I started reading DUNE: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert - son of the author of the original Dune series - and Kevin J. Anderson on Monday night. I’m not yet sure how I feel about the style of the younger Herbert - the book reads a lot more quickly and doesn’t have the same meticulous tone as the original Dune. I thought that the following quote was pretty funny when I spent Tuesday at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center.
When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.
— SISTER BECCA THE FINITE
My team at Laszlo recently started working on visual designs & UI implementation for the CALO: Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes project through SRI. Memories of working at SRI & my past life in academia flooded back to me as I saw my buddy Dave Blei and all of the brilliant professorial types in action. I’ve got to find a way to incorporate the word “ontology” into my daily life more and remember to roll my eyes when I meet Bayesian statisticians. I also talked to a robot researcher about problems that he was trying to solve - local navigation using keypoints coupled with reactive obstacle-avoidance. Quite similar to the main project that I worked on when I was at SRI, albeit with a larger robot that drove outdoors rather than shoebox-sized robots in office environments.
When I’m done with the latest Dune I’m going to check out John Sundman’s Acts of the Apostles. John is a self-proclaimed technoparanoaic, a judge for the latest Loebner Prize competition, and writes damn-good documentation for OpenLaszlo.
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