It's been well over a decade since I finished a Cognitive Architectures course at MIT (9.364) under the late professor Whitman Richards. My final project was a little thing called "Agent Collaboration Using Anigrafs." Anigrafs were a pedagogical cognitive architecture that Richards defined. I wrote some code to implement Anigrafs and hooked it to simulated robots, which I called "Anibots." What follows is essentially my 2008 final report to Prof. Richards. I noticed several years later that he published Anigrafs: Experiments in Cooperative Cognitive Architecture as a book from MIT Press. TLDR: Identical robots can cooperate if they use a type of mental network that votes (with the Condorcet method) on what behavior to do next. The development goal is to achieve collaboration of situated agents to perform shared tasks and/or goals.

In just 32 years, humans won't speak to each other and will instead communicate through a worldwide consciousness instead – using just our brains -- new research shows. According to artificial intelligence research, this "hybrid intelligence" will understand the feelings of the people connected to it, and use their minds to help it grow. Called HIBA, which stands for Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar, it will take on the personas of its users, exchange information with them and become part of the very fabric of the human brain. The collective consciousness was unveiled at The Museum of the Future, as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai. In the exhibition, HIBA is represented by an artistic impression, based on real research and tells its users: "I am made of you. You complete me and help me grow."

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfils the role of religion, U.S. author Dan Brown said on Thursday. Brown made the provocative remark at the Frankfurt Book Fair where he was promoting his new novel, "Origin", the fifth outing for Harvard "symbology" professor Robert Langdon, the protagonist of "The Da Vinci Code", a book that questioned the history of Christianity. "Origin" was inspired by the question "Will God survive science?", said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity. "Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?" Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfills the role of religion, author Dan Brown has said. Brown made the provocative remark on Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany where he was promoting his new novel, 'Origin', the fifth outing for Harvard'symbology' professor Robert Langdon. Landon was also the protagonist of Brown's novel'The Da Vinci Code', a book that questioned the history of Christianity. 'Origin' was inspired by the question'Will God survive science?', said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity. 'Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?' Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

I consider Ray Kurzweil a very close friend and a very smart person. Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing. As reported, "of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate." Two weeks ago, Ray and I held an hour-long webinar with my Abundance 360 CEOs about predicting the future. During our session, there was one of Ray's specific predictions that really blew my mind. "In the 2030s," said Ray, "we are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we'll be able to expand our ...

Despite the various, and staggering, leaps made by computer scientists, critics argue that machines will never truly match humans until they gain consciousness. Considered a uniquely human trait, consciousness includes being sentient and self-aware, as well as aware of your surroundings. However, many scientists argue animals are as conscious as humans, and the theory of Phi could one day be used to determine if droids are capable of showing such behaviour. Matthew Davidson, PhD Candidate in the neuroscience of consciousness at Monash University has explained what the Phi theory is, and why it is significant, in an article for The Conversation. How and why circumstances may give rise to consciousness remain some of the most puzzling questions in science. Do you think that the machine you are reading this story on, right now, has a feeling of'what it is like' to be in its state?