What’s the relationship between living and artificial systems? How can we combine the two to form sophisticated solutions to challenges in science and engineering? The annual conference Living Machines puts these questions under the microscope.

Conference chairs Paul Verschure (Director of the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems Group at Pompeu Fabra University) and Tony Prescott (Director of the Sheffield Centre for For Robotics, University of Sheffield ) hosted the 2013 events July, 29 – August, 2 at the Natural History Museum in London, a venue no less enchanting than last year’s edition which took place at Antonio Gaudi’s La Pedrera in Barcelona.

In addition to the workshops and the international roster of plenary speakers, this year’s conference featured a special exhibition on Living Machines at the London Science Museum.  Intelligent artifacts and biohybrid art made up the majority of installations displayed. Some of the stranger-than-fiction highlights included: a live musical performance featuring a humanoid robot; a robot model of ‘trace’ fossils from the dawn of life; music composed by a bio-inspired computer programme that mimics natural selection; plant-like robots that grow and change shape; wearable computing for finding your way in darkness and a robot that powers itself by digesting insects.

The fascinating exhibition complemented captivating talks on Natural and Artificial Selves by University of California Berkeley’s Tarrence Deacon; Biomimetics for medical devices by Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena from Imperial College London; the history of living machines by Andrew Pickering from the University of Exeter, and several others.

Stay tuned for the Convergent Science Network’s next edition of Living Machines, coming up in the summer of 2014! To read more about the 2013 event click HERE.

The term Singularity refers to the theory that — in conformance with the way technology has been advancing— ultra-sophisticated technology is inevitably likely to emerge. Technology so advanced, it would surpasses human intelligence and capability.

Singularity has become a common theme in pop culture and science fiction and it certainly hasn’t been ignored by academics. When it comes to the debate over whether the moment of singularity will actually arrive… the jury’s still out.

A recent article by Tony Prescott, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, takes a look at this issue.  Before presenting his personal opinion, Prescott raises an important question: How should Artificial Intelligence (AI) really be compared to human intelligence? If you ask Prescott, human intelligence encompasses much more than the raw brain power of the average individual— something that evolved to its current capacity around 100,000 years ago. For this reason, Prescott maintains that we should actually be comparing AI to our collective human intelligence. “After all, as an entity, AI can stretch across multiple machines. Likewise, the human race amounts to much more than the sum of its parts when we share our capabilities. And why strip us humans of our intelligence-enhancing artifacts?… intelligence-boosting technologies have hugely expanded our ability to apply shared knowledge and control our environment according to our goals…cultural and scientific development have led to a larger, longer-lived and better-educated human species.”

This notion of collective intelligence is something cyberneticist, Francis Heylighen, refers to as “Global Brainpower.” And according to Prescott, this communal strength makes the possibility of singularity happening far less likely. Additionaly he argues that while humans are working hard to make machines more advanced, they’re still far from being on par with many human qualities.

Humans are experts in the seemingly simply skills of acting in and understanding our world. Robots however, are not— the clumsy maneuvres at robo cup tournaments certainly highlight this fact. And in the long run, Prescott argues that there is no economic incentive for replacing this aspect of human intelligence “machines will continue to be engineered to take on the tasks we do poorly, rather than the ones we do well. Like symbiotic systems in nature, the future partnership of people with intelligent machines will be successful because its two halves complement, rather than copy, each other.”

Tony Prescott is also the Director of the Sheffield Centre for Robotics (SCentRo), Director of the Active Touch Laboratory, Co-Director of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group and a Visiting Fellow at Bristol Robotics Laboratory. You can read the full story about his take on super-intelligent machines HERE.

Europe supports new biological approaches for Information and Communications Technology

Evolvable hardware, artificial cells, bidirectional interfaces between mechanical and living entities. These are all examples of how biology can be applied to ICT.

Tony Prescott, professor of cognitive
neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, heads the European project BIOTACT (BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch ) which investigates the tactile systems of whiskered animals such as rats and shrews in order create highly sensitive sensory technology. Additionally, One of Tony’s past European projects involved modelling a robot control system after the structure of a rat brain. Today, Tony is a consortium member of the Coordination Action of the Robot Companions for Citizens FET Flagship Initiative.