George Rebane

There has been another significant advance in machine intelligence.  Two projects have demonstrated that machines will now start doing independent research that can lead to new discoveries.  Adam, an artificial critter, did an experiment in yeast genetics to prove a longstanding hypothesis, ‘he’ did it with very minimal human intervention.

Adam has cost roughly $1 million to develop and the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can. (The development) group has also created another robot scientist called Eve dedicated to screening chemical compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that could combat diseases such as malaria.

Another step forward in this field is another system that was allowed to ‘look’ at a physical system (a compound pendulum), ‘play’ with it, and then deduce the physical laws that made the pendulum do what it does.

More here and here and here

These advances again demonstrate the ongoing acceleration of technology that Singularity Signposts highlights.  The part of such advances that is rarely discussed is their socio-economic impact.  Adam now is capable of displacing a number of very talented scientists and laboratory technicians.  In short, robots have already impacted humans doing lower level jobs, but now they are starting to do the jobs of highly trained workers.  Contrary to some loud denials from politically motivated investigators, this will have devastating effects on the future employability of workers who will seek to compete with machines and still draw wages that maintain a quality of life to which people (at least Americans) have become accustomed.  There will be more to say on this in a later post. 

I want to thank the several RR readers – not all of whom believe in the portents I have here outlined – who sent me links to various announcements of these very significant events.  And I apologize for the delay in posting this since I have had some corrupted cookie problems in logging in to TypePad.