(Other Words) Tick-tick-tick — each sweep of Big Tech’s clock enhances corporate power and sweep away more of our civil rights.
At first, each new surge of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies can seem perfectly benign, even playful. Take “Spot,” the robotic, four-legged “doggie” that actually has no spots, no puppy eyes, no tail to wag, and can’t bark.
It’s very undoggy. In fact, this electronic critter is rather creepily nightmarish, but it’s marketed by cute videos, including one of Spot mixing margaritas (admit it, that beats training your real dog to bring your slippers to you).
But you can’t just adopt a Spot at your local animal shelter. Each artificial canine — manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which is owned by Hyundai — sells for about $75,000.
So who’s buying them? Mainly such big corporate outfits as oil refineries, mining operations, and electric utilities that want an unblinking eye to monitor and record workers, visitors, protestors, and all others who approach their facilities. Just one more layer of our cycloptic surveillance society.
But the point at which Spot really loses all cuteness and turns into a menacing beast of authoritarianism is when it’s turned into a police dog.
(Vice) Despite widespread public outrage at police departments’ use of Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, law enforcement agencies continue to look for ways to experiment with the headless, quadrupedal machine.
One of the more creative examples comes from Honolulu, where police spent more than $150,000 in COVID-19 relief funding to purchase a Spot robot to take body temperatures, disinfect, and patrol the city’s homeless quarantine encampment.
Honolulu is one of four police departments to purchase or lease a Spot robot—the Massachusetts State Police, New York City Police Department (which recently returned the robots), and the Dutch National Police, which purchased one of the machines in April.
The purchase of the robot by the Honolulu Police Department (HPD), first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat, was one of several expensive purchases the department made for the encampment that angered Honolulu residents who felt the money could be better spent elsewhere.
During a January city council meeting, HPD officials attempted to “vindicate ourselves for some of the bad press.” They claimed that Spot would actually save the department money because it would reduce the need for more manpower and equipment, and that the robot allowed the department to keep operating a successful street-to-shelter program despite the pandemic.
Last week, the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference took place in Washington, D.C. One of the exhibitors was Ghost Robotics—we've previously covered their nimble and dynamic quadrupedal robots, which originated at the University of Pennsylvania with Minitaur in 2016. Since then, Ghost has developed larger, ruggedized "quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles" (Q-UGVs) suitable for a variety of applications, one of which is military.
At AUSA, Ghost had a variety of its Vision 60 robots on display with a selection of defense-oriented payloads, including the system above, which is a remotely controlled rifle customized for the robot by a company called SWORD International.
The image of a futuristic-looking, potentially lethal weapon on a quadrupedal robot has generated some very strong reactions (the majority of them negative) in the media as well as on social media over the past few days. We recently spoke with Ghost Robotics' CEO Jiren Parikh to understand exactly what was being shown at AUSA, and to get his perspective on providing the military with armed autonomous robots.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Fitting network models to neural activity is an important tool in neuroscience. A popular approach is to model a brain area with a probabilistic recurrent spiking network whose parameters maximize the likelihood of the recorded activity. Although this is widely used, we show that the resulting model does not produce realistic neural activity. To correct for this, we suggest to augment the log-likelihood with terms that measure the dissimilarity between simulated and recorded activity. This dissimilarity is defined via summary statistics commonly used in neuroscience and the optimization is efficient because it relies on back-propagation through the stochastically simulated spike trains. We analyze this method theoretically and show empirically that it generates more realistic activity statistics. We find that it improves upon other fitting algorithms for spiking network models like GLMs (Generalized Linear Models) which do not usually rely on back-propagation. This new fitting algorithm also enables the consideration of hidden neurons which is otherwise notoriously hard, and we show that it can be crucial when trying to infer the network connectivity from spike recordings.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
A lab experiment investigated how college students respond to touch from a humanoid robot during conversation. The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, revealed that students who received touch from the robot (pats on the hand) felt more positive affect during the interaction. Moreover, the students were more likely to comply with a request from the robot if it was accompanied by touch.
Interpersonal touch — from human to human — has been linked to numerous benefits such as reduced stress and improved immune functioning. Some studies have suggested that touch from a robot can also elicit positive reactions in humans, suggesting the potential for a new form of therapy called “robotherapy.” But findings from these studies have been largely mixed and the studies themselves were not without limitations.
Study authors Laura Hoffmann and Nicole C. Krämer note that previous studies have almost exclusively evaluated mutual touch between robots and humans. The researchers were interested in isolating the effects of touch initiated from a robot to a human. To do this, they designed a lab experiment where participants engaged in a one-on-one interaction with a robot who either patted their hand during conversation or not.
A total of 48 students from a European university took part in the lab study. The students were told they would be having a conversation with a robot counselor and were randomly assigned to a touch or no-touch condition. In both conditions, the participants were filmed as they engaged in a conversation with a humanoid robot that was being controlled by an experimenter in a separate room. The robot was Softbank Robotics’ NAO robot and was roughly two feet tall with a plastic body that included eyes, a mouth, and hands.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
How ‘I quit' is leading to 'I, Robot'
Last week, two separate but related labor market themes caught my attention.
After Thursday’s news that employees walking off the job hit yet another record in September, a report from Reuters showed that North American companies added a record number of robots this year to bolster assembly lines, in a bid to alleviate the well-chronicled labor crunch (a hat tip on this article goes to economic commentator James Pethokoukis, who runs one of my favorite reads on the global economy).
Citing data from the Association for Advancing Automation, Reuters pointed out that industrial firms rang up nearly $1.5 billion worth of robots (29,000 to be exact) — a whopping 37% more than the comparable period in 2020. Separately, Google Cloud research in June showed that two-thirds of manufacturers using artificial intelligence (AI) are relying more heavily on it.
The Morning Brief has ruminated about the impact of the labor shortage and its close blood relative, the Great Resignation. Connecting the seemingly disparate threads, it poses a burning question: Are workers reluctant to fill open jobs — or stay put in them, for that matter — sowing the seeds of humanity’s eventual demise in the labor force?
However irrational, the theme that human workers should fear the dawn of our robot overlords is hardly a novel one. Yet like everything else in the pandemic-era, the fallout from COVID-19 has poured accelerant on an already raging fire. With conditions worsening, we cannot help but wonder if workers are hastening the rise of automation in a way that displaces human labor — but in a more permanent way?
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
What does Google’s parent company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start.
The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating “a general-purpose learning robot” — has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google’s Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks.
“We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices,” said Everyday Robot’s chief robot officer Hans Peter Brøndmo in a blog post. “The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors.”
These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There’s a “head” on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation.
One of Alphabet’s Everyday Robot machines cleans the crumbs off a cafe table. Image: Alphabet
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
(TechCrunch) Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show how homes and offices might be built a decade from now.
The project is a sort of huge sculptural planter, “hanging gardens” inspired by the legendary structures in the ancient city of Babylon. (Incidentally, it was my ancestor, Robert Koldewey, who excavated/looted the famous Ishtar Gate to the place.)
Begun in 2019, Semiramis (named after the queen of Babylon back then) is a collaboration between human and AI designers. The general idea of course came from the creative minds of its creators, architecture professors Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler. But the design was achieved by putting the basic requirements, such as size, the necessity of watering and the style of construction, through a set of computer models and machine learning algorithms.
During the design process, for example, the team might tweak the position of one of the large “pods” that make up the 70-foot structure, or change the layout of the panels that make up its surface. The software they created would then immediately adjust the geometry of the overall structure and the other panels to accommodate these changes, making sure it would still safely bear its own weight, and so on.
There are many automated processes in architecture, of course, but this project pushes the boundaries out in the level of final control seemingly given to them. The point, after all, is to make it a genuine collaboration, not just a sort of architectural spell-check that makes sure the whole thing won’t collapse.
Scientific innovation may accelerate in the future, not because humans will become more virtuous but because artificial intelligence (AI) systems will lead the way. Our psychological blinders will be removed when AI systems will analyze data autonomously, without guidance from humans.
AI-scientists might conclude objectively and without self-pity: “`Oumuamua does not resemble any comet or asteroid seen before, but it resembles artificial objects like 2020 SO.”
Without prejudice or ego-driven ambitions to win honors, awards, or “likes” on Twitter, they might be the first to discover their AI analogs, sent to interstellar space by other civilizations.
Humans lack kinship to extraterrestrial AI systems. The breakthrough in assessing our cosmic reality might arrive when our own AI-scientists discover extraterrestrial AI systems as their technological relatives.
Here’s hoping that AI-scientists will provide us with a sober view of our cosmic neighborhood, the one in which human scientists insist on staying blind.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
(WIRED) THIS JULY, AMAZON showed off several new warehouse robots with names borrowed from Sesame Street that are, presumably, meant to evoke childhood wonder rather than futuristic dread.
Bert, a wheeled robot about the size of a filing cabinet, navigates around a warehouse carrying products. Ernie, a large industrial robot arm, moves totes filled with packages from conveyors onto shelves. Scooter and Kermit are both intelligent forklifts, capable of pulling several carts or stacks of plastic totes from one side of a warehouse to another.
The new machines demonstrate the potential for automation to creep into more areas of warehouse and package-sorting work, a critical part of the economy as ecommerce orders soar. Competitors like Walmart and FedEx are also rushing to adopt robots. It might seem that machines are poised to take over in warehouses—and help make up for a dire shortage of human workers. The transportation and warehousing industries had a record 490,000 job openings in the US in July 2021, a shortfall that will be felt especially during the ordering and fulfillment crunch of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But not so fast. A rush to adopt more automation does not mean that artificial intelligence and robots will solve the worker shortage. Amazon’s prototype robots are not yet capable of doing the most challenging, and important, work inside its fulfillment centers: picking the many products stored on its shelves. They’re simply not smart enough.
Amazon has invested heavily in warehouse robots already. In 2012 it acquired Kiva Systems, a company that made robots capable of maneuvering shelves by scooting beneath and lifting them up. These robots follow markers on the floor and route shelves filled with hundreds of products to human workers who have to find the correct item in a bin. Amazon has since acquired more robotics firms, hired top robotics researchers, and funded challenges aimed at solving key problems in the field.
(CNN)The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals.
Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.
Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.
"I was astounded by it," said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was co-lead author of the new research.
"Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use but when you ... liberate (the cells) from the rest of the embryo and you give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently a new way to reproduce."
For the first time, computer scientists and mathematicians have used artificial intelligence to help prove or suggest new mathematical theorems in the complex fields of knot theory and representation theory.
The astonishing results have been published today in the pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature.
Professor Geordie Williamson is Director of the University of Sydney Mathematical Research Institute and one of the world's foremost mathematicians. As a co-author of the paper, he applied the power of Deep Mind's AI processes to explore conjectures in his field of speciality, representation theory.
His co-authors were from DeepMind—the team of computer scientists behind AlphaGo, the first computer program to successfully defeat a world champion in the game of Go in 2016.
Professor Williamson said: "Problems in mathematics are widely regarded as some of the most intellectually challenging problems out there.
Like snowflakes, no two branches are alike. They can differ in size, shape and texture; some might be wet or moss-covered or bursting with offshoots. And yet birds can land on just about any of them. This ability was of great interest to the labs of Stanford University engineers Mark Cutkosky and David Lentink—now at University of Groningen in the Netherlands—which have both developed technologies inspired by animal abilities.
"It's not easy to mimic how birds fly and perch," said William Roderick, Ph.D. '20, who was a graduate student in both labs. "After millions of years of evolution, they make takeoff and landing look so easy, even among all of the complexity and variability of the tree branches you would find in a forest."
Years of study on animal-inspired robots in the Cutkosky Lab and on bird-inspired aerial robots in the Lentink Lab enabled the researchers to build their own perching robot, detailed in a paper published Dec. 1 in Science Robotics. When attached to a quadcopter drone, their "stereotyped nature-inspired aerial grasper," or SNAG, forms a robot that can fly around, catch and carry objects and perch on various surfaces. Showing the potential versatility of this work, the researchers used it to compare different types of bird toe arrangements and to measure microclimates in a remote Oregon forest.
A bird bot in the forest
In the researchers' previous studies of parrotlets—the second smallest parrot species—the diminutive birds flew back and forth between special perches while being recorded by five high-speed cameras. The perches—representing a variety of sizes and materials, including wood, foam, sandpaper and Teflon—also contained sensors that captured the physical forces associated with the birds' landings, perching and takeoff.
Impressions of a robot's personality can be influenced by the way it looks, sounds and feels. But now, researchers from Japan have found specific causal relationships between impressions of robot personality and body texture.
In a study published in Advanced Robotics, researchers from Osaka University and Kanazawa University have revealed that a robot's physical texture interacts with elements of its appearance in a way that influences impressions of its personality.
Body texture, such as softness or elasticity, is an important consideration in the design of robots meant for interactive functions. In addition, appearance can modulate whether a person anticipates a robot to be friendly, likable, or capable, among other characteristics.
However, the ways in which people perceive the physical texture and the personality of robots have only been examined independently. As a result, the relationships between these two factors is unclear, something the researchers aimed to address.
