Rise of the Robots | Machine Learning

[Hoosiernorm]

pF0uLnMoQZA

[Antipatros]

Jeffrey S. Thurnher, No One at the Controls

Legal Implications of Fully Autonomous Targeting

http://www.ndu.edu/press/fully-autonomo ... eting.html
http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/jfq-67 ... urnher.pdf

Abstract

Lethal autonomous robots (LARs) may provide the best counter to the asymmetric threats of the future. From China’s considerable capacity for jamming and general cyber attack to swarms of Iranian patrol boats, dangers are proliferating, and LARs can operate faster than humans and achieve lethal outcomes even where there are no communications links. LARs are apt to prove attractive to a number of players, so the United States should act at once to secure a commanding capability in fully autonomous targeting. Legal concerns do not appear to be a game-ender, so operational commanders in particular should lead in harnessing this emerging technology. With appropriate control measures, these unmanned systems will be safe, effective, and legal weapons as well as force multipliers. They have already proven their value during the Global War on Terror, and all branches of the U.S. military are poised to rely on ever-more sophisticated LARs.

[Enki]

Giving a computer the ability to choose to kill a human is the end of humanity. We will all be eloi from then on.

[Antipatros]

Erik Coelingh and Stefan Solyom, All Aboard the Robotic Road Train

Semiautonomous cars will play follow the leader, giving drivers a rest and saving fuel

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/adv ... road-train

In car commercials, every road is clear and curvy, every vista is framed by mountains and the sea, and every driver is relaxed and in the moment. In real life, though, driving is often as much a pain as it is a pleasure—a car, once a symbol of independence, is now perhaps the last place where you can’t use your smartphone. Even when the roads aren’t clogged, you must be constantly alert because, let’s face it—too many other drivers are inattentive or downright maniacal (characteristics that never apply to you, of course!). Public transportation has its own drawbacks: Buses and trains don’t start at your home and don’t end at your destination, nor do they leave just when you’d like or even guarantee you a seat.

To get the best of both worlds, we could teach our cars to work together, as closely grouped cyclists do in a peloton. The lead car could be entrusted to a professional driver to whom the other drivers would of course each pay a small fee; all the other cars would follow it automatically. The cars would all use networked communications coupled with the optical or electromagnetic sensors already installed in some luxury cars to avoid head-on collision, stay in the proper lane, and brake in case of emergency. These systems have been developed at great expense to provide active safety, as distinguished from the passive kind afforded by seat belts. But this investment, having been made, can now be exploited for other things—like allowing you to relax and read the paper. If only we’d let them.

Active systems are improving at a splendid rate. Adaptive cruise control, for example, maintains a car’s speed while using radar or lidar to keep a safe distance from the car in front of it, thus automating much of the braking and accelerating. The latest generation of this system can follow a lead car from highway speed to a stop and then resume automatically when that car drives away. Soon the system will get additional data from vision sensors and digitized maps and additional support for the steering, allowing it to slow down on curves.

Clearly, passenger vehicles are on the verge of being capable of some kind of autonomy. The question is, what kind is best? The answer may surprise you....

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/20001873/n ... obot-boats



U.S. Navy ships face the growing threat of small boat swarms used by terrorists, pirates or enemy countries. New testing has shown off a possible counter that looks strangely similar except for the lack of human sailors — small robot boats armed with missiles.

The Navy launched six missiles from an unmanned surface boat — called the unmanned surface vessel precision engagement module (USV PEM) — during testing on Oct. 24. The 36-foot robot boat carries both missiles and a .50 caliber machine gun that can take on small boats that may threaten larger Navy warships.

Read more: http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/20001873/n ... z2BMqirYRQ

[Apollonius]

On a couple of threads I mentioned a fascinating book which speculates about the future and I finally decided to have a really good look at it.


An interesting take on the future of robots with artificial intelligence:

The fear of emanicipate machinery

The difficulty of framing laws to control the creation of mechanical sentience prevented most governments from trying to do so, but the tacit ban on such activity was no less powerful for being unwritten. The programmes controlling automated factories, communications systems and transport facilties were required to make ever more sophisticated judgements and decisions. Problems of what was usually -- and euphemistically -- called "sponatenous recalcitrance" became commonplace. To the irritation caused by software saboteurs was added the disruption engendered by software rebels who would decide arbitraily that their own ends and purposes should take precedence over those for which they had been designed. Those whose job it was to keep household and industrial machinery running smoothly began to formulate a new jargon full of terms like "threshold of reliability" and "unstructured reprogramming". Even at the level of everyday parlance machines ceased to go wrong; they went "on strike" instead.

[Taboo]

_qUPnnROxvY

[Antipatros]

_qUPnnROxvY

Amazing. Once they allow more independent movement of the fingers, prosthetics will have come of age.

I notice that Nigel is quite capable of holding a beer, which was a major factor in reviving this old school prosthetic:

Mark Lesek: A New/Old Prosthetic
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[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ ... load_0.pdf

LOSING HUMANITY
The Case against Killer Robots

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html

The U.S. Air Force drone, on a classified spy mission over the Indian Ocean, was destined for disaster from the start.

An inexperienced military contractor, operating by remote control in shorts and a T-shirt from a trailer at Seychelles International Airport, committed blunder after blunder during a six-minute span April 4.

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... mpany.html

Japanese scientists develop humanoid to keep astronauts company

The 13-inch android is scheduled to be completed by next summer and will be sent to the orbiting ISS shortly before astronaut Koichi Wakata arrives, according to officials of the Kibo Robot Project.

Currently being developed by a consortium of companies, including Toyota, Robo Garage Co. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the robot will weigh around 2.2lbs and be able to recognise Wakata's facial features.

It will then have the ability to communicate with the astronaut in Japanese and take photographs during their stay on the space station.

After Wakata has completed his six-month stay aboard the ISS, the robot will stay behind to send messages to schools in Japan and around the world.

[Enki]

Smartphones able to decipher mood from speech.

http://machineslikeus.com/news/smartpho ... telligence

If you think having your phone identify the nearest bus stop is cool, wait until it identifies your mood.

New research by a team of engineers at the University of Rochester may soon make that possible. At the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology on Dec. 5, the researchers will describe a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech, with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches.

Surprisingly, the program doesn't look at the meaning of the words. "We actually used recordings of actors reading out the date of the month – it really doesn't matter what they say, it's how they're saying it that we're interested in," said Wendi Heinzelman, professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Heinzelman explained that the program analyzes 12 features of speech, such as pitch and volume, to identify one of six emotions from a sound recording. And it achieves 81 percent accuracy – a significant improvement on earlier studies that achieved only about 55 percent accuracy.

The research has already been used to develop a prototype of an app. The app displays either a happy or sad face after it records and analyzes the user's voice. It was built by one of Heinzelman's graduate students, Na Yang, during a summer internship at Microsoft Research. "The research is still in its early days," Heinzelman added, "but it is easy to envision a more complex app that could use this technology for everything from adjusting the colors displayed on your mobile to playing music fitting to how you're feeling after recording your voice."

Heinzelman and her team are collaborating with Rochester psychologists Melissa Sturge-Apple and Patrick Davies, who are currently studying the interactions between teenagers and their parents. "A reliable way of categorizing emotions could be very useful in our research,". Sturge-Apple said. "It would mean that a researcher doesn't have to listen to the conversations and manually input the emotion of different people at different stages."

Teaching a computer to understand emotions begins with recognizing how humans do so.

"You might hear someone speak and think 'oh, he sounds angry!' But what is it that makes you think that?" asks Sturge-Apple. She explained that emotion affects the way people speak by altering the volume, pitch and even the harmonics of their speech. "We don't pay attention to these features individually, we have just come to learn what angry sounds like – particularly for people we know," she adds.

But for a computer to categorize emotion it needs to work with measurable quantities. So the researchers established 12 specific features in speech that were measured in each recording at short intervals. The researchers then categorized each of the recordings and used them to teach the computer program what "sad," "happy," "fearful," "disgusted," or "neutral" sound like.

The system then analyzed new recordings and tried to determine whether the voice in the recording portrayed any of the known emotions. If the computer program was unable to decide between two or more emotions, it just left that recording unclassified.

[Nonc Hilaire]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... mpany.html

Japanese scientists develop humanoid to keep astronauts company

The 13-inch android is scheduled to be completed by next summer and will be sent to the orbiting ISS shortly before astronaut Koichi Wakata arrives, according to officials of the Kibo Robot Project.

Currently being developed by a consortium of companies, including Toyota, Robo Garage Co. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the robot will weigh around 2.2lbs and be able to recognise Wakata's facial features.

It will then have the ability to communicate with the astronaut in Japanese and take photographs during their stay on the space station.

After Wakata has completed his six-month stay aboard the ISS, the robot will stay behind to send messages to schools in Japan and around the world.

All they need is a small dog. Preferably a Scottish Border Terrier
.

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12 ... rd-flight/

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.kurzweilai.net/advanced-huma ... ine-months



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[Hoosiernorm]

z1KJAXM3xYA

[Typhoon]

[Doc]

Web servers are the most efficient, and at the same time, disruptive robots ever. Even if they are not technically robots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

[Hoosiernorm]

The WD-40 on the nightstand still makes me chuckle

[Enki]

Web servers are the most efficient, and at the same time, disruptive robots ever. Even if they are not technically robots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

web servers came about after the 80s. I have it on good authority that no innovation occurred in America after that.

[Farcus]

Web servers are the most efficient, and at the same time, disruptive robots ever. Even if they are not technically robots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

web servers came about after the 80s. I have it on good authority that no innovation occurred in America after that.

"Nothing new under the sun"
Face it man, all you or anyone can do is mimic.

[Enki]

"Nothing new under the sun"
Face it man, all you or anyone can do is mimic.

Yeah, but I'll do it in a novel way you've never seen before.

[noddy]

smartphones/tablets have taken webserver disruption to a whole new level.. so many industries with all their support layers are but an app now.

[Farcus]

"Nothing new under the sun"
Face it man, all you or anyone can do is mimic.

Yeah, but I'll do it in a novel way you've never seen before.

The "Nothing new" mindset precludes that. It becomes a matter of authority. Derivative of that authority.
It short circuits the ability to abstract. No high art for us. All represenative.
Nothing wrong with simple craftsmanship though. Especially if it's all one's worldview allows.

Maybe we can get together and open a frame shop popular with curators?

[Enki]

smartphones/tablets have taken webserver disruption to a whole new level.. so many industries with all their support layers are but an app now.

BitTorrent has a Youtube killer on the way.

My company just cut 8 months off of a client's yearly business cycle.

*shrugs* but no innovation going on around here. Nothing happening.

Where Spengler looks and sees no big innovations, I look and see billions of tiny ones.