Valleys and Troughs

This is how the World Ends.

From ctrl+alt+del comes artist Tim Buckley's vision of the apocalypse: a pirate robot fighting a ninja zombie riding a t-rex. Yep. That pretty much covers everything.

VALLEY

MIT to rework robot apocalypse from the ground up.

We can't stress enough how frustrated we are that the future is taking so long to get here. So we tend to applaud the efforts of pretty much anyone working to realize the visions we were promised in our youth, which have largely existed only fictionally to date. And yet we are not without scruple; we understand that certain pursuits are almost destined to bring about our own destruction. Turns out MIT, which heads the Mind Machine Project, has no such reservations:

After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to begin with -- plan to get things right.

They plan to get things right. Awesome. Sounds bulletproof to us. We can't manufacture a printer that consistently just works and these clowns are giving themselves five years to build a robot that can read children's books. What could possibly go wrong? At least President Obama, for one, is prepared to do what is necessary. Man, we love that guy.

TROUGH

via popsci

Morning Marginalia: Robots that smile at you.

The above is a "receptionist robot" on display at Japan's International Robot Exhibition 2009. It requires human direction to operate, but is designed to accurately portray emotions via facial expressions. For Christ's sake. Japan will ruin us all.

TROUGH

via popsci