1st AI-Powered RoboScientist Created

The rise of the robots hasn't resulted in a murderous rampage quite yet, but it has reaped an enormous toll on low-level jobs. Assembly lines, farms, factories - the machines have taken over millions of man-hours, but now the scientists have surpassed those systems and begun to make themselves obsolete. Because Adam is online - and he's a scientist.

UK researchers hooked up an experiment-designing program to all the automated equipment needed to do its own lab work. This isn't arrays of repetitive tasks, although Adam can do that no problem, this is real science.

The Adam system was basically told "go look at yeast" and successfully theorized, experimented, analyzed and refined its results from start to finish. Other automated assistants have the humans coming back asking "Did you do what I told you?" Adam is asked "What did you do?"

The system is completely self-starting, only needing human fleshbags to bring supplies - and not to sound alarmist, but some day it's going to work out that other machines are far better at that.

There's even an electronic Eve, an upgraded system built by the same researchers using their experience with Adam, their improved skills, and apparently no sense of impending doom or biblical metaphor whatsoever.

Summary: An artificially intelligent Adam and Eve already exist, and are in charge of a cyber-genetics laboratory. Somebody needs to make a movie about this immediately - if they want to make money before the real deal kills us all.

Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/1st-ai-powered-robot-s...

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Permalink Reply by Adam Unger on July 2, 2009 at 1:20pm: Great find Marino, interesting thoughts. As the singularity starts to hit, it seems inevitable that the "low level" jobs will be replaced by our increasingly smart machines. The limiting factors can only be the human will to... well, remain human. As our society increases its technological capacity, we will enhance our own faculties to keep pace. Computers may outthink us, but we should be able to use those same upgrades to enhance our own minds. In addition, we will be able to sync our mechanical enhancements to our bodies just as fast as "individual" machines will advance. I am quite confident that we won't let our humanity become obsolete.

In fact, we can witness our merging with technology now. Mental faculties such as remembering phone numbers have long since been replaced by cellular phones. Smart phone technology has allowed us to outsource entire functions of our brains to our proprietary devices. This allows us to focus our cognitive efforts elsewhere, spurring innovation. As technology gets smaller, smarter, and faster, this merge will occur much more seamlessly.

Finally, similarly to how Adam and Even derived the behavior and other properties of yeast, a computer at MIT was able to derive all of Newton's laws of physics by simply observing a pendulum in motion. Here's the source: Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics; ▶ Reply to This