FTA: Wow, psychopathic robots -- I didn't see that coming. And by didn't see that coming I mean I'VE BEEN TRYING TO WARN YOU FOREVER.
Yeah, I'm no neoludite, but I really think we need to be on top of this stuff.
From the referenced article: A human-robot co-existence society could emerge by 2030, says Chen in his paper. Already iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba floor cleaner are a part of more than 3 million American households. The next generation robots will be more sophisticated and are expected to provide services such as nursing, security, housework and education.
I've long argued against the idea that AI and robotics need to achieve human abilities sets before they begin being an economic danger to broad swaths of the human population. Part of my argument is that it doesn't take human inputs to get human level results.
To wit:
This is exactly the sort of solution I'm talking about. To replace a human worker you don't need to build a robot that does everything they do. You can build various robots which together do the things that the worker does. Similarly you don't have to create a program which is capable of doing everything the human can do - to replace a worker, the AI doesn't have to have an opinion on films or understand the differences between being sarcastic vs. being sardonic, it just needs to preform a task, or a series of tasks, essentially as well as a human and do so at a price point that is attractive to its corporation.
Since we're Americans, we can also expect to soon see systems of robots like these employed on battlefields all over the world! Lowering the cost of war in terms of American lives mean the jingoists will want to go to war at the drop of a hat (what else is new?) and it will be harder to convince them when it's time to stop. It also means, as I've said before, that we're going to see a *rise* in terrorism. Terrorist are not vandals. The whole point of sending a machine instead of a soldier is that we don't really care (at least on an emotional/moral level) what happens to the machine, so the terrorists will behave around the machines and then they will target civilians.
Listen, roboticists, you're all very bright and clever, but I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to do a little more work on solar power, eh? Maybe wind?
FTA: MINAMI-ALPS, Yamanashi -- "Momozono Robot Ramen," a ramen shop that opened here in November last year, is gaining popularity not only for its delicious ramen noodles, but for its robotic chef. The ramen-making robot was built by 60-year-old shop owner Yoshihira Uchida, who spent about 20 million yen on its construction. Customers can place their orders on a computer in the shop, customizing various aspects such as the levels of soy sauce, salt, and richness of the soup. Uchida says there are 40 million different flavor permutations.
This is just the first of many. We'll automate every short order chef and follow that up with all chefs.
Japan as we know is the mecca of all things mecha and this 1/1 scale, Scratch build model ( or monument ) of the RX-78 GUNDAM in Odaiba Japan is the coolest statue I've ever seen put in a public park.
If there was ever a time to go to Japan, do it now before it's gone.
The Unabomber's stuff is up for auction. And I desperately want them to publish his journals. Ted Kaczynski's nuttier than the spelling of his last name, but the man is also one of the most interesting psychopaths you could ever take the time to read about.
For starters, he's very complicated. Dr. Charles Epstein, one of the Unabomber's victims, characterizes Kaczynski in the article linked above as, "the essence of evil. He's evil and amoral. He has no compassion." Dr. Epstein has, to say the least, every right to feel that way about Kazcynski, however I would argue that his remarks, largely correct though they are, fail to paint the full picture of the second most famous terrorist to ever target Americans.
Let me be clear in my remarks, Ted Kaczynski is not a man to be admired or respected. His attacks were awful. His fears, perhaps not as ungrounded as they may appear at first blush, are, never the less, hardly a justification for his actions. That being said, I reserve the word 'evil' for those whose crimes are motivated by the pleasure they derive from them. I think that pleasure was absent from Kaczynski's motivations.
Kaczynski, like, I would wager, all terrorists, was motivated but that most dangerous of concepts, 'the greater good.' His manifesto is peppered with criticisms of how modern society has eroded personal freedoms and about how 'leftism' has made it impossible to act completely morally. In this respect many of his quotes are indistinguishable from those of Glen Beck (Plus, neither of them are overly partial to institutions of higher education) or even some of the more radical Teabaggers many of whom echo the unabomber's views on political correctness's impact on/relationship to morality.
(I feel it's important to note where Kaczynski departs from the American extreme right, however, isn't just in his acceptance of violence, but in what I personally feel is an only logical extension of his distaste for large government and that's his hatred of large organizations of virtually any kind but specifically manufacturing. Not being a great speller, I frequently have misspelled the Unabomber as the 'Unibomber,' thinking the 'uni' was short for university. In fact the term comes from the FBI case designation, 'Unabom' which was a contraction of 'UNiversity and Airline BOMber.')
Kaczynski's lack of compassion for others could be clearly seen in his short story, 'Ship of Fools,' which has been turned into a stop motion animation short that is worth watching. Listen to the language Kaczynski uses to describe the other groups/passengers on the ship of fools and notice also the way that he dismisses their problems as trivial compared to his own (the ones that, by and large, only he can see):
Still though, Kaczynski is not an entirely unthoughtful person, far from it. Take, for example, the strange case of Bill Geerhart who, in 1999, posed as a little boy and sent letters to various celebrities, politicians and serial killers. One of the people he wrote was Ted Kaczynski. Below is Geerhart's letter and Kaczynski's response...
This note is turning into something far longer than I intended it to be, so I will cut this short by opening up a whole new can of worms and just point out that we are, as Americans (or, perhaps, just as humans in general), rather inconsistent with our views on Terrorism. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is all too frequently a PR campaign. Look at how some have even defended the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller as justifiable because they believe the doctor, an abortion provider, to be himself a murderer or that his murder wasn't 'really' terrorism because what some(usually specified as Islamic)terrorist groups do is 'worse.' How do you feel about water boarding? How do you feel about what North Korea is doing to our journalists? Or about what we're doing to an Iraqi journalist? Do the ends justify the means? Is it best to fight fire with fire? Is Ted Kaczynski's greatest crime terrorism or is Ted Kaczynski's greatest crime being wrong about what is the greater good?
Personally, I think he's a terrorist. Personally, I think that's why Dr. Epstein thinks he's evil and not because Kaczynski's a neo-luddite and Epstein's a geneticist. I also think that for a man preoccupied by the notion of acting in a 'competely moral way,' Kaczynski was quick to decend into tribalism....
... and I can't wait to read the intellectual acrobatics that will be required to justify his actions in his own mind.
PS: Kaczynski fun fact, the Unabomber is a virgin. PPS: Learning more about the Unabomber is really fascinating. Obviously he was mentally ill, but the degree to which his mental illness impacted his life... was incredible. He couldn't read people's emotions, he couldn't distinguish facial expressions... surprising? No, not exactly, but fascinating.
FTA: The robots in Jeff Krichmar’s lab don’t look like much. CARL-1, his latest model, is a squat, white trash can contraption with a couple of shopping cart wheels bolted to its side, a video camera wired to the lid, and a couple of bunny ears taped on for good measure. But open up that lid and you’ll find something remarkable — the beginnings of a truly biological nervous system. CARL-1 has thousands of neurons and millions of synapses that, he says, “are just about the edge of the amount of size and complexity found in real brains.” Not surprisingly, robots built this way — using the same operating principles as our nervous system — are called neurobots. Krichmar emphasizes that these artificial nervous systems are based upon neurobiological principles rather than computer models of how intelligence works. The first of those principles, as he describes it, is: “The brain is embodied in the body and the body is embedded in the environment — so we build brains and then we put these brains in bodies and then we let these bodies loose in an environment to see what happens,” This has become something of a foundational principle — and the great and complex challenge — of neurobotics.
By show of hands, who's comfortable with this? Anyone? Anyone?
FTA: Firstly, mobile robots have now proved able to cope with complex outdoor environments; secondly, the price of production has fallen; and, finally, society should now see robot labourers as a benefit not a curse.
Speak for yourself, article! I'm less than thrilled by the idea that food will become that much more industrialized.
FTA: Scottish scientists yesterday claimed we are only five years away from a generation of robots capable of putting together wardrobes, beds and chairs.
The article's headline is about Robot Butlers but the obvious downside is that any robot capable of being a butler is (likely as not) capable of being virtually anything else. Add in a pinch of this and a dash of that, maybe a smidge of this and boom, this is what you get....
This is serious. We all like the fantasy of our having robot butlers but we fail to realize the reality of how this technology would impact our world. Robot butlers, once they hit the appropriate price point, will simply gut the jobs of the unskilled. By dramatically increasing the labor supply labor wages will free fall... essentially, if a robot can do a job 24 hrs a day for X dollars a day(maintenance, fuel, depreciation of value), and a human can do the same job 16 hours a day, but not quite as well, than they will have to take approximately (or less than) x/2 dollars a day. (Cost of a robot/years until replacement is needed)+(robots annual maintenance)+(robot's fuel expenditures)= (total annual salary of all workers needed to do the same job) + (amount needed to compensate for losses due to human inefficiency).
There are circumstances that could mitigate the problem: a strong public backlash, (bad) deflation due to lowered buying power of the large number of unemployed, (good) deflation due to the cheaper manufacturing costs, government intervention and safety nets.
Now, all that being said, I totally want one. The world is going to go through some extremely interesting changes. They're already happening. It doesn't take huge leaps in our technological capabilities to see amazing changes- just look at how the internet is still changing our business world.
FTA: A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries. Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast. Ross King, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, said that Adam's results were modest, but real. "It's certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable," he says.
Of note here, the more specialized a task is, the easier it is to automate. Interesting times ahead.
And some more.... this from another article about another lab AI.
FTA: The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that become established laws – yet without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.
And in a funny sort of connectedness, this inovation in automation will likely send some extra Middle Eastern Cabbies our way... the UAE is introducing the driverless cab.
The US Army is drafting a white paper on the subject of robots; how to deploy them, what they can be used for, how much autonomy to give them...
FTA: "This is a concept paper to think about warfighting outcomes and what robotics will do for soldiers," says U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, who directs the Army Capabilities Integration Center, Fort Monroe, Va. "I am starting out with the idea of having an technology-enabled human. [But] we might someday come up with [separate] IT doctrine and robot doctrine." He reiterates that "we want to make the people or humans in charge under command and control in a 'whole of government' approach."
PW Singer has written extensively about it, here's a video of PW plugging his book Wired For War that Man With Powers first pointed out to me:
Headline: Robots Are Taking An Increasing Number Of Jobs, New UN Report Says
When's this from? 2004.
FTA: The chances of having an obedient robot do unwelcome or dangerous jobs have increased tremendously, with orders for industrial robots rising to a record 18 per cent in the first half of this year, a new report co-sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) says.
And this is now with clunkily engineered robots with narrow (to no) AI. It reinforces my point that what we already are able to do could replace jobs by the hundreds of thousands. In a few years it will begin. By the time we're forty unemployment could be in the ball park of the Great Depression. We should entertain the possibility that this is a chiasmic period in history. Our economy is shrinking and our technology is advancing. This might be the time that they cross and we begin a permanent and ever accelerating contraction of the number of people needed to maintain the entirety of the system. Less and less people producing more and more.
It raises an interesting question that isn't really up my alley- what would happen with a robot with AGI that has out 'lived' its usefulness? In reality, I don't think we'll create much AGI, not because we will never be able to, but because there are good reasons not to. For starters, narrow AI- AI that has little-to-no personality, little-to-no opinions- would be more appealing to businesses that are likely to be the first to be able to afford AI. This is also, not coincidentally, where the majority of the funding into AI research is going.
The first hour's the most important. Strokes, heart attacks, serious injuries- your odds of surviving any of them dramatically improve if you're able to get medical care within the first hour. With that in mind, meet the ER... 2.o.
FTA: Help could come in the form of a mobile operating theatre, according to a consortium led by non-profit lab SRI International, based in Menlo Park, California. The device, called Trauma Pod, is still in the early stages, but its developers claim it will ultimately be able to retrieve someone from the battlefield, diagnose them, and perform lifesaving procedures while transferring them to hospital.
This, or something quite a bit like it, could also be used on manned mission to Mars or in remote parts of the world where access to hospitals is spotty at best. This also fits into my general thesis about our work force- we'll be able to streamline more and more each day. Still, the days of AI doctors aren't around the corner.
Don't worry, I'm confident our youth are dumb and violent enough to destroy these things for pizza... well until we get the CCTV's everywhere like they do in London.
For me, Kurzweil's money in the bank... up to a point. All prediction models break down past the singularity- yet he continues to make predictions about what will come after it. Now, all that being said, I think he's broadly right. We stand at the cusp of three major revolutions (see my post about Juan Enriquez) all of which are likely to break in the next ten to twenty years. Anyone of them could fundamentally change the world. All three of them definitely will.
What kind of world will our grandkids live in? To us, it will truly seem like magic- especially on the holodeck.
