This book brings together contributions to the Fourth Artificial Life Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the summer of 1994.
An account of the creation of new forms of life and intelligence in cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence that analyzes both the similarities and the differences among these sciences in actualizing life.The Allure of Machinic Life
Examining the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of artificial life.
Given the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few decades, AI and its related applications have become part of daily life in ways that we could never have dreamt of only a century ago. Our routines have been changed beyond measure by robotics and AI, which are now used in a vast array of services. Though AI is still in its infancy, we have already benefited immensely. This book introduces readers to basic Artificial Intelligence concepts, and helps them understand the relationship between AI and daily life. In the interest of clarity, the content is divided into four major parts. Part I (AI Concepts) presents fundamental concepts of and information on AI; while Part II (AI Technology) introduces readers to the five core AI Technologies that provide the building blocks for various AI applications, namely: Machine Learning (ML), Data Mining (DM), Computer Vision (CV), Natural Languages Processing (NLP), and Ontology-based Search Engine (OSE). In turn, Part III (AI Applications) reviews major contemporary applications that are impacting our ways of life, working styles and environment, ranging from intelligent agents and robotics to smart campus and smart city projects. Lastly, Part IV (Beyond AI) addresses related topics that are vital to the future development of AI. It also discusses a number of critical issues, such as AI ethics and privacy, the development of a conscious mind, and autonomous robotics in our daily lives.
This book looks at artificial life science - A-Life, an important new area of scientific research involving the disciplines of microbiology, evolutionary theory, physics, chemistry and computer science. In the 1940s a mathematician named John von Neumann, a man with a claim to being the father of the modern computer, invented a hypothetical mathematical entity called a cellular automaton. His aim was to construct a machine that could reproduce itself. In the years since, with the development of hugely more sophisticated and complex computers, von Neumann's insights have gradually led to a point where scientists have created, within the wiring of these machines, something that so closely simulates life that it may, arguably, be called life. This machine reproduces itself, mutates, evolves through generations and dies.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. Number one in its field, this textbook is ideal for one or two-semester, undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Artificial Intelligence.
This volume contains 71 revised refereed papers, including seven invited surveys, presented during the Third European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL '95, held in Granada, Spain in June 1995. Originally AL was concerned with applying biologically inspired solutions to technology and with examining computational expertise in order to reproduce and understand life processes. Despite its short history, AL now is becoming a mature scientific field. The volume reports the state of the art in this exciting area of research; there are sections on foundations and epistemology, origins of life and evolution, adaptive and cognitive systems, artificial worlds, robotics and emulation of animal behavior, societies and collective behavior, biocomputing, and applications and common tools.
In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.