Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures

My Philcon artificial intelligence talk is at 1pm tomorrow at Virtual Philcon 2020. You can register for it here.

I’ve uploaded a PDF of the talk to slideshare. The Obama Deep Fake movie was too large to uploaded, so I just used a still for that. The PDF has the references as well as the sources of all the images in the splash page above.

There are 22 images, 3 “real”, the rest from various films & so on.

• Talos — Jason & the Argonauts
• The Mechanical Turk — popular chess playing fake (18th century)
• Tik-Tok — Wizard of Oz
• Robot Maria — Metropolis
• Joe (transparent robot) — The Proud Robot
• Roy Batty (replicant) – Bladerunner
• R2-D2 & C-3PO — Star Wars
• Terminator — Terminator
• Rommie (ship avatar) — Andromeda
• Android Gunslinger — West World
• Commander Data — Star Trek Next Generation
• Mecha — AI
• Sonny — I, Robot
• BB-8 — Star Wars
• Eve & Wall-E — Wall-E
• Asimo — Honda robot
• Johnny 5 – Short Circuit
• Sophia — The First Robot Declared a Citizen by Saudi Arabia (2016)
• Janet — The Good Place
• Ava — Ex Machina
• Samantha — Her
• Denise Virtual Assistant — NextOS (now Realbotix)

And I have a number of references. These should be useful starting points. One of the striking things about these is that all are from the last five years; and all but two from the two years. The field is moving that fast!

• Miller 2019 – The Artist in the Machine
• Mitchell 2019 – Artificial Intelligence
• O’Neil 2016 – Weapons of Math Destruction
• Pickover 2019 – Artificial Intelligence
• Scharre 2018 – Army of None
• Shane 2019 – You look like a thing and I love you
• Tamboli 2019 – Keeping Your AI under Control
• Trask 2019 – Grokking Algorithms

2020 Philadelphia Science Fiction aka Philcon

Philcon runs from about noon this coming Friday (11/20/2020) till early evening Sunday (11/22/2020). It is, inevitably, virtual this year. With that said, they are going to a lot of trouble to make it as live & immediate as possible. And are clearly much helped by the benefit of earlier virtual conferences this year. For instance, the program participants were invited to training sessions to check out their setups & make sure they knew how to present on Zoom & Discord. I found mine helpful. Thanks Syd Weinstein & crew!

I have my schedule as well:

Remembering our sparks of inspiration. Recountings and tall tales of our best discoveries and why they continue to inspire us. With Carl Fink (moderator), John Skylar (the invariably intelligent!), Tom Purdam (always witty & knowledgable), and myself.

From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from fighting the Coronavirus to flying Killer Drones, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? 

What can be done with current technology? Are we going to be piloting mechs with our minds before the decade is out? With the ever charming & erudite Catherine Asaro, Rebecca Robare (one of the filk), and myself (as moderator). For me, a nice follow-on to my Arificial Intelligence talk!

 The practical considerations of building a city on Mars, from the habitat to the technology of living on an inhospitable world. I’m moderating based on my talk of a few years back, Mars or Bust! And have Robert Hranek (who has already scared me with his level of preparation), Premee Mohammed (who has scared me with her Lovecraftian Beneath the Rising and who is basically the advance team for Mars), and Tobias Cabral (who I’ve shared many panels with & who is not at all scary — meaning no offense!) to put questions to!