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Category Archives: robots

Tiny robots could fly around no-kill rules

03 May

robo-flyA pair of intriguing-and-potentially-linked robot stories made the news this week, with the first being a United Nations report calling on a moratorium for automated killing machines. The report for the UN Human Rights Commission suggests a worldwide ban on the production, assembly, testing and deployment of fully or semi-autonomous weapons until rules can be developed to govern their use.

With United States, Britain, Israel, South Korea and Japan already having such killer robots, the clock is ticking. Removing humans from the decision to institute killing, the report says, could lead to an increase of it.

“Decisions over life and death in armed conflict may require compassion and intuition. Humans — while they are fallible — at least might possess these qualities, whereas robots definitely do not,” it says. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 3, 2013 in robots, war, weapons

 

Auto-transcription? Be careful what we wish for

07 Mar

robot-writingWhen thinking about the Pentagon’s technological research, it’s more pertinent to wonder what its scientists aren’t into than what are they into. The latest doozy from its James Bond-like Q-wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a real imagination stoker: total transcription of every conversation on earth.

Yup. According to Wired, DARPA has given University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease $300,000 over two years to work on a project called, “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” As per the article:

The idea is that business meetings or even conversations with your friends and family could be stored in archives and easily searched. The stored recordings could be held in servers, owned either by individuals or their employers. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on March 7, 2013 in DARPA, journalism, robots

 

In the robot job war, imagination is the weapon

28 Feb
Will Smith might have had an easier time if he'd worked with the robots instead of against them.

Will Smith might have had an easier time if he’d worked with the robots instead of against them.

A few weeks back, a story about how humans were losing the labour race against robots was making the media rounds. The mini-furor was kicked off by comments from MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson on 60 Minutes.

“Technology is always creating jobs,” he said. “It’s always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.”

From reading most of the news stories on the subject, it was easy to figure Brynjolfsson for a techno-pessimist – someone who, despite his job at MIT, feared the encroachment and spreading of technology.

The thing is, Brynjolfsson is also the co-author of a 2011 book called Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. If you’ve read it, you’ll know he’s anything but a cynic. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on February 28, 2013 in robots

 

Angst over robot jobs picking up steam

31 Jan

industrial-robotsIt’s easy to tell when a new technology has reached critical mass – discussions over its long-term effects start kicking into overdrive. That’s happening now with robots and how they are going to affect the human job market.

Conventional thinking has always held that automation and robots have historically been good things, because when a machine takes over a task, the human who used to do it is forced to do something smarter and better. This has had traditional repercussions both great and small, from auto assembly line workers necessarily having to upgrade their skills or maybe even start their own businesses, to regular people simply not having to remember minutiae like phone numbers because machines do it for them. Machines have traditionally freed our brains to worry about other, more important stuff.

However, in a recent 60 Minutes interview, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Bruce Welty raised a worrying issue – that robotic development has now reached the exponential phase, which means that machines are taking over human tasks faster than humans can come up with new and better things to do. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on January 31, 2013 in robots

 

A big Mahalo to technology in paradise

18 Jan
This may be the best photo I've ever taken; twelve years ago, such shots weren't possible with my film camera.

The nicest photo I’ve ever taken? Twelve years ago I couldn’t take such shots with just my film camera.

Aloha from Hawaii, where the wife and I have been on vacation/honeymoon since the Consumer Electronics Show ended last week. There’s nothing quite like some time in heaven after a week in hell.

Speaking of which, I was thinking the other day of how the former can bring perspective to the latter. Driving along the Kuaia coast in our rented convertible, we were having about the best time imaginable, thanks in some part to the music piped through our car’s Bluetooth stereo system. Life really doesn’t get any better than riding through paradise with your hair blowing in the wind, with the sounds of Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin in the background.

It brought me back to my last trip to Hawaii, about 12 years ago. I didn’t have a wife or convertible then, but I did have tunes in the car. The difference is, they were the result of my hauling a flip book full of CDs along in my luggage. Now, rather than dragging that heavy folder of eminently scratchable plastic halfway across the world, all of that same music is packed nicely into a tiny device that beams it wirelessly into the air. Needless to say, now is much, much better than then. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on January 18, 2013 in robots

 
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