The Streeb-Greebling Diaries

A new blog

2011-09-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

I've started a new experimental blog over here, where I'll be continuing to speculate on all sorts of topics (but probably mostly robot and AI related).

This is part of my "out of the cloud" strategy, to see if I can gain a greater degree of digital autonomy.

On wasting money on robots

2011-06-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Does the US government waste money on robotics? Probably it does. In the past I've complained about "robot bees", and there does appear to be a lot of robotics research which seems to be poorly coordinated and of questionable value. However, it's difficult to pick winners when it comes to research (otherwise it wouldn't be research), and it may turn out that robot bees are in fact really useful for carrying out inspections of damaged nuclear reactors or collapsed buildings or mines, in places where other types of vehicle wouldn't be suitable.

Criticising the PR2 for folding towels slowly seems pretty lame though, and this sort of childish characterisation or misrepresentation of technology projects is the main reason why on the couple of occasions where I've been asked to appear in mainstream media I've always declined.

Since as far as I'm aware Willow Garage is a private company the criticism here seems to be against the University of Berkley which carried out the aforementioned towel folding. This argument is easy to refute if you think about how many towels and other items of clothing get folded in the US each year, how much time that takes and what the economic value of that time is. I suspect that it's a really big number. If you can produce a general purpose textile folding robot at the right price level then this is potentially a huge industry. Also the speed of folding on this research robot isn't a big issue.

"Computationally,the throughput was primarily limited by the optical flow calculation: the NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU provided a through-put of 1 optical flow computation per 5 seconds, and the processing of each frame requires either one or two optical flow computations, depending on whether a 2-D grasp point detection is made"

This process only needs to be speeded up by an order of magnitude or so for the system to be more practical, and it seems reasonable to believe that this will happen within less than a decade, especially given the amenability of vision algorithms to parallelisation. Also there are many possible alternative ways to calculate optical flow. Beyond a certain point it makes no difference how fast the vision computations are, because physics sets the pace.

Also the appearance of the Microsoft Kinect sensor, which happened after the towel folding research was done, may make all the above limitations irrelevant.

As far as government prudence goes probably far more substantial savings could be made in the military and security areas, where there seems to be a lot of profligate spending on projects of questionable value even within their particular scope of interest. Is there really any need for ICBMs to be sitting unused in silos for decades, long after the cold war ended? Was it really necessary for the US to build a second smaller version of the space shuttle? Is the US tax payer getting value for money out of the Afghanistan war? All of these things are basically just parasitic costs.

Celebrity chefs

2011-06-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

One more personal robot

2011-06-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

Another personal robot, similar to the Turtlebot, but with a simple arm and gripper.

The price is $1200, so this is an affordable machine which anyone could buy and start developing software for. Having a somewhat standardised and affordable PC based robotics platform on which to do research and development, in the style of early home computers, has been something which was aspired to for the last couple of decades, but is only now a realistic proposition. The only drawback is the timing of its introduction - something which Ray Kurzweil talks about in regards to the appropriateness of inventions - isn't very optimal since there aren't currently many people with much disposable income. As a consequence it's possible that new products like this may fail simply because of the ambient economic conditions, but the longer term prospects look good.

Reinventing money

2011-05-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

Money is a very old invention. As soon as you go beyond subsistence farming, such that you're creating a surplus which you might want to exchange then money becomes an obvious trading technology. Money can be represented by anything, so long as that thing is difficult to reproduce without expending effort commensurate with things of value and it's agreed upon within a community as a token of exchange.

There are problems within the current money system which result in the creation of tokens without corresponding goods or services - a kind of fraud - and monetary reform seems to be a desirable goal to work towards. Cryptocurrencies, although really just another kind of token, offer hope that the current bugs in the monetary system have a technological solution. This takes the creation of money and the administration of its movement out of the hands of a few cronies and makes it algorithmic in nature - independent from any particular individual, organisation or government.

Here is a discussion about Bitcoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency. Whether Bitcoin succeeds or not in becoming a common method of value exchange remains to be seen, but cryptocurrencies in general seem to be the way to go with regard to eliminating the current inefficiencies and inconveniences in the money system. Efficient online micropayments is just one of the possible applications.

There are a couple of problems with Bitcoin that I can think of.

The most obvious one is that the people who are likely to become the wealthiest are those with large computational resources to do the mining in the early years after the currency was initiated, and people with such resources are likely to be already wealthy groups or institutions - such as financial trading companies who own supercomputing clusters.

Another issue is that there is no algorithmic mechanism within Bitcoin to encourage circulation of money, and this is compounded by the fact that after twenty years or so no further Bitcoins will be created. A possible failure case is that many users of this currency just sit on it, like a stash of gold. Instead there should probably be a modest but constant inflation rate (2% per year for example), with no upper limit. This would still allow a high degree of currency predictability which is good for business, but discourage organisations or individuals from sitting on their heap of gold for too long, otherwise it gradually loses value.

Solar Fire

2011-05-09T03:18:00.000-07:00

This looks quite neat, and would be especially suited for equatorial regions. The main limitations are that you need a water supply, and that in this case it looks as if the adjustment of the mirrors throughout the day is purely manual. There's nothing very high technology here, and systems like this could have been used to generate power at any time in the previous century or more.

It's also possible to obtain mirrored tape, so the mirrors could be made very cheaply using any common material such as plastic or wood for the backing.

There is some free software (GPL) available to calculate the mirror angles, and in principle this simulator could also be extended to include an estimate of power output given the current or average cloud cover. One of the problems with solar systems is being able to make an estimate of whether it would be capable of producing a usable amount of power at a particular location, and that's where a simulator could help in making investment decisions.

Of course this is likely to be a higher maintenance system than photovoltaics and batteries, but at current prices it's far cheaper than that. Cheap photovoltaic solar has been promised for many years, and so far hasn't materialised, but new ways of producing solar panels should mean that they eventually become the lowest cost and least maintenance solution.

Cleaning up

2011-05-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Assuming that this demo can be taken at face value as representative of typical performance then this is pretty impressive, and probably indicative of early uses of service robotics.

Even if the robot is limited to detecting cylindrical objects that's still quite a good achievement. It's also possible to envisage other light duties, such as sweeping, watering, opening and closing curtains or blinds, surface cleaning, feeding pets and dusting. Individually all of these jobs might be automated using special purpose machines, but the main advantage of a general purpose robot is that you don't need to buy, learn to use and maintain lots of separate gadgets.

Service robotics is probably going to be more of an evolution than a revolution. I've learned my lesson with regard to making predictions, and just because technology exists at a certain price level does not mean that it will be used or commercialized. For this kind of application there are additional psychological issues, such as displacing habituated practices, being confident that the robot isn't going to damage anything or be taken over by Anonymous, and so on. There might also be issues around home insurance and possible fire hazards, so all of these things need to be worked out and they will probably work themselves out slowly. Nevertheless, service robotics - which includes telepresence and teleoperation - represents a huge and so far mostly untapped market capable of delivering real value and transforming many aspects of the overall economy.

On not voting in the referendum

2011-05-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

Under ordinary circumstances I usually always vote, even if it's in a pseudo-random way by the flip of a coin or some other arbiter. The 2010 general election was my most systematic voting attempt to date, via data mining manifestos, but since the victors promptly dumped most of their manifesto pledges shortly after arrival in office the whole exercise turned out to be one of utter futility anyway.

Referenda in the UK are a really unusual phenomena, and there havn't been any within my adult lifetime. In this case it's over a proposed change to voting procedure - essentially the algorithm used to count votes. The choice is between a simple majority, which in computation terms would be known as a winner takes all (WTA) algorithm, or an "alternative vote" (AV) system which is more akin to a weighted sum or probabilistic method based on ranking of candidates by order of preference.

No matter which algorithm is selected they both follow a democratic principle. I've also voted under both systems in the past, so it really isn't any big issue. Elections of Euro MPs uses something similar to, or the same as, the proposed AV algorithm. So in this case no matter which is selected that's ok with me, provided that the algorithm is consistently applied, and I'll therefore abstain from voting as an indicator of no preference.

There seems to be a lot of political-type stuff going on in the UK at the moment, which is mostly connected to the current situation of stagflation and the fallout from decisions over public service and education cuts, so there are many things which people want to change or preserve. In this context offering a referendum on an issue which very few people care about seems rather perverse.

For more ranting on this topic, and photos of some of the referendum campaign leaflets, see here.

War and information

2011-05-05T05:34:00.000-07:00

I think the final point about wars, and the propaganda required to sustain them, might be a very optimistic sign for the future. The Iraq war which started in 2003 is a good example of this kind of scenario, where more transparency might have perhaps fatally undermined the narrative emerging from Blair and his co-workers.

Imagine for example if two minutes after Colin Powell delivered his infamous Iraq speech to the UN people at the claimed locations of the blurry missile silo photos were able to tweet a link to a live video stream from the same site showing that no such silos existed. With advanced editing tools and augmented reality fake videos will become increasingly possible to produce, but if enough corroborating crowdsourced evidence exists this might be sufficient to shift the narrative in a very different direction.

Another strategy which sustains wars, rather than generating a highly elaborate deception narrative, seems to be to avoid talking about them altogether. So for example in the previous five years, apart from the exposure by Wikileaks, there has been extremely minimal media coverage of the war in Afghanistan apart from occasional reports of soldiers being killed. Essentially Afghanistan has become a forgotten war as far as public awareness is concerned, and the propaganda used to prop it up seems to be very minimalistic indeed.

A reason for optimism is that we now live in a world of ubiquitous information, and maintaining largely or wholly fictitious narratives is going to become an increasingly difficult and high maintenance task. The fragility of propaganda narratives in an environment where multiple independent countervailing observations are available, often in real time, is likely to make the buildup to wars more difficult if they are to enjoy any degree of support amongst the populace.

So, one possible response to this in future might be wars which are launched rapidly, with almost no propaganda buildup, and in a cultural environment in which citizens are encouraged to be ultra-loyalists who bear more emotional allegiance to the flag than to any rationalizing narrative involving ideas about democracy or WMD.

A strange radio announcement

2011-04-20T03:40:00.000-07:00

Listening to the radio whilst driving I heard a very peculiar advert. At first I thought it was a spoof, but it seemed not to be. The announcement went something like:

"Do you suspect a member of your family of being a terrorist? If so, report them to the police now! If the accusation turns out to be false, then no harm is done. This message is on behalf of Durham county council".

I don't spend a lot of time listening to the radio, so perhaps this is a common message. The first thing which came to mind was that this sounds like something you might hear announced in a totalitarian state - inform on your friends and relations. The second thing which occurred to me is that making such accusations about members of your family is far from a harmless activity, and could have very significant consequences for that individual even if they're innocent.

A state within a state

2011-04-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Shaxson talks about the UK banking system and tax avoidance. He's right that although I've always been a UK citizen the existence of a "City of London Corporation" with it's own mayor separate from the mayor of London is a completely new revelation to me. Nothing in my education or in the popular media (newspapers, TV, etc) informed me about this. It sounds almost like a state within a state, with it's own laws and a voting system which allows companies as well as citizens to vote. This merely goes to show that you can live in a country and still not know very much about it.

I really had very little idea about banking until the current recession began a few years ago, and it turns out that my thinking on this topic was comically naive. It seems very clear that more transparency, regulation and democratic oversight is urgently required in the financial sector in order to avoid the catastrophic failures that we've witnessed in the recent past.

One potential big disruption coming to the banking system is the emergence of cryptocurrencies. The way that money moves around at present is already electronic to a high degree, so using cryptocurrencies is no different in that regard, except that it would be likely to be more secure and readily facilitates online micropayments with negligible computational or administerial overhead. Their principal advantage is that they don't require centralised banks, which can collapse or engage in arbitrary money printing and other questionable practices. If cryptocurrencies become popular this doesn't necessarily resolve the issue of tax avoidance though, and without further regulation identical shenanigans could continue unhindered, regardless of the form in which money itself is implemented.

Until quite recently I had no idea that private banks created money from nothing whenever a new loan is issued. That is, they don't need to hold any assets in order to be able to issue loans. This violates the commonsense notion of lending something. For instance, if I lend a book to you I typically need to own the book in the first place, otherwise I'd be regarded as a thief attempting to launder his ill-gotten gains, and money is really just a meta system which stands for things of value, like books, and allows convenient exchange of value which is more efficient than barter.

To me this was also a revelation, because it means that at the heart of what I had thought of as a fairly sober and responsible type of business activity is something akin to large scale fraud. Of course, the amount of money in circulation does need to expand in order to adequately represent the goods and services available, but giving this ability to private companies sets up an unvirtuous cycle where it's easy to see that there's a compelling incentive towards irresponsible or "sub-prime" lending - the very type of lending which caused the collapse of the financial system and consequent public bailouts or buyouts.

One way to implement monetary reform would be to have some non-commercial independent organisation under democratic oversight deciding upon how much money was needed to represent goods and services based upon an analysis of the overall economy. The other way, which I think is more viable in the long run, and less susceptible to human fallibility, is the way that inflation occurs within the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Under that system inflation of the number of coins in circulation occurs continuously over time and at a rate which is entirely predictable. This predictability should allow for steady expansion in goods and services, and discourage bubbles and crashes. It's also good for business in that completely predictable inflation allows you to plan for the future with greater confidence. It would also mean that private banks would have to behave responsibly, and lend in accordance with their assets with no incentive to lend more than they can really afford to.

Encirclement

2011-04-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Turtlebot

2011-04-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

Although this may look like every other small trash can style robot which has existed in the previous couple of decades it's really a big deal. The Turtlebot is both low cost, having a total cost of probably less than $1500, and it also has SLAM and autonomous navigation capability.

It could be argued that Neato got there first, but the Neato is, as far as I'm aware, a special purpose cleaning robot not intended to be hacked or reprogrammed by users. The Turtlebot is really what the WhiteBox robot from five years ago would ideally have been, except without the fancy molded casing, and of course if those robots are still in production there's now an opportunity to fulfill Tom Burick's original concept of a home robot costing about the same as a high end PC.

This is the Sinclair Spectrum or C64 of robotics. It's not glamourous and it doesn't have a simple to use GUI, but there's enough functionality to potentially build some interesting applications and since the software is open source it's completely hackable. Just like with the early home computers, anyone with sufficient interest and a low budget could construct one of these and start messing around with it, with only minimal effort and without needing to be an expert in robotics algorithms. There is still plenty more work to be done before robots can carry out many useful tasks beyond their existing cleaning or telepresence niches, but this is the beginning of a new service robotics industry.

Clegg against Cronyism

2011-04-05T02:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the year out of curiosity I conducted a survey of the educational backgrounds of front bench MPs, in order to see whether a popular saying was merely mythology or whether it had some basis in reality. The results showed that the popular idea that MPs are mostly privately educated in a small clique of "independent" schools has a strong factual basis.

This makes recent statements by Nick Clegg, himself a veteran of Westminster school, all the more intriguing. Is Clegg a fan of Sluggish Software? I doubt it. More likely in an environment where unemployment is high social mobility is becoming the topic of the day. Fear of unemployment also tends to foster more conservative career decisions with less possibility to move between companies, especially if they're operating with minimal staff. A traditional route of social mobility via university education also looks as if it's immanently about to be severely curtailed.

Until quite recently I had believed that British society was becoming more egalitarian. Within my own lifetime I've undoubtedly had more opportunities than my grandparents did, who came up against very rigidly enforced social class limitations. The same sort of explicit exclusion, based upon the occupation or status of your father, no longer exists but it does seem that what might be called "classism" or the more popular contemporary term "cronyism" is on the rise. Some of the employment advice I've had recently does make the suggestion that you try to become friends with "important people" or people at companies that you want to work for, in the hope that your application might be more favourably dealt with.

I suppose that increasing cronyism is only to be expected in a business as usual scenario in which inequality continues to increase as advances in automation and use of outsourcing concentrates wealth into shrinking and more defensive social networks. It's also possible that cronyism could be the outcome of falling energy per capita or increasing cost of energy. If energy becomes too expensive or scarce then transport opportunities might be more limited and who your neighbours are becomes more important.

Robot economics

2011-04-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

An article about the dilemmas faced by managers as the service robotics industry grows. This is the standard narrative around robotics and employment, and to large extent I think it's true that robotics can complement existing workforces and make work safer, more productive and less stressful.

Automating previously manual processes, such that workers become managers or teleoperators of robots, is just the first stage though. Over time the supervisory jobs can also be subject to automation as more data about the details of supervision is collected, mined and modelled, so ultimately there is really no escape from the rising tide.

Some jobs which are primarily about human contact and the human condition will probably remain largely immune from automation, and here I'm thinking of things such as artistic pursuits. This is not to say that AI systems cannot also do creative work, but much of the value of art seems to originate from a fascination with the humanity of the artist and their individual story.

Going beyond the standard narrative in the sort term, by which I mean the next few decades, I expect current trends to continue. As more systems are automated this concentrates wealth, and hence political power, into fewer and fewer hands. Initially robotics complements the existing workforce, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious that jobs are being lost in the drive for ever greater efficiencies. The middle classes shrink and become less affluent, cronyism becomes more apparent in daily life and the fraction of the population who are in one way or another defined to be "economically inactive" continues to enlarge.

My guess is that the number of jobs which are immune from the effects of technological unemployment is not going to be sufficient to keep the system stable in the form that we know it now, and that as inequality increases the resulting stresses will bring about a higher degree of localised production with less reliance upon money as a representation of value and determinant of wealth. The kind of phenomena I'm expecting is to see people getting paid less and finding it much harder to obtain money via their own labour, but still having an acceptable standard of living from a surplus of goods and services produced via automation in a decentralised way. In a world where automation technology is more advanced, factories may lose their competitive advantage in terms of economies of scale and it may be possible to produce single items on demand at the same unit cost that a factory could produce a thousand or a million identical widgets. Raw materials will still need to be moved around, bought and sold and recycled, so I still expect a monetary economy to play a part in that regard, but eventually perhaps the majority of the economy may be a gift or post-scarcity system similar to that of our distant tribal ancestors, or similar to the economy of open source software which exists now.

Sandwiched between the current monetary system and a gift economy is an intermediate stage of the citizen's income. To an extent we already have this, although often imperfectly implemented, in terms of social security systems. As inequality rises but automation is not yet fully downwardly mobile it may be possible for the fortresses of wealth to effectively "buy off" the rest of the population by issuing a minimum income guarantee as a right of citizenship, keeping most people at least sufficiently comfortable that they don't revolt against the status quo. This strategy might temporarily bolster a primarily money based economy for a while, in order to ensure that the purchase power of those in its possession is not depleted too greatly.

Although I think that money will become less important it seems unlikely that its fall from favour will be entirely catastrophic. In many ways money is a convenient indicator of value, and direct electronic exchange via cryptocurrencies or other electronic tokens would be quite efficient and keep any unproductive rent seeking activities to the minimum.

A smarter way to do education

2011-03-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

I don't expect that education is ever going to be an exact science, but something like this turns it into more of a science than in was in the past. I particularly like the inversion of labour, where what would have been homework becomes classwork - that makes a lot of sense to me. The inversion means that you can not only do things such as pause the video and look something up, but it also means that you've got more time to think up any relevant questions which might not be adequately resolved by web searches.

I also think he's right about timing, and that chance events, such as trouble with parents or a temporary illness, can make the difference between getting a good education or not under the traditional model of teaching.

There's no reason why this method couldn't also be applied to higher education. As I've mentioned before I think we're probably facing a crisis in higher education as costs escalate out of control, which may mean that the traditional university experience is not something which is realistically affordable to the majority. Making teaching more internet based, and perhaps using libraries for things such as exams, might provide a way to deliver higher education in a smarter and cheaper way. I also like the idea of students mentoring each other. When I was a kid although I learned a lot of stuff about computers through individual experimentation I also learned some of the basics from other children with similar interests, and I'd describe this process as being a semi-competitive one which acts as a virtuous cycle.

Also from a wider perspective, why does education have to be something crammed into the first couple of decades of your life? There probably are good physiological reasons to have such a front-loaded arrangement, but perhaps the more advanced aspects of education could be more flexibly spread out over a lifetime.

Churnalism

2011-03-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

There's a rather amusing and potentially somewhat disruptive new web site called churnalism.com, which allows users to detect instances of churnalism. I spent an entertaining few hours trying it out, and the results are indeed revealing.

I've been vaguely aware of the phenomena of churnalism, where some journalists copy and paste press releases from companies or institutions in a more or less verbatim manner and then issue it as a news article without citation in a way which appears to be their own work, but I had no idea how widespread this was or what amount of copying occurs. What I found was that churnalism is widespread and very easy to locate, even amongst the most reputable news sources such as the BBC and the more "serious" newspapers. Some "news" articles are more than 90% copy and pasted from an original press release without any sort of warning or disclaimer that this is actually the public relations viewpoint of a particular company rather than the more independent writing of a journalist.

The method for detecting churnalism is quite simple. Think of any well known UK company or institution then go to their web site. They usually have a "media" or "press" button somewhere on the site, which then typically links to recent press releases. Copy and paste the text, and see if any news article matches are found.

It's quite enlightening really, because this indicates in a compelling way that when you're reading a newspaper or a news site what you're actually reading may often be 50% or more public relations spin-doctoring. I already knew that newspapers tend to be biased in various ways, but I hadn't realised that in some cases the articles aren't just biased, they're completely captured, literally and directly acting as a mouthpiece for certain interest groups.

This is likely to be a disruptive moment for journalism, because they're either going to need to add disclaimers or citations to some of their stories - in which case the degree of capture is going to become far more obvious to the reader - or they may choose to clean up their act in order to avoid losing credibility. Ignoring sites like churnalism.com, and hoping that nobody visits them isn't going to be a viable strategy because it's quite common now for news stories to have comments sections, and it only takes one commenter to post a link to the relevant churnalism analysis for the journalist (or churnalist) to be rumbled as a plagiarist.

Jimmy Wales also has an article about PlagiPedia. Presently this seems to be more of an idea than a web site, but crowdsourcing plagiarism detection in a manner similar to Wikipedia seems like it would be feasible to do. It probably would also be possible to automate this process to a significant extent. A German politician has already been forced to resign as a result of wiki based plagiarism detection, and you have to wonder whether there are any other politicians who obtained PhDs via the same kind of deception. Did David Cameron or Nick Clegg, or any other front bench politicians, write PhD theses during their university education? Is it common for people to obtain higher education qualifications via plagiarism? I hope not, but as far as I know not much analysis of this kind has been done.

Hopefully all of the above should lead in a positive direction towards greater honesty and integrity, or at least to it being more common for original sources of writing to be cited to their proper authors.

The new eugenics

2011-02-28T03:39:00.000-08:00

Maybe the new eugenics in the 21st century is going to be quite benign after all. This documentary highlights the uses and abuses of Darwinian ideas in society, and there's a depiction of a sort of eugenics where children have DNA or blood samples taken which are then stored, and if two adults later want to have children they can then consult the database to decide whether they are "genetically compatible" and determine the probabilities of having offspring with certain genetic diseases. Assuming that the genetics information is reliable, that seems like a much more reasonable way of doing things, rather than forced sterilisations or genocide, and it's just a private decision where the state doesn't get involved.

There will no doubt be a lot of other dilemmas which arise from a better understanding of genetics. For example I can imagine a court case in which an employee sues their employer because a work situation in which they were placed caused a particular deleterious set of genes to be expressed, affecting their health. Situations like this might mean that certain types of jobs or insurance policies are only available to people with certain types of genetics or epigenetics, and this is all bound to be highly controversial.

Robonaut: Scaling space manufacturing

2011-02-27T15:40:00.000-08:00

Hysterical criticism of humanoid robots in space is probably misguided. I think that there is a place for humanoids, provided that tasks involving the combination of dextrous manipulation and sophisticated cognition, such as repair and assembly, remain difficult to automate entirely with AI. Humanoid telerobots would be a much safer way of providing exterior maintenance and assembly of space stations, avoiding exposing astronauts to radiation risks and also permitting greater scalability via ground based teleoperation.

The "project M" scenario, as depicted in the following video, is probably not the best use of robotics though, unless you wish to begin doing industrial manufacturing on the lunar surface. For exploration or science purposes a more conventional rover type of design would be likely to be more successful.

Those who are now criticizing Robonaut havn't thought carefully enough about what it would take to do things in space other than science in a cost effective manner - like manufacturing, mining and eventually building habitats for humans - under a conservative expectation that critical AI problems may remain difficult for at least the next few decades.

If after some testing it turns out that Robonaut can perform some basic teleoperated tasks, such as using a spanner, saw and drill (the same tools which astronauts use on EVAs), in a microgravity environment and in a way which isn't too demanding or confusing for the human operator, then the possibility exists to scale this up and have a workforce permanently stationed in orbit ready to receive modular components lifted by commercial rockets and assemble them on demand and without years of prior planning into whatever vehicles or products are required using terrestrially based tele-construction workers. Teleworkers on Earth can be hired from the construction industry, at pretty much regular wage rates, and if a humanoid design is used then the amount of re-training which they'll require can be minimized.

With that sort of manufacturing ability more ambitious projects become possible, such as the construction of large ships which can mine asteroids for materials, solar power factories or sending humans on extended deep space missions. A point worth noting is that humanoid telerobots do not necessarily need to be the same scale as a human - they could be much larger or much smaller, depending upon the tasks being undertaken. From an ergonomic point of view all that matters is that the body proportions are sufficiently similar to a human to make the operation job as natural and cognitively lightweight as possible.

Control theory

2011-02-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

Quite a good series of lectures on control theory. These principles apply not just to industrial engineering, but to any self-regulating system, such as a thermostat, a living cell, your heart rate and blood pressure, companies, cities, governments, economies and the biosphere as a whole.

GROK2 model

2011-02-19T14:19:00.000-08:00

Here I've created a URDF model for the GROK2 robot with the Kinect sensor head.

ALL YOUR AL-101 BASE

2011-02-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

Creating a URDF model of the Zagros Robotics AL-101 mobile robot base.

AV will make no difference

2011-02-18T04:58:00.000-08:00

There is supposed to be an upcoming referendum in May on whether or not to change the voting system in the UK from first past the post to an Alternative Voting (AV) system in which voters rank their choices (first preference, second preference, etc).

I think what's needed isn't a change in the type of voting, although a move to more secure and verifiable voting would be a benefit. What's needed instead is a deeper democracy, where people get to vote on decisions which actually impact upon their lives, such as for example local council spending, combined with what's called "open government" where voters can freely get access to the data generated by government agencies.

There is progress being made on the open government aspect, but what voters can do once they have more access to information and become better informed still remains extremely limited, to the extent that it violates the law of requisite variety as an effective method of governance. As a citizen I can vote every four or five years for a new government, but that's both the beginning and the end of my participation, and those who are being voted for frequently don't even make a good faith attempt to abide by their manifesto pledges anyway. In the absence of enough variety this vacuum is occupied by other interest groups - big companies and wealthy individuals - who generate variety through a complex system of lobbying and social networking.

Fundamentally off-topic

The pro/anti AV debate is an interesting phenomena in itself, because I expect that a great deal of fervent argumentation is going to take place in the Westminster village and in newspapers/TV over the next couple of months, whereas in reality the particular type of voting system used could hardly be a topic more remotely distanced from the list of high priority issues currently concerning UK citizens, which are typically connected to unemployment, inflation, education, taxes and public services. If there are any debates held in public I'm expecting to hear cries of "we don't care about this issue, we want referendum on X", where X could be university fees or NHS privatisation or one of many other hot topics.

Exasperation with the status quo

On a personal note, my view of politics as currently practiced has not improved one iota, and is unlikely to change even if AV is adopted. In the 2010 elections I tried to do what voters are theoretically supposed to do, by examining the various manifestos and trying to determine which one most closely matched my views. Luckily the party I (belatedly) voted for actually did get into office, but already we can see the usual practice of manifesto pledges being jettisoned or ignored which leaves me wondering whether voting really has any meaning at all, other than perhaps as a woefully inadequate gesture of participation.

Deconstructing the Zeitgeist Movement

2011-02-17T15:57:00.000-08:00

I've seen the various Zeitgeist movies, including most of the first one which was pretty dubious and has been widely criticized. Here is some commentary on the latest such movie, called Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.

If you've seen any of the other Zeitgeist movies beyond the first one then you can save yourself quite a lot of time because the latest version doesn't contain much in terms of new concepts, but rather it presents the existing ideas in a slightly more entertaining way. If not, then here is the latest one.

In my estimation, I'm sympathetic towards the resource based economy idea, and taking a systems approach to running things. In the long term actually I don't think there's going to be very much alternative to managing economies as integrated machine-managed systems, as opposed to the highly unsustainable and periodically dysfunctional way in which things work currently. The depiction of future cities is nice, but there's also a vast amount of hand-waving here (practically flapping) and not very much depth to the grand visions.

A world without money

One of the major themes of Zeitgeist is the possibility of a world without money, where nanotechnology - or some other futuristic wizardry, perhaps involving robots - can synthesise and recycle products on demand. For many sorts of consumer products this may be quite feasible, and it's not too difficult to imagine bigger and better RepRaps combined with more traditional forms of industrial automation. But there may still be competing zero sum interests, and how should these be arbitrated? Suppose citizen X wants a boat and citizen Y wants a car, but the computerised management system indicates that there is not enough resources in the environmental inventory to satisfy both demands simultaneously. There may still be a need for some forms of trade, and where there's trade there is inevitably a need for some kind of abstract representation of value. The non-homogeneous distribution of resources around the planet will surely mean that there will be surpluses of resources in some areas and deficits in others, and traditionally this has been addressed with some kind of trading system.

If money still exists in the distant future, perhaps cryptocurrencies are the way forward, avoiding the issues of financial fraud and centralized banking which currently bedevil our monetary system.

Scientism

My other main criticism is that the depiction of science in the Zeitgeist movies.

Firstly the treatment of the role of genetics and environment seems rather loaded towards a notion that genes don't matter very much. In human society there are numerous phenomena which have little or nothing to do with genes, but claiming that none of our behaviors or biases are in any way regulated by genetics I think is probably not well founded in contemporary biology. For instance, it's quite likely that it is to some degree "genetically determined" that most humans have two legs, and five fingers on each hand. If the morphology of the body is regulated by genes it seems at least plausible that the morphology of its organs, including the brain, are also influenced to some extent by genetics. Our understanding of genetics is still at quite an primitive stage, so there will be much more waiting to be discovered, but it's likely that life is a deviously complex mashup of genetic and environmental interactions, where genetics does have some role in setting up biases and propensities towards certain kinds of behavior or emotional reactions. An example would be that it's believed that some people possess tetrachromatic vision, which gives them slightly different visual sensing capability and maybe different behaviors or behavioral biases become possible as a consequence.

Also in Zeitgeist it's assumed that there is a single "correct" solution to resource management problems. In complex systems such as a society usually there are a range of possible solutions, all with their own accompanying costs and benefits. None of these may be "the best", and choosing one depends upon what direction you wish the society to move in. This may be something which requires decisions to be voted on by citizens, rather than made automatically, otherwise you're putting a computer system in charge of the long term overall evolution of society - which may be asking too much of a system whose main function is resource allocation.

Future Architecture

In the podcast there's some criticism made that the circular cities envisaged aren't easily scalable. This is a reasonable criticism, but not really a show stopper. I can imagine other designs which would scale in a modular way.

If we're thinking about the architecture of the distant future, say a century or more from now, then this is a time when resource shortages of raw materials is going to be ever more acute and an increasingly large fraction of resources will need to be either reusable, recyclable or decomposable (made from organics). Assuming more advanced genetic engineering capabilities it might be possible to have buildings which are partly or entirely organic - made from a wood-like material which can self repair by extracting carbon from the air using sunlight as an energy source to assemble it into a super-strong nanotube like material. Another idea would be to have the walls of buildings contain a soil layer within which the roots of plants could grow. This might mean that you can grow vegetables along the sides of high rise buildings (rather than only in the windows) and have robots periodically harvesting them as part of a localised intensive food production system capable of supporting the appetites of megacities. These green buildings could be fertilised by processed sewage produced by the occupants, reducing the strain on sewer systems which has been a perpetual issue for large conurbations, and I think there are existing "vertical farming" proposals of this kind already. Under this scenario buildings would from a distance have a fuzzy appearance and varying colouration, depending upon what type of vegetation was growing on them. Residents could also get creative with configurable robotic plantation schemes to create artwork, brand logos, slogans or badges of status/allegiance along the sides of their residences. Another, perhaps more likely, situation would be that all buildings are coated with a photovoltaic material which produces electricity.

As for monolithic "totalitarian" style of construction, I agree with the comments made in the podcast about this not reflecting the diversity of human culture. Cities in the future are likely to be at least as diverse as they are now, containing a combination of old and new. A good example of this is the city of York in which I lived for quite a while. It's a 2000 year old city, where you have architecture which is many centuries old standing next to modern office blocks, and a sewer system which was constructed by the Romans in the first few centuries of its existence. It's a rare occasion where cities are built entirely from scratch, and even then all cities evolve over time in a way which is difficult to plan for unless you have a crystal ball which can foresee future transport systems and types of economy (the original roads of York were the width of a chariot, i.e. two horses side by side). I've seen the totalitarian architectural style myself in various cities. Typically it was built in the 1960s and consists primarily of grey concrete blocks as far as the eye can see. It's pretty depressing, and no doubt is a contributory factor to the psychosocial stress of its inhabitants. But people can be more imaginative than this, especially when they're empowered by technology.

Zeitgeist as a meme

On the whole in spite of their failings and vagueness the Zeitgeist movies (at least the later ones) are a well crated attempt to bring ideas from cybernetics into the public arena. I'm not aware of anyone in the mainstream media who even remotely touches upon these sorts of issues. If you're not paying attention then it's easy to adopt a whiggish attitude towards the way that current societies and economies operate, but the only thing which is for certain is that the way we live now is definitely unsustainable, and that things will need to change in what by todays standards are fairly substantive ways if there is to be any longer term future for human civilization.

Zeitgeist also provides a much more optimistic counterpoint to the the frequently gloomy presentations about the future made by Singularitarians, who don't take a systems viewpoint (hence the runaway scenarios) and all too often rely upon scare stories to get their message across.

Freedom Box: A more pragmatic view

2011-02-17T05:14:00.000-08:00

"Social networking—that is, the ability to use free form methods of communication from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion—changes the balance of power in society away from highly organized vehicles of state control towards people in their own lives."

I generally agree with Eben Moglen about the possible benefits of plug computers, and I'm running such a system myself. In addition to the freedom aspect it should also be emphasized that there are also many pragmatic and economic benefits to running your own server, especially if it's on a low power device which costs a negligible amount of money in electricity to run.

If you expect to get a high amount of web traffic, like Wikipedia or YouTube, then plug computing isn't a good solution, but if you want to run a personal home site to host your own content and blog then it's a decent alternative to the current "cloud" based offerings. For example, if I wanted to host the same amount of data as I'm currently hosting on DropBox then I'd be paying top whack (about $240 per year, or roughly the cost of a netbook), whereas hosted on the plug there are no additional costs. The same savings apply for hosting a web site, wiki or blog - all of which is possible in "the cloud", but which you usually have to pay a never ending subscription free for if you want a non-trivial amount of storage space. It is also possible to pay for a fancy domain name, but if you don't particularly care about that you can obtain free ones from DynDns.

With the first generation of plug computers you definitely needed to be technologically knowledgeable in order to be able to install and administrate it, but the software is getting simpler and much more consumer oriented, as described in this podcast about the TonidoPlug, so within a few years this should be something which is practical for a mainstream user base. As Moglen mentions in his speech there is also the Freedom Box Foundation, which aims to produce a Debian based distro oriented towards plug computer systems.

The typical sort of application for a plug computer would be storing music files, family videos/photos, or hosting a blog or web site. Some of this data you might want to be accessible only to a few people, or for personal use only, whereas if you put it into "the cloud" in an unencrypted form then potentially it could be accessed or copied by others without your knowledge or permission.

In my case I was less concerned about the freedom aspect than with more pragmatic factors, such as maintaining a web presence whilst keeping costs to the lowest possible level and enabling some resilience from the possibility of free hosting services becoming not so free under recession conditions. If I were a student or a soon to be made redundant civil servant who was planning a protest though then the freedom aspect would certainly matter much more to me. In that context freedom means the freedom to not have your cloud hosted web site or blog shut down because someone from the Home Office has made a discreet phone call to someone at Google (or whatever company is hosting the site), or made a bogus copyright violation claim in order to have the site removed. In the case of a copyright violation dispute at least if you're hosting your own data then you have the chance to negotiate with the claimant in a reasonable manner, and make any necessary adjustments, rather than just having your web site instantly removed by the hosting company.

A bigger Steamroller

2011-02-15T03:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that Kurzweil will be making a lot of mileage out of this in subsequent books, but as an AI achievement it's not all that impressive. Noam Chomsky describes it as "a bigger steamroller", and I think I agree.

My knowledge of TV game shows is pretty limited, so I'm unfamiliar with the details of how this game works. It seems to be a case of given an answer you have to guess the question - the reverse of a general knowledge quiz.

If anything this Jeopardy playing computer is a good illustration of what's wrong with what passes for AI, for quite a laundry list of reasons. The first and most obvious is the question of where the system's knowledge comes from. It's claimed that it "learns", and if it did this by watching old TV shows that would be much more exciting since this would mean that it had needed to solve many classically hard AI problems, but scratch the surface and I think you'll discover a whole bunch of men behind curtains manually entering text into databases in a highly selective way. And that's just the beginning of the grievences.

Given a big database of past Jeopardy examples, and some other data sources like Wikipedia or Wordnet which can be used for additional semantics it would be possible to devise a classifier which matches the answers to the questions, or vice versa. You can get as fancy as you like, employing boosted-neural-genetic-fuzzy-probabilistic classification methods of all conceivable types and flavours, and even run them in parallel with a winner takes all arbitration at the end which could itself be optimised, and I expect that's all that this system really is. It doesn't need to have any self model or theory of mind, and in spite of superficial appearances it probably doesn't understand much human language either outside of the realm of Jeopardy questions. Any situations involving construction or interpretation of a narrative, mental imagery, mental rotations, planning or perspective taking will also be off limits.

There's also the snake-oil salesman aspect, which isn't necessarily anything sinister but is a natural consequence of being presented with limited or selective information. If you make gross simplifications - which is completely to be expected in the mainstream media - and vague claims like "It knows the English language" or "It has read Wikipedia" or "It learns new things as it goes" then it's easy for the naive viewer to conclude that this is a much bigger advance in technology than it really is by misinterpreting its limited scope and applying some anthromorphisms (I also expect some Singularitarians to leverage these misunderstandings for their own purposes).

Marvin Minsky's position on the workings of the mind is well known, but there is also an opposing view to this which comes from neuroscience. People like Jeff Hawkins claim that much of the brain - specifically the cortex - consists of very homogeneous electro-mechanics, and that the labels assigned to functionally distinguishable areas are similar to the labels assigned to different muscles in an anatomical diagram. The muscles do different things in different places, but fundamentally the mechanism is the same everywhere. Who is right will eventually become much clearer once the connectome can be analysed.

There are some benefits to the above demonstration though. It could be regarded primarily as a sort of public outreach, which might help to get young people initially interested in computer science or AI, which if Google ngrams can be believed has seen declining public interest since the late 1980s. There is also the obviously self-serving benefit for IBM of getting some prime time TV advertising for their servers or software.

Here's some more video of the computer playing the game.

Questionable primate biographies

2011-02-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

I had an amusing interaction with an employment agent recently, who had asked for a description of what I'd been doing over the last year or so. I replied in an email, giving what I thought was a fairly lucid account of my recent activities and projects. The agent replied saying that this description was "insufficiently business-like", and that I needed to inject certain fictional elements into my account "to make it more credible". The more credible account is one where I have a much higher degree of personal freedom and agency than is really the case - a version of life with the ego dial turned up to eleven.

This little episode highlighted to me the desire of people to create and dwell within a semi-fictitious narrative, and that often a good story is preferred to an accurate story. We all do it of course, but some autobiographies can be more fictitious - or more consciously fictitious - than others.

A recognition of this kind of phenomena goes back a long way, but a nice recent example of the desire to live within a particular narrative, and the various deceptions and absurdities which result from that, is given in the story of Cheeta the chimp. The Cheeta story is amusing on several levels. It highlights the plight of animals living in the human world, the desire of humans to both deceive others and be deceived, the concept of nostalgia as a saleable commodity, the extreme lengths which humans will go to in order to obtain and assemble a storyline and the anthropomorphisation of the lives of non-human creatures.

Also this narrative generating ability - even if it has only the most capricious relationship to the data - I think will turn out to be a central feature of the construction of an artificial intelligence. The ability to answer the question "what did you do yesterday?" in a coherent manner, and to have an ongoing personal history is something which AI systems to date don't seem to have addressed, and certainly I've seen nothing along those lines in robotics so far. It's about assembling a mind, and then being able to have a theory of other minds too which is roughly based upon yours.

Telerobotic shopping

2011-02-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

I expect that sights like these are going to become much more commonplace over the next 5-10 years. This is an outrageously expensive telerobot, but fundamentally there's no reason why robots like this couldn't be manufactured far more cheaply, since really it's just some motors and a motor controller, a battery and something equivalent to a mobile phone. Any location where you can broadcast video from a mobile phone is a place where a telerobot could potentially be used.

Copying books

2011-02-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

This is all fine in the world as it exists now, but I expect that there will be a time at which paper books become obsolete. There are lots of issues around DRM and the practicality or otherwise of ebook readers, but it seems likely that at some point in the future - and who knows when that will be - these issues will be resolved to some mutually acceptable extent. In that world of paperless offices the business model described above breaks down, because you're no longer shipping atoms and your literary wares consist only of pure information.

Another view would be that people enjoy having books as physical items, like ornaments, and that physical objects containing or representing information will always exist.

A possible future business model for authors in a bookless, or almost bookless, world might be a charitable one. So at the end of the book it might say something like:

If you enjoyed this book please don't forget to donate to the author.

or

Sponsor the sequel by donating to...

in the classic cliff-hanger style. If a sufficient number of people liked what they'd read, and wanted to read more from the same author, then it seems quite likely that this approach might work. Without the physical atoms, publishing middle men and negligible distribution cost popular authors might still be able to make a reasonable living.

Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome

2011-02-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

I've seen all too many sufferers of Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome, but just like any other addiction there is hope that with effort rehabilitation is possible. I am living proof that MTBS is not a fatal condition. For almost the entirety of the 1990s, with the exception of using Amiga OS for the first few years of that decade, I was inside of the Microsoft MSDOS and Windows bubble. I'd met people who knew something about Unix, but that seemed very foreign, and to have had any experience of Unix meant that you had to have either been a computer scientist or worked for a large corporation. In contrast I'd grown up with 8 bit home computers, and just been familiar with whatever software happened to predominate in the consumer computing marketplace. Also in the UK Apple hardware was not common in the 1980s and 90s, since it was typically far more expensive than other kinds of home computer.

It was only in the early 2000s that I began to entertain the possibility that there might be a world outside of the Microsoft ecosphere. The main factors encouraging me to explore this terra incognita were things like:

Software upgrades becoming less about improved technology and more about Microsoft wanting you to buy the latest version with a certain amount of arm twisting.

Trying to find ways to avoid having to waste time dealing with malware, and the increasingly unpleasant consequences of installing anti-virus and anti-spyware software.

Looking for cheaper solutions to the same problems (like replacements for Outlook).

Microsoft abandoning older versions of their software, which then became unusable due to security vulnerabilities.

The cost of Microsoft software continuing to escalate, despite an increasingly large market and economies of scale which would normally push prices down. This did change for development tools in recent years, with the Express versions becoming free, but by then I was already outside of the Microsoft box.
Irritation with the cognitive dissonance associated with ubiquitous pirated software and Windows Genuine Advantage. Having to tell people that they should buy a copy of Windows which cost more than the (sometimes second hand) computer they were using.

Microsoft's refusal to do anything with Internet Explorer, having won the "browser wars".

Annoyance that Microsoft wasn't dealing with fundamental issues, such as the OS slowing down over time and requiring re-installations.

Chernobyl

2011-02-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

A video made shortly after the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl.

William Hague under cyber attack

2011-02-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

William Hague alerts the nation to the presence of cyber-reds under the Foreign Office bed, but if this article is anything to go by it just sounds as if the government IT systems aren't very secure and that they suffered from pretty ordinary malware and phishing attacks.

Here is the Zeus malware which Hague is referring to.

It does look quite nasty, and I'm so glad that I left most of these security woes behind by moving to Linux. I'd suggest that the Foreign Office do the same, and they might also save some money in the process, as well as increasing the security of the realm.

"We're witnessing an exponential rise in the misuse of cyberspace. In a decade, this could be out of control, and we have to start to do the thinking now."

Five or more years ago I might have agreed with this opinion, with the tide of spam and computer viruses being seemingly unstoppable, but now I think this is just alarmism possibly disguising an agenda to create yet another quango.

"General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, last month said the UK needed its own Cyber Command, similar to that set by by the US defence department."

Modern software and good IT support: yes. A "cyber command"? Probably just an excuse to employ a few more of your friends and relations on exorbitant consultancy fees at taxpayers expense, and give them smart looking quasi-military uniforms.

I'm not Bruce Schneier, but my understanding is that the problem of botnets is primarily a problem of the prevalence of older versions of Microsoft Windows using the notoriously insecure Internet Explorer browser and where the user logs in with administrator access by default. Conduct an IT audit and upgrade or replace the relevant systems, and this is a problem which you can solve without the need for creating a whole new government or military department populated by iPad-tapping cyber generals.

A Failure of Teleoperation

2011-02-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

There are worse examples of robotic bomb disposal, where the robot actually gets blown up, but this snafu illustrates the limitations of robotic perception and manipulation as it currently exists.

It looks as if there's a camera on a pan and tilt mechanism on top of a pole, and a second camera on the arm, but no cameras which give a good view around the wheels/tracks or under the gripper. Also, non-rigid objects like paper bags are not so easy to handle with a gripper.

A solution to the visibility problem might be just to attach an omnidirectional camera on the front of the robot below the base of the arm, which would enable the operator to see under the arm and also on the ground around the front wheels. Some unwarping of the image might be necessary to provide the operator with a more intelligible display, but that could be done quite easily in software.

ROS for the rest of us

2011-02-03T03:37:00.000-08:00

A talk by Patrick Goebel of Pi Robot about ROS. At this point ROS is sufficiently commonly used that I expect that it's the way that things are likely to go, at least within the academic and hobby domains, within the next few years. It's also possible that commercial products could be based upon ROS (with some caveats for the patented feature detectors within OpenCV), since it's under a very permissive BSD license.

So far I've written a few things for ROS. There are some drivers for Phidgets devices, a driver for a USB to I2C converter and also a driver for use with a stereo camera and v4l2stereo.

An interview question

2011-02-01T06:57:00.000-08:00

At a job interview earlier today I think I flunked one of the Human Resources questions, but it was at least a question with an interesting background to it. The question was as follows:

"At [company X] what do you think are three attributes which your line manager would describe you as being?"

And I said something like:

"Quiet. Analytical. Easy-going."

They then later asked:

"What are three attributes which you would use to describe yourself?"

And I said the same. In hindsight that maybe wasn't the best answer, and instead I should have said something similar but non-identical. The combination of these two questions are probably about an assessment of perspective taking, or what is known in psychology as theory of mind. In simple terms, whether you can put yourself into someone else's shoes and imagine the world from a point of view which may be slightly different to your own, perhaps also with a different status relationship. I expect that it will turn out that many social animals (non-human primates, cats, dogs, elephants, perhaps even cetaceans) have some degree of TOM capability, even if it's of a quite rudimentary nature compared to our own.

Viral organisations as a precursor to automated governance

2011-01-31T12:59:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-17T13:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-17T13:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-14T12:46:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-13T05:03:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-08T15:29:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

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.

Kinect initial test

2010-12-31T10:32:00.000-08:00

I've acquired a Kinect sensor, and have done some initial tests on it to see what the depth maps look like.

The quality looks very good, and it appears that there is relatively little noise in the range measurements. As I had expected, this sensor definitely doesn't work outdoors, but under all the indoor situations in which I've tried so far it seems to work well. Just like with stereo vision there is a minimum ranging distance, but this is quite short.

The sensor itself is quite bulky, and this is probably because it contains a motor used to tilt it up and down. If I use this as a replacement for the existing dual stereo camera head on the GROK2 robot then I'll need to design a fairly industrial mounting for it.

With the arrival of sensors like this the quest for good perception on mobile robots operating indoors and which don't require ranging distances more than a few metres is reaching its conclusion, and we are almost in a position where yet another of the necessary criteria required for a new robotics industry to begin can be ticked off of the list. No longer is it the case that to obtain good short distance range data you need to buy laser scanners costing thousands of dollars - like the nodding laser on the PR2 robot. It's also to be expected that other companies will try to produce similar sensors and that their cost will come down still further, as happens with all new consumer gadgets.

The next step is to try using this sensor for SLAM, and I think that Willow Garage are already in the process of doing that. The prospects for being able to build and navigate within 3D models of indoor environments over the next couple of years are better than they ever have been.

A reward for filth

2010-12-23T15:37:00.000-08:00

The economist Gregory Clark gives an interesting talk proposing a particular idea about the relationship between population, technology, mortality and income (or wages).

The model has some counter-intuitive outcomes, but might help to explain a few things which have puzzled me for a long time, such as why within modern society so much vitriol is directed towards teenage mothers, whereas only a few generations earlier teenage motherhood was normal. This model would predict that teenage mothers shift the birth graph upwards and therefore the equilibrium point on the population/income graph shifts backwards, reducing living standards.

The model also challenges my preconceptions, in that improvements in technology might not always result in improvements in living standards (actually the reverse, if mortality curves remain unaffected). Typically though changes in technology may also have implications for mortality, so the relationship is a complicated one.

A theory of everything - in colour

2010-12-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

The history of washing

2010-12-13T14:21:00.000-08:00

A documentary about one of the greatest pieces of home automation: the washing machine. Washing machines are an early example of robotics in the home, and probably save more hours of tedious manual labour than any other home appliance. It's only really within the last few decades that the process of washing clothes has become mostly automated, and I vaguely remember that in the 1970s my grandmother had something resembling the mechanical washing contraption depicted in the video.

A point cloud model of the author

2010-12-13T01:59:00.000-08:00

As observed by the forward stereo camera of the GROK2 robot. This is a composite "mind's eye" view generated from observations in several different pan and tilt positions. There are some depth errors around the computer monitor, but the depth estimates for most of the scene look reasonable.

The points were exported in X3D format, then viewed using the MeshLab utility.

Also here is a point cloud view from the Rodney robot situated on the desktop. This uses the Minoru webcam which has a shorter baseline distance of 6cm, so the depth resolution is not as good as from GROK2. The original intention with the Rodney robot was just to be able to identify objects within a short range on the desktop, so longer ranges aren't very important anyway. The large black object on the right is the giraffe-like "neck" of the GROK2 robot.

Undoubtedly the quality of the imager on the Quickcam 9000 is much superior to that on the Minoru, especially under low artificial lighting conditions.

Sentience project update

2010-12-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

Over the last month or so using a new dense stereo correspondence algorithm called ELAS I've made some quite substantial improvements to the vision systems of the Rodney and GROK2 robots, meaning that they can reliably see the structure of the environment around them under most conditions, probably with enough accuracy to enable a "functional vision" capability. Whilst the depth resolution may not be as good as for active sensing methods, such as laser scanners or the Kinect, for purely passive vision this is quite a pleasing result.

Here is an example depth map using the ELAS algorithm, where disparities are colour coded. The different colours make it easier to see structure in the distance than is otherwise the case with a monochrome representation of depth.

Converting the disparities to ranges, then projecting them in 3D gives a reasonable point cloud model. Here a few stereo images taken from different pan and tilt angles are combined into a unified 3D model.

In this model you can see the desk with the Rodney robot on the left, a cup, the keyboard and screen, and a small Surveyor robot in front of Rodney.

Whilst this isn't quite at the same quality as the CMU hallway runs produced by Moravec in 2000-2002, it's getting into the same ballpark and with some ray modelling and projection of rays into an occupancy grid this would certainly help to resolve the longer distance features.

My last attempt to do this, using an orange juice carton as a subject, was in 2004/5, and although the overall approach was the same the results were not as good using cruder algorithms and camera calibration. Also it should be noted that this progress actually has little to do with raw processing power, and much more to do with improvements in algorithms. The ELAS algorithm is pretty fast, especially on low resolution images, and would have been usable on a computer of five years ago had it been available back then.

Data war

2010-12-09T02:54:00.000-08:00

I was going to wait a while longer to see what happens before making any comment on the whole Wikileaks debacle which has been dominating the news within the last week or so, but it appears that some of my contemporaries seem to have a sufficiently irrational view on this that I might as well make an opinion known.

My opinion on Wikileaks itself up to this time has been that I thought they were doing important work in the public interest, helping to highlight corruption and misdeeds such as violations of international laws, human rights abuses and financial fraud. If we are to have any hope that the world of the future will be a more civilised one than the world of the past then information of this kind - unpleasant or embarrassing though it may be - does need to be brought to public attention and not remain hidden from view or be permitted to be erased from the history books. In a properly functioning democracy, this is the function of whistle blowers and investigative journalists.

For a summary of Wikileaks and the motivations behind it, there's an instructive speech given by Jacob Applebaum at the HOPE conference.

However, since the takedown of Wikileaks what has been described as a "data war" has ensued against the various companies involved, such as Paypal and Visa. Foolishly, even people who ought to know better are apparently supporting this kind of vigilante action, and in the BBC article even a Wikileaks spokesperson seems to be at least tacitly supporting it.

First of all, voluntarily downloading any sort of botnet program onto your computer is a really bad idea. No really, I can hardly emphasise strongly enough how idiotic this is. Are you sure that you know what that program contains? Did you check the source code and compile it yourself, or is it just a binary? Apart from attacking web sites - which is of course totally illegal - what other things might that program be doing on your computer? Remember that malware developers are opportunists, and sometimes actively exploit news events. Do you have any credit or debit cards, and if so is it really in your rational self-interest to attack companies which facilitate payments of this kind? Is attacking web sites likely to help or hinder Wikileaks, or whistle blowers in general?

So to anyone who is tempted to join "operation payback", or encourage others to join, I would seriously advise you to think more carefully. Boycott or civil disobedience campaigns are a better way of expressing displeasure than engaging in overt criminality. I think it's a major error of judgement of anyone claiming to represent Wikileaks not to unambiguously condemn DDOS attacks on web sites at the earliest available opportunity.

Going beyond the current headlines, and regardless of what may or may not be the fate of Wikileaks, occasional and sometimes large scale leaks of information from companies or governments - sometimes by accident rather than by design - is likely to remain as a feature of the landscape. This is really just a function of the increasing density of data storage and internet bandwidth. Probably there will be some attempt to improve technical security and security procedures within governments and other large organisations, but technical measures alone won't prevent a determined insider from leaking information, although they may influence the volume of such disclosures.

One way in which organisations can respond to the threat of leaks is simply to become more transparent, with public disclosure as the default behavior whilst only guarding the most sensitive information. An early example is data.gov.uk. From the leaked diplomatic correspondences it's pretty clear that there exists a needless culture of secrecy, and that many of the documents have been gratuitously classified more out of habit than due to any good reason.

Also see 2600 Magazine condemns DOS attacks.

Kinectbot

2010-11-17T14:28:00.000-08:00

The folks at the MIT personal robotics group didn't waste any time getting the Kinect depth camera working with a mobile robot, with this only approximately a week after the sensor was hacked.

Achieving good spatial awareness has been a fundamental obstacle for robotics, and in the foreseeable future this could be a solved problem. Whilst experimenting with humanoids, such as the Rodney robot, it became obvious to me that unless the robot has a good level of awareness of the shape of it's surroundings then its intelligence and range of skills remains highly constrained. Once 3D information is available then detecting large objects such as people, walls, doors, chairs and desks becomes a far easier proposition than is the case with 2D vision.

This is also a demonstration of the power of building upon earlier work, using existing open source algorithms wherever possible. A big problem in the past was that robotics software would usually be re-invented from scratch, with little or no transferability of software from one system to another either due to hardware incompatibilities or because the software was regarded as being secret or only released under restrictive licences. Being able to get a rapid result such as the above means using software components, such as the SLAM algorithms, which themselves will have taken many years to research and develop.

Don't believe the cyberwar hype

2010-11-17T13:34:00.000-08:00

One problem caused by the rise of the world wide web and 24 hour news is that news items are now often generated with very little fact checking or journalistic analysis.

A fairly good example of this is a story about an alleged Chinese web traffic hijack. There's a lot of suppositions in this story, and when faced with such notions it's a good idea to apply occam's razor. Is it more likely that:

(a) Chinese technicians made a configuration error, then corrected it 18 minutes later.

or

(b) The Chinese government conspired to hijack a vast amount of internet data, in order to perform unspecified data mining or tampering on it.

In the absence of any other information, I know which hypothesis makes the fewest assumptions.

There's also some fearmongering in the article about the Stuxnet virus. The appearance of viruses which are specifically targeted at industrial infrastructure, as opposed to the usual constituency of hapless internet users, is cause for concern. However, it's important to note that even though considerable expertise, time and probably financial resources may have been required in order to create Stuxnet, and that there does seem to be credible information suggesting that it was targeted at a specific location (it only affects inverter drives whose manufacturers are based in Finland and Iran), as far as we can tell it was completely and utterly unsuccessful at causing any non-trivial amount of industrial disruption. This should indicate something to us about the difficulty and likelihood of any nation being able to launch a cyberwar capable of causing significant inconveniences to an opponent in a targeted way which doesn't simply degrade the whole internet globally. The introduction if IPv6 should make malware writers (whether they're state sponsored or not) jobs even harder, since the address range becomes so incredibly gigantic that brute force attacks really have enormous odds stacked against their success.

Measuring virtual objects

2010-11-15T02:29:00.000-08:00

A video showing that depth cameras can also be used to take measurements from objects fairly accurately.

Being able to make such measurements easily with a low cost sensor should mean that 3D models of objects or people can be made very easily by non-experts, then used in games or online environments such as Second Life, without needing to have any expertise in using complicated CAD tools.

Another related application of interest would be the ability to generate models from objects for use with rapid prototyping (RepRap) type devices. This could already be done using shape from silhouette techniques or with lasers, but a depth camera probably makes it even easier.

It seems likely that before long these sensors, or variations on the theme, will be available on all games consoles and probably also available separately for PCs. One possible consequence might be the emergence of the "3D web", which was something which was much anticipated in the mid 1990s, but never happened. Back at a time around 1996/7 I had a VRML web page, where the clickable items were 3D objects such as a spinning globe. One of the reasons for the failure of the 3D web was the poor rendering performance of the hardware which was available at the time, and this is now no longer an issue, but the main reason was that it's difficult for the average user - or even a quite knowledgeable user - to generate 3D content of their own in a way which doesn't require a considerable investment of time and effort.

A possible scenario might be that you take your object and present it to the camera, rotate it a few times, and then you have a 3D model automatically extracted and with any missing details filled in which can be posted onto ebay, all in the space of one or two minutes.

Does this mean that the game is up for stereo vision ?

For indoor scenarios in which mobile robots might typically operate perhaps it does. But there are still some big unknowns, and they are how well these systems perform in natural lighting, and also how they perform when two or more such systems are operating within the same space. For the latter problem possibly slightly different IR wavelengths could be used to prevent interference.

For outdoor situations, which would include automotive or agricultural systems, I think it's possible that this kind of sensing might not work very well unless you're pumping out large amounts of energy, in which case bleedover and interference becomes more of an issue. So within those realms stereo vision or multi view stereo might still remain the best option in terms of cost and performance.

Tobin tax

2010-11-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

A news item about the possible introduction of a Tobin tax (aka "Robin Hood" tax). It's mildly frustrating in these kind of discussions that they never consider the financial system from a cybernetics perspective.

The financial system as we know it now is a bit like steam engines prior to use of mechanical governors. There's nothing to damp out fluctuations or prevent the whole system from blowing up. Transaction taxes levied on each trade could provide the principal mechanism which really does make boom and bust economics a thing of the past - or at least turn tidal waves into minor ripples.

It's probably true that there will always be speculators making speculative trades in this or that, and that sometimes these trading decisions will be bad, based upon superstition, faulty information, the vagaries of fashion or bad maths. Occasionally such bad decisions will compound according to positive feedback to generate a bubble. But the financial system is not a force of nature outside of our influence. It's an artificial system devised by humans, and as such can be subject to the moderating influences of laws, regulations, taxes and so on. We don't have to become victims of our own limited outlook or tendency to follow the latest fad, and I expect that future generations will look back on the economic booms and collapses of the past with a combination of amusement and horror.

Philosophy and Science

2010-11-11T06:55:00.001-08:00

The Kinect hack extravaganza

2010-11-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

Not long after it's release the depth camera on Microsoft's new game console has been hacked, with an open source driver being available for Linux.

It's a similar situation to the early days of webcams. When the Connectix Quickcam was first released around 1996 there was no open source driver or API available, and people also wanted to try using it for robotics.

It would be good to have someone do an all round test of one of these cameras under different lighting conditions and in different environments, to see what kind of limitations exist. How well it copes with natural lighting is one of the main concerns.

But even if you don't care about robotics there are also other more traditional applications for depth cameras. In a video conferencing scenario - the typical use case for a webcam - you could have not just a flat image but a 3D model of the users being displayed, and if you tie this in with face detection to estimate head pose then you could have a situation where it really appears that the screen is a window through which you're looking at the other person in quite a natural way.

Mob mentality

2010-11-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

Watching some of the news coverage of rioting students this seems to confirm the apprehension of myself and others about what might be on the horizon over the next few years. If the economy doesn't pick up and unemployment remains stubbornly at acutely high levels there could be a protracted period of ongoing social unrest, similar to the various strikes and riots which took place in the 1980s, except with civil servants substituting for miners.

Students, their fees, and the decommissioning or loss of funding of some academic departments are probably only a small component of what looks like quite an extensive laundry list of potential problems.

Inflation is higher than the official target of 2%.

Soon the VAT increase to 20% will automatically inflate most prices by an additional 2.5%.

Fuel prices remain at levels similar to those during the 2008 oil price spike. There may be longer term benefits if fuel prices remain high, but in the short term when considered in conjunction with other factors it's likely to lead to further discontent.

If upper limits are not centrally imposed then local taxes seem likely to rise, as local councils attempt to recoup some of the budget shortfalls coming from central government.

Cuts in police budgets may mean that they're less able to respond to any unrest when it occurs.

Even for those workers who havn't taken voluntary pay cuts, disposable income and the purchasing power of their pounds will relatively decrease as other costs rise, so this is bound to add inflationary pressures into the system as people seek pay rises to try to keep their living standards on an even keel.

There is probably more malaise than I've listed here, and I havn't touched on the problems of the now retiring baby boomers and their pensions, but that's enough collapsitarianism to be going on with for the moment.

So I expect more than just students to protest, and people should protest about matters of importance, but if at some time in the next few years you find yourself (in the style of the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime) in a mob which is becoming angry and violent and taking an unscheduled detour off the planned protest route, as the students did today, then my advice is to make a swift exit from the scene. Avoid populist rhetoric, elaborate conspiracy theories and extremists claiming to have easy answers to complicated problems.

Also in addition to the budget deficit there's a more general democratic deficit. This doesn't look like a situation which you can easily vote your way out of, and there's a lack of political biodiversity. The problems we have now originate from the previous Blair/Brown administration, and looking at the photo from today of an anarchist kicking in a window - which will presumably become an iconic image from 2010 - you can trace that smashed window back to Gordon Brown's mistaken belief that the era of "boom and bust economics" was over, his failure to recognise that house prices were getting seriously out of line with average earnings and his belief in "light touch regulation" of the financial industry and the mystical "financial innovation" which turned out to be not much more than fraud, bad maths, or some arcane mixture thereof.

Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals seem to have much by way of solutions to offer, and talk of a "Big Society" only seems like so much airy rhetoric - extremely hard to pin down to anything practical. So there is discontent and distrust of all the mainstream political parties, compounded by the expenses scandals of 2009 and ongoing investigations into the alleged criminality of former politicians accused of stealing public money. At this point it seems that it would be very easy for extremist elements to step in and appear to offer a way out of the impasse.

Marvin Minsky's robot arm

2010-11-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

Considering the relatively primitive state of technology in 1968 compared to what's available today this is a fairly impressive attempt at building an articulated robot appendage. This would have been at a time when there was still a great deal of optimism about AI and its rate of progress, where nothing like this had been done previously, and prior to the production of the Lighthill report and Perceptrons.

It looks like the arm is hydraulically actuated, since pneumatics probably wouldn't be strong enough to hold the weight of a child. The complicated kinematics, which would normally require quite a bit of processing power, are bypassed by having a small model which contains a few potentiometers, with Minsky manually solving the inverse problem.

Ewok rampage

2010-11-08T08:05:00.000-08:00

A system called PTAMM (Parallel Tracking and Multiple Mapping) looks interesting, and this type of structure from motion augmented reality is closely related to robotic visual perception systems. Here is an example:

Unfortunately the license associated with this system makes no sense.

"No part of the Software may be reproduced, modified, transmitted or transferred in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the express permission of Isis"

Ok, so this isn't open source. No wait...

"Isis’s permission is not required if the said reproduction, modification, transmission or transference is done without financial return, the conditions of this Licence are imposed upon the receiver of the product, and all original and amended source code is included in any transmitted product."

So it is kinda open source. ish.

"You may be held legally responsible for any copyright infringement that is caused or encouraged by your failure to abide by these terms and conditions."

So it's a pseudo-open "throw code over the wall" sort of endeavour, but they can sue you if you make any derivative work which according to them "encourages" financial return. That's pretty vague. Any redistributed modification could constitute encouragement to do something or other, dependent upon the prejudices or theories of the observer. Probably best not to touch this code with a barge pole.

This highlights the perils of "roll your own" software licenses. In such cases there's a good chance that the language used doesn't make sense, is self-contradictory, or may not actually be legally valid if it came to the crunch. Probably they would be better off either keeping PTAMM as a closed proprietary system, or else using a standard open source software license which preferably is OSI approved.

Within the academic sphere, of which this could be a part, there might be a gap in the pantheon of licenses for a validation only license. That is, where the code is open for inspection and independent use, but only specifically for the purposes of checking that particular algorithms described in an academic publication do what it's claimed they should.

Robot carers

2010-11-08T03:15:00.000-08:00

A BBC article about robots which might be used for care of the elderly. Rather than having sceptical comments from caring organisations a better strategy would be to collaborate with them in the research.

If I were someone doing this research probably the way I'd approach it would be to consult social services organisations who work in care homes on exactly what it is that they do on a daily basis, and I'd also do some time and motion studies for different scenarios. Only then can you identify what the relevant needs are and which of those might be amenable to automation. My guess is that having an anthropomorphic talking head, although it's very mediagenic, is not a high priority in this line of work.

Mobile robots probably do have their place, and will be useful for communication, picking things up and moving things around. Even more lucrative though will be wearable technology. A device which you can wear which continuously monitors your heart rate and blood pressure, and which can alert a nurse or doctor automatically in an emergency would be useful and probably also commercially viable. Wearable devices which assist mobility are also the lowest hanging fruit in terms of possible commercial robotics opportunities for the elderly. An exoskeleton-like device which could be strapped to the legs which assists in walking or standing up, with at least equivalent support functionality to a walking stick would have no problems in selling if it could be manufactured in the right price range - even if it were a relatively primitive electromechanical type of system.

The reputation economy

2010-11-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

Receiving "points" for carrying out certain tasks has been quite well established in the domain of retail brand loyalty schemes. People will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to receive "points" of incredibly low economic value, often amounting to tiny fractions of a pence each. There's now a proposal to extend a similar points based system to casual labour.

If the "points" have some non-trivial economic value then this may be a good idea, basically clearing out a lot of the bureaucracy surrounding the process of hiring casual labour. This isn't really the same as the "big society" idea, which is based upon the notion of volunteering without economic reward. I think the big society will fail to boost volunteerism by a significant percentage (most people are not highly altruistic), but that altering the economy to be more focussed around alternative currencies - such as a person's reputation - may be more successful.

It might be a better idea to have a single, officially approved, reputation system which is exchangeable for goods and services, rather like money. Performing certain tasks either boosts or decreases your reputation, with the votes of other people being used to decide who has a higher or lower reputation. In this way even if structural unemployment rises due to automation people who are unemployed in the conventional sense will still be encouraged to maintain their reputation and engage in activities which enhance their social standing in the opinion of others.

An advantage of a reputation based points system is that you can't borrow your own reputation from others and get into reputational debt. You have to build up your reputation from your own actions, and antisocial activities will damage your reputation and reduce its economic value. Also, reputation systems should be non-zero sum, such that if I increase my reputation this doesn't mean that someone else is excluded from having the opportunity to also do the same, although relative competition would still exist.

It's worth remembering that there is nothing inalienable or inherently valuable about money as we now know it. It's just an imaginary man-made system, and could be replaced by other kinds of system which in some way indicate value and facilitate the fair distribution of goods and services. New technology and ubiquitous internet access may mean that value representations more complex than physical cash (metal or paper) or credit cards can be implemented and made practical.

Job extinction

2010-10-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

For any young person about to start their career it's certainly worth thinking about what kinds of jobs are likely to be automated in the foreseeable future and basing your decisions around those expectations. This article lists 20 jobs which may be in danger of extinction.

Some of these I definitely agree with. Cashier, garbage collector, toll booth operator, news anchor, pilot and mail man all seem like jobs which if they're not fully automated in 20 years time will probably be significantly more automated than they are now, with fewer job opportunities.

In 20 years, or even in 50, I think there will still be human actors and actresses. Yes, there are savings to be made with virtual actors, and yes the virtual actors will be highly realistic and glamorous, but I think there will be a backlash with audiences "getting tired of all these fake movie stars". Some proportion of the acting profession will remain human, simply because people are inherently interested in other people and like to model themselves to some extent after their heroes - even if they're fictitious ones. Also there is money to be made out of gossip and celebrity which would be hard to recreate with virtual actors.

I could turn out to be wrong about this, but I think that any occupation which involves accurate dexterous manipulation - especially of non-rigid objects - will remain expensive to automate in the foreseeable future. Building machinery which recreates the movements and sensing of a human hand has not been easy to achieve, and even if it is achieved within this time frame it may remain too expensive for the mass market. So I think jobs like car mechanic will still exist, although what car mechanics do may change since electrification means that the internals of a vehicle become radically simpler and the increase in use of electronics may mean that this job becomes more like that of an IT technician, doing non-traditional tasks such as sensor calibration. In principle car maintenance could be fully automated, with appropriate design of the vehicle, but given the slow rate of change in the automotive industry I'm expecting only partial automation within two decades and perhaps more jobs created related to automotive sensing and safety systems and the checking/certification thereof.

Prostitution seems like an unlikely candidate for automation, but there would certainly be advantages to robot prostitution in terms of reduced issues with sexually transmitted diseases and zero probability of unwanted pregnancy. However, similar to the issues with acting this is a human contact type of situation and I expect that robot prostitution will not be universally deemed to be the most desirable option. Strange though it may seem, in the future people will still want to have sex with other people - at least some of the time.

Waiters will definitely see job competition from robots, and I expect that within 20 years it will not be unusual to be served by a robot in many dining locations. However, I expect that human waiters will remain employed in the more upmarket restaurants as a sort of status symbol providing product differentiation from the riff-raff. Also, jobs are likely to be created in the maintenance, programming and upgrading of robots performing customer-facing retail tasks. A few jobs will also be created in the "back end" administration of teleoperator systems and teleoperator marketplaces, and of course a whole new market will open up for workers performing teleoperation tasks.

Librarian jobs will probably still remain, despite the near total electrification of books. I think that libraries will turn into community centres where educational, training, voluntary and maybe even some medical activities take place, and that the job of the librarian will be more like that of a social worker or community manager. Within the next two decades there will be a shake up of the higher education system, as traditional ways become less cost effective and the economic value of a college degree falls. Libraries may be a beneficiary of this disruption as a classical university education becomes unaffordable for the majority. This is really just a swinging back of the pendulum to a time prior to the baby boomer generation when libraries were the primary hub of popular education.

Assembly line workers have been under consistent threat of technological unemployment for the previous two centuries, and this trend is likely to continue. What I've observed directly for myself is that the kinds of factory jobs which tend to be preserved and resistant to automation are those which require a high degree of dexterous manipulation - the "fiddly little stuff" - especially when dealing with objects which are non-rigid.

It almost seems silly to specify the job of "film processor", because this is a job which is largely already obsolete. For the foreseeable future digital storage and distribution is the way that all media is going to go.

Security guards I think will be partially automated. Jobs like patrolling and surveillance are on a trajectory to be fully automated within the foreseeable future, but those which involve human contact will remain either difficult or undesirable to automate. Chasing then wrestling a suspect to the ground or bungling them into the back of a van is unlikely to be something which a robot could do easily, and even if this were possible there may remain legal liability reasons for having it done by a person.

Supermarkets and other big retailers have been trying to get rid of cashiers for quite some time, and it seems possible that within the foreseeable future they will eventually succeed both in installing appropriate technology and also persuading customers to use it. I expect that a row of cashiers will be replaced by a couple of (human) security guards at the entrance and that paying for items will be done automatically via a mobile phone. Probably for reasons of tradition as much as anything else shoppers will still place items onto some sort of conveyor belt where they will be counted and totalled automatically without a cashier. Any item which cannot be counted (eg with a defective RFID) will be flagged, and the shopper directed to either replace it or put it into a reject bin. An overhead camera above the belt, with cameras also elsewhere around the store, will deliver internet based cloudsourced security, with the security guards being alerted to any shoplifting or attempts to bypass the conveyors. Cloudsourcers receive payments if the guard confirms that something suspicious occurred, or have reputation points deducted if it was a false alarm. The lower your reputation, the less chance of being employed within the teleoperator marketplace, and equal opportunities employment regulations may mean that employers must always choose teleoperators with the highest ranking available at the time of recruitment - a process which can be fully automated.

Surgery will be more automated, but I expect that the automation in most cases will be merely augmenting the abilities of a human operator. The article mentions malpractice cases, but it should also be noted that fully automated systems can make mistakes too, which may result in malpractice cases against the manufacturer - potentially a bigger problem than a malpractice case against an individual person. Since surgery involves manipulation of flexible objects, within the next two decades I think that this is unlikely to be fully automated with a high degree of confidence that mistakes can be kept to an acceptable level, except in some niche areas such as eye surgery. A career as a surgeon still seems reasonably safe.

Construction working also is a mixed bag in terms of employment. There will be ways of constructing buildings which are much more automated than how things occur now, but to what extent these will be deployed remains unclear. I'm not an expert on the construction industry, but expect that the cost of human labour is only a very small component of the overall cost of new building, with the biggest cost being merely buying land. Whilst the capital costs significantly outweigh the labour costs there may not be very much motivation to introduce more automation. New jobs in construction automation will be created in building, selling, maintaining and operating new types of robotic construction machinery.

Scare tactics

2010-10-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

It looks as if Ben Goertzel is coming around to my way of thinking about SIAI, or perhaps he held this opinion all along but didn't say much about it.

"Personally, I'm a lot more worried about nasty humans taking early-stage AGIs and using them for massive destruction, than about speculative risks associated with little-understood events like hard takeoffs."

The problem with The Scary Idea is that it's just not elucidated in enough detail to be credible. Certainly once you get into the realm of AI being embodied, either in large or small format, there are all sorts of hard physical constraints and practical issues which the doomsters consistently hand wave over. They also tend to view intelligence as something which can be extended to indefinitely high levels, and not as a form of adaptation to an environment. So in my view The Scary Idea is actually a bogus idea. It's an idea that will lead you astray and waste your mental resources if you provide it with cognitive free reign.

I think all this scaremongering emerged particularly strongly in the years after 2001, when it was compellingly demonstrated that fear could be used to both mobilise public opinion and generate a revenue stream. In the previous decade AI research seemed to have been languishing in one of its winter periods, but in what was commonly referred to as "the post-9/11 era" highly speculative, poorly characterised or astronomically minuscule risks were suddenly treated with a far greater degree of seriousness. If AI could somehow be conflated with fears about public safety and terror plots then perhaps a new spring time of research funding would be forthcoming. I see The Scary Idea as being one of the outgrowths of that zeitgeist.

In general it's probably not a good idea to have your thinking primarily dominated by fear. Fear limits intellectual scope, encourages paternalism, and can result in overly conservative risk-averse decision making strategies along the lines of the precautionary principle which would appear to be at the heart of The Scary Idea.

Don Quixote complex

From an anthropological perspective there are also status implications for The Scary Idea. Engineers, and especially AI researchers, are low status individuals in most societies. Look how much they get paid/noticed compared to other professions or academic fields. As far as I'm aware nobody has ever been awarded a Nobel prize in science for doing AI research. Contrary to this lowly position The Scary Idea posits the AI researcher as a high status heroic character, striving to save humanity from A Terrible Fate.

For some previous opinions of SIAI and Friendly AI see Singularity Research Challenge: funding the wrong stuff and What is friendly?

New applications of coffee

2010-10-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

This seems like a really good idea for a robotic gripper.

It would be cheap to manufacture and can handle a wide range of objects. A design of this kind radically simplifies both the mechanical and computational requirements for a "tidying up" kind of robotic application, eliminating the need for complex sensing of the shape of the object and motion planning of fingers. Even if a soft manipulator wears out or breaks after a few million cycles, it wouldn't be particularly expensive to replace.

Today's robot soldiers are tomorrow's robot police officers

2010-10-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

Still largely a surveillance device, but moving towards the role of a soldier is this vehicle. It's design doesn't look terribly well thought out. The slope of the front of the vehicle no doubt provides the sensors with an excellent view of the road ahead, but it will also conveniently funnel dirt into what looks like a bank of sensors and also if someone shoots at the front of the vehicle then bullets are likely to deflect straight into the sensors, which might result in the vehicle being disabled.

The future of warfare on the ground is probably going to consist of a range of mostly teleoperated vehicles. At the lower end you'll have the simple buggy or tracked platform with a gun strapped onto it, with something like a mobile phone at its heart. These are essentially the disposable infantry of the future, and are the preferred modus operandi for terrorists or paramilitary organisations due to being cheap and easy to build in a hurry from commonly available materials. At the upper end you'll have larger heavily armoured vehicles similar to the above, with a range of expensive sensors and having semi-autonomous navigation and perception for detecting other vehicles or people.

It's very likely that policing will follow the same trajectory, although lagging military development due to the many additional safety requirements. Policing via UAVs is already beginning, but this isn't ideal for street level activities due to variations in weather conditions, obscuring trees or buildings and so on. If the vehicle is capable of autonomously following a predefined patrol route then searching for suspicious activity can be crowdsourced via the internet, driving wages down to the lowest possible level and using labour from any geographical location. Such a vehicle could be on patrol almost around the clock, stopping only to refuel or have its batteries changed, which provides the high availability/visibility which crime-ridden communities demand whilst also minimising labour cost, and could be armed with some non-lethal weapons such as sonic devices or water cannons.

In case anyone is worried about the accountability issues of say policing in England being carried out by teleoperators in Nigeria or elsewhere then a system of checks could be employed. On the one hand you have the operators doing the policing, and on the other you have operators being paid to rate their actions as legitimate, according to some given rule set, or illegitimate. If a teleopertor gains enough illegitimate points then they are excluded from the system, thereby losing their income (the equivalent of being fired in a teleoperated economy). Also there would be the opportunity for communities to become self-policing by volunteering to do the teleoperation job on a part time basis. If enough volunteers were available then the policing labour cost could fall to something close to zero.

Conventional policing would still be needed to do jobs which require the manhandling of suspects, but I expect that bundling people into the back of vans is a minor component of overall police expenditure and teleoperators could call in a dedicated (outsourced) squad to do this as necessary.

Living on a plane

2010-10-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

On the effects of losing stereoscopic vision.

This is interesting because the conventional view about the function of biological stereo vision seems to be that it only applies at short distances of a few metres, or not that much more than arm's length, for things like grabbing the next branch or judging how to pick up an object.

Triage

2010-10-07T02:58:00.000-07:00

There's a rather silly proposal to remove malware infected PCs from the internet apparently being made by Microsoft, accompanied by some laughably tame criticism of the security of Microsoft operating systems.

It all sounds rather dystopian, but somehow I think the chances of a system like this going ahead are incredibly slim indeed. Apart from the general kerfuffle which would be caused, such a strategy would result in the biggest migration of PC users from Windows to Linux ever known.

Perhaps they're thinking that this would maximise revenue for the companies selling "security" software, and increase the amount of business coming from support contracts, as in the Cyber Clean Center. There might be some truth in this, and when you take a look at the companies participating in the Cyber Clean Center, they're all the usual suspects who would stand to benefit financially from a more coercive approach to network security.

Escape from Alcatraz

2010-10-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

My guess is that Facebook have done this preemptively to guard against the possibility of later legal trouble or anti-monopoly regulations. Google did something similar with their Data Liberation Front. It also provides a clearer divide between users legitimately doing what they want with their own data and bots or screen scrapers which might be used for more nefarious purposes, such as by spam or phishing.

Unlike as suggested in this discussion of the Facebook movie I don't believe that there is any "major generational shift" with regard to privacy, in terms of some whole new attitude which will become the new norm. I think it's just that if you're older you've accumulated more kipple in terms of personal history which potentially could have negative effects if it was all completely in the public domain. Also older people are more likely to have health problems, and any revelations with regard to health can have quite substantial negative implications with regard to acquiring jobs, dating or other social activities. For example, if a high ranking politician admits to any moderately interesting health problem there is an immediate media storm of speculation and the sharks begin circling waiting for any sign of weakness which can be exploited to their advantage.

Old and faulty

2010-09-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

A podcast discussing old and faulty software and its implications. I think the fears here are rather overblown - comparable to those which surrounded the Y2K bug - and of course includes the lame but obligatory "digital pearl harbour" quote (how many times have we heard that before).

It's claimed that there are zillions of lines of COBOL code (or some large number) out there running most of the infrastructure of modern life, and that as the knowledge of how to maintain these systems disappears from the job market due to technological change and the ravages or mortality, this could result in some great calamity (doom perhaps?). I think this is unlikely. Most businesses - especially large ones - know all about the problems of obsolescence, particularly of software and electronics, and businesses which don't plan for obsolescence are not really viable on any medium to long term time scale.

It may be the case that financial industries are not traditionally accustomed to planning for technological obsolescence. It's worth remembering that the conversion of accounting from paper to electronic formats largely took place only within the previous three or four decades. In a paper based world you don't need to think about these issues, and technology was limited to things such as typewriters which remained quite static over long periods of time. Paper archives also didn't need to be periodically translated into different languages, and methods of processing paper, in terms of filing cabinets and indexes, probably also didn't change much from one decade to the next.

Large amounts of old code can sometimes also be replaced by much smaller amounts of newer code, since as time passes much of the low level details get abstracted away by use of libraries or higher level languages. I actually have a qualification in COBOL programming, and can confirm that it is indeed a diabolical carbuncle, but probably made some sense in the 1960s and 70s. As I remember much of COBOL was heavily oriented around a very particular sort of printer technology, which makes little sense in today's world especially if not much actually gets printed out.

So I don't think it's worth losing any sleep over the collapse of COBOLitarianism, and it's demise should be cause for celebration rather than mourning. Most large business owners don't want to see their enterprises destroyed through negligence, and as the need to replace old back end systems arises they will be replaced, with little or no apparent change as far as the customer is concerned.

Wordpress postponed

2010-09-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

For the present I've abandoned my experiment in wordpress blogging. It was a valiant attempt, and I still might end up moving to wordpress at some point, but for the present trying to import from Blogger to wordpress in order to keep two blogs synchronised over a trial period of six months doesn't seem to be a viable option. Currently the Blogger import plugin on wordpress 3.0.1, which was previously a one or two click operation, appears to be completely broken.

Trying wordpress is part of my overall "out of the cloud" strategy. The thinking behind this is that if I have the facility to host my own content I might as well try to, and based upon past experience at the end of the dot com bubble I'm keenly aware that in straitened economic times free (as in beer) web services can change their terms and conditions, hastily erect paywalls or disappear overnight without warning. If the worst came to the worst Google could say "You guys in the long tail, we're not making much money out of you - especially if you don't use Adsense - and we have some other fancy service we could use the disk space for. Bye bye". I don't expect that will happen, but it's always a good idea to have a fall-back option.

The third age of cybercrime

2010-09-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

I never developed software directly for Siemens PLCs, although on one occasion I had to interface with them and communicate within their data block framework, and for another industrial application I considered using them but eventually chose a different sort of motion controller which was better suited to the job. I did write software on various other PLCs though, and the level of security on these devices was always either very cursory or non existent. Lack of security on such devices shouldn't come as any great shock though, because at least in the application domains I dealt with industrial control systems were only very rarely connected to SCADA systems or the general administrative IT system of a factory. In some cases security meant using a key to turn a dial to a particular number, so you would need physical access to the factory, control room and control cabinet or machinery together with quite specialised knowledge about what to do with the particular electronics. Factory level security - gates and security guards at entrances - was always highly variable, ranging from ultra strict to just being able to walk directly into a factory without being questioned by anyone, but security on control rooms and cabinets was usually adequate.

So if Stuxnet was specifically targeting Siemens PLCs this probably narrows down the possible culprits to control systems engineers. Those devices are fairly complex and expensive. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to learn how they operate (it's nothing like web or database programming on a Windows PC or a mobile phone), and it's not really the sort of thing which even an ardent technophile such as myself would hack on in their spare time outside of a work environment.

The Guardian article, which is a bit more in depth than others I've read on this topic, downplays the possibility of a financial motive, but a proposition such as "pay us $X, or else we shut your factory down" could be quite lucrative for organised crime groups, who might also have the finances to be able to recruit and train a specialist control systems engineer. Nationalistic/tribalist malevolence is also a possibility too, and nation states would certainly have the means and motive to generate this sort of malware.

Probably the moral of the tale is don't run mission critical applications, such as SCADA systems, on Windows, although I realise that currently the alternatives may be few and far between (maybe a gap in the market). Windows was designed primarily for home computer users, and wasn't created from the outset to be a secure networked system. Also in a factory environment it's probably a good idea to have some policy with regard to use of USB pen drives, and maybe it's wise to disable any unused USB ports in the BIOS on computers running critical applications.

Downsizing the state

2010-09-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

I think that if the economy remains stagnant then 2011 could turn out to be a turbulent year in political terms. Presently we're in a kind of calm before the storm period. VAT hasn't yet gone up to 20%, which will inflate the cost of nearly everything, and the public sector employee layoffs havn't yet begun.

So how many people are going to become unemployed within the next year or so? It's difficult to come up with a precise quantity, but it's possible to do a back-of-an-envelope type of calculation. If the state is downsized by 25%, as indicated in this BBC article, and if it currently has around six million employees according to the Office of National Statistics, then if the number of jobs lost is in a similar proportion this works out at about 1.5 million. This is close to the current official claimant count for the unemployed for August 2010 (1.47 million), which means that potentially over the course of 2011 unemployment could double if the economic outlook doesn't improve.

1.5 million is only a very rough figure, but it gives some idea of the order of magnitude of the problem. Conservatively assuming that only a million of these newly unemployed claim state benefits, and that they're only able to get a miserly £50 per week to live on that adds £2600,000,000 per year of additional borrowing to the government's deficit. Will they be able to afford it, or will they resort to printing money again, instigating an extra round of "quantitative easing" or currency devaluation?

And apart from the numbers there's also the human element. I expect that many of those about to join the dole queue will be quite well educated middle class professionals who constitute the bulk of civil society. People like teachers, managers, administrators, councillors, social services staff, police officers and maybe some medical professionals (although it was claimed at the last election that NHS spending would be "ring fenced" to protect it from cuts). These people have a long way to fall in terms of living standards, and may not choose to slide quietly into poverty. They're also well connected in the classic social networking sense, and may be somewhat politically active.

So all the above looks like a recipe for a decidedly dicey situation. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of social unrest or rioting, similar to the poll tax riots of the late 1980s. In the best possible scenario the economy continues to recover and there is no particular problem in absorbing the consequences of a reduced public sector, with growing private sector business picking up the slack. Whether that will happen remains to be seen, but based on my own job searching the employment situation still looks extremely bleak with no obvious signs of improvement in the immediate future.

Festo arm

2010-09-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting approach to the design of a robot arm, but I don't think that it's entirely novel. I've read of other designs from previous decades which used a similar sort of idea with many joints arranged in a snake-like fashion.

There are a few reasons why designs like this havn't been successful in the past. The main one is that the control of an arm with this design, in terms of the forward and inverse kinematics, is going to be significantly more difficult than for conventional robot arm designs. The fact that it's pneumatically driven also adds to the complexity of the control problem, since the rate of expansion of the various chambers may not be known precisely and may change over time as the system ages. Also, as I've experienced for myself, pneumatic actuators can be very noisy, to an extent where the noise problem alone might exclude many possible applications outside of a controlled factory environment. To really be practical the compressor needs to be small, capable of being run from a battery, and make as little noise as possible.

However, if the above problems can be adequately solved, then perhaps this sort of design will become much more popular. The all-plastic design has the advantage of minimising weight, which means that the arm can be longer than would otherwise be possible, and the compliant nature of combined plastics and pneumatics should mean that this design will be fairly safe to use in close proximity to people. Also a plastic arm is likely to have a much lower cost of manufacture than one traditionally made from metal, especially if it can be printed with something like a rapid prototyper.

An introduction to anthropology

2010-09-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Here is the first of a series of presentations by Alan Macfarlane on the topic of anthropology. I got interested in this topic due to the connection with Noble Ape and thinking about trying to simulate tribal cultures. Also it's difficult to understand the peculiar features of human cognition without also learning something about the environmental and social pressures which generated it.

If you believe that technology will eventually largely eliminate material scarcity it's interesting to note that some of the primitive tribal societies were living in a post-scarcity type of environment, below the carrying capacity of the environment. The future to some extent may come to resemble the past, with a greater emphasis upon reciprocity, gifting and individualistic status seeking. Post-scarcity is already well on the way to being achieved within the realms of software and music.

Is Google Instant a Spivey experiment?

2010-09-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

Google have added a feature which allows search results to be returned as you're typing a query. I'm not sure that this is immensely useful, although it's an impressive technology demo showcasing how fast their system runs.

One thing which occurred to me is the question of what, if any, additional information this sends to Google and how they might try to monetize it (attempting to adopt the mindset of someone trying to sell advertising). In this instance each keystroke probably is invoking a query, or maybe the system just polls the query box every few hundred milliseconds - probably the keystroke event would be more efficient in terms of coding and processor usage than continual polling. This could convey - directly or indirectly - time stamped information about when keys are being hit, in addition to the partially typed search query itself. I think something similar occurred with the now defunct Google Wave, and possibly they might have reused the same code.

Does the temporal sequence of keypresses convey any information about the user or their intent? According to a company called Digital Proctor, it does. I'm not sufficiently expert in this area of psychology to know whether Digital Proctor represents real innovation, or is merely snake oil/pseudoscience, as many psychometric type tests are, but the notion that you might be able to identify someone from their typing style doesn't seem completely unreasonable. Both handwriting and speech are really just motor patterns, and those are relatively unique, so typing patterns might be also.

Here's the elevator pitch:

If their claim is true then possibly Google may be able to identify users, even if they're not logged in, via their typing style. A more likely scenario is that typing style is not completely unambiguous but can be used along with other weak classifiers such as browser info to make a strong one.

But even if typing style only provides such a weak signal about the identity of the user that it's not worth considering, other information may still be latent in the semantic-temporal pattern. Are there systematic relationships between the semantic content of the query, or the intent which the user has, and their physical movements? According to the psychologist Michael Spivey, there might be.

Spivey describes his ideas in a book called The Continuity of Mind. His basic idea is that there are multiple cognitive processes going on in parallel which are in some sense vying for control of your motor output, and that this dynamic struggle is to some degree apparent in your movements. In his view the decision of which action to take isn't the final output of a sausage machine but is created and modulated in flight by multiple other processes occurring simultaneously. This is quite consistent with a Brooksian notion of cognition as multiple parallel streams rather than a strictly sequential or "club sandwich" cognitive architecture.

So maybe with enough mining of a large semantic-temporal database it might be possible to extract any systematic correlations between search queries or particular words and temporal typing patterns, and this could be saleable to advertisers or useful for displaying contextual adverts. Whether Google realize this or not I don't know. Maybe they just wanted to show off the speed of their search engine, and hadn't considered that keystroke sequences might contain additional information.

Knuth in action

2010-09-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

The remote controlled economy

2010-09-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

An article written by Marvin Minsky in 1980 called Telepresence: a manifesto shows how forward thinking he was about telerobotics, or perhaps how slowly technology has progressed. At that time computing and communications technology were still in a relatively primitive state - for example, home computing was only just beginning - and I'd say that it's only really within the previous five years that telerobotics has become a really practical prospect.

For telerobotics you really need:

Video cameras. It was really only from the late 1990s onwards that capture and transmission if images digitally became something which could be done cost effectively with consumer hardware, and only by the mid 2000s that enough internet bandwidth existed to do this well (broadband) without a lot of jerkyness. The transition of camera technology from analog to digital within the previous decade has been a largely unnoticed revolution.

The internet, or some comparable system for high speed bidirectional communication capable of transmitting streaming video. Even though the internet existed in some form in 1980, computing speed and bandwidth would have been far below the minimum requirements.

Wireless communications. It took at least another decade for wireless telecommunications to become possible via mobile phones, and another 10-15 years on top of that for the infrastructure to become ubiquitous and have enough bandwidth to support video.

Small low cost computers which can act as telepresence relays. Embedded computer hardware fast enough to stream video and audio has only come into the price range of a few hundred dollars within the last five years.

Low enough communications cost. It seems like a distant memory now, but 5-10 years ago being connected to the internet or making extensive use of mobile phones could be quite a pricey business. It was only around 2000 that flat rate internet subscription was introduced, prior to which communication would be paid for by the minute and costs could quickly mount up. Over a decade ago not many people could afford to be connected to the internet full time, without being cut off by their ISP or running up massive telephone bills.

Minsky identifies some of the main areas where telerobotics will be useful, and he also talks about the "men in suits" problem with regard to space based construction. The development of the International Space Station within the last decade has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that having (mostly) men in space suits bolting things together is not a scalable way to carry out construction work in space. To reduce risk and cost and apply economies of scale it would be far better to use telerobots operated from the ground, with the construction sites being in geostationary orbits. If the robots were semi-autonomous it might be possible for one operator to work on more than one construction task at a time, and the work could be done by anyone with minimal training, as opposed to the extensive training which astronauts must currently go through.

But the bulk of the telerobot revolution won't take place in space or even in nuclear power stations (which presumably was a fashionable topic in 1980) but instead in the more mundane settings of homes, office spaces, streets, hospitals and ground based construction sites where there is far more potential for economic and social transformations to occur. Some of this could be controversial, since the ingrained tribalism of human psychology is often opposed to "foreign" workers and I'd guess that the legal and taxation frameworks of most countries are not geared towards a situation where potentially anyone can telerobotically do physical work at any location within a few seconds of logging in, although there may be benefits in terms of a much reduced need for migration and essentially perfect automatically policed immigration control. Telerobotic working also enables an expanded workforce which includes people who previously would have been considered to be economically inactive, such as the disabled and elderly.

Also telerobotics makes no assumptions about the progress, or otherwise, of research in AI. Even if you take a very pessimistic view in which AI remains a near intractable problem taking decades or centuries to solve with no major breakthroughs along the way this doesn't prevent the rise of a telerobotics industry in the near future. Many of the services for which telerobotics is a facilitator may also be fundamentally human-to-human in nature, such as health care or holidaying, so this isn't necessarily a robot takeover situation even if AI does make significant progress. For many such scenarios you can just think of the robot as another kind of communications channel.

Open core?

2010-09-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

It will be interesting to see what happens when an app store selling "commercial" (i.e. proprietary) software appears within future versions of Ubuntu. I'm not really ideologically opposed to proprietary software - I've written plenty of it in the past - but closed source methodology has various pragmatic disadvantages and typically a low bus factor.

There has been proprietary software in Ubuntu for years, in the form of various drivers and codecs, but so far no explicit closed source applications are installed by default or are overtly advertised as far as I'm aware (unless Ubuntu One counts). One possible problem if big name software companies show up to display their warez within the app store is that the OS could begin to suffer from the same issues as occur with "open core" systems - assuming that Canonical takes a cut from each app downloaded from the store, as Apple do with theirs. That is, it could be considered financially advantageous to ship low quality or broken default free applications with the distro, in order to make the purchasable proprietary equivalents a more enticing choice. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might contend that's why they ditched the Gimp if they believed that a version of Photoshop might feature in a future app store, but this would of course be a completely scurrilous speculation.

Also, merely prominently displaying proprietary apps in front of the free software within the store could itself be contentious. In my crystal ball I can foresee much wailing, flame wars and gnashing of YouTube videos if the introduction of an app store isn't managed with due care.

Probably the path of least resistance would be to stick to proprietary games within the store, at least initially. Although there are open source games - some of them quite good - for the most part people don't expect to have the four freedoms with respect to games, which can be considered to be more artworks than utilitarian by nature.

Augmented life

2010-09-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Eventually people will no longer think of this sort of thing as "augmented reality" and just think of it as ordinary life. The technology needed to do all of the things shown in this video exists today. What's missing are commercially available Eyetap-like spectacles, which could be wirelessly connected to a phone.

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

On Bullshit

2010-08-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts from Harry Frankfurt on the nature of bullshit, of which in contemporary life there seems to be an ever increasing quantity.

The comments about the relation to sincerity reminds me of the situation with Tony Blair over the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The public, and to some extent also the media, were primarily concerned with whether the claims being made were true or not, but to Blair what mattered was not the truth or falsity of the matter but instead whether he sincerely believed that the weapons existed. This highlights the tenuous predicament of the bullshit artist.

Of course blogging represents the very pinnacle of bullshitting, so I by no means exempt myself from membership of this category. But I think (however inexpertly) that BS transcends merely an agnostic relationship to the truth. Much of what seems to be going on could be ascribed to a sort of social persuasion or social bonding - a kind of glue which is maintaining some coherency between members of a group. Large swathes of politics, religion, media and marketing falls into this persuasiveness and bonding mode of communication. What's being said could be true or could be false, but in a sense the content of the message itself doesn't matter so long as it serves the function of binding the group in collective action. Without some degree of bullshit, goods might not be sold, relationships might never be formed, polite conversations about the weather never be engaged in and novels go unwritten.

The telerobotic bosses

2010-08-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on the various uses of telerobots highlights, as might be expected, that the main hurdles involved are the human factors rather than technological ones. For mobile telepresence the technology required such as high speed wireless networks, cameras and small computers has been easily available at consumer price levels for at least the last few years.

The article suggests that a telerobot is viewed by its users as more than just a webcam on wheels, and that people soon associate the robot with the corporeal presence of the teleoperator rather than merely a piece of machinery.

In an office where a telerobot is operated by a single user it takes about 4 days before coworkers start to refer to the robot by the operator’s name. It’s not, “where’s the robot?” it’s “where’s Jeff?”

In previous work I have also come across the difficulties of deploying applications containing cameras into "secure" environments, so it's not too surprising that similar red tape also applies to telerobots. In some 2D barcode verification software which I wrote a couple of years ago I added a "paranoid mode" which permitted the system to visually verify markings without displaying any images or video on a screen at military sites. So banks and military facilities are probably not a good types of industry for early adoption of roaming video cameras, although once this becomes a more normal practice in the wider society I expect that attitudes and red tape will change out of necessity.

Another observation isn't what I'd expect.

About 30% of operating time is spent driving the robot around. Nearly 100% of users, however, didn’t want this time to be reduced. Driving around time was great for walking conversations, thinking, etc.

This might be the case if you're exploring a new remote site, or only visiting it via the telerobot quite infrequently. If you're teleoperating the robot on a more regular basis though at the same location I think the initial novelty is going to wear thin and that operators will want to keep the driving time to a minimum. This intuition comes partly from driving telerobots myself, such as the Surveyor SRV and GROK 1, and also from articles describing military use of Pacbots where there seems to be a demand for greater autonomy and reduced manual driving time. A compromise similar to that used on the rovers on Mars might be a simple waypoint based driving system, where the operator can designate a point on the floor that they wish to drive to and the moment-to-moment control of movement to the destination is then handled by the robot.

Also on the topic of human factors there's the issue of migration. Is a telerobotic worker "migrating" in some sense if the robot is located in another country? For pure telepresence this isn't an issue, but if the robot is going to be used to carry out something resembling a job, such as a doctor performing surgery, then red tape is definitely going to get involved. Many countries have quotas for migrant workers, and especially in hard times migrants generally become a focus of suspicion and hatred. Governments may view telerobotic working as a way for compaines to evade paying local employment taxes such as National Insurance.

I'll be very surprised if telerobotics doesn't become a growth area within the next five years, because all of the technology is here and there are social, environmental and economic forces pushing in this direction. No doubt the Great Recession has been holding things back, but that won't remain the case indefinitely. A decade from now I think it's entirely possible that telerobots could be so ubiquitous as to be thought of as unremarkable - like office chairs or domestic electrical appliances - and its quite foreseeable that teleoperation interfaces could become an integral part of social networking systems ("click here to visit me", etc).

How to avoid signing NDAs

2010-08-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

Eric Raymond dispenses some advice on how to avoid signing the dreaded Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). I've signed a few in my time, but on occasion managed to avoid them by quibbling over the legal minutiae. For example, at a job interview a few months ago I was asked to sign an NDA before getting a tour of the factory. Amongst several objectionable paragraphs the most ridiculous was one requiring that the agreement not only by binding on myself but also on my descendents too. I don't have any descendents, but can't rule out the possibility that I might have some at a yet to be determined point in future. It seemed unreasonable that persons as yet unborn should be legally compelled to observe the terms of an agreement made by me, so I refused to sign. Just as Raymond suggests, they had little interest in defending the zany terms of the NDA, saying that it had been written "by some American lawyer", and I still got my factory tour regardless.

In general it's a good idea to be wary of signing anything of a legal nature, unless you're sure what you're signing yourself up to. Otherwise you could be signing all of your possessions, inventions and/or rights away or doing yourself other kinds of disservice. Next time another NDA situation turns up I may try following Raymond's advice. Talking about fiduciary responsibility is certainly likely to bamboozle most secretarial workers, unless they've previously studied law.

Howard Gordon, RIP

2010-08-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

I was saddened to hear of the death of Howard Gordon of Surveyor Corporation with whom I worked quite extensively over the last year or two on the Surveyor SVS. A quick search shows up about a thousand email correspondences with him in the last 12 months. Howard was clearly very talented, knowledgeable on software and electronics, enthusiastic about robotics and always helpful in resolving bugs or suggesting changes.

I don't know how much I should divulge, because presumably Surveyor Corporation will continue, but the last I heard at the beginning of this year he was working on some interesting stuff relating to navigation of robots in a home or office environment. By the beginning of 2010 I'd developed the firmware stereo algorithms about as far as they were likely to go, given the CPU and memory constraints of the Blackfin DSPs, and had done some experiments with occupancy grid mapping and visual odometry using the SVS. These early mapping experiments were purely open loop, since the surveyor robot I was using didn't have closed loop speed control, and so suffered from the gradual drift which all such systems encounter. However, towards the end of 2009 Howard was developing a new system which would have an accelerometer for inertial sensing, encoders for closed loop motor control and GPS for use outdoors. I was optimistic that combining the vision system with this additional sensing could yield a pretty good navigation capability at a cost in the order of a few hundred dollars.

Towards public sector accountability

2010-08-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Open sourcing public spending in CSV format is an excellent idea, and I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with a policy of the current government. In the past the details of how government departments spent public money was largely secret, and widely suspected to be subject to corruption. Perhaps it may have been possible to uncover some aspects of public accounts by visiting a library or making a freedom of information request, but few people - even professional journalists - would have bothered to go out of their way to do that, since you would need to have a good idea of what you were looking for in advance, and the information would have been at a high aggregated level rather than on an item by item basis.

This helps to close the loop on public accountability, allowing interested citizens to raise concerns if they find anything which looks excessive or inappropriate, or perhaps even to suggest alternative spending strategies which might deliver better value. Closed loop systems generally perform far better than open loop ones, and it's much harder to slide towards tyranny or become seriously out of step with public expectations if a balance of power exists between governors and the electorate.

However, I would like to see the transparency go further down to items of lower cost than £25,000, otherwise corrupt bureaucrats could simply make repeated payments of slightly less than this amount in order to remain under the radar of scrutiny. I'd also like to see publishing of spending details enshrined as a legal requirement for all future governments, rather than merely being just the policy of one particular administration.

Robonaut

2010-08-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

After more than a decade in development it's encouraging to see that Robonaut is going to get some real testing in space.

By now we're quite accustomed to seeing astronauts busying themselves around the international space station. They make it look easy, but this is difficult and dangerous work, with one of the biggest hazards being exposure to solar radiation, which a space suit doesn't provide very much protection against. If a robot had a similar degree of dexterity to a human astronaut it would be far wiser to carry out construction work in space via telerobot. Use of such robots would also make space based construction a far more scalable proposition, since the human operators could potentially be ground based - especially for geostationary construction sites.

As always with telerobots the ergonomic factors will be the decider as to whether Robonaut is a success or failure. Really it needs to be as easy and intuitive as possible to operate the robot, so that the user doesn't quickly become tired, frustrated or disorientated. There may also be Terrestrial applications of this sort of development in terms of things like telerobotic care work or working in hazardous environments (fire fighting or deep sea operations, for example).

Lane departures

2010-08-10T04:58:00.000-07:00

In terms of image processing this fruit is about as low hanging as it gets. Detection of lanes on motorways is really a special case, with the markings on other types of road being not nearly so consistent in appearance.

The processing needed to do this is fairly minimal, so it could be implemented on an FPGA or DSP inside the camera housing itself, with a GPS receiver being used to calculate approximate speed so that it doesn't need to be wired into the car's other systems. Alternatively speed could be estimated from optical flow, although that would require more processing power since it involves finding correspondences between frames.

Some other vehicle image processing features can be seen here.

Presently I think that systems like this are only implemented on very high end luxury vehicles, but I expect that before long this will be a standard feature in all vehicles.

Pedestrian detection

2010-08-04T15:32:00.000-07:00

If this system works as well as advertised then I can imagine car insurance being higher if you don't have one of these fitted.

Knowing how fallible vision systems can be, especially when you have distortions produced by rain or snow or low lighting conditions, false positives could really be a problem if they cause the brakes to be automatically activated. The vision sensor could be combined with GPS to ensure that it's only active in areas where pedestrians are likely to be present (i.e. not on motorways), and if you wanted to get even more clever the pedestrian detections could be stored and uploaded to a central server in order to calculate a "probability of pedestrians" at each location, which can then be used as a prior probability by the detection algorithm.

Also another way to help reduce road accidents might be for the vehicle to have access to a traffic accident statistics database somewhere in "the cloud". You could then maybe have a coloured indicator on the dashboard to provide some notification to the driver if the GPS location is within an area where accidents are more frequent than average.

Stereo Assist

2010-08-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

A talk by Gideon Stein about using stereo vision for detecting vehicles and pedestrians. It's an expert system, so this only applies in the narrow context of driving, but still could be quite useful. A combination of stereo correspondence and monocular object detection is used to improve the ranging performance. The fact that they aren't using longer range correspondences with small disparities suggests that they're not using sensor models or doing structure from motion. Possibly I could add this sort of functionality to v4l2stereo if I can get some test images.

Doomster status

2010-08-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

The C-Realm podcast tackles the slippery topic of doomsterism - something which will be familiar to artificial intelligence aficionados. The basic thesis seems to be that doomsters are primarily low status individuals, who are seeking to enjoy an elevated status in the post-doom world which they have so cannily predicted. I'm not sure that this entirely explains doomsterism, and indeed the very vague and inaccurate nature of virtually all doom predictions means that doomsayers never actually get to the stage of being able to look back and say "I told you so".

Tim Tyler provides a more multi-faceted summation of the motivating factors behind doomsterism, but there may also be simpler origins. When a blackbird sees a cat prowling in its neighbourhood it sounds the alarm, partly to scare or annoy the cat, triggering a reflex called acoustic startle, and partly to alert other birds to the danger.

There's an obvious adaptive advantage to this behavior, and prognostications of doom may be a human equivalent of the bird's alarm call, explaining why so many people pay attention to them.

The main brand of doom discussed in the podcast relates to peak oil. The peak oil idea itself seems pretty difficult to refute. We have a good idea of how oil naturally formed, and we know that new oil is being created much too slowly for our rate of consumption to be sustainable. Sooner or later the oil will begin to run out, and most of the "easy oil" (that is, where you don't need to do much more than drill a hole in the ground to extract it) may already have been produced, as indicated by the declining volume of new discoveries. The main problem for doomsters is that oil will not run out suddenly in a single catastrophic event - like turning off a tap - but instead will from the consumer point of view appear to be becoming ever more expensive over time. Also, there are alternatives to oil, and possibly also synthetic ways of manufacturing oil using bio-engineered organisms.

The existing manner in which markets operate - however imperfectly - would seem to ensure that there will be a transition away from oil and towards other energy and hydrocarbon sources. As oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, the alternatives start to become cost effective by comparison and there will be more financial incentive to invest in those alternatives. If the transition is poorly managed at a political level, with anti-competitive interests seeking to block the transition for as long as possible, then there could be more wars or disputes in oil producing areas of the world, but unless these escalate into nuclear wars this isn't a scenario which spells doom for the whole of humanity. Things might be rocky for a while, but it's not an unsolvable problem. Doomsters typically assume that the status quo will continue until it breaks - a catastrophic state transition - and underestimate the adaptability and ingenuity of humans when faced with a challenge.

Here in the UK I expect doomsterism and doom-meisters to be on the rise in the next couple of years. Cuts in public services and rises in taxation will probably cause some degree of unrest, strikes, protests and so on. But this is really just civilization-as-usual, and shouldn't be confused with a species extinction event (although it may cause the extinction of the coalition government).

Mandriva paywalls

2010-08-02T02:48:00.000-07:00

In 2003/4 Mandriva, then called Mandrake, was my favourite Linux distro and was probably the easiest to use out of the various distros which I'd tried up to that point. I think that even back then they were having financial difficulties, and I don't think that much has changed about their financial predicament since.

As this video suggests, trying to get users to pay for things which in other distros "just work" is the sign of a bad business model. Technically they're perfectly within their rights to charge for Gstreamer or other software components, since it's kosher to charge for free software if that's what you want to do. However, they would be much better off if the paying element was concentrated on product differentiating applications or services. Canonical does this with Ubuntu One and their music store, so there are existing precedents. If basic multimedia functionality which is nothing new appears to be broken or have a paywall in front of it, then users are just going to move along to the next non-blocking distro - I know I would.

Open Source in Government

2010-08-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

A presentation by Arjen Kamphuis about the introduction of open source software for government use in the Netherlands. Back in 2002 I think the Dutch rail service could perhaps be forgiven for having a web site which only worked with Internet Explorer. At that time very few people were using Linux as a desktop operating system, and the browser wars had been over for some years with Microsoft having won by dumping and/or bundling its browser at zero cost.

I expect that something similar is about to happen in the UK. Vague noises have been made in manifestos about the possibility of using open source in government services, but if they really need to cut out somewhere between 20 and 40% of overall spending then they'll simply have no other option than to pursue the FOSS route. Possibly free web based services could be used, such as Google Docs, and even though Google may be relatively benevolent thus far, dependence upon a single proprietary supplier to run an entire government is probably not a recipe for success, with the possibility of improper influence, back doors or withdrawal of services if international relations turn frosty.

Mind Monkeys

2010-08-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

Explosions in Afghanistan

2010-07-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

A visualisation of the Wikileaks Afghanistan data, showing explosions of improvised explosives between 2004 and 2009.

I was thinking of doing something like this myself. With minimal programming effort it's possible to generate all sorts of information about the movements of particular task forces, covariances between task force activities, trends in use of robots and drone aircraft, and so on. For military historians, this is an amazing resource giving an unprecedentedly detailed view of how a modern war was prosecuted. The comprehensive nature of the data suggests to me that it was leaked by someone at a high level in the chain of command, perhaps unhappy with the way things are going.

From a robotics perspective, there are some detailed eyewitness accounts of Pacbot and Talon robots being used to dispose of roadside bombs. Assuming that these are at least moderately truthful it provides some evidence that robots really are useful, and on quite a number of occasions have saved lives - sometimes getting destroyed themselves in the process. Also, there are a number of occasions where operators describe having tried unsuccessfully to use a robot to dig carefully around or under an IED, so for robot designers at iRobot and elsewhere I think it would be a good idea to build a small articulated digger attachment (perhaps hydraulic) which can scoop out small amounts of soil.

One thing which I did check out within the data is whether ground based robots are being used not just in the traditional capacity for bomb disposal but also as offensive weapons, as depicted above. I couldn't find any such incidents, so in spite of the promotional videos showing roaming machine gun equipped Talon robots it looks as if this isn't what's happening at present - although it's surely only a question of time and confidence before that changes.

As far as I'm aware the Afghan war isn't an illegal war, in the same sense that the Iraq war was (based upon a claim of self defense against WMD subsequently confirmed to be false). When it commenced in 2001 I was actually in favour of going after the perpetrators of 9/11 but the war seems to have been conducted in a poorly focused fashion, suffering from a large degree of scope creep to the extent that they seem to be fighting rather tragically against the local population in a manner very reminiscent to the occupation by the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. The above animation strongly suggests that the situation is not becoming any more peaceful over time, and that sooner or later a Soviet-style withdrawal is the logical conclusion. It's just a pity that so many lives and so much money had to be wasted in the exercise, whilst the principal reason for entering that country (going after Bin Laden) has still not been properly addressed. Imagine, if you will, the same amount of money which has been squandered on fruitless adventures in Afghanistan being spent on space exploration, medical research, artificial intelligence or renewable energy projects and how that would would have provided positive returns in terms of knowledge and economic activity.

General intelligence

2010-07-29T02:37:00.000-07:00

A video showing a mother bear retrieving her offspring from getting trapped in a net by gnawing through it. This seems like fairly unremarkable stuff, but on further consideration it does require some flexibility of intelligence. The logic would be something like:

X is trapped by Y, therefore I need to attack Y to free X.

It requires some general notion of being entrapped, and dealing with the thing which is causing it rather than just naively tugging on X as a less intelligent creature might do.

As far as I know there is no robot currently which can solve this problem. Nets don't naturally occur in the wild, so the bear has no ancestral knowledge of how to deal with this specific situation distilled within its genome. Instead it's improvising in an adaptable way to a situation which it has not previously encountered.

If a robot gets stuck it may have some hard coded behavior which it uses to try to back out again, or flip itself over, but if it got trapped in a net and there was no net cutting software directly programmed into it (assuming that it has an arm capable of cutting) it's unlikely that it would be able to reason about the situation and find an adaptive response to an unknown hazard - at least with any software that I've seen used previously. This requires general intelligence, which includes being able to perceive the physical structure of the surroundings, formulate an abstract characterization of the overall situation ("I am trapped" or "my friend is trapped") which includes a goal state (of being freed) then select a behavior from a range of possible responses which is appropriate to move towards the goal.

Job losses

2010-07-27T02:16:00.000-07:00

Robert Reich writes an article about the separation of company profits from job creation. I think this sort of phenomena will be part of a longer term trend over the next few decades, probably culminating in campaigns to divorce jobs from income.

I'm not as pessimistic as Reich and I think that in the near term many of the jobs will return, but with each economic cycle the number of jobs which can be automated increases, and most companies don't care whether a unit of labour is performed by a human or a machine, so long as it is done with the highest possible yield for owners and/or share holders. Currently it's possible to carry out some unit of labour more cheaply by outsourcing it to other areas of the world, where the cost of living is lower. Before long that's going to be supplemented with telerobotic working, which has similar economic effects to conventional outsourcing, with the final phase being job losses amongst the tele-workers as the telerobots are replaced by fully automated equivalents (replacing the human remote operator with some software).

Presently the level of automation even in the wealthiest nations is not sufficient for this to become an issue of popular debate, but I expect that by the mid part of this century it will be. Assuming no major disasters occur (like nuclear wars, and so on) which set the clock back, there will be a point at which human labour becomes essentially deprecated except for a few niche human-to-human (H2H) occupations.

So how will humans get along in a situation where their labour value is reduced to something close to zero? The up side is that in an automated economy there is no problem with supply of goods or services, so long as there is adequate recycling of materials and use of renewable energy for the system to be sustainable over the long term. The most obvious route is to have something similar to a citizens income, where each person is assigned an income which is some fraction of GDP per capita. This would be similar to having a minimum sharehold in the economy, but where it was either impossible or illegal to sell all of your shares.

Killed by code

2010-07-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Software Freedom Law Center highlights the problem of proprietary software used in medical implants. I think in general any system which is controlled by software and where there exists the possibility that a bug could result either in death or in someone being sent to jail then the code should always be independently auditable. Being able to check the code for flaws means that you can have the highest confidence possible that the system will operate as intended, and reduces potential liability issues. If the code has been out there for a while, and many eyeballs have scrutinized it, then it would be much harder for accusations of negligence to be made in the event that a previously undiscovered bug is found.

The situation for robotics is not quite so drastic as for medical implants, but if you have a robot operating in someone's home which is bigger than a Roomba and has at least one manipulator then there exists the possibility of accidents or unauthorized usage due to software errors which could have damaging or fatal consequences, so a similar principle might apply. Large companies may be able to absorb the costs of legal issues arising from software related accidents, but smaller ones probably won't be able to. So if robotics is going to become a larger industry then at minimum at least adopting an "open core" approach may be advisable.

Moonwalk One

2010-07-24T14:24:00.001-07:00