THREAT TO HUMANITY!!!!!1

In another (yes, another) sensationalist attempt to attract readers and sell ads, we find an AFP article entitled Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert.

Just some more fear-mongering from our wonderful media if you ask me.

So we can add psycho killer robots to the list of things to be worried about in this troublesome modern age. But I thought Hollywood already taught us that? In fact, the article even refers to The Terminator.

Capitalizing on Tragedy

In light of the mining disaster in Utah, NPR has taken the opportunity to ask two patronizing questions:

Could Robots Replace Humans in Mines?

Duh.

Why do human beings still risk their lives burrowing miles under ground and doing one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the world?

Because robots are expensive and people are not.

That’s about all it amounts to. Until robots become the cheaper option, humans will continue to perform the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks.

via AAAI.org News

Never to be Outdone

Apparently the French aren't the only latecomers to the robotic ethics debate, now the US Congress has decided the enter the mix. A “Congressional Caucus of Robotics” has been formed to investigate the situation. Right. Note the same Bill Gates quote about robotics found in EVERY SINGLE OTHER ARTICLE OF THIS TYPE... can’t these “journalists” find anything new to use?

via AAAI.org News

Another Quality Microsoft Product(tm)

IEEE Spectrum has a lengthy profile of the tiny, 11-man division of mighty Microsoft developing a toolkit for robot designers. The blatantly uncritical article glowingly portrays the team as an underdog guaranteed to succeed. I’m shocked that there are still tech-savvy people out there who believe Microsoft to be capable of producing quality products.

Will the machines controlled by MS Robotic Studio crash with Blue Screens or Red Rings?

via AAAI.org News

More on Ineffective, Unenforceable Guidelines

Apparently the "we need a code of robot ethics" meme just won’t die. As previously reported, the government of South Korea is hard at work drafting just such a code for robots and developers to follow. Nothing new here, just the same fear-mongering jargon, the same quote from Bill Gates and the same lack of discussion about the effectiveness and enforceability of the proposed guidelines. I guess the French media are just slow to catch on...

via AAAI.org News

Mainstream Media

The NY Times has an extensive profile of robotics at MIT, which, like many of the Times' science & technology articles, is dumbed-down to the point of being unreadable.

The author, Robin Marantz Henig, is apparently an accomplished science writer who strives to make her work attainable for the general masses. Unfortunately, she glosses over significant issues, focuses on the wrong things, and mixes up some important details.

For example, the author understates the complexities of machine vision, pattern recognition and mastering language. She criticizes current research for being unsophisticated, but seems impressed by MIT robots from 14 years ago. For some strange reason, Henig feels the need to describe Prof. Rodney Brooks’ “rubbery features and bulgy blue eyes” (perhaps this make him seem more “human” for readers). Finally, she appears to be much more enamored with the robots’ hardware while the vast majority of the “sophistication” lies in the software and algorithms controlling the machines.

I understand that the Times is designed for the average American, and more scholarly papers belong in specialized academic journals, but works of this nature do a disservice to both reader and subject. Instead of employing professional writers who claim an ability to digest complex topics for the public, media outlets should seek genuine subject matter experts with a complementary gift for writing (they do exist).

Read at your own risk. I gave up about halfway through.

How would NLP parse buzzwords?

More about Powerset (covered here before), which Techdirt seems to think is little more than buzzwords and patent threats. The start-up claims to be developing natural language search technology, and recently held an event in San Francisco to unveil itself to the world.

Among its many lofty goals, Powerset wants to become the ultimate web system, by creating what ZDNet calls "the natural language search mashup platform." For now, I've got to be as skeptical as Techdirt and think that these folks just combined as many hot buzzwords as they could come up with and slapped a couple of questionable patents on them. This kind of talk is a great way to generate venture capital funding, but likely won't do much to advance NLP. Hopefully it will turn out that Powerset has something great in store for all of us, and that this is all just some marketing and PR run amok, but until then we'll just have to wait & see.

NLP to Earn Big Bucks

The NY Times covers news mining algorithms designed to digest the volumes of information available on the Internet in news articles, journals, studies, and legal filings. Financial institutions are using these programs to generate massive amounts of stock trades, easily replacing large staffs of analysts. Much like reactive day-traders who launch waves of trades based on buzzwords found in headlines, these systems look for key words & phrases known to be trade triggers to predict movement of individual stocks and sectors.

Overrated Semantic Search

Several IT news outlets have been fawning over Xerox's new semantic-based search engine, which I've covered before. The general idea behind the technology is to analyze linguistic structures in order to improve search results.

Xerox plans to use this technology in legal software to enable "e-discovery" by sifting through massive amounts of documents, searching for information relevant to a case. Perhaps this will lead to the second instance of software being sued for practicing law without a license.

This is all well and good, and a natural progression for the science of search. Not all that dramatic an improvement as the articles would lead us to believe, buy hey, you gotta sell papers, right? However, it aggravates me when the media makes a factual error while covering a topic I’m familiar with...

For example, common searches using keywords "Lincoln" and "vice president" likely won't reveal President Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. A semantic search should yield the answer: Hannibal Hamlin.

Except a Google search for “lincoln’s first vice president” provides the correct result, as does running “Who was Lincoln’s first vice president?” through my quite unsophisticated Answer Machine. While I can’t fault the reporter for overlooking my humble research, shouldn’t they be capable of running a simple Google query? Wouldn’t this fall under the category of “thorough fact checking?” Shouldn’t they run their “facts” through a subject matter expert before publishing them? And I mean an actual expert, not a PR staffer from the company at hand. Unfortunately, more and more tech articles in the media have regressed to little more than paraphrasing press releases.

Furthermore, if I notice obvious mistakes regarding topics I know a little something about, what other incorrect information am I obliviously consuming? And the media wonders why we don’t trust them anymore...

Delusions of Grandeur

An article has been floating around the web that overstates the importance of video game artificial intelligence.

"A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers," says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT's Media Lab.

I don't agree. I think this (just like everything else, right?) is a problem of semantics. Consider this quote:

"As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system." - Martha Pollack

Researchers all over the world are doing exciting and relevant work in AI, yet we don't recognize it at such. Consider the work by Google in machine translation, by Stanford and other in autonomous navigation, and by scores of groups in data mining. I would argue that these are monumentally important advancements, far greater than the incrementally improved enemy combat tactics in Halo, yet most people don't recognize them as artificial intelligence.

AI has a PR issue. Perhaps AAAI needs an advocacy arm?

AI News for the Masses...Down Under Style

n extensive article about robots, androids, and artificial intelligence was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. Although designed for a layman, it still provides a decent perspective about the current state and future of AI.

Child-like Robot Creeps Out Bloggers

Engadget has declared the Japanese-built (of course) CB2 Child Robot as the most disturbing machine ever built. But it isn't that bad, is it?

World's First Robotic Murderer?

It's the same old story: idiot accidentally kills himself with robot, media blames 'unsafe killer robots,' we all laugh at 'Skynet became self-aware' jokes. Expect to see more of these in the future... blaming artificial intelligence for human stupidity.

When Will It End?

Yet another article has appeared in a British newspaper forecasting the dire consequences of AI as a result of a recent public debate at the London Science Media Centre. The Daily Mail chimes in again, repeating most of what's previously been covered, with concerns that robotic caregivers could "dehumanise" patients, and citing an uneasy relationship with technology.

One ray of coherent thought shined through, however, as it was revealed that the original intent of the debate was for scientists to dispute the "silly report" on robot rights released by the UK Department of Trade and Industry. Unfortunately, all of the media outlets covering the debate chose instead to focus on vague worries of out-of-control robots running amuck. Gotta sell papers I suppose...

Here's a gem from this latest article:

I certainly wouldn't want to be a British squaddie on the sands of Iraq with robot-controlled American gunships patrolling overhead.

Umm...too late?

More Fear Mongering over Robots in UK

Now it seems the “West Britons” are jumping on the bandwagon, with the Belfast Telegraph being the latest UK media outlet to spread FUD about the coming robotic menace. The article has a decent layman’s overview of the current state of robotics, but can’t avoid inciting worry over the increasing use of military robots, “robot rights,” and robots replacing humans providing care for children and the elderly.

It doesn’t get much more ominous than this:

So are these machines a threat?

Yes...

Sounds like those scientists at the London Science Media Centre really frightened the journalists in attendance...or perhaps the less-than tech-savvy reporters misunderstood much of the discussion and wrote sensational articles in order to attract readers.

More coverage of this debate:
Artificial Minds: British Wary of AI
Artificial Minds: Robo-FUD from the BBC

I just wish I could get my hands on some transcripts or other source material from the actual event to see for myself what really went on...

British Wary of AI

More doom & gloom from the UK as a result of a "forward-looking" debate on robot ethics at the London Science Media Centre.

The Financial Times is concerned that robots designed for urban warfare could be misused for policing purposes. The Daily Mail fears robots making wrong decisions and warns of vague "consequences." To me these seem more to be matters of posse comitatus and accountability rather than cultural issues exclusively pertaining to AI.

The old saying "We fear that which we do not understand" rings awfully true...

Robo-FUD from the BBC

The BBC generally has much better articles about AI than their latest piece about the questions posed by autonomous robots. Plenty of misplaced fear-mongering about the coming distopia with machine enslaving man, sprinkled with a bit of socialist concern for robots' rights to health care.

A single quote captures my feelings about this article rather succinctly:

"It's poorly informed, poorly supported by science and it is sensationalist," said Professor Owen Holland of the University of Essex.

The author is concerned with determining who to blame should an autonomous military robot kill someone in error. The proper answer, of course, would be the operator and/or chain of command, as appropriate. Additionally, just like any bit of military hardware, the defense contractor should also be investigated, and similar models inspected and re-tested.

Robotic rights are also addressed in this article, and again, another quote from a professor is needed to steer the discussion in the right direction:

"The more pressing and serious problem is the extent to which society is prepared to trust autonomous robots and entrust others into the care of autonomous robots."

We have a long way to go to counter Hollywood's negative portrayal of robots & AI, and it seems to me that most reporters are only interested in playing off of and propagating these sentiments. Certainly, there needs to be "informed debate" in order to give careful consideration about safeguards regarding human-machine interaction, but vacuous drivel such as this is not a good start.

Unmanned Vehicles Magazine

I stumbled across an interesting UK-based magazine devoted to UAVs and the like. The website in particular has an excellent collection of news items related to unmanned systems of all kinds.

Film Noir's portrayal of AI

How do the various Hollywood visions of the future compare with current AI research & applications?

The Financial Express (Bangladesh's only English-language financial daily) has an entertaining article about the treatment of Artificial Intelligence and other futuristic technologies by the motion picture industry. There seems to be a recurring theme that technological advancement is destined to doom the human race, as opposed to saving it. The writer points out films that showcase believable technology of the near future tend to be pessimitic, like The Terminator series and I, Robot, while more optimistic franchises like Star Trek employ distant and unrealistic technologies. So are these apocalyptic images really the fate of humanity, or is Hollywood just a little technophobic?

via KurzweilAI.net

Max Headroom Lives!

Coming soon to your TV: newscasts written, produced and anchored entirely by autonomous software.

Think Ananova without the writers. The system, called News at Seven, generates a script from RSS news feeds customized to a viewer’s interests which is then read by an avatar created using the Half-Life game engine. The system can also augment the broadcast with clips from YouTube or other video sites based on keywords in the news stories.

News at Seven was created by a team of researchers at the Northwestern University Intelligent Information Lab led by Kristian Hammond along with grad students Nathan Nichols and Sara Owsley. Several videos are already available for viewing, including a report on the alleged North Korean nuclear test.

A novelty for now, perhaps, but possibly the next step in the long journey towards building systems we interact with in a much more natural way. Imagine an avatar you could ask questions of or hold a conversation with. Using methods such as those described above, this avatar could instantly become an expert in almost any conceivable subject. Or, instead of re-formatting RSS feeds for a news script, the system could follow some sort of knowledge representation framework to build an information bank for later use. If we replace the RSS feeds with some other form of input, say sensory input, it could create “memories” of “personal experiences.” The question at the heart of the matter is: how do we define understanding? Does the News at Seven avatar understand the stories it presents to its audience? Most would agree that it does not. But what if the avatar was able to keep a record of the information from these stories in an accessible memory bank, and could discuss the matter with other people (or avatars) to formulate decisions, actions or even opinions based on that knowledge? Would that qualify as understanding? Or intentional behavior? Or even conscious thought? What do we humans, as conscious beings, do beyond this that leads us to define it all as consciousness and understanding?

via Slashdot