Today’s quote comes from creative non-fiction author Lee Gutkind whose new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, explores “robotics subculture and the challenging quest for robot autonomy”. It was recently reviewed by M. G. Lord at the LA Times, and it contained this wonderful quote from the book about why scientists such as those Gutkin profiles chase their dream of creating autonomous robots:

“The fact that you, a human being, have achieved the magic milestone of re-creating, if only for an instant, a real living creature that thinks and acts on its own, something almost human, is really quite remarkable. And the frustration and failure that precedes it makes the magic of the moment of triumph all the more astonishing and satisfying and worthwhile.”

Today’s quote comes from physicist Fritjof Capra. I am just reading through his (so far) superb book, “The Hidden Connections“, which aims to describe “the unified systems that integrate the biological, cognitive and social dimensions of life”.

At any rate, the quote comes from page 9, where Capra is talking about the nature of life, in particular the process of “autopoiesis” (self-making or auto self-creation) where “living networks continually create, or recreate, themselves by transforming of replacing their components”. Here, he demonstrates that “viruses are not alive, because they lack their own metabolism”, but he then goes on to add:

Similarly, a robot that assembles other robots out of parts that are built by some other machines cannot be considered living. In recent years, it has often been suggested that computers and other automata may constitute future life forms. However, unless they were able to synthesize their components from “food molecules” in their environment, they could not be considered to be alive according to our definition of life.

I found this particularly interesting because he approaches the idea of a “living” robot from a biological point of view rather than simply using consciousness or self-awareness as the criterion for a future life form.

Capra has his own webpage, and there is a really fascinating interview with him at intuition.org. Some of his other books include: The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Turning Point, and Uncommon Wisdom.

Today’s quote comes from an old (1995) interview in Wired with AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter where he talks about the complexity of the human spirit:

“If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth [like Bach] could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about - what humans are about, what love is about, what caring about people is about, and what humor is.”

More commonly referred to as the “Deep Web“, it’s defined as “World Wide Web content [that is] not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines”. I prefer deepnet myself because a) I can use it for the word of the day, and b) it sounds cooler.

I found a reference to it while searching for DARPA on Google, and was interested to discover that they had funded (along with a host of other US groups like the NSA and the US Air Force) an AI-based deep web search engine that is now being run under a commercial company called Fetch. According to another news article on Computer World, the search is “used by government agencies seeking to rapidly import and integrate data from multiple Web sites and databases for emergency response, location intelligence and antiterrorism efforts”.

Yet another great example of how the military-industrial complex continues to drive technology.