4 ms·

Rise of the Machines (Anybots)

18 points by auferstehung 19y ago

Novash 19y ago
"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 19y ago
  http://ycombinator.com/people.html http://ycombinator.com/people.html
  - Novash 19y ago
    Then that's an yes. Damn, I feel dumb (more than the norm).
ivankirigin 19y ago
I love the airbags for ears. Obligatory YC orange.
henning 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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.

18 points by auferstehung 19y ago

"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 19y ago
http://ycombinator.com/people.html http://ycombinator.com/people.html
- Novash 19y ago
  Then that's an yes. Damn, I feel dumb (more than the norm).

ivankirigin 19y ago

I love the airbags for ears. Obligatory YC orange.

henning 19y ago

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 19y ago
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.