Robotics - Another Cog in the Singularity Wheel

This article is significant not for the fluff on the top amounting to: "Who wouldn't want a robot around the house to perform menial tasks?" Rather, it's significant because of the approach to building a robot that they are taking.

Developing intelligent behaviour
The key issue governing these tasks is intelligence and developing intelligent behaviour on a number of fronts, the corner stone and main work of COGNIRON.

organized around seven key research themes, the project studies multimodal dialogues, detection and understanding of human activity, social behaviour and embodied interaction, skill and task learning, spatial cognition and multimodal situation awareness, as well as intentionality and initiative. Finally, the seventh research theme, systems levels integration and evaluation, focuses on integrating all the other themes into a cohesive, cogitating whole.

Dr Chatila summarizes the purpose of the seven themes. "Research breaks down into four capacities required by a cognitive robot companion: perception and cognition of environment; learning by observation; decision making; communication and interaction with humans."

Basically, they're taking robot brains and teaching them the same basic way we would teach a child, or an animal will treat it's offspring. That's a significant advance in processing technology and an interesting turn of events...Once our machines start learning by themselves, where will the knowledge take them?

Kurzweil's Singularity theory needs for robotics and especially AI research to progress in this manner and for computers and machines to start learning on their own for his predictions / theories to come to fruition. A couple of other things that could come about with the progression of this technology: The Terminator was spawned by a very similar set of circumstances. Another sinister AI is our old friend Hal from 2001. Finally, you can't talk about AI villains without giving The Borg a mention...

Here's to Humanity...hopefully we don't accidentally create our own exterminator!