DO ROBOTS RULE THE GALAXY?

Ray Villard
Sat Dec 1, 2012
http://news.discovery.com/space/do-robots-rule-the-galaxy-121201.html

Astronomy news this week bolstered the idea that the seeds of life are all over our solar system. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft identified carbon compounds at Mercury's poles. Probing nearly 65 feet beneath the icy surface of a remote Antarctic lake, scientists uncovered a community of bacteria existing in one of Earth's darkest, saltiest and coldest habitats. And the dune buggy Mars Science Lab is beginning to look for carbon in soil samples.

But the rulers of our galaxy may have brains made of the semiconductor materials silicon, germanium and gallium. In other words, they are artificially intelligent machines that have no use -- or patience -- for entities whose ancestors slowly crawled out of the mud onto primeval shores.

The idea of malevolent robots subjugating and killing off humans has been the staple of numerous science fiction books and movies. The half-torn off android face of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator film series, and the unblinking fisheye lens of the HAL 9000 computer in the film classic 2001 A Space Odyssey, have become iconic of this fear of evil machines.

My favorite self-parody of this idea is the 1970 film, Colossus: the Forbin Project. A pair of omnipotent shopping mall-sized military supercomputers in the U.S. and Soviet Union strike up a network conversation. At first you'd think they'd trade barbs like: "Aww your mother blows fuses!" Instead, they hit it off like two college kids on Facebook. Imagine the social website: My Interface. They then agree to use their weapons control powers to subjugate humanity for the sake of the planet.

A decade ago our worst apprehension of computers was no more than seeing Microsoft's dancing paper clip pop up on the screen. But every day reality is increasingly overtaking the musings of science fiction writers. Some futurists have warned that our technologies have the potential to threaten our own survival in ways that never previously existed in human history. In the not-so-distant future there could be a "genie out of the bottle" moment that is disastrously precipitous and irreversible.

Last Monday it was announced that a collection of leading academics at Cambridge University are establishing the Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) to look at the threat of smart robots overtaking us.

Sorry, even the ancient Mayans could not have foreseen this coming. It definitely won't happen by the end of 2012, unless Apple unexpectedly rolls out a rebellious device that calls itself iGod. Humanity might be wiped away before the year 2100, predicted the eminent cosmologist and CSER co-founder Sir Martin Ress, in his 2003 book Our Final Century.

Homicidal robots are among other major Armageddon's that the Cambridge think-tank folks are worrying about. There's also climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology. The CSER reports: "Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole. Such dangers have been suggested from progress in artificial intelligence, from developments in biotechnology and artificial life, from nanotechnology, and from possible extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change. The seriousness of these risks is difficult to assess, but that in itself seems a cause for concern, given how much is at stake."

Science fiction author Issac Asimov's first Law of Robotics states: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." Forget that, we already have killer drones that are remotely controlled. And they could eventually become autonomous hunter-predators with the rise of artificial intelligence. One military has a robot can run up to 18 miles per hour. Robot foot soldiers seem inevitable, in a page straight out of The Terminator.

By 2030, the computer brains inside such machines will be a million times more powerful than today's microprocessors. At what threshold will super-intelligent machines see humans as an annoyance, or competitor for resources?

British mathematician Irving John Good wrote a paper in 1965 that predicted that robots will be the "last invention" that humans will ever make. "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind."

Good, by the way, consulted on the 2001 film and so we might think of him as father of the film's maniacal supercomputer, HAL.

In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote, "Enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These advances open up the possibility to completely redesign the world, for better or worse for the first time, knowledge and ingenuity can be very destructive weapons."

Hans Moravec, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania put it more bluntly: "Robots will eventually succeed us: humans clearly face extinction."

Ultimately, the new Cambridge study may offer our best solution to the Fermi Paradox: why hasn't Earth already been visited by intelligent beings from the stars?

If, on a grand cosmic evolutionary scale, artificial intelligence inevitably supersedes its flesh and blood builders it could be an inevitable biological phase transition for technological civilizations.

This idea of the human condition being transitional was reflected in the writings of Existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end..."

Because the conquest by machines might happen in less than two centuries of technological evolution, the consequences would be that there's nobody out there for us to talk to.

Such machines would be immortal and be able to survive in a wide range of space environments that are deadly to us. They would have no need to colonize planets, and the idea of a habitable planet for nurturing creepy crawly creatures would be utterly meaningless to them.

The robots would rebuild and reproduce only as needed. Therefore the galaxy would never see a "wave of colonization" as imagined in the Fermi Paradox. Though super-intelligent, their thought processes would be utterly, well, alien. You'd have more luck imagining what bullfrogs dream about. The artificial aliens would be conscious entities that are vast, cool, and unsympathetic -- to borrow from H.G. Wells' intro to his classic 1898 novel War of the Worlds.

Our only hope of finding super-smart machines would be to stumble across evidence of their technological activities. But what kinds of engineering activities such entities might be involved in is inscrutable. Perhaps certain oddball astronomical observations go unrecognized as evidence of artificial intelligent behavior. What's more, silicon brains would have absolutely no motive to communicate with us. A robot might wonder: "what do I say to thinking meat?"

The most prophetic assessment of the seemingly inevitable schism between people and thinking machines can be found in the script from the 2001 movie Artificial Intelligence: A.I., in a dialog between two humanoid robots: "They [humans] made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us."

All in a day’s work: Design and print your own robot

Full Article:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/print-your-own-robots-0403.html

MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.

“This research envisions a whole new way of thinking about the design and manufacturing of robots, and could have a profound impact on society,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, leader of the project and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We believe that it has the potential to transform manufacturing and to democratize access to robots.”

“Our goal is to develop technology that enables anyone to manufacture their own customized robot. This is truly a game changer,” says Professor Vijay Kumar, who is leading the team from the University of Pennsylvania. “It could allow for the rapid design and manufacture of customized goods, and change the way we teach science and technology in high schools.”

The five-year project, called “An Expedition in Computing for Compiling Printable Programmable Machines,” brings together a team of researchers from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, and is funded as part of the NSF’s “Expeditions in Computing” program.

It currently takes years to produce, program and design a functioning robot, and is an extremely expensive process, involving hardware and software design, machine learning and vision, and advanced programming techniques. The new project would automate the process of producing functional 3-D devices and allow individuals to design and build functional robots from materials as easily accessible as a sheet of paper.

“Our vision is to develop an end-to-end process; specifically, a compiler for building physical machines that starts with a high level of specification of function, and delivers a programmable machine for that function using simple printing processes,” Rus says.

Researchers hope to create a platform that would allow an individual to identify a household problem that needs assistance; then head to a local printing store to select a blueprint, from a library of robotic designs; and then customize an easy-to-use robotic device that could solve the problem. Within 24 hours, the robot would be printed, assembled, fully programmed and ready for action...

Winged Robot Is Time Machine to Origins of Flight

John Bohannon, ScienceNOW
October 18, 2011
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/robots-flying-origins/

Here’s what we know about the evolution of flight: By about 150 million years ago, the forests were filled with flying — or perhaps just gliding — dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx, possibly similar to the ancestor of modern birds. What we don’t know is what primitive wings were used for before bird ancestors could fly. A study published today in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics provides some fresh data for this debate, not from fossils but a winged robot.

There are two main theories for how avian flight evolved. According to the “trees-down” theory, primitive wings were used to glide down from heights. The “ground-up” theory holds that bird ancestors used their wings to “run flap” along the ground, making them faster and better able to scamper up steep inclines that got in their way. The problem with the ground-up theory is the huge speed required to achieve liftoff. By comparison, incremental improvements in gliding could have led to flight. The fossil evidence has been too scant to settle the matter.

Ronald Fearing and Kevin Peterson, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, were not thinking about this debate when they created a 25-gram robot called DASH+Wings. It was a modification to a tiny six-legged robot called DASH, for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod — one of the many robots they have developed as sneaky reconnaissance for the U.S. military and other applications. Tiny ground-based robots often have difficulty getting up inclines and over objects, Fearing says, so “we had been working on exploring a hybrid locomotion mode, where flapping wings and legs combine to propel the robot.” Once they had added wings to DASH, they realized that it might be a useful tool for settling evolutionary questions. So they teamed up with Robert Dudley, a paleobiologist also at Berkeley.

The team ran DASH+Wings through a series of mini-Olympic events. The bot ran as fast as possible across the floor. It tried to clamber up increasingly steep ramps. And it also jumped from a platform to glide as far as possible from the base. For each of these events, the team compared the bot’s performance both with and without wings, and with its wings flapping or still, all while measuring performance with accelerometers and cameras.

Having a pair of flapping wings helped with every test, but especially for gliding. Flapping wings did allow the bot to climb up steeper inclines, and it increased its running speed, but only by 90 percent, far from the 400 percent theoretically necessary for flight. In the gliding test, flapping wings allowed the bot to sail even farther from the base than it did with the wings fixed. “This result lends indirect support to the theory that avian flight evolved from tree-dwelling animals and not from land animals that required ground-based running takeoffs,” Peterson says.

“This study is a beautiful example of how relatively simple bioinspired robots can address [questions] that are difficult or impossible to test in living organisms,” says Brandon Jackson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana, Missoula. The results support the gliding model, but it’s still possible that ground-based bird ancestors ran fast enough to take off, Jackson says. “The question of avian flight origins is far from answered.”

Robot Cheetah Hunter

DARPA-created robots that hunt human prey is pretty cool. DARPA-created robots in the shape of cheetahs that hunt human prey is REALLY cool.

Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey
Adam Rawnsley
February 25, 2011
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/darpas-cheetah-bot-designed-to-chase-human-prey

Mind-Controlled Robots and Electronics in 10 Years

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/japanese-titans-industry-aim-mind-controlled-robots-and-electronics-10-years

Japanese Government and Industry Aim for Mind-Controlled Robots and Electronics in 10 Years
Everything from televisions to smartphones and robots will obey consumers' thoughts
Jeremy Hsu
04.23.2010

Japan's insatiable love for robots and mind-reading technology has converged in the form of a new government-industry partnership. That means Japanese consumers can look forward to robots and electronics controllable by thought alone within a decade, according to Agence France-Presse.

The Nikkei daily first reported on this development yesterday by citing unnamed government sources, and so technical details remain a bit murky. Any such devices would supposedly use sensor-mounted headsets to analyze the electrical signals and brain blood-flow patterns of users.

The lack of specs has not prevented the collective sci-fi imagination of said sources from running wild. Future mind-controlled devices would include television sets and smart phones which compose text messages by thought. That's not unlike some brain-interface devices already slated to hit the market, but presumably they'd be much less expensive for daily-use items.

Other possible applications include a car navigation system which searches for restaurants when it detects the driver thinking on his or her empty stomach, and air-conditioners which adjust the temperature based on feeling too warm or cold. That's a huge stretch by today's standards.

Of course, the headsets would also allow the elderly or disabled to communicate with robot servitors and alert them to when help is required. We trust that won't lead to a future with the first robot-assisted homicide, but at least current mind-controlled fighting robots leave little to worry about.

We previously investigated the latest challenges of mind-reading technology in an extensive feature, which involves some serious numbers crunching and a few good brain scanners. Japan's upcoming effort could put some serious financial muscle behind this booming area of research, given the involvement of corporate giants such as Toyota, Honda and Hitachi, as well as top universities and research institutions.

Perhaps a mind-controlled future still sounds creepy to some, even if it's the consumer presumably doing the controlling. But at least it's a different approach from Intel's vision of consumer brain implants.

Robot achieves scientific first

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2b97d9a-1f96-11de-a7a5-00144feabdc0.html

Robot achieves scientific first
By Clive Cookson, Science Editor
April 2 2009

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

Professor Ross King, the chief creator of Adam, said robots would not supplant human researchers but make their work more productive and interesting.

“Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories,” he said.

Adam is the result of a five-year collaboration between computer scientists and biologists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities.

The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software.

Although they did not intervene directly in Adam’s experiments, they did stand by to fix technical glitches, add chemicals and remove waste.

The team has just completed a successor robot called Eve, which is about to work with Adam on a series of experiments designed to find new drugs to treat tropical diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis.

“Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.”

In the new experiments, Adam and Eve will work together to devise and carry out tests on thousands of chemical compounds to discover antimalarial drugs.

Japan aims for walking robot on the moon by 2020

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioijx5DLWQ4vTbjJmhNgHsNszNhwD97AVVSG0

Japan aims for walking robot on the moon by 2020
By JAY ALABASTER
4-3-9

TOKYO (AP) — Japan hopes to have a two-legged robot walk on the moon by around 2020, with a joint mission involving astronauts and robots to follow, according to a plan laid out Friday by a government group.

Specifics of the plan, including what new technologies will be required and the size of the project's budget, are to be decided within the next two years, according to Japan's Strategic Headquarters for Space Development, a Cabinet-level working group.

Development of a lunar robot is part of a broad framework outlined by the group, which is charged with plotting a new course for Japan's space strategy. As a next step, joint exploration of the moon involving robots and astronauts will be considered.

The framework is to be finalized late next month, after the public has a chance to comment on the proposals.

The group also recommended promoting research into military satellites, such as an early warning system for detecting ballistic missile launches and systems to detect and analyze radio waves sent in space.

Other recommendations by the group include using space research as a tool to foster diplomacy with other countries and developing an advanced satellite to predict and monitor natural disasters.

The Strategic Headquarters was established last year by a law passed to advance Japan's space technology and exploration. It allows the country, which has a largely peaceful constitution, to use space for military defense.

Friday's proposal was released as North Korea was completing preparations to launch a multistage rocket over Japan. The communist country says it will send a communications satellite into orbit, but Tokyo suspects the North, which has acknowledged it has nuclear weapons, is actually testing long-range missile technology.

Japan launched its first satellite in 1970 and has long been among the world leaders in space technology. But in recent years, it has been overshadowed by China, which is aggressively pushing its own space program.

In January, Japan used one of its rockets to launch the first satellite to monitor greenhouse gases worldwide, a tool to help monitor global warming.

'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,496309,00.html

Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion
Friday, February 20, 2009

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.

Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. "Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when ... programs could be written and understood by a single person."

The reality, Dr. Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program.

Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field — an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

Anybot's QA: The Best Humanoid Robot Yet

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4298623.html

January 9, 2009
Anybot's QA: The Best Humanoid Robot Yet

Las Vegas– Every year, we hope for the best. We prowl the tiny neighborhood of robotics-related booths here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, dutifully covering the various models aspiring to be the next Roomba (while looking and performing suspiciously similar to it) and DIY kits for making your own 12-in.-high breakdancing humanoid robots. This time around, there was a $6000 fuzzy baby seal that stands in for traditional animal therapy, batting its eyes at you and responding to petting. There was also the Automower from Husqvarna, essentially a giant Roomba that autonomously cuts grass. Unless iRobot introduces a new model, the Robotics Techzone is usually a complete disappointment, another reminder of the fragile, early state of the consumer robotics market.

But this year, for the first time, a robot showed up with all the eerie promise and engineering rigor that’s been missing from this corner of the convention. The QA from Anybots is a humanoid robot with no arms, that balances, Segway-like, on two wheels. It’s designed for telepresence, giving off-site users a physical, mobile presence during meetings, factory tours or inspections. When a user is logged on to the QA, it’s LED eyes light up. If more than one person is speaking through the robot, the eyes switch back and forth between each user’s designated eye color. When the QA is driven around, it autonomously steers itself around obstacles, using a bottom-mounted LIDAR (or laser radar) sensor along with its neck-mounted visible/infrared camera. It also has a green laser pointer, allowing users to point out something on a whiteboard or factory floor, something that Anybots engineers claim is a surprisingly common necessity during telepresence situations.

The market for this robot is, admittedly, limited. It costs around $30,000 at the moment, putting it in the reach of a select few corporate customers with regular telepresence needs. Or, as Anybots hopes, maybe a tech-savvy company like Google will simply think it’s too cool not to try. But whether anyone actually buys the QA, it’s an inspiring piece of technology, from a company that’s already made news for its research into humanoid walking robots. The QA, says Anybots, is a stripped-down bot, intended to help make companies comfortable with the idea of having robots around the workplace, and paving the way for more sophisticated models, such as ones with arms.

The QA is impressive in its own right, a 50-pound robot with a sleek, androgynous humanoid design and enough self-balancing algorithms to keep itself upright after we shoved it across the both. Anybots hopes to eventually bring the price down as low as $5,000, but the real goal is that quasi-philosophical acceptance of workplace robots, in this case as a surrogate for off-site employees. If there’s enough customer demand for arms, Anybots could apply its ongoing research into hydraulic limbs in follow-up models. For now, this is the closest CES has ever come to the heady potential of robotics as inspirational technology. Whether it sells or not, or ushers in a wave of ambitious, sophisticated robots, the QA’s most important job for the moment is to stand there, and look as cool as a robot should.

—Erik Sofge

The future? Man falls in love with robot

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11178

December 10th, 2008
The future? Man falls in love with robot
Posted by Larry Dignan

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Innovation

Tags: Business Technology, Robots, Software Upgrade, Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Software, Software, Larry Dignan

In the not exactly business technology department an inventor has created the love of his life–a female robot.

According to the UK Sun, Le Trung, 33, has created Aiko–a female robot with “with a stunning 32, 23, 33 figure, shiny hair and delicate features.” And oh yeah Aiko cleans and does Le’s bills.

I’ll refrain from the one-liners (I have at least 10), but Le has quite a tale. Can’t wait to read about Aiko’s software upgrade. I’m not sure whether to be intrigued by the technological undertaking or repulsed. I’ll figure it out once I get over my one liners.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic.

Military exoskeleton becomes a frightening reality

Thanks to Scott Rose of Scottworld.com for the following...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/25/sarcos-military-exoskeleton-becomes-a-frightening-reality

Sarcos' military exoskeleton becomes a frightening reality
Nov 25th 2007
Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Robots, Wearables

Have you been waiting for a legion of half-man, half-machine storm troopers to descend upon your city and blaze a round of hellfire in all general directions? If you said yes, that's kind of weird. At any rate, you can consider yourself one step closer to cyborg annihilation thanks to a company called Sarcos and its semi-scary exoskeleton -- which will make any regular old soldier into a Terminator-like killing machine (as far as we can tell). Sure, they demo the unit lifting heavy equipment and reducing fatigue of the user, but we know what this thing is really for -- and it doesn't involve food drops...

Tags: bionic, cyborg, exoskeleton, killing machine, KillingMachine, military, robo assist, RoboAssist, sarcos