

Rise of the Machines (Anybots) - auferstehung
http://www.inventorsdigest.com/2_08/robot.aspx

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henning
It's easy to dismiss this as so far off that it's not worth thinking about,
but there are plenty of brilliant people with PhDs who think robots with
sufficient capabilities to resemble strong AI in domain-specific ways (human-
competitive in limited specific tasks) will come in the next few decades.

It would be impossible to overstate the magnitude of the consequences of such
developments.

A few years ago Prof. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, director of research at the Fair
Isaac Corp (they created the FICO credit score) and the confabulation lab at
the University of California San Diego, gave a talk to my neural networks
class about his very firm belief that real strong AI would come in < 30 years.
He didn't convince me that it would happen, but he correctly pointed out that
were it to come it would make economics obsolete and could lead to some kind
of grand utopia if we don't fuck it up.

~~~
ivankirigin
There will be scarcity of time for a long time. Reputation and other social
currency will always be scarce. Economics won't be obsolete anytime soon.

Robots might build a dyson's sphere on every star, but economics will still
matter.

Also, Anybots is all about tele-operated robots. They're smart, and punting on
the hard AI problem. It becomes a control problem of having someone in a 3rd
world country act like my butler.

The point is that they can succeed without significant developments in robotic
perception, planning, and understanding.

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ivankirigin
I love the airbags for ears. Obligatory YC orange.

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Novash
"That said, the 38-year-old doctorate and millionaire (he made a bundle
selling his Internet storefront system Viaweb to Yahoo! in 1998) sounds like
those guys who pine for flying cars." So, the Trevor Blackwell guy is PG's
pal?

~~~
davidw
<http://ycombinator.com/people.html>

~~~
Novash
Then that's an yes. Damn, I feel dumb (more than the norm).

