Firm to introduce robot lawyers

http://www.betterhumans.com/News/4882/Default.aspx

A law firm has announced plans to introduce robot lawyers utilizing artificial intelligence to provide legal opinions and advice.

Buys legal firm says it is starting to roll out three robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, as early as next year, says Reinhardt Buys.

"Although the public will initially be rather hesitant to fully engage with virtual legal intelligence, there are so many benefits," says Buys. "The robots never sleep, they have virtually limitless memories and they get smarter every day.

A Business Day report notes that the robots' duties will be initially limited and controlled. The report notes:

According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions.

The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjort, says: "Our intuition is that people won't mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues—quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work.

"If the case is won, if the deal is done, complaints will be few and far between."

High-speed robots

KurzweilAI.net, Nov. 10, 2005

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?....html?id%3D5013

MIT researchers have proposed a method of making robotic muscles 1,000 times faster than human muscles, with virtually no extra energy demands and the added bonus of a simpler design.

The artificial muscles would be achieved by actuating conjugated polymers on command by sending charges to specific locations in the polymer chain in the form of solitons (charge density waves) that are activated by shining a light of a particular frequency on the conducting polymer. This study appears in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Amazon creates artificial artificial intelligence

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?....html?id%3D5013

seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 4, 2005

Amazon.com has launched a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can't do itself, such as identifying objects in photographs.

The robot that thinks like you...

New Scientist, Nov. 5, 2005

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-t...825241.700.html

"Scientists built a robot that thinks like we do and set it loose to explore the world. New Scientist discovers what happened next

"The infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks,
grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind
impressionable and hungry to learn. Before my eyes it is
already adapting, discovering that the striped blocks are
yummy and the spotted ones taste bad.

"Its exploration is driven by instincts: an interest in bright
objects, a predilection for tasting things, and an innate
notion of what tastes good. This, after all, is how babies
explore the world and discover that pink, perky objects
exist, and that they produce milk. Hands-on exploration
moulds their billions of untrained brain cells into a fully
functioning brain.

"The infant I am watching wander around its rather spartan
playpen in the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla,
California, is a more limited creature. It is a
trashcan-shaped robot called Darwin VII, and it has just
20,000 brain cells. Despite this, it has managed to master the ..."