Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948,

Kautzen Kautzen is a municipality in the district of Waidhofen an der Thaya in the Austrian state of Lower Austria Lower Austria (german: Niederösterreich; Austro-Bavarian: ''Niedaöstareich'', ''Niedaestareich'') is one of the nine states of Austria, ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

) is an adjunct faculty member at the

Robotics Institute The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014 article in ''Robotics Business Review'' magazine calls it "the world's best robo ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

, USA. He is known for his work on

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human ...

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

, and writings on the

impact of technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

. Moravec also is a

futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities abou ...

with many of his publications and predictions focusing on

transhumanism Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. Transhuma ...

. Moravec developed techniques in

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

for determining the

region of interest A region of interest (often abbreviated ROI) is a sample within a data set identified for a particular purpose. The concept of a ROI is commonly used in many application areas. For example, in medical imaging, the boundaries of a tumor may be de ...

(ROI) in a scene.

Background

Moravec attended Loyola College in Montreal for two years and transferred to

Acadia University Acadia University is a public, predominantly undergraduate university located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, with some graduate programs at the master's level and one at the doctoral level. The enabling legislation consists of the Acadia ...

, where he received his

BSc A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

in mathematics in 1969. He received his MSc in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

in 1971 from the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thames Ri ...

. He then earned a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot which was remote controlled by a large computer. The robot was able to negotiate cluttered

obstacle course An obstacle course is a series of challenging physical obstacles an individual, team or animal must navigate, usually while being timed. Obstacle courses can include running, climbing, jumping, crawling, swimming, and balancing elements with th ...

s. Another achievement in robotics was the discovery of new approaches for robot

spatial representation Spatial may refer to: *Dimension *Space *Three-dimensional space Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determ ...

such as

3D occupancy grids 3-D, 3D, or 3d may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Relating to three-dimensionality * Three-dimensional space ** 3D computer graphics, computer graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data ** 3D film, a ...

. He also developed the idea of

bush robot A bush robot is a hypothetical machine whose body branches in a fractal way into trillions of nanoscale fingers, to achieve very high dexterity and reconfigurability. The concept was described by Hans Moravec in a final report for NASA in 1999 ...

s. Moravec was a cofounder of

Seegrid Corporation Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsyl ...

, in 2003 which is a robotics company with one of its goals being to develop a fully autonomous robot capable of navigating its environment without human intervention. He is also somewhat known for his work on

space tether Space tethers are long cables which can be used for propulsion, momentum exchange, stabilization and attitude control, or maintaining the relative positions of the components of a large dispersed satellite/spacecraft sensor system. Depending on t ...

Publications

* 1988 – Sensor Fusion in Certainty Grids for Mobile Robots appeared in

AI Magazine The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

Books

''Mind Children''

In his 1988 book ''Mind Children'', Moravec outlines

Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...

and predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard, in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030–2040. Moravec also outlined the "neural substitution argument" in ''Mind Children'', published 7 years before

David Chalmers David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Univer ...

published a similar argument in his paper
Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia
, which is sometimes cited as the source of the idea. The neural substitution argument is that if each neuron in a conscious brain can be replaced successively by an electronic substitute with the same behavior as the neuron it replaces, then a biological consciousness would be transferred seamlessly into an electronic computer, thus proving that consciousness does not depend on biology and can be treated as an abstract computable process.

''Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind''

In ''Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind'' (), published in 1998, Moravec further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence, generalizing

to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and extrapolating it to predict a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding

superintelligence A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. "Superintelligence" may also refer to a property of problem-solving systems (e.g., superintelligent language ...

Arthur C. Clarke Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 191719 March 2008) was an English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film '' 2001: A Spac ...

wrote about this book: "''Robot'' is the most awesome work of controlled imagination I have ever encountered: Hans Moravec stretched my mind until it hit the stops."

David Brin Glen David Brin (born October 6, 1950) is an American scientist and author of science fiction. He has won the Hugo,Colin McGinn Colin McGinn (born 10 March 1950) is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami. McGinn is best known for his wo ...

for ''The New York Times''. McGinn wrote, "Moravec … writes bizarre, confused, incomprehensible things about consciousness as an abstraction, like number, and as a mere "interpretation" of brain activity. He also loses his grip on the distinction between virtual and real reality as his speculations spiral majestically into incoherence."

References

External links

* (Interview with Moravec on technical progress and artificial intelligence)
Hans Moravec's official website at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Center

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20080511161337/http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/users/hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/1999/NASA.report.99/9901.NASA.summary.html Moravec Bush Robot Final Report
NOVA online interview with Moravec in October, 1997.
* * Wikiversity:Mind Children {{DEFAULTSORT:Moravec, Hans Austrian technology writers Roboticists Artificial intelligence researchers 1948 births Living people Futurologists Acadia University alumni University of Western Ontario alumni Stanford University alumni Austrian transhumanists American transhumanists People from Waidhofen an der Thaya District