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artificial intelligence

Science Corner: Should AI Stand for Alien Intelligence?

Tracking a ball to catch it is a form of intelligence, albeit not abstract like language. (Image by Karen Dayton from Pixabay)

Over the holiday weekend, I chatted with my sister-in-law about a study her and her dog participate in on providing communication tools to canines. Maybe you saw this segment on CBS Sunday Morning or some other reporting on this work. The dogs are given buttons, each of which plays a recording of a spoken word. We know dogs have some capacity to understand spoken language, since they can be trained to respond to commands. The word buttons close the loop, allowing the dogs to use words as well. While the sophistication of the speech may be disappointing for anyone expecting the translator collars from Up, this setup actually requires more intelligence on the part of the dogs since they have to do the translating themselves–possibly with some deciphering by the humans as well. The idea that the dog can press a button that says “dinner” when he’s hungry or “toy” when he wants to play seems pretty straightforward. Combining “downstairs” and “broccoli” to request a vegetable-flavored treat kept downstairs instead of “upstairs broccoli” (florets kept upstairs) is more intriguing.
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Science Corner: Sing a New Song

ukelele photo
My daughter has taken this time to teach herself to play the ukelele. (Photo by Josh Engroff )

Music has been helping us stay together even as we stay apart, from window serenades to video conference concerts. It is hard to imagine we will ever have a shortage of music making, not to mention the decades of existing music recordings. So we don’t need to train computers to make new music for us, but of course that hasn’t stopped us. We don’t do it so that they can replace us, we do it so we can better understand the music we make and what makes it appealing. And whether it is the intention or not, I think teaching our machines to make a joyful noise is just as worthy as making those sounds ourselves.
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Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking I Am Mother with Sam Blair

I Am Mother still of human child resting her head on her robot mother's shoulder
It’s nice to have someone to share the post-apocalypse with. Does Mother count? (Image © Netflix)

Welcome to the first Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! I’ll be having a conversation here on the blog on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch alonggh and join the conversation. This week’s film is I Am Mother, a Netflix film from this year about a robot raising a human in a post-apocalyptic future (FYI: there will be spoilers). I’m joined by Sam Blair. Sam (@revsblair on Twitter) is a hospice chaplain in the Pittsburgh area and co-host of the Church of the Geek podcast.
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Science Corner: Predicting Periodically

cake decorated with the periodic table
I enjoy birthday cake periodically. (Photo by jpotisch )

The periodic table turned 150 earlier this year, or at least March 1 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s version. Chemists had organized the elements in a tabular fashion previously, and some features (like interactivity!) of contemporary representations would be added later. Still, Mendeleev’s published version was a significant milestone, since he recognized regularities within properties of the elements which suggested some elements with specific features were undiscovered. Even better for his legacy, his predictions held true. Now, a century and a half later, a computer program has relearned what Mendeleev and his contemporaries knew and made some predictions of its own.
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Science Book Review: The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

Cover art for "The Big Nine" featuring a circuit diagram and the names of the nine AI companies
Note the lack of killer robots, a threat Webb considers overblown by sci-fi. (Cover art by Public Affairs Books)

Amy Webb, author of The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, describes herself as a futurist, a job I wasn’t entirely sure actually existed outside of science fiction. Sure, plenty of people reason about the future and some do so in rigorous and quantitative fashion, but often in very narrow and specialized areas–predicting stock markets or elections or planning for consumer trends. Futurism strikes me as needing more of a generalist, and Webb seems to fit the bill. She takes the kind of broad view necessary to convey just how all-pervasive AI has already become and its potential for even greater influence. At the same time, she provides adequate detail and specificity in multiple domains so that all readers have something concrete they can relate to. Actually, the book reads like a blend of science fact and fiction as Webb tells us where we’ve been and imagines where we might go. So maybe futurist is something of a science fiction job after all.
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