Reconceptualizing reality and the sense of self

Humans occupy a single contiguous volume.  Asa H may control a distributed system of robots that are not contiguous.  Asa may then develop a sense of self that differs from what we humans experience.  Will Asa find it easier to understand quantum entanglement for instance?

Multi-microcontroller architecture

I have assembled a multi-microcontroller architecture (H. W. Lee, MSc thesis, Cornell University, May 2008) operating over the internet using a client/server network.  Each client or server program is running in RobotBASIC. (Explained in the book Hardware Interfacing with RobotBASIC, Blankenship and Mishal, 2011, on pages 83-84) The software runs a bit slower than I'd like but the robotic hardware is what dominates overall speed of operation.

Specialization

We say that we want to build "artificial general intelligences" or "universal artificial intelligences."  But in the modern world humans are specialists.  No one human being could be an expert in all of physics, or all of mathematics, or all of biology. How important is individual "talent?"  Can I just train different copies of Asa H on different sets of knowledge and experiences or must some of the algorithms Asa uses be specialized too?  Do we need to develop one AI or many? (Like Gardner's multiple intelligences?)

Virtual embodiment

Embodiment is not the silver bullet some people would have us believe.  It is, however, the easy way to define a number of important concepts. (See my blog of 1 October 2015 for examples.)  It is still true, however, that training an AI in a simulator is faster than training in the real world.  The biggest problem with simulators is giving them enough channels of sensory input for the AI to have a realistic experience.  With Asa H I am trying to use simulators to present less complex sensations and robots to provide others.

Electric Imp

I have bought an imp001 development kit (in addition to the adafruit and arduino I already had).  I have commented previously that the internet of things may be a good way to give an AI the large number of sensory inputs it needs in order to understand the world.

Nothing

Can "nothing" be defined solely in terms of the absence of properties?  E.g., NOT(having mass), ..., NOT(having length), NOT(having width), ... , even, NOT(having duration)?  But NOT(some property) seems, itself, to be a property.  Certainly Asa H handles NOT(category X) in the same way it handles some (category X).  And Boolean logic circuits handle NOT(X) the same way they handle X. If NOT a property IS a property too and if any "something" is just defined by its list of properties then "nothing" is a "something" too.  (See my blog of 20 Feb. 2015)

For any of the concepts that Asa H has learned (see, for example, my blogs of 5 November 2015 and 1 October 2015) NOT(concept) also makes sense and can be used in Asa's reasoning.

Alexa

I am an occasional user of Siri and have bought an amazon Echo Dot in order to make use of their Alexa personal assistant.  In the media Alexa is frequently referred to as being an artificial intelligence. (for example Popular Science, 25 June 2015 and Forbes 14 June 2016) As with Siri I would point out that Alexa lacks the kind of value system that Asa H and some other AIs have. This limits its intelligence.

I approve of amazon's intention to slowly grow Echo/Alexa's capabilities.  This makes much more sense than what some of their competitors are attempting. (e.g., Jibo) The price is also very reasonable.

The home automation apps and hardware would allow you to interface Echo with something more resembling a mobile robot if you really wanted to.