] The big question, however, isn't whether people become
] more techno than flesh, but whether robots develop some
] form of consciousness - self-aware minds of their own.
]
] Sidney Perkowitz raises this question in "Digital People:
] From Bionic Humans to Androids" (Joseph Henry Press), a
] book that describes how a new generation of robots could
] serve as "the next level of humanity."

Probably soft, but an exemplar of an active and robust meme.

TimesDispatch.com | Mind over Matter

] Inspiration is fine, but above all, innovation is really
] a management process.
]
] Ask most people who invented the lightbulb, and they will
] promptly provide the wrong answer: Thomas Alva Edison.
] Truth is, the famous inventor's 1879 debut of his
] incandescent light trailed others by decades. So why does
] he get all the glory? Mostly because of what he did next,
] notes Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs
] Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies
] Innovate.

A pretty compelling review of the book.

Building An Idea Factory

] IEI is busily transforming all of its advanced neural
] network paradigms into TCP/IP based systems. The overall
] intent is to convert many, if not all, of the TCP/IP
] nodes on the Internet into functioning neurons. The
] resulting freethinking entity will be capable of
] introspecting upon all human-originated content residing
] on the Internet and World Wide Web, and from that
] knowledge store creating new ideas and strategies that
] will inevitably transform our thinking and our planet. As
] this World Brain accumulates new knowledge, it will begin
] to create a "SuperNet" above the Internet, vastly
] overshadowing the present content stored there.
]
] This coming World Brain will not be accessed via search
] engines. We will simply ask it to introspect on the
] information we, as humans, seek.

Imagination Engines, Inc. (Stephen Thaler) is not shy about
proclaiming the potential of this technology.

IEI's World Brain Project

Stephen Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc., has developed a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

] What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in
] a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at
] General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
]
] "His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous
] Generation of Useful Information," the official name of
] the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent
] was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent
] Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about
] that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number
] One!"
]
] Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of
] what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking
] machine.

In a piece like this it's hard to separate the hype from the true advancements. The concept presented makes a certain kind of intuitive sense -- but maybe that's because it resonates with ideas and results presented by others.

The emergent behavior of the cockroach-like H3 robots sounds real similar to Rodney Brooks walking robots. (google on 'rodney brooks subsumption citations')

David Gelernter presented a concept of "affect linking" (The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought by David Hillel Gelernter) which had a notion of dialing the level of creativity by accepting different amounts of fuzziness in matching ideas together.

This resonance is, perhaps, an indicator that Thaler may be on to something. A stronger indicator would be experimental data the show that Thaler's algorithm scales up to machines with greater than a cockroach-level processing power.

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