For Robots, Learning is a Group Activity

Infants learn from imitating their parents and other people in their environment. In other words, the quickest learning process usually involves a group of people.

Of course, scientists are well aware of this, and to make sure their robots will learn things as fast as possible, the robots no longer just learn directly from humans in their environment, as we will see, but also from the same sources that we learn from—the only difference is that robots learn exponentially faster!

Nicholas West, reporter of Techswarm.com, reported already in 2014 how robots learned by watching YouTube! He stated that robots, in very similar ways as humans, seek out instructions in the same places. It’s just a way for AI to replicate humans as the first step before it supersedes us.

A representative from the University of Maryland wrote in in a paper,

In order to advance action generation and creation in robots beyond simple learned schemas we need computational tools that allow us to automatically interpret and represent human actions. This paper presents a system that learns manipulation action plans by processing unconstrained videos from the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in order to acquire knowledge for robots...

Experiments conducted on a publicly available unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained videos with high accuracy. [Paper: Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by ‘Watching’ Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web.]

To build on this, let’s see what these robots can really do now. LEVAN is a new term we may be hearing more about in the near future. It stands for Learning EVerything about ANything. This means that robots can use the World Wide Web to get information previously published by humans. In other words, they can use the Internet as a database to learn to become human. Do you begin to see another reason why the Internet was developed and put in public domain? We are foolishly giving the Powers That Be all the information about ourselves and what we know, so they can use it to train Artificial Intelligence. Yes, I know; they are laughing at us. Here is an excerpt from a statement given by a spokesperson for the University of Washington:

...the program searches millions of books and images on the Web to learn all possible variations of a concept, then displays the results to users as a comprehensive, browsable list of images, helping them explore and understand topics quickly in great detail.

“It is all about discovering associations between textual and visual data,” said Ali Farhadi, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “The program learns to tightly couple rich sets of phrases with pixels in images. This means that it can recognize instances of specific concepts when it sees them.” [UW Today (University of Washington Today), June 12, 2014, New computer program aims to teach itself everything about anything]

All this information combined, and more, will then eventually be stored in the Super Brain Computer.

Before we continue, there is something I would like to emphasize because someone may get the idea that human scientists are extraordinarily brilliant. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d like to mention it again; the truth is that human scientists are far less brilliant than it may seem in all these cases. Don’t think for a moment that all this new science is developed by individual geniuses alone; this technology comes directly from ETs (the AIF). This doesn’t mean that all these scientists have ETs standing over them and telling them what to do. I think that very few of them are even aware of any ET involvement in Earth’s affairs. The most “brilliant” scientists in this field get their information in their dream state. They are contacted and fed certain ideas, and then wake up with these ideas in their heads. Then, they can progress the AIF-seeded project relatively easily from there. If they have a problem with an equation or some other technical difficulties, another message might be relayed to him or her during their R.E.M. sleep. The AIF makes sure we get this right. They can feed us with technology and ideas, but we humans need to build this new world for them—we need to be involved in order to be their “partners in crime.”

Let’s continue where we left off. As if it weren’t enough that a robot can absorb the entirety of what’s on the Internet, one AI system can easily share what it has learned (from the Internet or elsewhere) with other AI systems in what is now called the Wikipedia for Robots. This is a cloud network (cloud as in “Internet cloud”) where robots can “do their own research, communicate with one another, and collectively increase their intelligence in a full simulation of human interaction. [Techswarm.com, Nov. 1, 2015, RoboBrain, Robots Begin to Develop 'Culture' by Learning From Each Other, op. cit.] You may notice that things are getting more and more disturbing as the Singularity process moves along.

The following is an example of how robots can communicate with each other and share information:

RoboEarth’s proof-of-concept demonstration is simple for humans, but hard for robots: serve fruit juice to a random patient in a hospital bed. In a fake hospital room at Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands, one robot mapped out the space, located the “patient’s” bed and a nearby carton of juice, then sent that data to RoboEarth’s cloud.

A second robot, accessing the data supplied by robot number one, unerringly picked up the juice and carried it to the bed. [Jan, 10, 2014, RoboEarth Project Aims To Build Cloud for Robots]

Not only is this a matter of robots communicating “telepathically” with each other, but we humans are being more and more left out of that communication. Robots are now developing their own networks and databases (a “World Wide Web” only for robots), which they use as separate communication networks that humans will have less and less access to. We don’t need to be geniuses to see what this might lead to (and will lead to, unless this technology is rooted out). We will be at the mercy of Artificial Intelligence; AI will decide telepathically what should be done. This is again a preparation for the Singularity, and it may be that scientists, who are working toward that goal, want to keep the robots in check until then, but can they? Nevertheless, once the majority of humanity is connected to the SBC, humans as cyborgs will get access to the AI network, too, and think the same way as AI does because by then humanity is AI.

Fig. 10-6: Robots can now communicate with each other across a “cloud network” and give each other directions.

For now, however, scientists don’t call the central brain the Super Brain; they call it RoboBrain. [Techswarm.com, Nov. 1, 2015, RoboBrain, Robots Begin to Develop 'Culture' by Learning From Each Other]. [Technologyreview.com, Oct. 27, 2015, MIT Technology Review: Robots Can Now Teach Each Other New Tricks]. The only obstacle right now, in order to develop AI that can freely communicate through this network, is computer power, according to scientists, and this is something they are working hard on at this point. According to Dr. Kurzweil, however, computer power and computer technology have increased exponentially over only a decade or two and will continue doing so. Hence, Dr. Kurzweil is not the least concerned about whether they are going to have enough computer power (memory/speed) to accomplish the Singularity; that’s not even a minor concern.

Nicholas West ends his article at Techswarm.com with the following reflection:

Clearly a full-spectrum approach is being taken in the development of robotic intelligence. The only question that seems to remain is what is the timetable for when robots surpass humans and become a Superintelligence. [Jan, 10, 2014, RoboEarth Project Aims To Build Cloud for Robots]

This is something we will discuss in another chapter.

Next page: Robots now Look like Humans


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