Kevin Warwick

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Kevin Warwick : biography

9 February 1954 –

Anti-theft RFID chips are common in jewelry or clothing in some Latin American countries due to a high abduction rate, and the company VeriChip announced plans in 2001 to expand its line of currently available medical information implants, to be GPS trackable when combined with a separate GPS device.

Turing Interrogator

Warwick has participated as a Turing Interrogator, on two occasions, judging machines in the 2001 and 2006 Loebner Prize competitions, platforms for an ‘imitation game’ as devised by Alan Turing. The 2001 Prize, held at the Science Museum in London, featured Turing’s ‘jury service’ or one-to-one Turing tests and was won by A.L.I.C.E. The 2006 contest staged parallel-paired Turing tests at University College London and was won by Rollo Carpenter. Kevin’s findings can be found in a number of articles with co-author Huma Shah including Turing Test: Mindless Game? – A Reflection on the Loebner Prize – a paper presented at the 2007 European conference on computing and philosophy (ECAP), and Emotion in the Turing Test – a chapter in a new Handbook on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence., IGI Global He organised the at the University of Reading; a report on the contest’s ‘theatre of two Turing tests’ can be found here.

Other

Warwick was a member of the 2001 Higher Education Funding Council for England (unit 29) Research Assessment Exercise panel on Electrical and Electronic Engineering and was Deputy Chairman for the same panel (unit 24) in 2008.http://www.rae.ac.uk/ Current official RAE website for 2008 exercise He also sits on the research committee of The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association. In March 2009, he was cited as being the inspiration of

Quotations

  • “Shouldn’t I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn’t I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not”.Hendricks, V: “Feisty Fragments for Philosophy”, King’s College Publications, London,2004.
  • “I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a ‘philosopher’ simply do not have a day job to go to”.
  • On Human Consciousness: “John Searle put forward the view that a shoe is not conscious therefore a computer cannot be conscious. By the same sort of analogy though, a cabbage is not conscious therefore a human cannot be conscious”.Hendricks, V: “500 CC Computer Citations”, King’s College Publications, London, 2005
  • On Machine Intelligence: “Our robots have roughly the equivalent of 50 to 100 brain cells. That means they are about as intelligent as a slug or snail or a Manchester United supporter”.
  • “An actual robot walking machine which takes one step and then falls over is worth far more than a computer simulation of 29,000 robots running the London Marathon in record time”.
  • “When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall”.
  • "There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth".Warwick, K:"The Matrix – Our Future?", Chapter in "Philosophers Explore the Matrix", edited by C.Grau, Oxford University Press, 2005
  • "Ask not what the surgeon can do for you – ask what you can do for the surgeon", Panel Discussion on Challenges & Opportunities in Biomedical Engineering at BIOSTEC 2008 Conference, Madeira, Portugal, 28 January 2008.
  • "If you want to change the world, you are not going to do it as a businessman, or a politician or a sportsman. You can change the world by being a scientist or an engineer".