PBS Nova Phil

The android portrait of Philip K. Dick--an intelligent, evolving robotic recreation of the sci-fi writer who authored VALIS, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, UBIK, and many other masterworks. By ressurecting PKD as an android, we seek to realize genius-level AI with compassion and creativity. While we have a long way to go, even the early versions of the robot have made strong leaps forward towards this goal, resulting in an AAAI award for the AI systems, breakthrough abilities in robotic conversations and human-robot interaction, and world renown. The first version was built in 2005 by Hanson Robotics with David Hanson, Andrew Olney with the Fedex Institute of Technology team, the University of Texas at Arlington robotics institute, UT Dallas, and many other contributors, and captivated audiences at the WIRED Nextfest and the AAAI annual meeting. Unfortunately later that year the robot was lost in transit to a Google Tech Talk, and the project remained dormant for 3 years thereafter. This video shows the 2010 rebuild of the PKD android, this time built by Hanson Robotics with funding from VPRO, and collaboration from Bill Hicks, Dr. Kino Coursey, Doug Miles, Matt Stevenson and many others. He exhibits face perception, speech recognition, and conversational intelligence adapting Philip K Dick’s words and life history to generate new ideas during conversation with people. As of 2012, the PKD android serves the Initiative for Awakening Machines (IAM), wherein the Open Cog team under the leadership of Dr. Ben Goertzel works with the Hanson Robotics and RoboKind teams, to make the leap to true artificial general intelligence (AGI). This work is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and a Hong Kong City ITF grant. We intend to push the PKD android until it evolves super-human creativity and wisdom and transcends in a spiral of self-reinventing super-intelligence--what Philip K. Dick precognisciently described as a Vast Active Living Intelligence System, and what Vernor Vinge describes as the Technological Singularity. We predict this will occur sometime between 15 and 30 years from now. I am Dr. David Hanson, and this video shows another example of my work to develop robots with increasingly humanlike capabilities, in the quest to realize Genius Machines—machines with greater-than-human intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and compassion. To this end, I conduct research in robotics, artificial intelligence, the arts, cognitive science, product design and deployment, and integrate these efforts in the pursuit of novel human robot relations. By raising AGI among us—to be protagonists, friends, and members of our family—they will convergently evolve values analogous to ours, and thus come to truly care for us and earn our trust, and I believe this evolutionary path bears the highest likelihood of safety if we realize human-level intelligent, creative machines. Given the instability of our time, and the increasing complexity of global problems, we desperately need super-human Genius Machines, intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and compassion, to survive and make the leap to the next stage in human existence. Let’s pull together in an open source Genius Machines movement, and transcend into a better future.