal of Regenerative Medicine, provides the first
proof that reprogrammed human cells can supply tissue for transplantation.
Human embryonic stem (ES) cells, and other cells derived from the inner cell mass
of the preimplantation embryo are totipotent, that is, they are capable of forming
any cell or tissue in the human body. While numerous human ES cell lines are now
in existence, they are of little value in human transplantation, as they would be
rejected by a patient as foreign. Human therapeutic cloning has the potential to
solve this problem by providing cells that are an exact genetic match for the patient.
ACT's paper reports preliminary studies on two means of manufacturing such cells.
The first method is parthenogenesis. In this technique an egg cell is activated without
being fertilized by a sperm cell. A patient in need of a particular cell or tissue
type provides the egg cell, the activated egg cell forms a preimplantation embryo,
and the resulting stem cells are differentiated into the type of tissue the patient
needs. The paper reports success in activating egg cells in this manner to form many-celled
embryos resembling blastocysts. The paper does not report data on stem cell isolation.
In a second series of studies, the company performed somatic cell nuclear transfer
(cloning) to form preimplantation embryos. In this instance, human egg cells were
prepared by removing their DNA and adding the DNA from a human somatic (body) cell.
The paper reports that the somatic nuclei showed evidence of reprogramming to an
embryonic state as evidenced by pronuclear development (a type of nucleus observed
only in the fertilized egg) and by early embryonic development to the six-cell stage.
Again, the company did not report on stem cell isolation.
"Our preliminary results add to the weight of evidence that human cell reprogramming
is possible," said Jose B. Cibelli, Ph.D., D.VM., Vice-President of Research
at ACT and the first author of the report. "We understand that these are early
and preliminary results, but given the importance of this emerging field of medicine
we decided to publish our results now."
The company's goal in applying cloning to human medicine is to create stem cells
capable of differentiating into a variety of cells, such as heart cells, neurons,
blood cells or islets for transplant therapies. "These are exciting preliminary
results," said Robert P. Lanza, M.D., Vice President of Medical and Scientific
Development at ACT and an author on the paper. "This work sets the stage for
human therapeutic cloning as a potentially limitless source of immune-compatible
cells for tissue engineering and transplantation medicine. Our intention is not to
create cloned human beings, but rather to make lifesaving therapies for a wide range
of human disease conditions, including diabetes, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and neurodegenerative
disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease."
"Human therapeutic cloning could be used for a host of age-related diseases,"
said Michael D. West, Ph.D. the company's CEO and an author of the paper, "if
the human cells behave as animal cells have in previous studies, we may have found
a means of rebuilding the lifespan of cells at the same time. This would allow us
to supply young cells of any kind, identical to the patient, that could be used to
address the tidal wave of age-related disease that will accompany the aging of the
population."
Researchers from Advanced Cell Technology collaborated with scientists from Duncan
Holly Biomedical of Somerville, Massachusetts on the paper. The other authors are
Kerrianne Cunniff of ACT, and Ann A. Kiessling and Charlotte Richards.
Advanced Cell Technology is a biotechnology company focused on discovering and developing
cloning technology for human medicine and agriculture.
- Cloning Technology
The possibility of human cloning, raised when Scottish scientists at Roslin Institute
created the much-celebrated sheep "Dolly" has aroused worldwide interest
and concern because of its scientific and ethical implications. The feat, cited by
Science magazine as the breakthrough of 1997, also has generated uncertainty
over the meaning of "cloning" --an umbrella term traditionally used by
scientists to describe different processes for duplicating biological material.
What is cloning?
To Human Genome Project researchers, cloning refers to copying genes and other pieces
of chromosomes to generate enough identical material for further study. Two other
types of cloning produce complete, genetically identical animals. Blastomere separation
(sometimes called "twinning" after the naturally occurring process that
creates identical twins) involves splitting a developing embryo soon after fertilization
of the egg by a sperm (sexual reproduction) to give rise to two or more embryos.
The resulting organisms are identical twins (clones) containing DNA from both the
mother and the father. Dolly, on the other hand, is the result of another type of
cloning that produces an animal carrying the DNA of only one parent. Using somatic
cell nuclear transfer, scientists transferred genetic material from the nucleus of
an adult sheep's udder cell to an egg whose nucleus, and thus its genetic material,
had been removed. (All cells that are not egg or sperm cells are somatic cells.)
Why clone?
One goal of this and similar research is to develop efficient ways to alter animals
genetically and reproduce them reliably. Alterations have included adding genes (such
as those for human proteins) to create drug-producing animals as well as inactivating
genes to study the effects and possibly create animal models of human diseases. Cloning
technology also may someday be usedin humans to produce whole organs from single
cells or to raise animals having genetically altered organs suitable for transplanting
to humans.
The technique used to produce Dolly and other cloned animals is an extension of 40
years of research using DNA from nonhuman embryonic and fetal cells. Before this
demonstration, scientists believed that once a cell became specialized a liver, heart,
udder, bone, or any other type of cell the change was permanent and other unneeded
genes in the cell became inactive. Dolly's creators demonstrated that nuclei of an
adult animal's specialized cells can be made to revert to a nonspecialized, embryonic
state, thus restoring the ability to give rise to any kind of cell. Explorations
into how cells revert to an undifferentiated state may provide insights into the
process by which cells become cancerous.
Using the same technique that produced Dolly, researchers have cloned a number of
large and small animals including sheep, goats, mice and cows. But scientists remain
uncertain about whether genetic changes in the cells used to obtain nuclei will lead
to adverse effects on the health of the cloned animals.
- Umanoid intelligence requires humanoid interactions with the world.
Why build a human-like robot?
In thinking about human level intelligence, there are two sets of reasons one might
build a robot with humanoid form. If one takes seriously the arguments of Johnson
and Lakoff, then the form of our bodies is critical to the representations that we
develop and use for both our internal thought (whatever that might mean...) and our
language. If we are to build a robot with human like intelligence then it must have
a human like body in order to be able to develop similar sorts of representations.
However, there is a large cautionary note to accompany this particular line of reasoning.
Since we can only build a very crude approximation to a human body there is a danger
that the essential aspects of the human body will be totally missed. There is thus
a danger of engaging in cargo-cult science, where only the broad outline form is
mimicked, but none of the internal essentials are there at all.
A second reason for building a humanoid form robot stands on firmer ground. An important
aspect of being human is interaction with other humans. For a human-level intelligent
robot to gain experience in interacting with humans it needs a large number of interactions.
If the robot has humanoid form then it will be both easy and natural for humans to
interact with it in a human like way. In fact it has been our observation that with
just a very few human-like cues from a humanoid robot, people naturally fall into
the pattern of interacting with it as if it were a human. Thus we can get a large
source of dynamic interaction examples for the robot to participate in. These examples
can be used with various internal and external evaluation functions to provide experiences
for learning in the robot. Note that this source would not be at all possible if
we simply had a disembodied human intelligence. There would be no reason for people
to interact with it in a human-like way.
Why not just simulate it?
One might argue that a well simulated human face on a monitor would be as engaging
as a robotóperhaps so, but it might be necessary to make the face appear to be part
of a robot viewed by a distant TV camera, and even then the illusion of reality and
engagedness might well disappear if the interacting humans were to know it was a
simulation. These arguments, in both directions are speculative of course, and it
would be interesting, though difficult, to carry out careful experiments to determine
the truth. Rather than being a binary truth, it may well be the case that the level
of natural interaction is a function of the physical reality of the simulation, leading
to another set of difficult engineering problems. Our experience, a terribly introspective
and dangerous thing in general, leads us to believe that a physical robot is more
engaging than a screen image, no matter how sophisticated.
But in any case...
It turns out to be easier to build real robots than to simulate complex intereactions
with the world, including perception and motor control. Leaving those things out
would deprive us of key insights into the nature of human intelligence.
To do a worthwhile simulation you have to understand all the issues relevant to the
simulation beforehand; but as far as human level intelligence is concerned, that
is exactly what we are trying to find outóthe relevant issues.
- Artificial Intelligence Hasn't Peaked (Yet)
Just what constitutes artificial intelligence has always been a matter of some dispute.
And the terms of the argument change with each new advance in computer science.
Seen one way, as the effort to produce machines whose output cannot be distinguished
from that of a human, artificial intelligence, or A.I., is still very far away.
But from another perspective, it is all around us. Thirty years ago, for instance,
speech recognition was an artificial-intelligence problem of the first order. Today
it is commonplace, a fact that is evident to anyone who has called the United Airlines
flight information line or has used speech transcription software.
These things are considered A.I. before you do them, and after you do it, they're
considered engineering.
Other fruits of artificial intelligence research abound as well. Whether you are
struggling to beat your Palm organizer at chess, watching your word processing program
correct your spelling or playing a video game, you are witnessing the ways in which
artificial intelligence has insinuated itself into daily life.
A.I. is becoming more important as it has become less conspicuous, and it's less
conspicuous because it's everywhere, but often under the surface.
Since the time when the first work was being done at M.I.T., in the 1950's and 1960's,
computer scientists have generally agreed that artificial intelligence would arrive
incrementally.
We're engineering A.I. one piece at a time, the machine intelligence currently in
evidence fell along a spectrum.
At the less intelligent end are things like smart washing machines and coffeepots
- appliances that can figure out how dirty a load of clothes is or when to turn off
a coffee warmer. Experts generally agree that such appliances are the product of
rather sophisticated microprocessors and sensors, not evidence of artificial intelligence.
At the other end are machines whose output is genuinely difficult to distinguish
from a human's, like I.B.M.'s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, and Aaron, a robotic
artist that produces paintings that could easily pass for human work.
And somewhere in the middle are speech recognition programs, used in lieu of word
processors; collaborative filtering software, like that used by Amazon.com to make
purchase recommendations; and search engines that respond to questions phrased in
full sentences, not just search terms.
One reason for the proliferation of machine intelligence in the commercial world
is the seeding of the computer industry with artificial-intelligence researchers
who have moved beyond academia and taken jobs at high-tech companies.
Researchers in artificial intelligence are also working on a more general effort
called the Attentional User Interfaces and Systems Project, which includes a project
for continually monitoring streams of data like e-mail, voice mail, Internet news
alerts and instant messages. The system will gauge what the computer user is doing,
assign priorities to the messages and decide whether and when to interrupt.
Other graduates of university-based artificial intelligence programs have started
companies of their own. In 1983 born the Thinking Machines Corporation, a supercomputer
company that was bought by other companies in the 1990's. In 1986 born Ascent Technology
in Cambridge, Mass., to apply the research they had been doing to help airports solve
scheduling and allocation problems like gate assignments for aircraft.
The first commercialization efforts of artificial intelligence, in the 1980's, had
made an obvious mistake.We blundered about what we thought A.I. was going to be good
for, which was replacing people, what we discovered was that's not the commercial
appeal of A.I. It's about making things possible that weren't possible with people
alone.
As examples, a project at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for giving brain surgeons
a kind of X-ray vision by coupling video images with M.R.I. images, then the Mars
Rover, which navigates terrain autonomously.
Another M.I.T. spinoff is the iRobot Corporation, started 10 years ago, the current
director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. The company developed an interactive
doll with Hasbro called My Real Baby a self-navigating home robot that will be equipped
with sonar and a camera and will be controlled via the Web.
Of course, there are those who disagree that pieces of the artificial intelligence
puzzle are falling into place incrementally. It's very much like a country that's
declaring a war that it's losing to be won and then withdrawing.
There is still this tremendously important problem, which is to get computers to
know enough about the world.
Criticism of speech recognition raises the larger question of what constitutes intelligence.
Intelligence is just a whole lot of little things, thousands of them. And what will
happen is we'll learn about each one one at a time, and as we do it, machines will
be more and more like people. It will be a gradual process, and that's been happening.
An artificial intelligence researcher who created the Kurzweil VoiceReport, a speech
recognition program, agreed that "machines still do not have the subtlety, depth,
range and richness of human intelligence because it is still a million times simpler
than the human brain.
That gap is going to go away, and when it does, then machines can combine the subtlety
and pattern-recognition strengths with the other natural advantages they already
have, and that will be a very formidable combination.
Perhaps the flight schedule information line that understands words like "Chicago"
and "today" helps take machines a step closer to duplicating the outward
signs of a person's intelligence. But the artificial intelligence field remains far
short of modeling human consciousness and the inner mind.
A.I. has done a lot of little things that are very powerful, on the other hand, on
the science side, where we try to understand what makes humans work, we're still
a long way from that prize, and we need to work hard on it if we want to understand
our intelligence the same way molecular biologists understand our genes.
The world of artificial intelligence would not be the same without a robotic lawnmower. |
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