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...

It Takes a Village…?

An interesting experiment in Scotland seeks to build a robotic society to study emergent cultural behaviors. The robots will be grouped into “villages” and programmed to mimic each other’s actions under various conditions. The scientists expect the mimicked behaviors to change slightly every time they are copied, resulting in a variety of different and unpredictable results...much like the telephone game. Of course, the emergent behaviors will be uniquely robotic, and should be distinct from human or animal activities.

Given the general sentiment towards AI in Great Britain lately, don’t be surprised to see protesters warning against the inevitability of these robots going crazy and killing everyone...

NLP Calculator for Mac

The Unofficial Apple Weblog points us in the direction of a calculator that can solve a limited scope of natural language word problems. Written as a front-end for the GNU bc calculator, Soulver is something fun to play with but isn't meant to satisfy all your calculating needs.

I was recently mulling around the idea of creating a natural language Unix shell. It wouldn't be too difficult to map out a significant number of input patterns to actual Unix/Linux commands, but the necessarily narrow scope of the system would have been a major usability drawback, as it must be for Soulver.

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.

Ashes to Ashes...

Scottish engineers (alas, not Montgomery Scott) are speculating about tiny robotic "dust particles" which utilize wireless distributed computing and are capable of physically reconfiguring themselves. Consisting of multitudes of individual computer chips surrounded by morphic polymer sheaths, clouds of smart dust could fly in formation and changing shape to meet environmental and mission requirements. These devices would form a swarm intelligence, and could be used to explore alien worlds if released into the atmosphere of extrasolar planets by interplanetary space probes.

Talk of simulated swarms of 50 such particles able to shift into star formation immediately reminded me of one futurist's concept of a starfish-like body built of nanorobots designed for sophisticated AI beings of the future. Absolutely wild.

An Artificial Conscience for Artificial Warriors

The Economist has more on the U.S. military's attempt to build an ethical decision-making framework for autonomous weapon systems. This particular initiative seeks to map out all possible actions & outcomes in order to select the most appropriate or "ethical" behavior. It sounds a bit like Deep Blue's brute force calculation of all possible moves & consequences, however, the decision space of a battlefield is slightly more complex than a chessboard...to say the least.