Viral organisations as a precursor to automated governance

One interesting aspect which the recent North African uprisings have shown is that it's possible to use social networking software to coordinate people on a large scale to carry out some activity without any centralised leadership.  An article about a protest in the UK illustrates this phenomena particularly clearly. Here the police are complaining that there is no leadership with which they can deal.

"It is not good enough to throw our hands up in the air and say 'Oh, we can't negotiate because there is no one to negotiate with,'" he told Prospect magazine in an interview published on Thursday. "There are lots of people we can talk to, but they need to stand up and lead their people, too. If they don't, we must be clear that the people who wish to demonstrate won't engage, communicate or share what they intend to do with us, and so our policing tactics will have to be different ... slightly more extreme."

My guess is that these are not completely leaderless organisations. There are probably some people who initially had an idea which then "went viral" via the medium of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. They're not leaders in a traditional sense, and are more like the initiators of a meme which then grows and spreads. In the past the primary method of disseminating memes was via a figurehead individual - a celebrity, president or spokesperson - in combination with centralised broadcast media (TV, leaflets, posters, books, etc).

In a computerised system it may be that the human figurehead or governing leadership is not actually necessary, provided that the software is able to structure interactions between users in a way which facilitates collective decisions to be taken and discourse to proceed in some intelligible, albeit decentralised, manner.

This is similar to previous ideas I've had about automating the process of managing companies or governments, and I still think that the "management in a box" notion will eventually come to fruition. In this scenario you deploy your management team as a software system running on a bunch of servers (or "the cloud"), configure what type of governance you want and what sort of industry it will be running, and then the system just starts hiring, buying and selling, or issuing policies which can be implemented by people.  This doesn't necessarily mean that people would be slaves of the computer system, but instead the automated system just acts as a convenient way to enable many human participants to take decisions collectively, perhaps with a limited amount of automated reasoning and some algorithms intended to try to keep the system as a whole in homeostasis.  In a business context homeostasis would mean at least breaking even on average, or in a political context it might mean maintaining a target number of followers.  You could call this the next generation in office productivity software - going beyond individual productivity to the productivity of the overall organisation.

Cleaners that do SLAM

Here is an interesting talk about the Neato cleaning robot. I knew that this robot used a type of low cost laser scanner, but I didn't know to what (if any) extent it was able to do SLAM. This video presentation makes it clear that the robot is capable of SLAM, and is actually quite a smart machine able to navigate between rooms and recharge itself quite competently. It's definitely a big improvement over the previous Roomba generation of floor cleaners.

The next stage up from cleaning the floor would be to use a similar mobile base for a telerobot, which you can command to go to particular locations at particular times. Even without any manipulation ability this could facilitate some early stage applications, such as hospital or care home visits, factory or office inspections and virtual holidays. Of these I think virtual holidays at desirable/exclusive locations would be the most commercially lucrative, since the robot is a scarce resource and users could bid to spend time on it in a manner reminiscent of ebay.

GROK2 Kinect

I've now replaced the head of the GROK2 robot with a Kinect RGBD sensor on a pan and tilt mechanism. After having tried a variety of sensor approaches in 2010 the most successful was still stereo vision, but the data obtainable from the RGBD sensor in indoor situations looks significantly better than what could be expected from stereo vision.



Taking the Kinect apart is a challenge in itself, and is described in detail here. Initially I thought that the tilt motor might be useful, but since this isn't a servo and the mechanism is quite flimsy I removed the stand and (carefully) sawed through the section connecting the base to the sensor (it looks like metal, but is actually plastic with a thin metal covering.

I had been expecting to find that the Kinect is mostly an empty plastic box with a small amount of electronics inside - as is often the case for webcams - but actually this isn't the case and there is a surprisingly dense set of three circuit boards. This sensor seems to be a computer in its own right, and also has an internal cooling fan.

A nice feature of the Kinect is that it has a metal chassis with two large holes at opposite ends sufficiently large for 5mm bolts. This makes it easy to securely fasten the sensor down onto a surface. In this case I used a long strip of aluminium for a base, with each end bent upward by 90 degrees. I also trimmed off some excess plastic, but otherwise retained the front cover, which provides protection for the camera lenses.



Tilt control was implemented in a simple way by directly fixing the sensor to a servo. This has the disadvantage of making the mechanism heavy on one side, so after some failed experiments with counterweights I added an aluminium sheet collar which allows the pan axis to rest on it. This eliminates any wobbly motions which can occur if the pan axis were connected only to the servo.



Another issue with this design for a pan and tilt mechanism is that the sensor cannot look directly downwards. To increase the field of view when the sensor is tilted down towards the floor I removed some of the upper section of the "neck", and replaced it with some flat aluminium sheet.



Robotics now looks as if it's at a point where the depth sensing problem - something which I've struggled with for many years - can be considered to have been solved, and that RGBD sensors like the Kinect will probably become common and further reduce in size and cost over time. It's my guess that other games console manufacturers will develop their own equivalent sensors, and that webcam manufacturers will also get in on the act due to the now elevated consumer expectations of performance.

So over the course of this year I'll be mainly investigating the next stages in the spatial awareness pipeline, such as SLAM, surface detection and object recognition. Another advantage of using the Kinect is that other developers will be doing similar things using ROS, so any successes can be shared and improved upon according to the open source methodology.

It's also worth remembering that this device wasn't released with open source drivers, and that in the space of a couple of months much software has been written for it by volunteers.  This should be a lesson to hardware manufacturers, that it's probably more advantageous to work in collaboration with the software developer community at large, rather than to keep the drivers proprietary.  Volunteers may fix a lot of your problems for you and allow you to reduce your support and development costs.

A landmark moment in politics

This speech by David Cameron represents a landmark moment. It's the usual flim-flam which can be easily anticipated, with the NHS being constantly used (and abused) as a political football by alternating red and blue teams, but it's the first time that I've ever heard a British politician mention "robotics". And that's robotics in the true sense, as opposed to the comical/derogatory sense of something like "my opponent's actions were robotic".

Such a statement proves that robotics is moving out of the shadows and into the scope of the popular consciousness, as the internet was in 1994 or computers were in the early 1980s.

Doing something else with your time

This is a nice research project, because it's an incremental step towards fully autonomous driving. Having the lead vehicle manually driven in the old-fashioned way is less scary, and also provides a legal locus of blame should anything go awry.

This looks like a far simpler system than anything which appeared in the Urban Challenge, with each following vehicle literally copying the steering of the lead vehicle with some delay proportional to their distance. It would also be possible to daisy chain the teleoperation signal along the convoy with each vehicle only communicating locally with the one ahead and behind it.



I don't think that this can easily be justified on environmental grounds, since even semi-autonomous driving like this is likely to result in more cars on the road which are more densely packed together, but it certainly is worth doing in terms of increasing transport efficiency and safety, making driving a more leisurely experience and reducing the cost of haulage (and consequently the cost of the goods being hauled).

The financial crisis and Cybernetics

Until recently I had thought of economies as being like ecosystems, in that you have a lot of variety with different actors making different buying and selling decisions. If enough variation and redundancy exists an ecosystem will eventually find a natural balance without any outside influence. This is a bit like the notoriously bogus independence of risk assumed by mortgage lenders in their estimations of the value of financial "products" and their derivatives, combined with the policy of "light touch" financial regulation upheld by the Blair/Brown administration.

“no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch.” - Gordon Brown, CBI speech, 2005

However, it has become obvious that this view was far too naive, and that economies instead tend to behave more like machines than like ecosystems. In a machine paradigm information flow is more centralised, variety is minimised for the sake of efficiency and significant components can behave in concert due to the non-local structuring of information.



So a healthy economy is a cybernetic one, where there are feedback systems built in which obey Ashby's Law.  One possible such feedback mechanism would be a Tobin tax, where as trading becomes higher frequency or higher risk the amount paid in taxation increases automatically, providing a counteracting balance to aid stability of the system overall.  In a cybernetic view of economics it's really the transaction between agents which is a critical point at which governance can act.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the above quotation from Gordon Brown resulted in the opposite of requisite variety, with runaway positive feedback being a more or less inevitable outcome, given enough time.  In simple terms, if you reduce the number of regulatory measurements and actions available within the feedback loop to below a certain threshold, then instability which may result in catastrophic failure becomes likely.

The revolution may, or may not, be tweeted

Just listening to stuff about Tunisia the kinds of issues they seem to be rioting about seem eerily similar to those in the UK - public spending cuts, high unemployment and a rising cost of living.



If, as is widely expected at the moment, there are further protests and possibly riots in the UK this year I think we can expect a similar kind of response, with bloggers and twitterers being in the front line when it comes to censorship.  The Digital Economy Act gives politicians sufficient legal powers to block the internet connections of individuals, and probably all they would need to be able to claim was that some copyright violation had taken place (which would be fairly easy if any advertising billboards or company logos are visible within video footage) or that national security might be threatened.  As a precedent there were some attempts to censor web sites last year after the student protests, but as always the internet routes around any such disruptions.

Some additional commentary on the Tunisian internet battles can be found here.

Bring your own

A BBC article about people being encouraged to bring their own computers to work, in an effort to reduce IT budgets.  It's interesting to see how in this case the operation of market forces is pushing in the direction of a more transparent society.

Obviously, if more workers are using their own hardware there's a much greater chance of data either being leaked or (more likely) sold to rival companies or stock market gamblers, and it would be possible to do this in a somewhat anonymous way similar to the way that Wikileaks operates.  No matter how much technical security is in place, if data is capable of being displayed on the screen then it's capable of being scraped and OCR'd if there is a sufficient incentive to do so, using software tools which are cheap and easily available.  If workers have remote desktop software installed then it's possible that even the task of screen scraping and recovering text could itself be outsourced and centralised.

Of course doing the above would be pretty unethical, but experience suggests that if there is money to be made from selling data then there will always be a proportion of individuals who are prepared to disregard any ethical considerations, especially if their wages are already very low and they don't particularly care about the company which they're working for.

The retirement of retirement

I think another of my predictions is about to come true, sooner than I had thought.  It has long been my expectation that for people of my age or younger there will be no retirement as such, and that people will be expected to work until they're no longer physically or mentally capable of doing so.

The end of an official retirement age is both a blessing and a curse.  For some it will be very beneficial, and for others (probably the majority) it will be an unpleasant forced "choice" due to economic circumstances.

Also it's worth pointing out, because some people seem to make strange assumptions, that I don't believe that average human life spans will increase dramatically in the near future and there is reason to expect that average life span may shrink or remain static.  Indefinite life spans, if they're possible at all, are something for the more distant future.  The transition to a post-oil economy could be rough or smooth, and just depends upon how intelligently it's managed by politicians and businesses.  There are likely to be political troubles emerging from the rising tide of automation as it eats into traditional middle class forms of white collar employment, producing even greater social polarisation.

So there is likely to be demand in future for technologies which not just help people to live better quality lives for longer in a medical sense, but also enable them to remain within the workforce for longer, and this would include mobility assisting devices and also systems which augment cognition.

The robotics singularity

At least from a literary point of view, a kind of robotics singularity occurred several decades ago.  Plotting all mentions of robotics in the literature looks like this.

Use of the term "robotics" really takes off around 1977, and I think it's too much of a coincidence that this is the year when the first Star Wars film was released.  Broadly speaking, we can probably divide robotics into pre-Star Wars and post-Star Wars eras.

Pre-Star Wars robotics

Examining the pre-Star Wars era in greater detail we can see that not a great deal of movement occurs during the "golden age of sci-fi", and that a linear increase in usage begins in 1968 which gathers momentum throughout most of the 1970s until a hard takeoff occurs.  Probably the film 2001: A space odyssey might have something to do with this, combined with the moon-mania which accompanied the Apollo missions.

Post-singularity

The post-Star Wars era sees a dramatic increase in "robotics", peaking around 1986.  My guess is that by that time movie-goers had become utterly sick of Star Wars sequels, and were ready for fanciful diversions of an altogether different kind. Incidentally 1986 was also the year of the Challenger and Chernobyl disasters - both regarded as big technological failures at the time.

In spite of the progress made in actual robotics in recent times usage of the term has never recovered since the mid 1980s, and may even be declining slightly.  Even Google Trends appears to show flagging interest.  From a roboticist's point of view even really titanic events like successes in the Grand and Urban challenges did not a jot to pique the interest of authors.

Digital survivalism

A podcast on HPR describes a few concerns similar to my own.  Being old enough to remember the messy end of the dot com era in 2000-2001 I've been wary in the last year or two that "free" services on the internet may not remain free under recession conditions.  Fortunately so far these fears have not been realised, and this is probably because the internet is now a more mature place, with more resilient business models and enough advertising revenue to be sustainable.  In terms of the internet, the world is quite a different place now than it was a decade ago.

Still it looks as if the recession/depression (depcession?) has some way to go, and we aren't out of the woods yet.  It seems abundantly clear by now that the very narrow definition of recessions in terms of GDP is inadequate to fully characterise the contemporary state of the economy.  If the depcession drags on for a few more years, as some commentators suggest, things could change though, and we might see more "free" services disappearing or becoming paying only.  So it's always a good idea to have a plan B, and not allow yourself (especially if you're running an organisation or business) to become too dependent upon services in the cloud and the whimsical nature of their terms and conditions.

So during 2010 I started hosting my own web site, with a Wordpress equivalent of this blog.  If Google were to decide that blogging was no longer cool, or economical to host, or if this blog were to become the victim of a collateral takedown, then I could still continue elsewhere without much inconvenience.  As mentioned in the podcast, the fortunes of technology companies vary from year to year and even the largest and seemingly most indefatigable of the mega-corporations can go into rapid decline if they fall out of fashion.

In addition I'd also like to try hosting a Diaspora site, but it looks as if the Diaspora project made some pretty unfortunate design decisions which mean that for the present it can't be hosted on an ARM based server.  Hopefully that will change in the near future, so that Facebook can be ditched.

All of the above could really be defined as a sort of digital survivalism, or digital sustainability.  It's an electronic equivalent of trying to be self-sufficient in straitened times, but hopefully not quite as loony as building your own private nuclear bunker and sitting on an industrial quantity of baked bean tins waiting for the balloon to go up.  Another advantage is having everything in one place where it can be backed up, rather than it being dispersed amongst a diverse range of web sites.  In theory replicated cloud databases might make backups a thing of the past, but you're really just trusting service providers to ensure that's the case.