Future Schlock ;)

Muffit · June 2nd, 2004, 07:52 PM

Hi all! And welcome to this week's edition of...

*** FUTURE SCHLOCK ***

This new thread will deal with ideas that have been rolling aorund in my head for some time - things I will never do anything with myself, but maybe (and this is stretching it I know!), someone will wander by and take a gander, the wheels will spin, and somebody else (someone with talent, LOL!), - perhaps one of you! - will find an implementation for these things(?) That said, be warned! This stuff is either gonna be really intriguing or awfully silly!!!

THE WEB MIND

My daughter and I were just watching a special about the future of robotics, and all the problems associated with programming them, and getting them to have more intelligence than a "lobotomized, retarded cockroach" (LOL!) which is what the lead scientist on tonight's show called current robot AI. Not being a stranger to programming AI myself, I got to thinking, why are we still thinking with a city-state intelligence? Oughtn't we be considering the possibilities of collective empiricism and erudition? Why limit ourselves to the puny storage capabilities of a single robot, when we have such wondrous wireless technology and things like the world wide web?

My thought is this - begin a new program, a consortium if you will, in which we define the standards for acquired robotic AI, and then link all AI devices to each other during development and testing - the result will be a huge shared mind, the Web Mind! No one corporation or entity need spend countless millions (and countless expendable robots), each acquiring years of learning like a child, only to lose all that innocent and useful knowledge the moment the batteries die or a replacement comes on line.

Rather than being told (thru the gazillions of lines of code that would be needed for that effort) how to think and what to think (and consider this -we NEVER tell robots WHY to think the way we tell them), let the robots develop naturally alongside our children. But going way beyond that, let ALL robots, everywhere, share their collective learning to bring about a huge brain of millions of cells - separated by distance yes, but not by connection. Like a VLA for robots I suppose.

No one nation or corporation should have to saddle itself with such expenses; and more importantly, no one will have to "reinvent the wheel" as my favorite boss and friend used to say. Think of it like an animatronic DLL...

HOLO-INSTRUMENTOLOGY

Okay, this pseudonym needs some work, but bear with me! Many, many years ago, before I saw it on Trek or heard mumblings of others working on keyboards like this, I envisioned a unique use for combining holography with motion detection. Picture this... your teenage great-great-grandson lives in a world so overcrowded, with housing so unreachable people live in tiny 6x6 rooms. But he's neither claustrophobic nor hurting for storage space - because he has the newest thing in musical instruments since the invention of the chopstick, pot and pan. He has a holographic projector hooked to a sophisticated home computer link in his room. From a menu he can select virtually any instrument ever created, and you know me, I don't believe in limitations, he can also fabricate anything his weird imagination can come up with as well, right at his com-port.

The projector yields an ultra cool virtual Gibson Stratocaster (by now only available to see through bullet proof glass at the Smithsonian), right in his hands. The motion sensors in the com-port sense his every movement and let him "play" it - with appropriate handicaps available allowing neophytes to sound like Hendrix (and that tech actually partly exists today). He can play any instrument, of any era, without ever having to purchase one or clean a mouthpiece or restring a guitar. No rosin, no band tightening, just pure enjoyment.

I foresee this first used by the latest (and richest) rock bands in concerts; but eventually like vocoders they will end up in every home in the U.S. and abroad.

Okay, I'm done for now! Sentient or silly, you decide! Got lots more but I think that's enough drivel for today.

Toodles!
Muffit

BST · June 2nd, 2004, 08:13 PM

Gadzooks, Muffit. With the "Web Mind", I think you just described the Borg!!

amberstar · June 2nd, 2004, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BST

Gadzooks, Muffit. With the "Web Mind", I think you just described the Borg!!

I think your'e right BST

Muffit · June 2nd, 2004, 08:26 PM

LOL BST and Amber! Yep, actually that "shared mind" idea is not really all that unique or new. I remember reading scifi books in the 60's with little suggestions of it.

I just thought, why should everybody be doing the exact same thing over and over? And why be limited to a few gigs inside of one robot when it could virtually hold hundreds of terabytes?

It's not all that different than a crawler or search engine, it would just need to be ordered far better than that, so that each query were as brisk as possible. This shared mind would store all knowledge by category and subclass within each unit, by a set of standards developed and maintained by the consortium.

I have long wanted to see this done with computers themselves - Googling is so awfully tedious and time consuming, and how often does it actually return what you're looking for? If we all would just take a few extra minutes classifying our info by a set of simple to follow (preferably automatic) standards, we could make Googling as fast as forming a simple association in our own brain.

Yikes, they also suggested implants for us to connect us to mail and web... well, I know it will happen, but I'd prefer my android did that and my thoughts were my own...

Thanks for the replies!!!

bsg1fan1975 · June 3rd, 2004, 03:30 AM

this AI stuff would really work in the military. We could send them out to be in the line of fire instead of our loved ones.

Muffit · June 3rd, 2004, 11:03 AM

Hi Bsg! So true. But sadly, such things would not mean our foes would not lose their loved ones.

It would be nice if all future wars were decided by robots killing each other not people (kinda like 2 kings fighting it out).

P.S. The shared mind thing dates really far back, but you all might remember a Star Trek ep in 1967 which was all about that:

"Operation Annihilate"

The little "bat" creatures turn out to be individual brain cells - which is why they are so hard to get rid of.

julix · June 3rd, 2004, 01:53 PM

Some of it sounds like stromtroopers and battle droids from Star Wars. I am not as well versed in some of this.....

Julix

shiningstar · June 4th, 2004, 05:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BST

Gadzooks, Muffit. With the "Web Mind", I think you just described the Borg!!

Ditto