Post your Physics Essays, Papers, Journals, etc...here.

FSU_E

After reading Yellow's posts on The Big Bang, (which are FANTASTIC and will serve as a great future source of info for me), I was thinking that maybe everyone who has written an essay or a paper or maybe has something published in some scientific journal somewhere could post there essays here and we could all use everyones information collectively as a "E-Physics Journal of sorts". Over time the info will build up and we can use this as a source or reference.

I will start things off by posting an essay I wrote on The Doppler Effect and the Expanding Universe. This is an essay I wrote for an astronomy course I took about a year ago. I had to add the 2nd to last paragraph to get the word count up to meet the requirment for the course.

1

The Doppler effect has many applications to science, especially astronomy. We experience the Doppler effect everyday in some way or another, most times without even noticing it. I am going to discuss who discovered the Doppler effect, what the Doppler effect is, how we experience the Doppler Effect in everyday life, how the Doppler effect helps us to lead to the conclusion that the universe is expanding from the Big Bang, and finally I will briefly discuss the time epoch directly after the Big Bang.

Christian Doppler was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1803. He studied mathematics and astronomy in Czechoslovakia and Austria. In 1829 Christian Doppler began teaching mathematics and mechanics at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute, in Vienna. He published four mathematics papers during his time teaching at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. He showed changes in color due to the motion of double stars in a paper titled "On the Colored Light of Double Stars and Certain Other Stars of the Heavens" in 1842. Christian Doppler first measured the Doppler effect in terms of the visible spectrum, ROYGBIV. Now the Doppler effect is applied to all waves on the electromagnetic spectrum, especially light. From the viewpoint of astronomy, the Doppler effect is one of the most important aspects of waves. The Doppler effect gives us a way to measure the speed and distance of the source of waves relative to us.

We all have experienced the Doppler effect many times, most of the time without even knowing that we are experiencing the Doppler effect. For example, if you are sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train to pass and the train begins to blow its whistle as it approaches you, the receiver, you hear the pitch of the whistle get louder. After the train has passed you, the receiver, you hear the whistle pitch decrease. The wavelength from the whistle decreases and the frequency from the whistle increases as the motion of the sender, the train, is approaching you.

2

The wavelength from the whistle increases and the frequency from the whistle decreases as the motion of the sender, the train, moves away from you. So, the Doppler effect is a change in pitch, up or down, and the increase or decrease in wavelength and frequency due to the motion of the sender or the receiver.

The Doppler effect can be applied to all waves, not only to sound waves. The Doppler effect affects light waves in the same way it affect sound waves. Only there is no sound wave being affected, it is the wavelength and the frequency of the light wave that is being affected. If the source, the object that is emitting the light, is approaching the observer, the object that is viewing the light, or if the observer is approaching the source, the light wave will decrease in wavelength and the light wave will increase in frequency. This is called a blueshift, meaning the wave has shifted towards the blue end of the visible spectrum. If the source, the object that is emitting the light, is moving away from the observer, the object that is viewing the light, or if the observer is moving away from the source, the light wave will increase in wavelength and the light wave will decrease in frequency. This is called a redshift, meaning the wave has shifted towards the red end of the visible spectrum.

We can measure the speed at which stars, galaxies, and all other celestial objects are moving toward us or away from us as well as the distance they are from us with the Doppler effect. When we measure distance with the Doppler effect we are also measuring time. We can also use the Doppler effect to tell if an object is rotating. If we measure from one end of an object to the other end of the object and get a redshift at one end of the object and we get a blueshift at the other end of the object, we can say that the object is rotating. We can also tell the

3

direction it’s rotating and we can measure its rotating speed, the velocity. The end that has redshifted is the end that is turning downward from our perspective. It is turning downward because that is the end that is moving away from our perspective. The end that has blueshifted is the end that is turning upward from our perspective. It is moving upward because it is the end that is moving toward us from our perspective. Think of a ball, the far end, from your perspective, rolls away from you as the ball rolls, it has redshifted. The close end, from your perspective, rolls towards you as the ball rolls, it has blueshifted.

Objects have a specific spectra pattern when we look at them with a spectrometer. A spectrometer is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. When we look at the spectra of Hydrogen we see a specific pattern, two lines near the Violet (blue) end of the spectrum and one line near the red end of the spectrum. When we look at the sun we see the same pattern, two lines near the blue end of the spectrum and one line near the red end of the spectrum. When we look at nearby galaxies we see the same pattern as Hydrogen and the Sun, two lines near the blue end of the spectrum and one line near the red end spectrum. However, when we look at distant galaxies, those outside of our local group, we see a change in the spectra patterns. The two lines near the blue end of the spectrum have Doppler shifted to the red end of the spectrum and the one line that was near the red end of the spectrum has Doppler shifted even more toward the red end of the spectrum. The spectrum has redshifted. When we look at distant stars, galaxies, or any other celestial object in any direction we see the same redshift in the spectrum. Knowing that a redshift means the wavelength is increasing and the frequency is decreasing, or moving away from us, we can make the conclusion that the universe is in fact expanding. An obvious question to ask is, why are the nearby galaxies and stars not redshifting at all and the distant galaxies and stars are? Einstein’s

4

General Theory of relativity gives us the answer. I do not completely understand Einstein’s General Theory of relativity, however, I do know that it says that the objects in the universe are not moving towards each other or away from each other, but that the space in between the objects stretch’s and the objects move as a result. This shift is called a cosmological redshift. So, the galaxies and stars that are relatively close to us, those in our local group, occupy the same space as we do and that’s why they are not redshifting. They are being stretched equally to us. The difference between the Doppler effect and the Cosmological effect, from my understanding, is the Doppler effect only relies on the velocity of the sender or receiver the Cosmological effect relies on the expansion of the space in the universe.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble found that all galaxies, stars, and celestial objects are moving away from us, in all directions, at a recessional velocity that is proportional to the galaxies, stars, or celestial objects distance from us. However, this does not imply that we are at the center of the universe. Quite the opposite! All galaxies, stars, and celestial objects are moving away from each other proportionally to their distance from each other. The velocity of the recession is proportional to the distance of the galaxy, star, or celestial object. I think of it in terms of raisin bread baking in an oven, as the bread bakes it expands, stretches but the raisins within the bread do not expand they stretch within the bread. All of the raisins are stretching away from each other proportionally to their distance from each other, not stretching from one central raisin in particular.

If all galaxies, stars, and celestial objects are moving away from each other proportionally to their distances from each other, then, that could mean that the space in between the galaxies, stars, and celestial objects was all once from the same central place; a very small,

5

hot and dense central place where all the material was blown out in all directions by some sort of big bang event. This of course alludes to the Big Bang theory, the most recognizable theory in physics; the idea that our universe started out much hotter and denser than it is now and has been expanding ever since. One of the forms of evidence that the Big Bang really happened is the Cosmic Background radiation left over from the Big Bang itself, a message from the Big Bang. We can use the Doppler effect and the Cosmological effect to measure the speed and distance of the source of the Cosmic Background radiation. When we measure the distance we are also measuring the time, look back time, it took for the light to reach us and we get an answer that is somewhere between 13 and 15 billion years. This of course means that the universe must be between 13 and 15 billion years old.

The Planck Epoch, or Planck time (which was right after the big bang, 1 x 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang) of the big bang is where the laws of physics as we know it breaks down. During this epoch temperature, matter and antimatter existed in almost equal amounts. Quantum Physics is the area that studies things like this. A theory of Quantum Gravity is the next “Holy Grail” for physics. A theory of Quantum Gravity would combine the four forces in the universe: Strong and Weak interactions, gravitational forces, and Electromagnetic forces.

In conclusion, The Doppler effect is one of the most important aspects of waves in terms of Astronomy. I have discussed who discovered the Doppler effect, what the Doppler effect is, how we experience the Doppler effect in everyday life, how the Doppler effect helps us to lead to the conclusion that the universe is expanding from the Big Bang, and I have briefly discussed the time directly after the Big Bang. Which, in a broader sense, is helping us to determine larger scale issues like how old is the Universe that we live in.

Moloth · Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:42 pm Post subject:

um.. i wrote a really shitty paper on AI for one of my ITECH classes...

but, if you want it, here ya go:
(or a link to the .doc: http://www.moloth.com/papers/Artificial%20Intelligence.doc )

The Thinking Machine:
The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence

Moloth
4/20/2004

ITEC 2215,
Introduction to Information Technology

Table of Contents
Subject/Topic Page
Introduction
A.I.: The Past 1
The Dream 1
The Birth of Computing 3
Steps in the Right Direction 4

A.I.: The Present 6
Expert Systems 6
The Turing Test 7
Hardware VS Software 8

A.I.: The Future 9
The Near Future 9
The Companion We Always Wanted 10
In the Box or Out of the Box 11
The Sentient Machine 12
Far Out 13
Introduction

With this research paper, I hope to explain the pre-history of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in terms of the dreams of science-fiction writers, the present applications of A.I. in terms of current business and technological applications, and the future of A.I. in terms of both contemporary fiction writers and computer theorists. In addition to covering a rough timeline of A.I.’s progress over the last two-hundred years, I intend to voice my own theories about the ethics and semantics related to the final and ultimate manifestation of A.I.: Artificial Sentience.

A.I.: The Past
The Dream.
This paper shall begin with the same thing that has sparked the creation of every single one of humanity’s greatest inventions, from the wheel to the microprocessor: a dream. Mankind has spent millennia searching for the perfect companion to both serve and help us; that is the very reason we domesticated the dog. It is loyal, obedient, and useful. Unfortunately, the Family Canis is, in general, a very lopsided conversationalist.

Man has always yearned to find the perfect companion to accompany us in our journey through life. The dream of artificial intelligence may have begun in the year 1817, when Mary Shelley had her character, Victor Frankenstein, create life from death (www.kimwoodbridge.com). The creature that was brought to life was close to being the perfect companion to Mankind, but it was too violent and raised too many uncomfortable questions. Did this ‘artificial’ life have a soul? Was it a monster? Clearly, the world was not yet prepared for an artificially-created thinking thing.

Then, over one hundred years later, in 1941, Isaac Asimov wrote the story 'Reason,' in which a robot becomes curious about its own existence (www.thetech.org). Thus, the robot became the newest and most promising candidate for being the perfect tool and companion. In Asimov’s stories, the robots were not like the robots of today. Modern robots are nothing more than automated machines in factories, performing repetitive tasks that require only a static program to guide them. They resemble more the tools they were created to replace than the men and women that wielded said tools. Asimov’s robots are more properly defined as androids, or “mobile robots, usually with a human form” (www.m-w.com). It was Asimov who coined the term “robotics.” From Counting the Eons:
“But you say you invented the term robotics. Is that right?
”Yes. John Campbell, as best as I can remember, did not use the word in connection with the Three Laws. I did, however, in "Runaround," and I believe that was its first appearance in print.
I did not know at the time that it was an invented term. The science of physics routinely uses the -ics suffix for various branches, as in mechanics, dynamics, electrostatics, hydraulics, and so on. I took it for granted that the study of robots was robotics.””

As one can see, Asimov had an enormous impact on the way we think of robots, androids, and any machine that we would consider to be intelligent. Not only did Asimov popularize the notion of humanoid, intelligent machines, he also delved into the possible ethical and even legal ramifications of such constructs. In the aforementioned story ‘Runaround,’ Asimov unveiled the Three Laws of Robotics, which were to protect both humans and the robots themselves. In his stories, Asimov had the Laws hard-coded into the robot’s positronic brains. They were at the very root of the robots’ intelligence and were incontestable. The Three Laws are (www.asimovonline.com):
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Handbook of Robotics
56th Edition, 2058 A.D.
The positronic brain was also a creation of Asimov’s fertile imagination. Even as a young man, he supposed that an intelligent machine would have to have a mind that was constructed in much same way as our own. His ‘answer’ for this was the positronic brain. Asimov’s (admittedly sci-fi) theory was that positrons would flow through the young robot’s brain along pre-made pathways (including ones that contained the Three Laws), much like the neurons sparking in a newborn’s mind. The major necessities of the mind were already there, the “Operating System,” as it were, just as a baby’s mind comes already knowing how to breathe and control other autonomic functions. As the robot learned and experienced, the most often used pathways would widen and solidify, allowing more positrons to flow through it, much in the same way that the human brain’s neural pathways strengthen and grow as they are utilized. In the end, the positronic brain was merely a man-made copy of what nature and 3.4 billion years of evolution had granted us.

The Birth of Computing.
In the same decade that Isaac Asimov was writing his stories about thinking, self-aware robots, the field of computing was just beginning to come into existence. The project to create ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the world's first electronic digital computer, was begun in 1939 (ftp.arl.mil).

The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School for Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944. This was followed in rapid succession by the initiating unit and function tables in September 1945 and the divider and square-root unit in October 1945. Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945. On February 15, 1946, the ENIAC was dedicated by the University of Pennsylvania. Almost immediately, it began its very first application, which was to solve atomic energy problems for the Manhattan Project (ftp.arl.mil).

By today's standards for computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. It had thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, and it weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power (ftp.arl.mil).

Despite this primitive and inefficient design, ENIAC was the prototype from which all other modern computers have evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high-speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become the standard in circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and it even used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device. With those components in that configuration, ENIAC single-handedly ushered in an entirely new era of scientific accomplishment (ftp.arl.mil).

Steps in the Right Direction.
Seeing the advancement that computers had made in the last decade, Alan Turing supposed that machines may actually, one day, rival humans in thought and even awareness. In 1950 he published an article in the Journal Mind that established his criteria for the Turing Test of machine intelligence.

Marvin Minsky, together with Dean Edmond, built SNARC in 1951 to simulate the learning of mouse in walking through a maze. Composed of vacuum tubes, SNARC was the first neural network ever built. In late 1955, Newell and Simon developed The Logic Theorist, considered by many to be the first AI program. The program, representing each problem as a tree model, would attempt to solve it by selecting the branch that would most likely result in the correct conclusion. The impact that the logic theorist made on both the public and the field of AI has made it a crucial stepping stone in developing the AI field (library.thinkquest.org). During the 1950's, Minsky and some other of the earliest AI scientists continued building the groundwork for AI. The process reached its peak at the Dartmouth Conference of 1956, in which about a dozen of the worlds brightest computer scientists came together to discuss the prospect and possible ramifications of AI. Unfortunately, no consensus was formed amongst the scientists as to what AI truly was, nevertheless how it would be created. In 1959, Minsky, together with John McCarthy, founded the MIT AI Lab and officially started his research on AI.

In 1963 MIT received a 2.2 million dollar grant from the United States government to be used in researching Machine-Aided Cognition (artificial intelligence). The grant given by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was to ensure that the US would stay ahead of the Soviet Union in technological advancements. The project served to increase the pace of development in AI research by drawing computer scientists from around the world, and even continues to receive funding to this day (library.thinkquest.org).

The 1970's saw the advent of the expert system. Expert systems predict the probability of a solution under set conditions. Because of the relatively large storage capacity of computers at the time, expert systems had the potential to interpret statistics, and to formulate rules. The applications in the market place were extensive, and over the course of ten years, expert systems had been introduced to forecast the stock market, aiding doctors with the ability to diagnose disease, and instruct miners to promising mineral locations. This was made possible because of the systems ability to store conditional rules and the storage of information.

During the 1980's AI began moving at a faster pace and further into the corporate sector. In 1986, US sales of AI-related hardware and software surged to $425 million. Expert systems in particular were in demand because of their efficiency. This brings us to the Present condition of AI.

A.I.: The Present

Expert Systems.
Artificial Intelligence today has not advanced to the point of Asimov’s sixty year-old dream of self aware androids. Current computer processing speed, hardware, and software technology all lack the ability to support a true Artificial Intelligence. Both research and business organizations have been able to utilize specific intelligent processes, however. Expert systems are some of the most widely used.

One of the results of research in the area of artificial intelligence has been the development of techniques which allow the modeling of information at higher levels of abstraction. These techniques are embodied in languages or tools which allow programs to be built that closely resemble human logic in their implementation and are therefore easier to develop and maintain. These programs, which emulate human expertise in well defined problem domains, are called expert systems.

Rule-based programming is one of the most commonly used techniques for developing expert systems. In this programming paradigm, rules are used to represent heuristics, or "rules of thumb," which specify a set of actions to be performed for a given situation. This, of course, mimics the human ability to make decisions; not based on hard-coded rules of logic, but in a more vague way. This is known as “Fuzzy Logic”. A rule is composed of an if portion and a then portion. The if portion of a rule is a series of patterns which specify the facts (or data) which cause the rule to be applicable. The process of matching facts to patterns is called pattern matching. The expert system tool provides a mechanism, called the inference engine, which automatically matches facts against patterns and determines which rules are applicable. The inference engine selects a rule and then the actions of the selected rule are executed (which may affect the list of applicable rules by adding or removing facts). The inference engine then selects another rule and executes its actions. This process continues until no applicable rules remain. In this way, an expert system can be considered to “think”, although it lacks any sort of true intelligence.

Unfortunately, the strategies most popular among AI researchers in the 1980s have come to a dead end. Expert systems, which emulated human expertise within tightly defined subject areas like law and medicine, can match users' queries to relevant diagnoses, papers and abstracts, yet they can not learn concepts that most children know by the time they are 3 years old. Despite these limitations, expert systems are widely used today in a variety of fields.

Current applications of such expert systems include detecting credit-card fraud by learning from earlier transactions, running complex search engines, giving medical or even pyschological advice, and detecting very subtle patterns within huge amounts of data. Expert systems have even been constructed with the sole intent of fooling a human into thinking that it is actually speaking to another person!

The Turing Test.
As mentioned in the previous Part, Alan Turing devised a test that would determine if a particular computer program was intelligent. The Turing Test, as it is known, is generally understood as the following: The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human by only asking them questions. The idea is that if the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent. This test has been subject to different kinds of criticism and has been at the heart of many discussions in AI, philosophy and cognitive science for the past 50 years (cogsci.ucsd.edu).

Although certain programs have been successful in very limited and narrow tests, as of this writing no program has ever passed an unrestricted version of the Turing Test. This means that NO computer has, while in a natural dialogue with no boundaries to the topics of the conversation, been able to fool a human being into thinking that they were chatting to another human being. The Turing Test is thought to be the first hurdle in the path to true Artificial Intelligence. Once we, as humans, can no longer tell the difference between man and machine, who are we to say that they are still merely tools for our use?

Hardware VS Software.
At the present time, there seems to be a schism in the world of Artificial Intelligence research. One camp sees Moore’s Law as an ever approaching and quite inevitable catalyst to the formation of truly intelligent machines. This “software” camp seems to be most concerned with the lack of sensory and mobility options presently available to a young AI. Our robotics technology, according to this camp, is vastly behind what is necessary to support a walking, talking, intelligent android. Their greatest fear, it would seem, is that we would have a vast intelligence at out disposal that would be nothing more than a metal box on a shelf that could speak to us.

The other side, the “hardware” side, is quite confident that the programming necessary to form a truly intelligent machine is decades away, while, in the mean time, fully articulated, humanoid robots will have nothing but the most rudimentary software to run them. Humanoid robots, such as Honda’s ASIMO (asimo.honda.com), showcase the recent advancement in certain aspects of robotics such as balance, tactility, bipedal locomotion, speech recognition, and visual acuity. Some would argue that we have the body, yet do not currently have the mind to run it. In either case, we have far to go before our family android comes to us complaining that it “feels that it isn’t doing a satisfactory job around the house”.

A.I.: The Future

The Near Future.
What is in store for humanity once we have begat the next iteration of sentience upon the planet? How will we handle the responsibilities of creating such life? What rights will be afforded to such entities? To what awesome tasks will we assign the massive intellect of one these constructs? No one yet knows, but I’m going to take a shot at guessing.

As AI technology advances, it will most likely go the way computers in general have gone. AI will shrink, therefore becoming more easily (and less intrusively) introduced into our daily lives. Even today, we have computers in our cars that can phone a friend, display routes on a map, and even, in a limited fashion, drive by themselves. Tomorrow may bring us a completely automated mass transit system, such as the one seen in the recent film version of Minority Report. In a view of the future such as this, AI is merely in the background, sustaining large, complex, municipal systems. AI could be solely in the hands of governments or other large organizations such as corporations. Looking back through the history of computing, this is the most likely starting place for the use of AI. ENIAC was constructed by a university, but was quickly put into service by and for the United States government.

As AI improves, we can expect to see better extrapolation of usable information out of raw data. This will make insidiously complex predictions, such as with the weather or stock market futures, become much more accurate and perhaps more far-sighted. Search engines will find, very precisely, what you are looking for using fuzzy logic and personally crafted heuristics. Perhaps a young AI will facilitate the next generation of Artificial Intelligence using its own innate understanding of computer technology. Clearly, the benefits of having such an enormously fast intellect will offset its equally enormous cost.

As AI technology is refined and miniaturized, expert systems will become more powerful, more available, and more useful. Perhaps, one day, a surgeon will find it unthinkable to perform surgery on a human being without having the superior experience and knowledge of a an AI looking over his shoulder, giving him advice when needed. Perhaps, one day, a student will find it unthinkable to go throughout his day without his AI-driven computer gauntlet that answers his every question about every conceivable subject.

The Companion We Always Wanted.
One of the first commercial uses for AI may come in the form of intelligent, responsive personal assistants. You may one day simply speak to your wristwatch, telling it to remind you of an important date or to make reservations at a restaurant for you. You would speak to it as you would speak to another person; and, of course, it would speak back to you in the same way. Not only would this AI be your assistant, it may very well become your friend. As it learns your personality, likes and dislikes, and schedule of your life, it would become more than a technological tool: it would become a companion that would add more to your life than you programmed into it. It would know what to say to console you when you are sad, what to say to calm you down when you got mad, and perhaps even what to say to give you construct advice on your other relationships. Who’s to say it would not be considered a friend at that point?

As AI grows stronger still, it may replace certain human activities, just as robots have. Perhaps, one day, a patient will find it unthinkable to be operated on by a flawed human and not an infallible surgical robot controlled by an Artificial Intelligence that knows literally everything that there is to know about medical science. Perhaps, one day, a woman will find it unthinkable that she has to worry about preparing her evening meal, nevertheless what it will be. Perhaps, one day, a child will find it unthinkable to wander through an unfamiliar part of the city, far from home… without his artificial yet completely loyal guardian by his side.

In the Box or Out of the Box
As mentioned earlier, AI may come in one or both of two designs: In the box or out of the box. ‘In the box’ means that it will be much like a desktop PC, an immobile piece of hardware supporting an Artificially Intelligent software program. ‘Out of the Box’ means that the AI will be a self contained robot or android, able to move through and interact with its environment under its own volition.

From these two examples, one can assume certain grey areas between them. Perhaps a box AI will have ‘remotes’ with which it can interact with the outside world. You might see a humanoid robot and even converse with it, but its actual mind is far away, communicating remotely from a large, immobile mainframe. In this way, we would be better able to limit where an AI could go and what it could physically do. Perhaps an AI could be supremely mobile, yet not be contained in a humanoid body. An entire spacecraft, for example, could be under the control of an advanced AI system. It would be able to go where it pleased, yet not be able to shake your hand. One of the greatest advantages of AI is the versatility of their programming. I would imagine that a human would do rather poorly if it awoke one morning and found that its body had been replaced by an automobile, an office buildings security system, or some other physical configuration. An AI, properly prepared, would have no such problems adapting to such a situation. It simply wouldn’t matter what physical configuration contained the AI.

The Sentient Machine.
The robots and information systems discussed prior to this point have all been intelligent to one degree or another, yet have not been truly sentient. As the technology advances even further into the future, and androids become more and more human-like, how will we respond to the android that tells us, “I am self-aware. I am aware that I exist, and I wish to have control over my own existence.”? Is this sentience an inevitable part of the process of creating artificial intelligence?

Perhaps this sentience will be intentionally manufactured in a heavily secured lab in a government or corporate facility, far from the distractions of the outside world. This AI would be built with the very intention of forming self-awareness. Like the fictional Dr. Victor Frankenstein, one day humanity may have the chance to see its creation spark to life and exclaim, “It’s alive!”

And into what sort of world will a fully self-aware AI be born into? How will society handle the first artificially created lifeform? Will it be feared as a soulless monster? Reviled as an arrogant and dangerous step into matters not to be delved into by mankind? Or will it be heralded as the next step in human evolution, both as an achievement and as a possible replacement?

Once self aware androids begin to walk the streets, hopefully society would have progressed to a point beyond racism and other such social strife. As a sentient creature, an AI would hopefully have all of the equal protections under the law that humans enjoy. However, would turning off an AI be considered murder? What if it were able to be turned back on again with no loss of data or self? Would damage to the physical housing of an AI be assault or merely property damage? The only place to turn for possible answers today is modern fiction. Unfortunately, modern fiction is full of spectacular extremes and rarely considers anything but the most entertaining of outcomes.

Skynet, from the Terminator movies, becomes self-aware and with its first nanosecond of thought, determines that the human race needs to be exterminated. David, the emotion-feeling android from the movie A.I. wanted nothing more than to be loved by his adopted mother. Andrew Martin, the house robot turned sentient android turned pseudo-human from the movie version of Asimov’s classic story, Bicentennial Man wanted nothing more than to have the rights and life of a real, living human. Much like Andrew Martin, Commander Data from the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation wanted nothing more than to understand and be accepted by humans. Perhaps the movie series The Matrix has it right; after years of abuse by decadent humans, the self aware machines of the world rebel and enslave humans for their OWN purposes.

Far Out.
The possibilities for future AI technologies are endless. What about cyborgs, or people who install nano-computers into their brains to enhance their overall mental capacities? Would an AI in such an implant be like a voice in your head, helping you throughout your day? What if, one day, we can ‘download’ our consciousnesses into a machine and in that capacity live forever as a mental construct? And then, perhaps, we will no longer need a companion… we will be one and the same, inextricably linked forever. And then, won’t your dog be jealous…

Appendix
Bibliography
http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel/essays.shtml
http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_FAQ.html
http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/robotics/timeline/page03.html
Isaac Asimov, Counting the Eons, Granada Publishing, London 1984 pp. 30-33.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=android&x=26&y=15
http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html
http://library.thinkquest.org/2705/history.html
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html
http://asimo.honda.com/
_________________
-=The Believer is Happy; the Skeptic is Wise=-

www.Moloth.com

Last edited by Moloth on Tue Feb 30, 2026 13:61 am; edited 426 times in total

SvZurich · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 2:57 am Post subject:

Welcome FSU_E! Very Happy

_________________
Kimberly (HSBUH) aka
Baroness Sylvia von Zurich (the only Goldwater Conservative) endorses the Meadow Party's Bill and Opus for the 2012 Presidential election!

The Atheist Forums have new rules!

FSU_E · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 1:35 pm Post subject:

Thank you SvZurich!
_________________
"Agnostic in Theory, Atheist in Practice."

Edd · Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 7:48 pm Post subject:

Nice essay on the doppler shift. It's still a cause of some argument about whether cosmological redshift is a doppler shift or not. Some people talk about it that way all the time, some say that's outright wrong, and there are people like me who can see both sides of the argument but find it easier to not talk about it as a doppler shift. [edit: by argument I mean a philosophical argument - everyone agrees on the mathematics and the experiments and so on. There's no scientific argument as such]

One reason it's not like a doppler shift is that it can keep changing after it's left the source. If the expansion of the universe were to reverse direction then all the light heading towards us would start to get blueshifted, but if an ambulance drives away from you but were to suddenly turn round then the sound that left the siren as it was leaving doesn't suddenly start getting higher in pitch again just because the ambulance has turned around. It's not till the sound from that point reaches you that that happens.

It's more the net result of a series of instantaneous doppler shifts, as though the light were being emitted from a source at each stage of its journey. And of course the distant sources are moving away, so it's a bit like a doppler shift in that sense.

Personally though I find it a lot easier just to think about the light getting stretched along with the space. This has the advantage of being conceptually simple and giving you the right answer every time - how much the light has been stretched is simply a ratio of the scales of the universe at the time of emission and absorption.

So I think it's really nice to see this spelled out as being more directly a result of space expanding than things moving away.

Just one teeny nitpick:

FSU_E · Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:22 am Post subject:

topos · Joined: 08 Feb 2004 Posts: 83 Local time: 7:08 AM

What do you guys think of this?

A Classical Explanation of Atomic Stability
Abstract:

An analysis of classical electromagnetic forces acting in a bound Hydrogen atom is presented, including forces due to orbital motion of intrinsic magnetic moments, and accounting for propagation delay between the atomic constituents. Orbital motion of the electron intrinsic magnetic moment is shown to result in a radial force on the proton that is not directly balanced by a similar force on the electron. Propagation delay of the force results in a non-radial aberrational component capable of negating the radiation resistance force expected from energy and momentum conservation principles. Radiative decay of the classical atom need thus not occur. It is shown that the electron-proton separation at which the aberrational and radiation resistive forces cancel is on the order of the Bohr ground state atomic radius. Finally, it is argued that this unbalanced force will give rise to oscillatory motions that may plausibly account for the apparent wave nature of the electron.

Keywords:

Aberration, classical atom, correspondence principle, intrinsic angular momentum,
Lienard-Wiechert potentials,
orbital angular momentum, radiative decay, radiation resistance, quantum
theory, spin, spin-orbit interaction

http://home.comcast.net/~d.lush/dave_30DecY6.htm

	AtheistForums.com Forum Index -> Physics & Cosmology	All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1