That Philip plans to revolutionize AI technology — in effect, achieving singularity in a virtual world — isn’t that surprising, because he said as much when I talked with him for The Making of Second Life:

Hey! Slow down. A Singularity in a virtual world could easily transcend its boundaries and cause problems for us all. I don’t think that Rosedale will achieve human-level AGI anytime soon, but we must acknowledge that the boundary between the virtual and the “real” is pretty damn thin. Perhaps this is just James Au’s choice of words, but I wish all of his readers would understand that AGI is not just a game, or a new entertainment company. It could utterly transform the planet in a way that it’s never been transformed in its entire 4.56 billion year history.

Amazing. CNN gets about five million daily visitors, and I’m sure Honda is advertising their short video in many other venues, including possibly television. Here is the video:

I have mixed feelings about this pro-robot corporate messaging. My hope is that the need for Friendly AI will become more clear as we develop more advanced robots and AIs and observe their propensity to follow the letter of the rules we give them while ignoring the “spirit”, and we’ll realize that the cognitive capabilities needed to interpret the spirit of requests are above and beyond what is needed to achieve goals in the world. While robots that mindlessly follow the letter of requests aren’t that big a deal when robots are weak and dealing in narrow tasks, it will become progressively more annoying and apparent when robots become more capable and perform across a range of tasks.

The next decade will surely bring many exciting demos in robotics and AI that I very much hope will bring more people around to our position that a well-funded Friendly AI research program is necessary if Homo sapiens is interesting in surviving the 21st century. Maybe Honda could fund one. Here are some demos that I could gain attention:

1. A “robotic engineer” that uses autonomous robots built in fab labs to extend its physical infrastructure. At the recent Foresight conference, Hod Lipson stated that a major goal of his lab at Cornell was to design a robot that can autonomously move out of the 3D printer as soon as it is fabricated. (Cool, huh?) Beyond that would be the goal of using such robots to build additional 3D printers automatically, without human intervention. I predict that both of these milestones will be met by around 2022.

2. An autonomous program in SecondLife that overloads servers by generating a large quantity of self-replicating objects, like the Sonic rings that caused 600,000 users to experience serious lag in late 2006. When I used to go on SecondLife, two of my favorite toys were 1) an object that allowed me to break the usual 100 m (or whatever) limit on flight height (you can fly by default in SecondLife), 2) an automated construction program that allowed me to generate hundreds of objects in a couple seconds. My hobby was flying up at about 600 m, constructing giant hollow spheres with many hundreds of tiles, then letting them rain down on random parcels below. Not very nice, but pretty funny. I was receiving automated messages scolding me for cyber-littering for weeks.

What would really be interesting is an automated script that spoofs SecondLife accounts, then uses them to create thousands of independent scripts that each generate a large quantity of garbage objects. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this, but I do know that various “hacker” groups on SL in the past, especially the Patriotic Nigras, have aggressively pushed the griefing envelope. (The motto of Patriotic Nigras is “ruining SecondLife since 2006″.) Their custom SecondLife client, ThugLyfe, includes various scripts and ban-evasion techniques that create major headaches for well-meaning Lindens. It would be interesting to create a griefing-oriented AI-based SecondLife agent and see if it could independently reinvent any of the functions included in ThugLyfe. This environment could be a proving ground for any would-be AGI program.

The reason why all the above is important is that virtual worlds will continue to increase in complexity until they better and better approximate the real world, so any AGI that would be a risk in the real world will hopefully be tested and used in virtual worlds, where we can hear about them. Philip Rosedale also supposedly started an AGI company called LoveMachine, but I don’t have much of a clue about it.

3. Some demo involving adaptive control of microid swarms. Microids are interesting because this is one of the first designs of an ant-sized microbot that avoids using complex moving parts that are susceptible to wear from friction or dust jamming. I’d be interested to see if the recent spray-on glass technology could be used to better seal ant-sized robots with complex moving parts against dust. 3D printers fabricating microids is a longer-term vision, but maybe by 2022? I am somewhat skeptical that useful microscale-fabrication desktop fabs are possible — my intuition is that we’ll only see macroscale-fabrication desktop fabs and maybe nanofactories (but hopefully not) before the Singularity.

4. A robotic swarm that powers itself from a diverse set of energy sources, including biomass, solar, and wind. This would probably be possible now if anyone put the money towards it.

Anyone else have any other ideas?

Cross-posted from SIAI blog.