Doomsters

As recession clouds gather and mighty economies crumble. Millenialists of the 2012 club (Milton Keynes branch) congregate to celebrate their impending existential demise.

House of lords takes bribes (unsurprisingly)

In an age where the mainstream media is little more than a megaphone for the government it's surprising to read what appears to be a genuine piece of investigative journalism. In an undercover operation the Times reveals that several members of the house of lords admit accepting very substantial back-handers from companies in exchange for having laws changed in their favour.

To me this isn't surprising at all, except for the fact that such a thing has actually been openly reported in public. I think in previous decades a story like this would have been quickly censored, or never made it past the newspaper editor (who may themselves have been part of the "old boy" network).

Although I admit that sometimes the house of lords does make sensible decisions I've never been a fan of that particular institution, since it's fundamentally anti-democratic - basically a peculiar kind of relic of feudalism. The traditional method by which people get into the lords is to make a substantial donation to whichever political party happens to be in power at the time, or to be an ex prime minister or senior cabinet member. In my opinion an institution like this is utterly anachronistic, and has no place in the 21st century, although I realize that this is not a popular viewpoint.

Microblog with confidence

At the end of the dot com era in 2000/2001 many web based services either disappeared entirely or became paying only, often without much forewarning for their users.

Since the popular microblogging service Twitter seems to conspicuously lack a business model it might be that identi.ca is a more robust alternative, less likely to suffer from abrupt and ham-fisted attempts at monetizing the service. Since this is based upon the Affero GPL and creative commons licenses if one server goes down because a company goes bust another is likely to crop up soon afterwards to replace it.

Centralize, and you build in weakness.

Security sillyness

"Security" is the application of last resort in mobile robotics, if you can't think of anything else that your robot could possibly do that might make money or be able to justify a research grant.

So this kind of stuff is just lame.



A robot of this size isn't going to be able to stop a burglar by firing a string vest at them. The only way that a security robot could be effective would be if it were armed with a sonic, microwave or electric shock weapon, but when that happens you're quickly getting into a whole new world of malevolent possibilities.

Another year, another android

The march, or perhaps the slightly awkward head movements, of the androids continues in 2009 with Steve Grand's new web site Grandroids. We havn't heard very much from Steve in recent years, apart from the occasional Biota podcast appearance, but it seems that he has been busy building some sort of new fembot.

Whether there is really a market for entertaining exhibition androids remains to be seen. I suppose there might be if he can come up with something sufficiently impressive and interactive. Honda has been hiring out their ASIMO robot, for some no doubt phenomenal fee, for many years. One counter argument against this business model is that as consumer robot toys become increasingly sophisticated and commonplace the "wow" factor of having a humanoid robot on display at an exhibition stand may be somewhat diminished, raising the bar on what is considered to be novel and at the cutting edge of technology.

Building android or anthropomorphic robots is certainly fun, and I've done some amount of this myself in the past, but my approach now is quite different from this one and I'm not convinced that Jacques de Vaucanson style mechanical curiosities are the best way to make progress on the robotics problem. Within the last ten years there have been several large humanoids, mostly of Japanese origin, yet none of these appear to have made the slightest progress towards being practical or commercially viable machines. The showcase android may have its five minutes of fame on YouTube or elsewhere, but the selection pressures within this domain will be for short term ad-hoc gimmicky features which aren't really making incremental progress towards the larger goal of more intelligent machines and are ignoring or avoiding what I would consider to be the key problems which need to be addressed.

I'd agree with Steve's observation that AI is always a harder problem than you think it is. Even the most enthusiastic supporters amongst the AGI and singularist movement I think frequently underestimate or dismiss as trivial or unimportant aspects of robotics which have mostly evaded adequate solutions thus far.

"People sometimes worry that robots are going to take over the world, but frankly the greatest threat robots have posed to humanity so far is that they tend to be heavy and fall over a lot."

On this I used to agree entirely, having experienced first hand just how stupid even the best robotic technology can be. The above statement would have been true five or more years ago, but as the previous blog post suggests the situation is changing rapidly. It remains that case that I don't believe that AI or robotic systems themselves are intrinsically a threat to humanity on any short to medium term time scale. However, I think there is a growing danger of the use of telerobotics as a means of directing and amplifying human malevolence.

Based upon reading the Grandroids site I would guess that Steve is in the Microsoft robotics camp, with mentions of MSRS and Microsoft speech technologies. At the moment the robotics community still seems to be divided as far as choice of operating system and software development methodology goes. On the one hand you have some using Windows and proprietary systems including MSRS, and on the other there are those who mainly stick with Linux and open source.

Wired for war

A podcast which discusses the use of telerobots in warfare makes a good point in that in a society where pressing young people into military service is considered politically unacceptable the inevitable outcome of that, if the same level of violence is to be sustainable, is greater use of mercenary fighters (hired guns) or to engineer humans out of the loop as far as possible by making greater use of robotics. Also mentioned is that inevitably non-state organizations will before long begin using the same telerobot weapons, which are much cheaper to manufacture than conventional military hardware such as warships and tanks.

Depression era cooking tips

Here's one for all those coders who are "between jobs" right now.

All about Bob

I found an interesting description of the program called "Bob", which is generally regarded to have been one of Microsoft's worst programs ever. I remember the PCs and software of 1995 quite well, but I never used this particular program - probably primarily because it didn't come pre-installed on the computers of the time and was not used in businesses.



It's not too difficult to see why this program was a flop.

• The graphics are too cutesy for most users, and even by the standards of 1995 look quite retro, being more reminiscent of the adventure games of the 1980s.

• The internet as we know it now did not exist, so that for example when selecting "buy a car" probably the information behind that was extremely limited and not very helpful.
  

Still, it looks like Microsoft Bob may have been ahead of its time. I feel that the way we use computers today is still highly sub-optimal from an anthropocentric viewpoint. The current paradigm is still very much one of programs, menus, tabs and widgets - a style of use all dating back to the Xerox innovations of the 1970s. Although this type of interface is clunky and sub-optimal it's a kind of sub-optimality that most people gradually over a period of years have become habituated to. This is one of the reasons why computer users often detest any kind of change, such as a change of operating system or office productivity software, because such change may mean that they have to re-learn all the clunky program-oriented stuff which enables them to complete everyday tasks.



In my opinion computers, both in a home and business context, need to become far more task oriented. Task orientation is much closer to how people actually think about things. So for example if I want to send an email to someone currently I have to open certain programs which I must know the name of and know how to find, then click on menus and buttons of various kinds. Surely it would be much easier just to click on an email icon and then the computer come back and say "who do you want to send to?" and I'd type in (or even perhaps speak) the name, then immediately begin typing the email without having to click on anything or drag anything or otherwise faff about. The problem with the existing program centric paradigm is that you're often presented with a menu full of options almost all of which are entirely irrelevant to completing your current objective - i.e. the computer has no idea what your objective really is, and is not goal oriented in the way it presents information to you.

In my view systems which were task oriented could considerably accelerate productivity. If the computer has some idea of what your objective is, and remembers how you achieved that on previous occasions it could make far more useful suggestions, and learn to auto-complete mundane information in an appropriately contextual way.

Simulating differential drive

I'm doing some simulation tests of the odometry of the differential drive of the GROK2 robot. Simulation is of course a simplification of what actually happens in reality, but it's good enough for the purposes of most of this phase of the development and testing.

This graph shows the lagg error in the PID loop for one of the motors as the robot executes a 90 degree turn. This looks fairly horrendous, although the numbers are actually quite small.



The simulation does bear some relation to reality, in that the control loops are all working in real time and rely upon the PC's CPU clock. Since the operating system has a mind of its own and is administering multiple other unrelated processes timings between simulation runs are never exactly identical.

The danger of hyperinflation

Listening to the radio this week for the first time I heard officials talking about "printing money" as a solution to the current economic troubles. Not only is this crazy, but it just doesn't work. Here's a recent example of what happens to the economy when a government irresponsibly prints money in a way which makes no economic sense.

Stagflation

Looking at my gas and electricity bills I've now been living in Sheffield for long enough to be able to make a fair comparison with the previous year to see how much prices have inflated. In terms of usage the figures are very similar, since I'm not running any more computers, lights or other gadgets than I had a year ago.

According to my calculations, the price of gas has risen by 55.4% compared to the same quarter in 2007/8, whilst the cost of electricity has risen by a whopping 178.2%. Obviously both of these are far ahead of the rate of inflation, which is officially around 5%. Personally I think that the officially quoted inflation figures are grossly underestimated. In real terms what this means is that I have less disposable income to spend on consumables.

Fortunately I can pay the bills, but I think there are going to be many people struggling this winter especially if they've recently been made redundant or have a large mortgage.

Could stereo webcams be here?

They might be soon, according to this BBC report. I've been expecting this to happen for years, although I wasn't expecting them to be used to make video anaglyphs, which seems like a somewhat niche interest. Instead I was expecting stereo to be used for background subtraction, so that a mundane background can be replaced with something more jazzy during video conferencing.

The factor which will determine whether this is at all useful will be whether you can grab two separate images simultaneously, rather than a single image with red and green overlayed.

The collective unconscious

An interesting result from brain imaging, suggesting that the way that high level concepts are represented in the brain is less variable than had previously been generally supposed.



At present though knowledge in this area is still very sketchy, so I wouldn't put too much faith in this one result. If this turns out to be true though it would contradict my dusty old psychology textbooks, which invariably claim that the way in which high level concepts are represented in the brain is completely unique and dependent upon individual experiences acquired during development.

One possible explanation might be that this is not detecting high level concepts at all but is instead detecting sub-vocal speech patterns being generated in Broca's area. Since the muscles involved in speech production are quite similar across individuals this might explain the apparent invariance.

Approaching singularity

Assuming that a technological singularity occurs at some time in the first half of this century, will people's thinking become increasingly muddled as that point approaches? According to this video, the answer would appear to be yes.



Here I'm assuming that "technological singularity" means a point in time at which the first smarter than human non-biological general intelligence emerges.

The first thing you have to consider is, why would anyone want to live up to and past this particular point in time, in some cases going to extreme lengths to do so such as having themselves cryogenically frozen. It seems to be assumed that a post-singular world is some kind of bowl of cherries, but what rational basis is there for assuming this? Might not a post-singular world be a somewhat confusing (from a human 1.0 perspective) dystopia, or merely a boring anticlimax?

Assuming that the emergence of powerful non-biological intelligences means the onset of some form of utopia seems like wooly thinking to me. For example, was the emergence of Homo sapiens greeted as a utopian revolution by Homo neanderthalis? Perhaps it was, but the outcome for the neanderthals in the long run was not particularly favourable.

Also, the notion that singularitarians would abandon their savings, presumably because some non-biological intelligence is going to provide them with everything they need in future makes the assumption that the non-biologicals, or artilects, are even interested in human affairs at all. Surely if you're rational and you believe (somewhat superstitiously) that a technological singularity is going to happen soon, you'll want to buffer yourself as much as possible from the jarring paradigm shifts and their inevitable disruptive consequences for society. Leaving yourself without any savings really exposes you to the full force of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, making your chances of surviving intact up to and beyond post-singularism far more uncertain.

Godzilla Vs The Insane Gigantic Asimo

Perhaps the most relevant question here is what mind-expanding narcotic was Honda's marketing department taking when they dreamed up this crazy stunt?

Reconstruction