The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture--that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world--that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us. You'll have a figure say, "The computers will take over the Earth, but that's a good thing, because people had their chance and now we should give it to the machines."

One of the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly, you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and aerodynamics that apply to anything that flies. That is how the idea of computation figures into the new ways in which scientists are thinking about complicated systems. At first, people who wanted to be scientific about the mind tried to treat it by looking for fundamentals, as in physics.

General International AI conference held in India. Specification, design, implementation and evaluation of intelligent and adaptive graphics that will provide the technical core of the next generation of interfaces. To assemble researchers from the Nordic countries, with some additional international participation. The workshop supports research linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts with computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, organization theory and law.

Harold Cohen was already an acclaimed artist when he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale back in 1966, and his work subsequently appeared in top-ranked galleries and museums around the world. So in 1969, when he began dabbling in computers, his intent was simply for the machines to help him create his drawings and paintings. I thought of designing a program as a kind of assistant, he recalls. I was to think up the heavenly paradigm and it was to do the earthly instantiation. But as Cohen found himself devoting less and less time and energy to his own paintings, his computerized alter ego, dubbed Aaron, began to take on a career of its own. In 1983, Aaron took up a pencil in its robotic hand and tirelessly produced drawing after drawing for an audience of captivated visitors to the Tate Gallery in London. It didn't matter to them that Cohen had to add color to the drawings with his own hand; many an onlooker walked out with one of the new drawings tucked under his arm. By last year, when the Computer Museum in Boston devoted an entire exhibit to Cohen's stepchild, Aaron had mastered paintbrush and palette and, once Cohen set up the apparatus, produced whole paintings, many of them quite pleasant to look at. Cohen's success with his computer program raises the question: Who is the creator of these paintings? The answer is by no means clear. Perhaps the creative intelligence is Cohen's because, after all, Aaron merely does what he programs it to do.

For a growing number of people, animal testing conjures up images of small, defenceless creatures being poisoned by chemicals, or having caustic substances sprayed in their eyes. But for others, testing on animals is a necessary step in finding cures for diseases that cause extensive human suffering. It's one thing to argue that animals should not suffer for the sake of an improved hair dye, but more difficult to object to animal testing in the quest for, say, a cure for cancer. Fortunately, there is some room for compromise. It is possible to find viable alternatives to tests on live animals and, thanks to technology, at least some of them can saved without abandoning important research.

What makes CRONOS different from other robots is that the positions and lines of pull of the muscles are also similar to those of the corresponding real muscles, and the tendons are positioned in biomimetically consistent ways. For this initial investigation, not all muscles were represented some were replaced by tendons alone, appropriately tensioned. Even before powering CRONOS up, it is clear that there is a fundamental difference between this and the conventional approach. You take his hand and shake it: it moves easily, and so does his whole skeleton. This multi-degree-of-freedom structure, supported by the tensions between dozens of elastic elements, responds as a whole, transmitting force and movement well beyond the point of contact.

There Is No "I" in "Robot": Robots and Utilitarianism (Abstract)

James A. Hendler, Edward A. Feigenbaum: Knowledge Is Power: The Semantic Web Vision.

The dawn of the 21st century has been called the decade of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely operated by pilots in the United States, rain Hellfire missiles on suspected insurgents in South Asia and the Middle East. Now a small group of scholars is grappling with what some believe could be the next generation of weaponry: lethal autonomous robots. At the center of the debate is Ronald C. Arkin, a Georgia Tech professor who has hypothesized lethal weapons systems that are ethically superior to human soldiers on the battlefield. A professor of robotics and ethics, he has devised algorithms for an "ethical governor" that he says could one day guide an aerial drone or ground robot to either shoot or hold its fire in accordance with internationally agreed-upon rules of war. But some scholars have dismissed Mr. Arkin's ethical governor as "vaporware," arguing that current technology is nowhere near the level of complexity that would be needed for a military robotic system to make life-and-death ethical judgments.

When the world ends, it may not be by fire or ice or an evil robot overlord. Our demise may come at the hands of a superintelligence that just wants more paper clips. So says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded and directs the Future of Humanity Institute, in the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He created the "paper-clip maximizer" thought experiment to expose flaws in how we conceive of superintelligence. We anthropomorphize such machines as particularly clever math nerds, says Bostrom, whose book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies was released in Britain in July and arrived stateside this month.