Are you ready for your own personal A. I. ?

Do you remember HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey”? This supposedly infallible computer with its menacing monotone voice represents the way that many people still picture artificial intelligence; cold, indifferent and merely simulating human emotions. Not coincidentally, in the year 2001, Ray Kurzweil launched his site "Accelerating Intelligence" with the intent to do a better job of “making minds” than the apologetic but homicidal HAL. On the road to achieving true machine consciousness, Kurzweil created Ramona, a "virtual person" that has also been composing music for the past 50 years. In her newest incarnation, Ramona (currently on version 4.2) is a charming chatbot with big dreams. Kurzweil predicts that by 2029, Ramona version 11 should be able to pass the "Turing Test", a method of determining whether a machine can produce responses that are indistinguishable from that of a real human. This might sound a bit far-fetched until you realize that Kurzweil now has all the advanced technology and data crunching power of Google at his disposal. Google hired Kurzweil along with neural net creator Geoffrey Hinton to develop Google's context sensitive algorithms into the ultimate in AI. Google's other big acquisition a few months ago suggests where their AI may eventually be going. Google purchased Boston Dynamics, the builders of advanced military robots that can run up to 29 miles per hour and walk over the toughest terrain. Although the final form of Google's AI remains shrouded in secrecy, it very likely that it could sound a lot like Samantha, the sultry artificially intelligent operating system (and intimate companion) in the new movie “Her” from Spike Jonze. As Samantha learns more menial tasks like how to optimize schedules and personalize software, the program (it? she?) also learns how to evolve a personality based on experiences, including curiosity, jealousy and love. Its a bit of an understatement to call it a romance unlike any other. This is really just the beginning and the field of AI is advancing extremely rapidly due to collaborations like the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska predicts: "During the next decade we’re going to see smarts put into everything.... Smart homes, smart cars, smart health, smart robots, smart science, smart crowds and smart computer-human interactions.” Another reason for this technological acceleration is the greater availability of build-it-yourself robots and programming. When you are ready to create your own robot, and perhaps test out your own insights into machine consciousness, you might want to look at the visual programming platform FlowBotics Studio. We are pursuing an aggressive roadmap on the journey to make robots smarter. One thing is certain, it's an exciting time to be alive!