REEM-B - The latest in humanoid robots

For those of us who think it's very likely that technology's accelerating pace of advance is soon going to become too rapid to follow, developments like this one already seem quaint. You know what it's like to look nostalgically at photos of computers from the '50s, or old ads for magical household appliances. In a few years that's exactly how it will be to go back to articles about robots like REEM-B.

A new humanoid robot called Reem-B was unveiled on Wednesday at an event on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.

The Reem-B robot from Pal Technology Robotics is capable of face recognition, speech interaction, biped walking, traversing stairs, and sitting (see video below). It can also recognize and pick up objects, as well as evaluate and map out a room to better navigate it.

Reem-B stands at 4'10" (1.47 meters) tall and weighs about 132 pounds (60Kg). It can carry up to 26 pounds (12Kg) in its arms and walk at a speed of 1 mph (1.5Km/h). It can also climb stairs. Using a main CPU that consists of a Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz) and a Geode (500MHz), the robot can operate for about 120 minutes before its battery needs to be recharged.

Full article.

Video.

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Robotic Spiders and Snakes Enter the Battlefield

Talk about a frightening taste of the future. People tend to have a fear of robots (which is perhaps why designers try so hard to make them look non-threatening), and they have a definite fear of spiders and snakes. So what happens when you mesh the two concepts? The military is about to find out.

"BAE Systems is developing electronic spiders, insects, and snakes to help soldiers gather information without exposing them to dangerous situations on the battlefield, according an announcement the defense giant released this week. The effort is being funded by a $38 million agreement with the U.S. Army.

The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance aims to create miniature robots that will act as the eyes and ears of soldiers in dangerous situations, such caves and mountainous areas, potentially saving many lives."

View the promo video here.

Read the original article here.


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Flexing Artificial Muscles

Combining biological and non-biological materials may allow researchers to use the best of both worlds to develop viable alternatives to worn out human parts. A great example of this trend has been announced on NewScientistTech: Muscular Films.

The term sounds more like gay porn than a scientific development, but it actually refers to the conjoining of thin sheets of polymer and living muscle tissue.

Thin sheets of polymer coated with living muscle could be used to test new drugs, repair damaged body parts, or even create life-like bio-machines, researchers say.

The Harvard University team created the "muscular thin films" by attaching muscle cells to elastic polymer sheets. By laying down striped patterns of proteins on these polymers, they were able to make the muscle cells arrange themselves into muscle fibres, similar to those in animals.

When shocked with electricity, the resulting hybrid material can be made to bend, roll up, or wriggle, at a rate that can easily be controlled.

To see video demonstrations of some of these muscular films in action, click here and here.

The Modern Battle Space Will Soon Get More Interesting

As modern battle spaces becomes more and more populated with non-human combatants, we can expect them to look like nothing we have ever seen before. DARPA has unveiled multiple bots of war at DARPATech 2007.

There's Big Dog, the four-legged robotic jogger from Boston Dynamics.



There's Little Dog, a much smaller bot that will probably be most useful as a means of improving Big Dog, since data from Little God and its environment can be easily scaled up.



And on to the flying bots. This one is called MAV, short for the creativity-lacking name, Micro Air Vehicle. This one is supposed to be so easy to fly that a caveman could do it. It's a 16-pound UAV that takes off and lands vertically, can hover in place, and can monitor a 10-km radius.



Are you beginning to get the picture? Stay tuned.

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This MULE Needs no Rider

It is truly eye-opening to find out what kinds of gadgets and weapons are being developed as we sit here thinking nothing is going to change. And the stuff we find out about is only the tip of the iceberg, you can count on that. This military robotic vehicle, unfortunately named the MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment), developed by Lockheed Martin, is an advanced unmanned vehicle.

Lockheed Martin's Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment (MULE) offers extraordinary capability in unmanned vehicle technology. The MULE's highly advanced 6x6 independent articulated suspension, coupled with in-hub motors powering each wheel, provides extreme mobility in complex terrain, far exceeding that of vehicles using more conventional suspension systems. It climbs at least a 1-meter step, and can cross 1-meter gaps, traverse side slopes greater than 40 percent, ford water to depths over 0.5 meter and overpass obstacles as high as 0.5 meter while compensating for varying payload weights and center-of-gravity locations. The MULE includes three variants: Armed Robotic Vehicle - Assault (Light), Transport and Countermine.

The military has the big bucks, and so will usually be the most advanced in terms of what it's developing, but just as with the Hummer, these things usually find their way into non-military contexts.

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First Ever Armed Robots Deployed in Iraq: SWORDS

For the first time in the history of warfare, armed robots have been deployed in a battle zone. The robots are called SWORDS, short for "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system."

The robots are not autonomous, yet. They are controlled remotely, with layers of safety and kill switches in case one of them decides to go off reservation like number 5 in the movie Short Circuit. Only three of these devices have been placed into service, and none has yet had occasion to fire its weapon. But that is expected to change soon.

I keep telling you people. The pace is picking up. Stay tuned or get left behind.

Source: DangerRoom

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Is it Real or is it Memorex?

Are you old enough to remember the Memorex commercials? Was it Aretha Franklin singing a high note? Both the tape and the person broke the glass? This time the question is, which one is the bionic hand?

This technology represents a major milestone in the effort to provide amputees with limbs that work as well or better than the originals. It's called the i-Limb (sorry Steve Jobs, they got the name first) and it is the world's most advanced bionic hand.

It attempts to solve a difficult problem with artificial hands, and that is the absence of tactile feedback to the brain which tells the user when enough pressure has been applied. It uses a feature called stall detection to prevent crushing delicate objects, like other hands. Another feature is its modularity, allowing fingers to be swapped out in minutes.

As they become even more effective, artificial limbs will eventually surpass the original versions, at which point they will become a more attractive option for replacing an undamaged limb.

[via Wired]

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Mental Control of Mechanical Systems: It Has Arrived!

I am very excited to post about this new technology. Two different tech companies have independently developed systems that allow humans to control not only computer systems, but robots as well.

Neurosky recently demonstrated a cost effective bio sensor and signal processing system for the consumer market (see video). It is eerie to watch the participant learn to manipulate objects on the computer screen. As one would imagine, the controller must learn to focus enough attention to an object, then use certain thought patterns to either pull it or levitate it.

OLogic is another firm that has coupled the above technology with its robotics knowledge to allow users to control virtually any mechanical system using their mind.

If you watch the video, listen for the last comment from the announcer; I found his mentioning of the accelerating pace of tech development to be one of the first times a reporter has noticed the phenomenon behind the Singularity.



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Return of the (Robotic) Fly

We have already heard about the remote controlled moths being developed by implanting control chips into moth larvae. On a sort of parallel course, we have now learned that Harvard University has designed and built a fully robotic fly. And it does fly.

A life-size, robotic fly has taken flight at Harvard University. Weighing only 60 milligrams, with a wingspan of three centimeters, the tiny robot's movements are modeled on those of a real fly. While much work remains to be done on the mechanical insect, the researchers say that such small flying machines could one day be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

Of course DARPA is funding this research, in hopes of using the robotic Musca domesticas for stealth surveillance operations.

Recreating a fly's efficient movements in a robot roughly the size of the real insect was difficult, however, because existing manufacturing processes couldn't be used to make the sturdy, lightweight parts required. The motors, bearings, and joints typically used for large-scale robots wouldn't work for something the size of a fly. "Simply scaling down existing macro-scale techniques will not come close to the performance that we need," Wood says.

Some extremely small parts can be made using the processes for creating microelectromechanical systems. But such processes require a lot of time and money. Wood and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, needed a cheap, rapid fabrication process so they could easily produce different iterations of their designs.

While these developments are a major achievement, there remains quite a bit more to be done before this fly will be turned loose. It needs an onboard power supply, tiny sensor equipment and flight control computer chips. But having taken wing, one can have little doubt that this little robot will eventually be on the job.

Source

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Exploring Swarm Theory

As promised, I have been searching the Internet for the latest news about emergent complexity. I found this fascinating article on National Geographic written by Peter Miller.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

That is fascinating, you say, but how does it affect the price of rice in China? It turns out that building computer models of ant behavior and swarm intelligence is allowing researchers to solve real-world problems.

In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. The company produces industrial and medical gases, mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, at about a hundred locations in the United States and delivers them to 6,000 sites, using pipelines, railcars, and 400 trucks. Deregulated power markets in some regions (the price of electricity changes every 15 minutes in parts of Texas) add yet another layer of complexity.

So they built a computer model based on the behavior of ants.

Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.

"It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have," Harper says. "But at six o'clock every morning we get a solution that says how we're going to manage our day."

For truck drivers, the new system took some getting used to. Instead of delivering gas from the plant closest to a customer, as they used to do, drivers were now asked to pick up shipments from whichever plant was making gas at the lowest delivered price, even if it was farther away.

"You want me to drive a hundred miles? To the drivers, it wasn't intuitive," Harper says. But for the company, the savings have been impressive. "It's huge. It's actually huge."

Another application of swarm intelligence uses the flocking actions of birds in flight.

A team of robots that could coordinate its actions like a flock of birds could offer significant advantages over a solitary robot. Spread out over a large area, a group could function as a powerful mobile sensor net, gathering information about what's out there. If the group encountered something unexpected, it could adjust and respond quickly, even if the robots in the group weren't very sophisticated, just as ants are able to come up with various options by trial and error. If one member of the group were to break down, others could take its place. And, most important, control of the group could be decentralized, not dependent on a leader.

This field is just getting started, and the applications to come defy imagination. How much do you want to bet that there's swarm intelligence in the brain's huge collection of neurons? Stay tuned.

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Learning How to Walk Uphill: Neural Loops

One of the most memorable times in any parent's life is when their child first learns to walk. One parent will hold the toddler upright while the other stands a few feet away with arms extended in encouragement. Baby steps, then a diaper-cushioned fall. Didn't quite make it. Try again. Baby gets almost all the way there. Try again. Success! Clapping hands and hugs all around.

What a marvelous thing is our brain, to be able to learn such a difficult process. We go on from there to the most anxiety-laden time in any parent's life: When their child first learns to drive. But learn they do, forming new neuronal connections as they go. Like riding a bicycle...you never forget how to do it. You add skill upon skill, understanding upon understanding. Amazing.

Now, let's apply that power to machines. Add some neuronal loops to the analysis circuitry, and you get this...the robot learns how to walk up a ramp. Remind you of anything?



[via Think Artificial]

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Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Ultra-Fast WiFi

Looks like I'm on an AR roll here, but it can't be helped. For AR to work, it seems to me that ubiquitous, ultra fast wireless connectivity will be required. At this point, even wired broadband is far too slow for a believable augmented reality overlay system. Much higher bandwidth wireless will have to be made virtually omnipresent.

A few city centers have made free wireless access available, but it will have to be present in every nook and cranny, every field and forest. Which will come first, the chicken or the killer app? I think the infrastructure and the application will have to encourage each other to be created, perhaps by the same company. (Could this be why Google is quietly buying unused pipes?)

As far as the hardware is concerned, here is a little fellow who doesn't yet exist, but may be developed in time to play a part in the task of making wifi reach every cubic centimeter of livable space on earth. Right now it's called the LANdroid, and it looks like this...



Apparently these guys are on DARPA's wish list. So after they are built and battle-tested, perhaps they can be deployed for peacetime use. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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That Moth Might Be Watching You

I don't like insects of any kind, but now there is reason to dislike them even more. They may be watching me.

I'm just kidding, of course. I am of insufficient interest to anyone to be spied on. But the moths may soon be watching someone. Before you start to worry about my sanity, let me fill you in on developments.

You've heard of DARPA, haven't you? They are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Their mandate is to manage and direct "selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursue research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions."

One of DARPA's projects is HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems). HI-MEMS "is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis." Yes, what they do is inject a chip into a moth at the larval stage, allowing the generation of new tissues to "form a reliable and stable tissue-machine interface." But to what end?

DARPA sees this as a possible low-cost means to create robot moths that will go wherever they are directed and presumably send audio and video back to their controllers. This will allow its developers to effectively co-opt millions of years of evolution rather than trying to make mechanical flying entities.

You may have seen video demonstrations of remote controlled rats that can be steered from a wirelessly actuated signal to its brain. So we (humans) are clearly working on developing the means to control the minds of lower forms of life to suit our needs. This fact raises some frightening possibilities.

If the brains of moths and rats can be controlled, so can the brains of humans. The Manchurian Candidate scenario doesn't seem as far fetched as it once did. It woudn't be difficult to install a controller chip without the host's knowledge. Consider that nature has already divised the means to do this, as exemplified in the brain-controlling fungus.

The spores of the fungus attach themselves to the external surface of the ant, where they germinate. They then enter the ant’s body through the tracheae (the tubes through which insects breathe), via holes in the exoskeleton called spiracles. Fine fungal filaments called mycelia then start to grow inside the ant’s body cavity, absorbing the host’s soft tissues but avoiding its vital organs.

When the fungus is ready to sporulate, the mycelia grow into the ant’s brain. The fungus then produces chemicals which act on the host’s brain and alter its perception of pheromones. This causes the ant to climb a plant and, upon reaching the top, to clamp its mandibles around a leaf or leaf stem, thus securing it firmly to what will be its final resting place.

The fungus then devours the ant’s brain, killing the host. The fruiting bodies of the fungus sprout from the ant’s head, through gaps in the joints of the exoskeleton. Once mature, the fruiting bodies burst, releasing clusters of capsules into the air. These in turn explode on their descent, spreading airborne spores over the surrounding area. These spores then infect other ants, completing the life cycle of the fungus. Depending on the type of fungus and the number of infecting spores, death of an infected insect takes between 4-10 days.

Any entity that is co-opted to act according to the wishes of an external controller would not be aware of that fact. It would believe that it is acting rationally and according to its own wishes. This has already been demonstrated in experiments on humans. For example, when the part of their brains that control their sense of humor was electrically stimulated so that they would find anything funny, they would always rationalize a reason for their irrational reaction. The bottom line: you would be controlled without being aware of it.

So how should we respond to these developments? I believe that they cannot be stopped, so we should pursue the development of safeguards and defenses at the same time that we are developing the capabilities. Someone will achieve these things. It should be we, as responsible people, who get there first and have safeguards and defenses alongside the technology itself.

The idea for this post was inspired by Think Artificial

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Want to Sound Like a Singularity Guru? Learn These Terms

George P. Dvorsky's blog, Sentient Developments, has an excellent list of "Must-Know" terms for the 21st century intelligentsia.

If you like to think of yourself as a knowledgeable person who is comfortable discussing the bleeding-edge developments of his or her day, you need to study this list. Here's a taste:

Artificial General Intelligence: This ain't your daddy's AI. Rather, AGI describes the kind of intelligence that you and I have -- the commonsense knowhow we have when we're put into unfamiliar situations. Once developed, artificial agents endowed with AGI will be non-specialized intelligent entities that will come to represent the bona fide synthetic equivalent to human intelligence, and then move beyond.

Cosmological Eschatology (aka physical eschatology): CE is the study of how the Universe develops, ages, and ultimately comes to an end. While hardly a new concept, what is new is the suggestion that advanced intelligence may play a role in the universe's life cycle. Given the radical potential for postbiological superintelligence, a number of thinkers have suggested that universe engineering is a likely activity for advanced civilizations. This has given rise to a number of theories, including the developmental singularity hypothesis and the selfish biocosm hypothesis.

Friendly AI: If we are going to survive the Singularity and the onset of greater-than-human AI, it had better be friendly. And if it turns out to be friendly, it won't be by accident. Computer science theorists such as Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ben Goertzel are already working on what may ultimately prove to be an intractable problem. A poorly programmed, malevolent, or misguided SAI could destroy all of humanity with a mere thought. Asimov's Three Laws will do little against incomprehensibly powerful autopotent entities (a term coined by Nick Bostrom indicating total self-awareness and ability to self-modify).

You don't want to be totally left behind, do you? Then get cracking!

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Robot Gives Remote Medical Faculty Legs

What a confusing headline. I apologize. Allow me to explain. Suffering from a shortage of faculty, the Nursing Institute of West Central Ohio has added a new member to the nursing educational community. Its name is RP-7™, and it is a Remote Presence Robotic System developed by InTouch Health®.

The robot, in effect, gives legs to remote faculty.

It will allow the professor to move, see, hear and talk as though they were actually with the students. As baby boomer nurses in education approach retirement, this technology will provide them with a new career option. This cutting-edge technology makes it possible for nursing faculty with chronic disorders or disabilities to continue to contribute to nursing education. It provides a seasoned workforce faculty with an option to work while on vacation or in retirement from anywhere in the world.

Judging by appearances, it seems to me that a few days' exposure to the robot might be required before students can tune it out and see the professor instead. Now that these faculty members have mobility, vision, hearing and voice, it does not take too much imagination to envision the addition of touch, in which case the remote nurses and doctors can treat patients as well as teach students.

Via BetterHumans

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Robot Cerebellum: Coming in Two Years

The BBC reports on Spanish scientists' efforts to build an artificial cerebellum to be used in humanoid robots.

Robots today don't move very much like humans. They lack the fine motor skills that it took evolution billions of years to get right. But researchers at the "Department of Architecture and Computing Technology at the University of Granada, part of a wider European project dubbed Sensopac," hope to implant an artificial cerebellum into a robot within two years.

The cerebellum is the part of the brain that controls motor functions.

The work at the University of Granada is concentrating on the design of microchips that incorporate a full neuronal system, emulating the way the cerebellum interacts with the human nervous system.

Implanting the man-made cerebellum in a robot would allow it to manipulate and interact with other objects with far greater subtlety than industrial robots can currently manage, said researcher Professor Eduardo Ros Vidal, who is co-ordinating work at the University of Granada.

How will humans respond to and interact with robots who move like we do? We will simply find it that much easier to anthropomorphize, which is something we do with not a little alacrity. We will develop ethical guidelines to help us know how to treat them, and eventually we will upload our minds into them. Stay tuned.

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Ray Kurzweil Speaks! The Singularity Explained

I wish everyone would watch this presentation by Ray at the Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There's a natural skepticism people feel when they first hear or read about the predictions made by Ray's Law of Accelerating Returns, but when you listen to him explain how it has worked and will work, you can't help but take him seriously. Ray is not a cockeyed optimist. He is a globally respected inventor, author and researcher. (Read more about his achievements here.)

The folks at Technology Evangelist attended the conference and recorded Ray's keynote presentation and were generous enough to share the recording with us. Please check it out below. It will be well worth your time, I promise.



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Machine Consciousness: No Practical Value?

I read an interesting article this morning from the Burlington Free Press featuring the work of Josh Bongard, hired by the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of computer science. The article focused much of its attention on Bongard's self-aware robot, Black Starfish.

The question naturally arises: What is self-awareness?

"You have a sense of your own body," Bongard said. That much seemed to be true of Starfish, whose creators assigned it the task of moving across a surface without telling it how to do so. Instead, the robot was programmed to test the locomotive possibilities for itself with a "series of playful actions" that Bongard compared to what a human infant engages in. The robot learns what its body can do and what it can't, ultimately teaching itself to walk, as Bongard describes it.

The article concludes with these thoughts:

He acknowledges that the notion of conferring a machine with self-awareness -- a quality which some people consider exclusively human -- can be "controversial."

He distinguishes, though, between self-awareness and consciousness. Starfish had one characteristic but not the other, he believes.

To be conscious, he said, one must be aware of one's own self-awareness.

Could a conscious robot be built?

"It's theoretically possible," Bongard replied, "but I'm not sure of the practical value."

I certainly give a lot of weight to statements made by an expert in the field, but Bongard's final words, as reported in the article, are curious. I wonder what Bongard considers the concept of "practical value" to encompass. The article does not explore further what he might mean, so it's impossible to say for sure, but if we take the comment at face value, perhaps he means to say that a conscious machine intelligence would serve no purpose for the betterment of humanity, at least that he can think of.

My previous post does mention the problems of ethics that are involved in how we would treat a conscious machine entity, and the idea that useful, intelligent machines need not be conscious, so perhaps Bongard is correct in a narrow sense, speaking as a scientist. But is practical value the only good? I think not.

I am reminded of a wonderful line in the movie Communion, where actor Chris Walken, playing the part of Whitley Streiber, discussing the reality (as he sees it) of ETs visiting Earth, says "The world is getting so small, it would be nice to meet someone new!"

That sort of captures one of the motivations behind the goal of machine consciousness: It would be someone new. Practical value? Maybe not. Valuable? Definitely.



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Boiling the Frog: Our Transition to Singularity

You've all heard the metaphor, right? Boiling a frog? Gradually increasing the temperature of the water so the frog gets used to it until it's hot enough to boil? Yes, that one. Apart from the sad conclusion of the analogy, the idea of gradual change not being very noticeable fits the way that accelerating technological change will be accepted by humans.

When you first hear the predictions that the singularity postulates, you are tempted to scoff. Human minds uploaded into a computer? Conscious machines blowing past human-levels of intelligence? Nanotech-augmented humans living indefinitely? Poppycock!

But consider how you would have responded 50 years ago to the idea of a global Internet connecting everyone instantly. Tivo. Google. iPods. You might have been tempted to scoff then, too. (Although society was a lot less jaded and a lot more credulous back then.)

My point is that we do not notice change when it happens gradually. And we should understand that the predictions of the singularity, although fast by today's standards, will arrive gradually, piece by piece, degree by degree, until we are happily boiling away in a delicious stew of transhumanism and computation. Let's look at a few examples.

Robotics: Rather than picture a world of intelligent androids a la I, Robot or Commander Data, think instead of robots being deployed in jobs that are too dangerous, difficult, unhealthy or boring for humans. That's already happening. Robots that drive carts around a Pittsburgh hospital, freeing up nurses to do more important things. Robots in Iraq that check out suspicious-looking objects that might be roadside bombs. We should see the development of robots doing mining operations and meat-packing. By taking on these jobs, robots improve the quality of human lives and make us more productive. As Rodney Brooks, Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and CTO of iRobot, adds:

So, it's not going to take any jobs away from people who want them.

Brain surgery. These surgeons are now doing surgeries they wouldn't have contemplated before because they have much better tools of knowing where everything is and being able to know what's happening.

It's like, you know, computers didn't replace office workers or accountants. They have changed the nature of the work they did, increased their productivity...my reality meter says that it's much more a symbiosis, working together and the robots doing the easy cases of the easy tasks, etc.

What about fully-autonomous cars. Will we feel comfortable giving up control of a vehicle traveling a busy highway at 70 mph?

I think that willingness to give up control is going to be slow. The car companies aren't saying, 'let's build an autonomous car right now.' They're saying, 'let's build aids.' I think gradually over time people would become more accustomed to this and we'll see gradual shifts. The high-end Lexus self-parking, automatic lane changing, staying at a fixed distance from another car. That's going to continue, because these are safety issues, and the Japanese car manufacturers in particular and the Germans want safety.

Augmented Brains: This will also happen gradually, beginning with neural prosthetics, at first being medical in nature. Cochlear implants for people with no hearing, artificial retinas for the sightless. There will be memory implants for people who have lost memory-creation and -storage function in the hippocampus. But when these implants become less expensive and require less-invasive procedures, they will be offered commercially as enhancements to functioning brains as well.

Uploaded (Instantiated) Minds: A team of researchers at Stanford is working at designing computer chips that mimic the human brain:

The team is also in the process of developing other neuromorphic chips. Its latest project--and the most ambitious neuromorphic effort anywhere to date--is a model of the cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain. The intricate structure of the cortex allows us to perform complex computational feats, such as understanding language, recognizing faces, and planning for the future. The model's first-generation design will consist of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons.

As these designs begin to approximate the functioning of the brain, it is not difficult to imagine researchers uploading patterns gleaned from high-resolution scans of animal brains and then human brains into these computer substrates.

These are just a few examples of how gradually these developments will take place, so gradually that we don't notice. Unless we stay tuned.

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Skynet is Now Live

I almost said "alive," but we're not there yet. In an announcement that's eerily reminiscent of Terminator, PublicTechnology.net reported Friday that the UK's latest military satellite, dubbed Skynet 5A, is now in service.

It is the first of three hardened satellites that will be used to ferry communications between the British forces anywhere in the world and their UK headquarters.

Just the day before this announcement came the report that the US was ordering another four MQ-9 'Reapers', worth $59m, to supplement its initial fleet of seven. The British plan to deploy its first "fully armed" Reapers later this year. According to the Register,

The MQ-9 is the most formidable killer robot currently in operation. It's a big beast, 36 feet long with an 86-foot wingspan. It can fly for 14 hours without refuelling, going at a maximum speed of 300mph and as high as 50,000 feet - nine and a half miles up.

The US Air Force describes it as an "unmanned hunter/killer weapon system". This term might perhaps have been coined by a fan of the classic Terminator movies, in which dystopian future battlegrounds are overflown by murderous Flying-HK death-droids intent on wiping out the last vestiges of human resistance to the machine overlords.

The real-world flying HK is at least as deadly as the ones in the movies, able to lift a hefty 3,750 pounds of munitions. This can equate to 14 laser-guided Hellfire missiles, a smaller number of Paveway smartbombs, or GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) with their own satnav/inertial guidance.

The Register makes the perhaps justified assumption that the Reapers will be operated remotely through the new Skynet satellite system. Even if this turns out to be the case, however, it seems that the command to fire on an enemy target will still be the sole province of a human operator.

If and when the killer drones become fully autonomous, or are run remotely by an artificial intelligence, the Terminator scenario will become more comparable to the reality. Until then, stay tuned.

(Via Robots.net)

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