A recent article in Scientific American, Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware, points to the work being done by engineers to instill a certain degree of self-awareness in robots, including the capacities for self-image and even a theory of other minds:
Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a property that psychologists call "theory of mind". For instance, the team had one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other's movements well enough to know where to lay a "trap" for it on the ground. "It's basically mind reading," Lipson says.
"Our holy grail is to give machines the same kind of self-awareness capabilities that humans have," Lipson says. "This research might also shed new light on the very difficult topic of our self-awareness from a new angle—how it works, why and how it developed."
A meme that gets bandied about by Singularity denialists is the assertion that a rogue super-artificial intelligence (SAI) won't be able to act on its desires and make a real impact on the physical world. It's just a really sophisticated computer, goes the thinking; it couldn't actually reach out and touch someone.
This runs contrary to the concerns of those in the Singularity camp who are gravely concerned that an SAI will be both uncontainable and capable of manipulating physical space in a non-trivial way.
I'd like to present a pair of arguments that will serve as a warning to those who would like to dismiss this possibility. The first is based on a recent technological breakthrough, the second being more of a thought experiment.
Robotic networking and self-replication
RoboEarth is a system that's allowing robots to build on and learn from the experiences of other robots. Think of it as an internet for robots. As it stands, robotics engineers have to teach their bots to navigate and function in the real world. RoboEarth, on the other hand, collects and centralizes information on objects and navigation, and in turn shares this information with other bots. What this means is that any new robot that's connected to this system will have immediate knowledge of its surroundings.
But it doesn't stop there. A recent breakthrough has endowed the TechUnited AMIGO robot with the ability to download all the information it needs for a specific task and then carry out that task. Check out the video below of AMIGO at work:
If this doesn't blow your mind then you're not paying attention. While the task was simple enough, that of autonomously picking up and serving a bottle of water to a person, the potential implications of this are huge. As Joris Peels of iMaterialize clarifies,
If you would combine Robo Earth, with genetic algorithms that automatically design robots and 3D printing you have a very powerful combination. It would be a system that could design a robot based on its experiences, then give that robot all the information it needed to navigate the world and carry out tasks. Anyone could then 3D print this robot anywhere around the world. And the system would be one of continuous learning and itteration with better robots being made every second. We’re still very far away from this but it is these kind of ongoing developments that make me think that I live in the future.
I think we should really consider the implications of this. I know, it sounds a bit sci fi and off piste. But, we will develop a Skynet at one point and we should consider the implications before we do so.
The scenario I'm imagining, as I'm sure are other Singularity-concerned futurists, would see an SAI co-opt this system (or create versions of its own) and begin to fulfill its intentions through a myriad of self-designed, recursively improving, and remotely controlled agents disbursed around the world.
Plenty of room at the bottom
Okay, so there's that example. The next consideration is something a bit more fantastical (relatively speaking): the potential for an SAI to reshape the planet (or significant portions of it) from the molecular scale upwards. Before you tune out, watch this video, Molecular Visualizations of DNA:
What you're seeing in this video is a very small sampling of the kinds of molecular machinery that's capable of arising through the processes of natural selection. What you're not seeing here, however, is the space of all possible molecular machinery that's capable of arising through intentional design. And what you're definitely not seeing here is the space of all possible molecular machinery that's capable of arising through intentional super-intelligent design.
The kinds of molecular machinery that we're familiar with has come about solely for the purpose of maintaining and propagating complex organisms. We're only beginning to imagine the kinds of molecular-scale processes and devices that might be designed to perform other kinds of functions; the design space is massive.
And this is where an SAI comes in. It's easy to imagine a system similar to RoboEarth in which an SAI can design and disburse both macro and micro scale devices. The only limitations facing such a system would be inherent energy and material constraints, other human or SAI-driven countermeasures, and the laws of physics itself.
Okay, what exactly am I imagining? Given free reign, an SAI could potentially re-arrange all matter on the planet. One possibility is that it could turn the Earth into computronium or anything else it wants. Or, it could remove all toxins and other pollutants from the surface and atmosphere. It could turn the planet into a Venusian hell, or a verdant Utopian paradise. Whatever. In all honestly, I can't even really begin to speculate without knowing the intentionality of a Singularity-surviving intelligence. But suffice to say the scope of its impact on the material world needn't be subtle.
For those of us engaged in foresight activities, the risk is in thinking too small on this matter—or in denying it altogether.
While we haven’t covered the Vgo robot in the past, it reminds me of several other telerobots we have seen, especially Anybot’s QB. Only Vgo is supposedly retailing for around $6000 (including ~$1200/year for the service contract), considerably less than the QB’s $15k price tag. Differences in maneuverability, reliability, and video quality may make the cost difference appropriate, but that’s not really my concern. Vgo is representative of the telerobotics market as a whole right now: reasonable run times (battery life is between 6-12 hours depending on upgrade options), Skype-level video quality, and compatible with standard WiFi. If you can afford the $6k (or $15k) price tag, you can probably have this setup in your home or office right now. In other words, this isn’t the technology of tomorrow, it’s here today and ready to go. Vgo launched sales in 2010 and has been marketing their product to a variety of applications, as you’ll see in the following video:
Not to sound cynical, but I’m guessing that Lyndon Baty’s use of Vgo is just another part of that marketing plan. I’m totally fine with that, by the way. Giving a child (and a school district) a reasonable solution for a terrible predicament is great. If it comes with a moderate price tag, so be it. So, while Lyndon’s personal story of perseverance and increasing freedom is exceptional, the underlying technological implications are pretty mundane: telepresence is gearing up to try to make a big splash in the market.
We’ve seen plenty of indications of this. South Korea is testing telerobots in their schools. They could have one of these devices in every kindergarten classroom by 2013. Researchers in Japan are experimenting with robots aimed towards emotional connections (with mixed results). As we said above, Anybots has their own platform on the market already. iRobot recently unveiled a prototype robotic platform that would transform any teleconference-enabled tablet computer into a telerobot. I’m guessing that in the next five years, one or more of these attempts at telerobotics is going to actually gain some traction and start moving some serious product.
Education may be a natural market. As we learned from Fred Nikgohar, head of telerobotics firm RoboDynamics, there are some big hurdles in other applications of telepresence robots. Offices value secrecy. Medical facilities worry about patient privacy. There’s a lot of bureaucracy standing in the way of widespread adoption of telerobotics. Schools have some of the same problems, but (to be perfectly honest) they also have sick kids who you can’t say no to. Or they’re run by governments who have nationalistic goals in science and technology (exemplified by South Korea). Get the price of telerobotics low enough, and we could see it expand into different niches of education including homeschooling, remote expert instructors (like the English tutors in South Korea), or online universities.
Back in July, we wrote about how UPenn’s GRASP Lab had taught their quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things. The next step, it seems, is teaching the quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things and actually build buildings. The video above shows a team of quadrotors cooperating to construct the framework of a (rather small) building. The building’s structure is held together with magnets, and the quadrotors are able to verify that the alignment is correct by attempting to wiggle the structural components around, which is pretty cool.
It’s fun to speculate about how this technology might grow out of the lab into the real world… To build actual buldings, you’d either need much bigger quadrotors (which is possible), lots of small quadrotors cooperating in big pieces (also possible), or buildings built out of much smaller components (which might be the way to go). The quadrotors probably wouldn’t be able to do all the work, but they have the potential to make construction projects significantly more efficient.
We are still a decade or two away from the next industrial revolution—one that will brought on by advances in molecular manufacturing, sophisticated AI and advanced robotics—but the early signs are already starting to be felt. According to GOOD magazine, the middle class is disappearing on account of increasing automation. The article quotes MIT economist David Autor who argues that:
...a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is "ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled 'routine' tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree)." Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that "can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country."
The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth-and you don't see it addressed in news reports-is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.
People say America doesn't make anything anymore, but that's not true. With the exception of a few short lapses, manufacturing output has been on the rise since the 1980s. What is true is that industrial robots have been carrying ever more of the manufacturing burden on their steely shoulders since they appeared in the 1950s. Today, a Japanese company called Fanuc, Ltd., has industrial robots making other industrial robots in a "lights out" factory. (That's the somewhat unsettling term for a fully automated production facility where you don't need lights because you don't need humans.) That's where we're headed.
It's not just manufacturing, either. Automated call centers are replacing customer-service agents. Automated checkout stations are replacing grocery-store clerks. When the science of computer vision advances sufficiently, we'll have algorithms, not humans, evaluating X-rays at airport security checkpoints and screening user-generated content for sites like Facebook.
Michael and Susan Anderson have published an article on Machine Ethics (ME) in the October issue of Scientific American. In the article, Robot Be Good: A Call for Ethical Autonomous Machines, they introduce both ME and their recent work programming ethical principles in Nao, a humanoid robot which was developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics.
Their findings in brief:
Robots that make autonomous decisions, such as those being designed to assist the elderly, may face ethical dilemmas even in seemingly everyday situations.
One way to ensure ethical behavior in robots that interact with humans is to program general ethical principles into them and let them use those principles to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.
Artificial-intelligence techniques can produce the principles themselves by abstracting them from specific cases of ethically acceptable behavior using logic.
The authors have followed this approach and for the first time programmed a robot to act based on an ethical principle.
Computer scientist and technology critic Jaron Lanier offers his two cents on the silicon valley mindset in his op-ed, "The first church of robotics." Excerpt:
The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.
Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.
It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.
What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.
If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?
ECCE the anthropomimetic robot: A robot with all the inner structures and mechanisms of a human (including bones, joints, muscles, and tendons), giving it a greater potential for human-like action and interaction in the world.
TED Talks: Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action: Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more. Here she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results.
Whoa, this one definitely falls under 'the future is now' files: These robots can upload their programs to other robots depending on what's required of them.
The A-Pod is an ant-inspired hexapod robot with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) abdomen (tail) and a 3 DOF head with large mandibles. Its 6 legs have 3 DOF each. The device itself has a total of 25 servos. The robot is controlled remotely with a custom 2.4 GHz RC transmitter.
This video primarily demonstrates body movement and mandible control. The developer still wants to do some mechanical improvements to the legs for improved walking.
INVEST €10 million in a robotic octopus and you will be able to search the seabed with the same dexterity as the real eight-legged cephalopod. At least that's the plan, say those who are attempting to build a robot with arms that work in the same way that octopuses tentacles do. Having no solid skeleton, it will be the world's first entirely soft robot.
The trouble with today's remote-controlled subs, says Cecilia Laschi of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, is that their large hulls and clunky robot arms cannot reach into the nooks and crannies of coral reefs or the rock formations on ocean floors. That means they are unable to photograph objects in these places or pick up samples for analysis. And that's a major drawback for oceanographers hunting for signs of climate change in the oceans and on coral reefs.
Because an octopus's tentacles can bend in all directions and quickly thin and elongate to almost twice their length, they can reach, grasp and manipulate objects in tiny spaces with extraordinary dexterity.
Via KurzweilAI: "The U.S. Army has released new footage of the BigDog robot--a sophisticated, four-legged "pack-bot" designed to carry 340-pound payloads across all kinds of terrain--up or down hills, through ice, sand, snow, and dirt--by monitoring sensors in its legs and adjusting its posture accordingly."
While this machine is very impressive, I'm not convinced of its practicality. The thing is slow, loud as hell and it has to carry its own fuel. I wonder if an actual beast-of-burden wouldn't be more effective...
MAKO Surgical recently announced the release of its RIO Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopedic System.
While the device is strictly intended for knee resurfacing operations, the RIO may be a sign of things to come; robots like RIO may be increasingly utilized in complex surgeries. Knee resurfacing is a notoriously difficult operation to perform and it is hoped that the RIO robot will introduce stability and precision.
The device is not completely autonomous. It is designed to assist surgeons during knee resurfacing operations, a minimally invasive type of surgery thought to be useful for younger, active patients with early osteoarthritis.
According to MAKO:
MAKO’s robotic arm system is the first FDA-cleared robotic arm system for orthopedic surgery. It provides patient-specific, three-dimensional modeling for pre-surgical planning. As surgeons use the robotic arm to resurface the knee for placement of the implants, RIO™ provides real-time inter-operative visual, tactile and auditory feedback, enabling a high level of precision and optimal positioning of the implants.
MAKOplasty® provides the potential for improved surgical outcomes, with a less invasive partial knee resurfacing procedure that spares healthy bone and tissue, preserves ligaments and allows for a more rapid recovery and a more natural feeling knee.
Sure, looks fancy -- but what about its bedside manner?
"I was responsible for vision-based navigation of the robot within the hallways. I used the vanishing points from the parallel lines present indoors to compute the robot heading. This was then fed into a controller to control the direction of the robot for navigation. The computation was made robust to change in light conditions, false detections, occlusions by a layered filtering approach that included RANSAC and least squares filtering among others." -- Pratap Tokekar
This is as disturbing as it is fascinating -- but perhaps I'm being unfair: there's clearly a very strong psychological desire for these women to be with and fuss over babies. It's no more weirder or depraved than this (NSFW). The consequentialist in me wonders if any harm is being done (likely none). In many of these cases, it's probably far more appropriate for these women to be with dolls rather than real babies.
Looking ahead, and given enough demand, it's completely reasonable to imagine these baby dolls becoming increasingly sophisticated and realistic. There will come a day when these women will be fussing over very cute and super realistic robot babies.
Check out how these robots work in concert to execute a goal, namely pulling a young girl across the room. Individually these bots are useless, but together they get the job done. This is an excellent illustration of how individual and identical agents, when designed and programmed effectively, can be used in a collaborative fashion.
Now imagine that these bots are self-replicating...
It's the product of the Missile Defense Agency and they call it the MKV-L (Multiple Kill Vehicle). The hover bot is meant to be used as a bundle of missile interceptors deployed by a larger carrier. Objectives of this particular test included having the MKV-L hover under its own power and prove its capability to recognize and track a surrogate target in a flight environment.
