Walk Like a Man, Fast as You Can

I'm amazed at the progress in robotics. It is solid. The day when robots take over the manual aspects of life is getting much closer.



What is less clear to me is the day when the robots will take over the intellectual aspects of life. Dedicated "smart" software is impressive, but I haven't seen any general purpose intelligence worth beans. Progress on this side of technology is much, much slower.

But the robots are coming, the robots are coming!

The Robots are Coming, the Robots are Coming!

And on bicycles no less...



Maybe this "takeover" by the robots won't be so bad. This robo-guy is a midget on a bike. He isn't the hulking threat that Klaatu was in The Day the Earth Stood Still. And this isn't the gray goo that threatens to swallow us up and they populate the earth with their slimy descendants.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day that I can sit down and have a friendly chat with a robot that not only makes a good companion but will help tuck me in bed at night and make sure I have three square meals a day. I'm an optimist with the fear of a little pessimism because I know some idiot will steal the warm and fuzzy robo-future and replace it with hulking RoboCop look-alikes who will beat me with a baton if I have an independent thought. The evil have a way of stealing sweetness and light and replacing it with power, dominance, fear, and pain. They prefer the future in shades of black. Oh... and with them on top.

Robots in the Kitchen

I think it is safe to say that robots won't be replacing kitchen staff in the next twenty years.

I worked in the high tech industry and I was amazed at the advances during my 3 decade career. Generally the advances that were most astonishing were in hardware, architecture, and a bit in software. The "advances" in robots and AI (artificial intelligence) have been amazing for their disappointments and inability to make radical, speedy headway. They are improving, but for an impatient person like myself, way too slow.

If I'm lucky robots will be driving cars (on specially designated and prepared roads) and doing light housework by the day I die, but I doubt they will be doing any truly complex tasks.

Here's the "state of the art" in cooking:



More info is available at Nick Bilton's blog on the NY Times.

All those culinary students can rest easy. Their jobs are safe for at least two decades!

The Latest Dystopia to Fear

Here is a tongue-in-cheek look into the future where humans will be dominated by the birdbrained. From the Gawker blog:

There is not, as far as we know, a forum where we might place bets on which non-robot species is most likely to conquer and enslave the human race, but if there were, we would place our money on the African Grey Parrot, which, scientists have recently confirmed, has the capacity to reason, a skill that places it in the same category as chimpanzees, gorillas and humans.

[E]ach parrot watched a researcher hide a walnut under one opaque cup and a seed under another. Next the researcher hid the cups behind a screen, removed one of the treats and showed the bird which one had been taken. Finally, the screen was removed to see if the parrot could work out which treat must remain, and under which cup it must be.

Only one of the parrots, a female called Awisa, was able to do this, choosing correctly in three-quarters of the tests –- 23 out of 30. "So far, only great apes have been shown to master this task," says Mikolasch.

Obviously, not all African Greys are capable of logical reasoning—though neither are all chimpanzees or gorillas, or, we might argue, humans—but even if only one in seven are, that provides the frighteningly long-lived bird with an elite class to lead the rest into battle. As an added advantage, African Greys, unlike great apes, have the ability to mimic, and perhaps speak, human language; they are also, like all bird species, notorious liars. In any event, we are likely to be saved from a future under the booted talon of rational parrots only because robots will get there first, but in the spirit of planning for all eventualities we suggest being nice to all the African Greys you meet from here on out.

I might prefer the birds, but right now I'm still fixated on the singularity when the machines take over. I'm just hoping to be taken in as the pet of some kindly robot who will feed me and treat me well. In return I promise to act illogically and stupidly so that it will be amused.

Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human"

This was an amazingly entertaining book. It was a grand tour of knowledge dressed up as reportage about competing at the Turing Prize as a contestant trying to convince judges you are human while computers do their best to convince the judges that they are in fact "the humans". Like a good Hollywood move, the guys in the white hats win, Cristian comes out... spoiler alert!... triumphant and wins the "most human human" prize.

As a tale of prepping to present himself as a "genuine human" in the Turing test for the Loebner Prize, this book presents an interesting and entertaining tale. The author delves into a richness of subject matter that is unexpected. He explores what it means to be a real person and just how you could use language to try to convince a blind judge that your are really a "human". Getting there involves many detours into arcane specialized knowledge.

What I liked about the book was the amazing depth of knowledge of many fields served up as a charming story in the context of prepping and competing in the Turing test. I actually learned many new things in philosophy and computers, my two fields of expertise, from reading this book. I also learned interesting bits about psychology, linguistics, chess, poetics, and poetry. All this learning while being cleverly entertained!

I learned of entropy, lossless and lossy compression, of aposiopesis, synecdoche, and enthymemes. of computability and complexity theory, of the chatterbots ELIZA and PARRY, and so on. Delightful stuff.

By the way, he points us at the "Shannon Game" and invites us to play it (click here). I can honestly say it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. It humiliates you because you think you know language and what letters to expect when, but as confident as I was, I came out a loser, a humbling experience.

Like a delightful musical composition, this book ends with a coda, an epilogue where he looks at another field of computers -- computer graphics -- and in less than a dozen pages riffs a variation on the theme of the book how the effort to present "real stuff" makes you much more critical and appreciative of the reality:

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author's intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said "UK Minister's Charm Offensive." This to me was hilarious. Of course they mean "offensive" as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister's creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can't enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it's alarms and extinguishers.

...

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called "caustics," the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that's a lot of ping-pong,and way beyond the where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

...

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it's important to know these things, to know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined -- and to seek it.

Try the book. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable it is.

The Computers are Taking Over!

How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?

Well... it happens when you let the computers run your world, and sadly we are doing more and more of that. For the gory details, read this post by an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who was trying to buy the textbook for his lab and discovered this insane pricing:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

...

The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.

On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.

The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.

Using Game Technology to Develop New Robotic Technology

It is funny how ideas feed on each other. Normally you think of game developers as parasitic on research by universities doing computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, and motion sensing research. But here's a case where university researchers are building on some game technology:



You can find the news story here.

Robots on the Fly

Progress in robotics continues apace. Here's the latest in robot birds:



From a New Scientist article:

You could be forgiven for thinking the bird in this video is real, especially when filmed from a distance. But it's actually an energy-efficient robot, weighing just 500 grams, that captures the elegance of a bird in flight.

The robot, aptly named SmartBird, has just been unveiled by Festo, the robotics company known for its bionic animal designs. It has previously created penguins that can communicate with each other to avoid collisions and a robotic elephant's trunk designed to grip objects and safely interact with humans.

SmartBird is modelled on the herring gull and can take off, fly and land while its flight is controlled remotely from the ground in real time.

To take off, the robotic bird flaps its wings with the help of an onboard motor. As the wings beat, the front edge also twists, enabling airflow along the wings to generate thrust. Once in flight, the tail acts as a rudder to steer the bird through the air.

The technology could be used to design "stroke wing generators" - devices that produce energy from water.

If you liked this video, you might also like to watch a bio-inspired robotic fish.

New Scientist has a "robotics" page here that is worth taking a peek at.

I'm still waiting for the all-singing, all-dancing, tuck-me-in-bed-and-feed-me robot that can tell me bedtime stories and worry about my health. Something tells me I've got a few more decades to wait. Actually it looks to me that the Grim Reaper will get me before robotics delivers on this promise. But I still enjoy reading about the progress.

The Truth about Education

Here are some bits from an excellent NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

Read the whole article.

The reality is that most jobs are subject to replacement by computer. In the short term it is the repetitive jobs, as Krugman points out, whether they be blue collar or white collar. There is no place for a diploma-wielding person to hide. The machines are coming to replace you.

Back in the 1960s this was a scary message, but a lot of the fear was couched in "what are people going to do with so much more free time?" The assumption was that the society as a whole would carry everybody and salaries would rise and we would all live happier more stuff-filled lives because the machines were going to take over and produce the goodies.

But since the "Reagan revolution" all those extra goodies being produced have been monopolized by the ultra-rich to help them to go from fabulously wealth to mind-blowingly, insanely wealthy. Instead of 100 foot yachts, they now have to make do with 500 foot yachts. Instead of a main home and one or two vacation homes, they own five, six, or a dozen. Meanwhile unemployment is at record highs, poverty at a record high, and the average was is stuck. This isn't caused by machines. This is caused by a social system where the ultra-rich have a strangle-hold on all increments to productivity. As machines make us more productivity, the ultra-rich skim off the benefits for themselves!

Here's Krugman's bottom line:

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

A Flying Robot

Here's an interesting video and article of a recent DARPA project to make a robot the flies like a hummingbird. The video has an external camera giving a wide shot of the parking lot and an inset video shows the view from a camera embedded in the robot:

A prototype robot spy "ornithopter," the Nano-Hummingbird, has successfully completed flight trials in California. Developed by the company AeroVironment Inc., the miniature spybot looks like a hummingbird complete with flapping wings, and is only slightly larger and heavier than most hummingbirds, but smaller than the largest species. ...

The ornithopter can fly into buildings under the control of an operator flying the spybot with the help of a feed from its tiny video camera. The prototype is capable of flying at speeds of up to 18 km/h (11 mph) and weighs 19 grams, which is about the same as an AA battery. ...

The spybot was developed for the US military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The hummingbird appearance is intended to disguise the bot, although it would look decidedly out of place and would attract attention in most places in the world since hummingbirds are not found outside of the Americas.

DARPA's head of the Nano Air Vehicles (NAV) program. Dr Todd Hylton, said the successful flight tests pave the way for new vehicles that resemble small birds and match their agility. The new drone is a departure from existing NAVs, which in the past have always resembled helicopters or planes.

The progess in robotics is relentless. Compared to the 2 billion years of evolution for DNA-based designs, robots are turbo-charged with design cycles lasting months not millenia.

Robot Ready to be Injected into your Veins

I remember watching Fantastic Voyage and thinking it was pretty cheezy back in the 1960s. But 50 years later, somebody is trying to build a robot that can get in your veins and maneuver do "do stuff" that will be medically useful.

Here's a bit from New Scientist:

... while microbots exist, and they can be made to swim, it's getting them to change direction that has been tricky so far - a bit of an issue if you're even planning on sticking them in a human body, for instance.

Now a system used to propel swimming microbots without the need for on-board fuel has brought this idea one step closer. Researchers at North Carolina State University have coaxed their bots to perform U-turns on command.

The microbot, a mere 1.3 millimetres long, is essentially a diode - an electrical element that only allows current to pass in one direction. The diode is exposed to an alternating electric field, which induces a voltage across it, creating an electric dipole. This dipole pushes on ions in the water, driving them backward and propelling the microbot forward.

...

Miniaturisation will be vital if the robots are ever to navigate human bodies., like in Fantastic Voyage. The group is also investigating "yeast-boats", which use metabolic reactions to motor through glucose or hydrogen peroxide solutions. A similar vehicle may one day carry a molecular doctor on board to make a diagnosis - or dock with diseased tissue to deliver a shipment of drugs.

I won't be first in line for this new medical treatment. I would need to be convinced that it isn't going to cause interesting problems like blocked capillaries or rogue microbots delivering drugs in the wrong locations.

Intelligent Machines

Here is a nice graph that depicts the difference between the new IBM Watson engine and the Wolfram "computational knowledge engine":

Click to Enlarge
And here is a discussion of the difference between the two by Stephen Wolfram from his blog:

IBM’s basic approach has a long history, with a lineage in the field of information retrieval that is in many ways shared with search engines. The essential idea is to start with textual documents, and then to build a system to statistically match questions that are asked to answers that are represented in the documents. (The first step is to search for textual matches to a question—using thesaurus-like and other linguistic transformations. The harder work is then to take the list of potential answers, use a diversity of different methods to score them, and finally combine these scores to choose a top answer.)

Early versions of this approach go back nearly 50 years, to the first phase of artificial intelligence research. And incremental progress has been made—notably as tracked for the past 20 years in the annual TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) question answering competition. IBM’s Jeopardy system is very much in this tradition—though with more sophisticated systems engineering, and with special features aimed at the particular (complex) task of competing on Jeopardy.

Wolfram|Alpha is a completely different kind of thing—something much more radical, based on a quite different paradigm. The key point is that Wolfram|Alpha is not dealing with documents, or anything derived from them. Instead, it is dealing directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge. And what’s inside it is not statistical representations of text, but actual representations of knowledge.

The input to Wolfram|Alpha can be a question in natural language. But what Wolfram|Alpha does is to convert this natural language into a precise computable internal form. And then it takes this form, and uses its computable knowledge to compute an answer to the question.

There’s a lot of technology and new ideas that are required to make this work. And I must say that when I started out developing Wolfram|Alpha I wasn’t at all sure it was going to be possible. But after years of hard work—and some breakthroughs—I’m happy to say it’s turned out really well. And Wolfram|Alpha is now successfully answering millions of questions on the web and elsewhere about a huge variety of different topics every day.

An Early Computer Enthusiast Turns Jaundiced

Here's a bit from an interview with Sherry Turkle, an early enthusiast for computers and their possibilities:

Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, "transgressive," and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It's not that she's against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She's concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.

The argument represents a skeptical turn for a researcher who was one of the first humanities scholars to take human interactions with computers seriously as an area of study. Because she began her academic career at MIT, starting in 1976, she had an early look at the personal computer and the Internet and now a front-row seat for robotics. She's a Harvard-trained psychologist and sociologist and refers to herself as an "intimate ethnographer," looking at how people interact with their devices. "I'm fascinated by how technology changes the self," she says.

By the mid-90s, her largely enthusiastic explorations of online chat rooms and video games had landed her on the cover of Wired magazine, making her a celebrity among the geek set. Back then her main interest was how creating alter egos in virtual worlds helped people shape their identities, as captured in her seminal 1995 book, Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster).

She still believes in those benefits. But in recent years, she has spent more time documenting the drawbacks and hazards of technology in daily life. Warnings fill her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (Basic Books), out this month, which devotes roughly half of its pages to her studies of robots and the rest to information overload and the effects of social networks and other mainstream technologies. At points the prose seems designed to grab readers by the shoulders, shake them as if out of a dream, and shout: "Put down the BlackBerry—you're forgetting how to just be!"

"We talk about 'spending' hours on e-mail, but we, too, are being spent," Alone Together concludes. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to diminish us."

The interview is full of thoughtful material.

I'm not sold on her argument. If find people can be perfectly shallow and have "breakdowns" as often as any computer. And I'm not sure that there is a lot "there" in a good number of people. I don't find that most people have the time of day for a meaningful encounter. Most people I run into are purely into economic transactions or superficial social transaction. It isn't obvious to me that these go any deeper than an encounter with a half decent robot.

I'm more of an optimist about the future capabilities of machine. I think they can be programmed to achieve the level of social interaction which will pass as meaningful companionship. My bottom line: how many "friends" have you had that really didn't understand you and really weren't "there for you" at crucial points in your life? A machine may not be really sympatico down deep, but they are devoted and can show real interest in you and your needs. I think Sherry Turkle either has impossibly high quality friends, or she has let her thesis blind her to the real world.

Robots Everywhere

This is fascinating...



I bet you didn't know there was a pressing need for robots to balance pencils on their tips!

Seriously... I love watching the progress in robotics. I'm still waiting for the robot to tuck me in to sleep and be my personal assistant making meals, cleaning up. reminding me of important stuff... you know, running my life. I keep thinking soon, real soon.

Future War

Here's a bit from a NY Times article about robots and war:

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.

But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers — and even some human rights advocates.

The world continues to get more complicated and humans are struggling to adapt and handle the complexity. The funny thing is that we will probably have to rely more and more on machines (computers) to understand the problems that our machines (robots) can potentially cause us.

The world is getting more "interesting" all the time:

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

I find the idea of an "ethical" robot quite funny. It is right up there with a "conscious" robot and a robot "in love". Just how do you shrink wrap something indissolubly human and stuff it into a machine? You don't. Machines will be intelligent and do very interesting things, but they won't be humans, they won't be ethical, they won't be conscious, and they won't love.

If you thought living through the Cold War with the key technology being a progression of nuclear weapons and platforms for their deployment, just wait for the fun of living through the era of military robots!

Handing Over Our Future to the Machines

CBS's Sixty Minutes had a segment on robot traders on Wall Street:



The CBS story focuses on insider trading and money made by this new technology. That worries me less than the unintended consequences of increasing automation. With the "flash crash" in May 2010, a taste of how robots can run amok. Nobody in his right mind wants to install robot traders that cause a meltdown, but it has occurred and if you listen closely they mentioned many other "mini flash crashes" have occurred since May. This is a train wreck waiting to happen!

The Future of Automobiles

From an article on the NY Times:

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.

The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

...

Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.

The Google research program using artificial intelligence to revolutionize the automobile is proof that the company’s ambitions reach beyond the search engine business.

Read the article and get a heads up on the future.

Update 2010-nov-03: Here is the official Google blog posting on this robotic car research. Here's the key bit from the post to show how serious Google is:

To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History.

Robots are Not Your Friends

At least I don't want to see this direction of robotics pursued too seriously. It calls up an elemental fear I have of snakes...







More about the project at CMU here.

Paul Davies' "The Eerie Silence"

This wasn't as dramatic a read as I had hoped. It was solid and workmanlike. It covers the field in answering the question: Is there Life Out There?

There were no shocks, no sudden new insights, or other bits to excite me. He does walk through the history of speculation about extraterrestrial life and spends a good deal of time on SETI, an organization which he has a special connection to since he runs the panel that defines the protocol for what to do after contact.

He covers all the bases. He walks through the Drake equation. He is knowledgeable about what science there is surrounding the search for ET. If you want to know the basic facts and the basic science behind the search for extraterrestrial life, and especially ET intelligence, then this is a good book to read. It won't make you want to get up and shout when you finish it. It won't arm you with special knowledge to take on the world. It will just give you the basic facts, and it ends up that those facts are fairly depressing. It is likely that there is no life and much more certain that there is no intelligent life out there.

I got a chuckle out of the section where he talks of religion and the search for ETs. He makes it very clear that Christians have an especially tough bit to handle since they claim that their god uniquely incarnated himself as a human. But if there are vast numbers of distinct ET species scattered across the universe, this is exceedingly hard to comprehend. Why earth? Why humans?

The one place where he opens up and lets you in to his innermost thoughts is in the final chapter where he talks about what he thinks/feels/knows wearing three hats: (1) scientist, (2) philosopher, (3) human. He is pessimistic with regard to life under (1) and (2), but he confesses that as a human he has had great hopes for finding ET since he was a child. I can second him on that. And I accept his views on (1) and (2) as fairly definitive. He has spent the time thinking about this and knows his science. It is pessimistic, but them's the facts. We are alone in an incredibly vast universe and are wired to think we have a "purpose" in life which obviously we are a meaningless speck in a vanishingly small speck of a planet on one medium sun in a mediocre galaxy in a universe that stretches 13.5 billion lights years, a distance that is truly impossible to really comprehend.

Brain in a Box

Here's some research being done at IBM:



This project is a bit ahead of schedule. Here's a graph by Hans Moravec from the 1990s estimating how soon a human-life intelligence could be achieved by computers:
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As I listen to Dharmendra Modha, I hear too much general fuzzy stuff. This guy is very, very far from achieving what he claims. Going back to the mid 1950s computer scientists have been promising that a "brain in a box" will be achieved in a decade or two. He needs to think less about ubiquitous implementation and "productivity" and more about the hard problem of coming up with a wiring which can process inputs and "think" about them and give results. This is so far from being achievable as to be laughable.

Back in the 1950s linguists thought they could produce an automated natural language translator. If you have used Google Translate, you know that 40 years later we are very, very far from achieving even this limited goal.

If you look at Douglas Lenat's Cyc project, for 16 years it has been trying to build a base of knowledge rules that would let a computer take in information and reason about it as a human would. That project is nowhere near being ready to deal with real world communication. For limited domains I'm sure it is helpful, but that is many orders of magnitude from what was promised when the project started.

Here is a Wired Magazine article that looks at Dharmendra Modha's research and calls it a "scam" (by another IBM researcher trying to build his own brain in a box!). I wouldn't call it a scam. I wrote research proposals. The pressure is always on to hype your project to get funding. Modha is guilty of "excessive enthusiasm". But without that he wouldn't have gotten any funding. It is a hoax in that the research goals will not be met within the project timeframe or budget. In fact, that timeframe will be off by at least an order of magnitude and the budget will be off by several orders of magnitude, easily 3 maybe 5 or even 8.