Yeah, I admit it, I listen to NPR. On Sunday’s Weekend Edition, there was a story on artificial intelligence, from the 2007 Singularity Summit held at Stanford in September. Specifically, the story (and the summit) was about what artificial intelligence is, and where it’s likely to go. I was particularly interested in the two separate types of AI; specialized and generalized. It seems like we’ve gotten pretty good with the specialized AI (robots that can perform one task, like vacuuming), and generalized AI is the next necessary step when it comes to evolving adaptive complexity (in the software sense) in robots. So far, I think the best we’ve been able to do is to create robots with lots of specialized AI that kind of pretends to be generalized AI… But maybe that’s a good thing, because whether we really want robots to be making (for lack of a better word) inexperienced decisions is a tough (and potentially scary) question.