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Dear Ray;

I’ve written a book about the future of software. While writing it, I came to the conclusion that your dates are way off. I talk mostly about free software and Linux, but it has implications for things like how we can have driverless cars and other amazing things faster. I believe that we could have had all the benefits of the singularity years ago if we had done things like started Wikipedia in 1991 instead of 2001. There is no technology in 2001 that we didn’t have in 1991, it was simply a matter of starting an effort that allowed people to work together.

Proprietary software and a lack of cooperation among our software scientists has been terrible for the computer industry and the world, and its greater use has implications for every aspect of science. Free software is better for the free market than proprietary software, and there are many opportunities for programmers to make money using and writing free software. I often use the analogy that law libraries are filled with millions of freely available documents, and no one claims this has decreased the motivation to become a lawyer. In fact, lawyers would say that it would be impossible to do their job without all of these resources.

My book is a full description of the issues but I’ve also written some posts on this blog, and this is probably the one most relevant for you to read: https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/06/h-conference-and-faster-singularity

Once you understand this, you can apply your fame towards getting more people to use free software and Python. The reason so many know Linus Torvalds’s name is because he released his code as GPL, which is a license whose viral nature encourages people to work together. Proprietary software makes as much sense as a proprietary Wikipedia.

I would be happy to discuss any of this further.

Regards,

-Keith
—————–
Response from Ray Kurzweil 11/3/2010:

I agree with you that open source software is a vital part of our world allowing everyone to contribute. Ultimately software will provide everything we need when we can turn software entities into physical products with desktop nanofactories (there is already a vibrant 3D printer industry and the scale of key features is shrinking by a factor of a hundred in 3D volume each decade). It will also provide the keys to health and greatly extended longevity as we reprogram the outdated software of life. I believe we will achieve the original goals of communism (“from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”) which forced collectivism failed so miserably to achieve. We will do this through a combination of the open source movement and the law of accelerating returns (which states that the price-performance and capacity of all information technologies grows exponentially over time). But proprietary software has an important role to play as well. Why do you think it persists? If open source forms of information met all of our needs why would people still purchase proprietary forms of information. There is open source music but people still download music from iTunes, and so on. Ultimately the economy will be dominated by forms of information that have value and these two sources of information – open source and proprietary – will coexist.
———
Response back from Keith:
Free versus proprietary isn’t a question about whether only certain things have value. A Linux DVD has 10 billion dollars worth of software. Proprietary software exists for a similar reason that ignorance and starvation exist, a lack of better systems. The best thing my former employer Microsoft has going for it is ignorance about the benefits of free software. Free software gets better only as more people use it. Proprietary software is an inferior development model and an anathema to science because it hinders people’s ability to work together. It has infected many corporations, and I’ve found that PhDs who work for public institutions often write proprietary software.

Here is a paragraph from my writings I will copy here:

I start the AI chapter of my book with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases plus countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.

We’ve known approximately what a neural network should look like for many decades. We need “places” for people to work together to hash out the details. A free software repository provides such a place. We need free software, and for people to work in “official” free software repositories.

“Open source forms of information” I have found is a separate topic from the software issue. Software always reads, modifies, and writes data, state which lives beyond the execution of the software, and there can be an interesting discussion about the licenses of the data. But movies and music aren’t science and so it doesn’t matter for most of them. Someone can only sell or give away a song after the software is written and on their computer in the first place. Some of this content can be free and some can be protected, and this is an interesting question, but mostly this is a separate topic. The important thing to share is scientific knowledge and software.

It is true that software always needs data to be useful: configuration parameters, test files, documentation, etc. A computer vision engine will have lots of data, even though most of it is used only for testing purposes and little used at runtime. (Perhaps it has learned the letters of the alphabet, state which it caches between executions.) Software begets data, and data begets software; people write code to analyze the Wikipedia corpus. But you can’t truly have a discussion of sharing information unless you’ve got a shared codebase in the first place.

I agree that proprietary software is and should be allowed in a free market. If someone wants to sell something useful that another person finds value in and wants to pay for, I have no problem with that. But free software is a better development model and we should be encouraging / demanding it. I’ll end with a quote from Linus Torvalds:

Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others’ knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.
And that’s exactly the same issue with open source (free) vs proprietary products. The proprietary people can design something that is smart, but it eventually becomes too complicated for a single entity (even a large company) to really understand and drive, and the company politics and the goals of that company will always limit it.

The world is screwed because while we have things like Wikipedia and Linux, we don’t have places for computer vision and lots of other scientific knowledge to accumulate. To get driverless cars, we don’t need any more hardware, we don’t need any more programmers, we just need 100 scientists to work together in SciPy and GPL ASAP!

Regards,

-Keith

An obvious next step in the effort to dramatically lower the cost of access to low Earth orbit is to explore non-rocket options. A wide variety of ideas have been proposed, but it’s difficult to meaningfully compare them and to get a sense of what’s actually on the technology horizon. The best way to quantitatively assess these technologies is by using Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). TRLs are used by NASA, the United States military, and many other agencies and companies worldwide. Typically there are nine levels, ranging from speculations on basic principles to full flight-tested status.

The system NASA uses can be summed up as follows:

TRL 1 Basic principles observed and reported
TRL 2 Technology concept and/or application formulated
TRL 3 Analytical and experimental critical function and/or characteristic proof-of concept
TRL 4 Component and/or breadboard validation in laboratory environment
TRL 5 Component and/or breadboard validation in relevant environment
TRL 6 System/subsystem model or prototype demonstration in a relevant environment (ground or space)
TRL 7 System prototype demonstration in a space environment
TRL 8 Actual system completed and “flight qualified” through test and demonstration (ground or space)
TRL 9 Actual system “flight proven” through successful mission operations.

Progress towards achieving a non-rocket space launch will be facilitated by popular understanding of each of these proposed technologies and their readiness level. This can serve to coordinate more work into those methods that are the most promising. I think it is important to distinguish between options with acceleration levels within the range human safety and those that would be useful only for cargo. Below I have listed some non-rocket space launch methods and my assessment of their technology readiness levels.

Spacegun: 6. The US Navy’s HARP Project launched a projectile to 180 km. With some level of rocket-powered assistance in reaching stable orbit, this method may be feasible for shipments of certain forms of freight.

Spaceplane: 6. Though a spaceplane prototype has been flown, this is not equivalent to an orbital flight. A spaceplane will need significantly more delta-v to reach orbit than a suborbital trajectory requires.

Orbital airship: 2. Though many subsystems have been flown, the problem of atmospheric drag on a full scale orbital airship appears to prevent this kind of architecture from reaching space.

Space Elevator: 3. The concept may be possible, albeit with major technological hurdles at the present time. A counterweight, such as an asteroid, needs to be positioned above geostationary orbit. The material of the elevator cable needs to have a very high tensile strength/mass ratio; no satisfactory material currently exists for this application. The problem of orbital collisions with the elevator has also not been resolved.

Electromagnetic catapult: 4. This structure could be built up the slope of a tall mountain to avoid much of the Earth’s atmosphere. Assuming a small amount of rocket power would be used after a vehicle exits the catapult, no insurmountable technological obstacles stand in the way of this method. The sheer scale of the project makes it difficult to develop the technology past level 4.

Are there any ideas we’re missing here?

Experts regard safety report on Big Bang Machine as insufficient and one-dimensional

International critics of the high energy experiments planned to start soon at the particle accelerator LHC at CERN in Geneva have submitted a request to the Ministers of Science of the CERN member states and to the delegates to the CERN Council, the supreme controlling body of CERN.

The paper states that several risk scenarios (that have to be described as global or existential risks) cannot currently be excluded. Under present conditions, the critics have to speak out against an operation of the LHC.

The submission includes assessments from expertises in the fields markedly missing from the physicist-only LSAG safety report — those of risk assessment, law, ethics and statistics. Further weight is added because these experts are all university-level experts – from Griffith University, the University of North Dakota and Oxford University respectively. In particular, it is criticised that CERN’s official safety report lacks independence – all its authors have a prior interest in the LHC running and that the report uses physicist-only authors, when modern risk-assessment guidelines recommend risk experts and ethicists as well.

As a precondition of safety, the request calls for a neutral and multi-disciplinary risk assessment and additional astrophysical experiments – Earth based and in the atmosphere – for a better empirical verification of the alleged comparability of particle collisions under the extreme artificial conditions of the LHC experiment and relatively rare natural high energy particle collisions: “Far from copying nature, the LHC focuses on rare and extreme events in a physical set up which has never occurred before in the history of the planet. Nature does not set up LHC experiments.”

Even under greatly improved circumstances concerning safety as proposed above, big jumps in energy increase, as presently planned by a factor of three compared to present records, without carefully analyzing previous results before each increase of energy, should principally be avoided.

The concise “Request to CERN Council and Member States on LHC Risks” (Pdf with hyperlinks to the described studies) by several critical groups, supported by well known critics of the planned experiments:

http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/request-to-cern-council-and-member-states-on-lhc-risks_lhc-kritik-et-al_march-17-2010.pdf

The answer received by now does not consider these arguments and studies but only repeats again that from the side of the operators everything appears sufficient, agreed by a Nobel Price winner in physics. LHC restart and record collisions by factor 3 are presently scheduled for March 30, 2010.

Official detailed and well understandable paper and communication with many scientific sources by ‘ConCERNed International’ and ‘LHC Kritik’:

http://lhc-concern.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/critical-revision-of-lhc-risks_concerned-int.pdf

More info:
http://lhc-concern.info/

Artificial brain ’10 years away’

By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.

“And if we do succeed, we will send a hologram to TED to talk.”

‘Shared fabric’

The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column — repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

Neurons

The team are trying to reverse engineer the brain

“It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

“It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”

And that evolution continues, he said. “It is evolving at an enormous speed.”

Over the last 15 years, Professor Markram and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column.

“It’s a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest — how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees,” he said.

“But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity.”

The project now has a software model of “tens of thousands” of neurons — each one of which is different — which has allowed them to digitally construct an artificial neocortical column.

Although each neuron is unique, the team has found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns.

“Even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, may have different morphologies of neurons — we do actually share the same fabric,” he said.

“And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can’t communicate across species.”

World view

To make the model come alive, the team feeds the models and a few algorithms into a supercomputer.

“You need one laptop to do all the calculations for one neuron,” he said. “So you need ten thousand laptops.”

Computer-generated image of a human brain

The research could give insights into brain disease

Instead, he uses an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors.

Simulations have started to give the researchers clues about how the brain works.

For example, they can show the brain a picture — say, of a flower — and follow the electrical activity in the machine.

“You excite the system and it actually creates its own representation,” he said.

Ultimately, the aim would be to extract that representation and project it so that researchers could see directly how a brain perceives the world.

But as well as advancing neuroscience and philosophy, the Blue Brain project has other practical applications.

For example, by pooling all the world’s neuroscience data on animals — to create a “Noah’s Ark”, researchers may be able to build animal models.

“We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever,” said Professor Markram.

It may also give researchers new insights into diseases of the brain.

“There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder,” he told the audience.

The project may give insights into new treatments, he said.

The TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July in Oxford, UK.

For any assembly or structure, whether an isolated bunker or a self sustaining space colony, to be able to function perpetually, the ability to manufacture any of the parts necessary to maintain, or expand, the structure is an obvious necessity. Conventional metal working techniques, consisting of forming, cutting, casting or welding present extreme difficulties in size and complexity that would be difficult to integrate into a self sustaining structure.

Forming requires heavy high powered machinery to press metals into their final desired shapes. Cutting procedures, such as milling and lathing, also require large, heavy, complex machinery, but also waste tremendous amounts of material as large bulk shapes are cut away emerging the final part. Casting metal parts requires a complex mold construction and preparation procedures, not only does a negative mold of the final part need to be constructed, but the mold needs to be prepared, usually by coating in ceramic slurries, before the molten metal is applied. Unless thousands of parts are required, the molds are a waste of energy, resources, and effort. Joining is a flexible process, and usually achieved by welding or brazing and works by melting metal between two fixed parts in order to join them — but the fixed parts present the same manufacturing problems.

Ideally then, in any self sustaining structure, metal parts should be constructed only in the final desired shape but without the need of a mold and very limited need for cutting or joining. In a salient progressive step toward this necessary goal, NASA demonstrates the innovative Electron Beam Free Forming Fabrication (http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/electron_beam.htm) Process. A rapid metal fabrication process essentially it “prints” a complex three dimensional object by feeding a molten wire through a computer controlled gun, building the part, layer by layer, and adding metal only where you desire it. It requires no molds and little or no tooling, and material properties are similar to other forming techniques. The complexity of the part is limited only by the imagination of the programmer and the dexterity of the wire feed and heating device.

Electron beam freeform fabrication process in action
Electron beam freeform fabrication process in action

According to NASA materials research engineer Karen Taminger, who is involved in developing the EBF3 process, extensive simulations and modeling by NASA of long duration space flights found no discernable pattern to the types of parts which failed, but the mass of the failed parts remained remarkably consistent throughout the studies done. This is a favorable finding to in-situe parts manufacturing and because of this the EBF³ team at NASA has been developing a desktop version. Taminger writes:

“Electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF³) is a cross-cutting technology for producing structural metal parts…The promise of this technology extends far beyond its applicability to low-cost manufacturing and aircraft structural designs. EBF³ could provide a way for astronauts to fabricate structural spare parts and new tools aboard the International Space Station or on the surface of the moon or Mars”

NASA’s Langley group working on the EBF3 process took their prototype desktop model for a ride on the microgravity simulating NASA flight and found the process works just fine even in micro gravity, or even against gravity.

A structural metal part fabricated from EBF³
A structural metal part fabricated from EBF³

The advantages this system offers are significant. Near net shape parts can be manufactured, significantly reducing scrap parts. Unitized parts can be made — instead of multiple parts that need riveting or bolting, final complex integral structures can be made. An entire spacecraft frame could be ‘printed’ in one sitting. The process also creates minimal waste products and is highly energy and feed stock efficient, critical to self sustaining structures. Metals can be placed only where they are desired and the material and chemistry properties can be tailored through the structure. The technical seminar features a structure with a smooth transitional gradient from one alloy to another. Also, structures can be designed specifically for their intended purposes, without needing to be tailored to manufacturing process, for example, stiffening ridges can be curvilinear, in response to the applied forces, instead of typical grid patterns which facilitate easy conventional manufacturing techniques. Manufactures, such as Sciaky Inc, (http://www.sciaky.com/64.html) are all ready jumping on the process

In combination with similar 3D part ‘printing’ innovations in plastics and other materials, the required complexity for sustaining all the mechanical and structural components of a self sustaining structure is plummeting drastically. Isolated structures could survive on a feed stock of scrap that is perpetually recycled as worn parts are replaced by free form manufacturing and the old ones melted to make new feed stock. Space colonies could combine such manufacturing technologies and scrap feedstock with resource collection creating a viable minimal volume and energy consuming system that could perpetually repair the structure – or even build more. Technologies like these show that the atomic level control that nanotechnology manufacturing proposals offer are not necessary to create self sustaining structure, and that with minor developments of modern technology, self sustaining structures could be built and operated successfully.

An unmanned beast that cruises over any terrain at speeds that leave an M1A Abrams in the dust
By Bjorn Carey Posted 05.21.2009 at 12:04 pm

Mean Machine: Troops could use the Ripsaw as an advance scout, sending it a mile or two ahead of a convoy, and use its cameras and new sensor technology to sniff out roadside bombs or ambushes John B. Carnett
View Photo Gallery

Today’s featured Invention Award winner really requires no justification–it’s an unmanned, armed tank faster than anything the US Army has. Behold, the Ripsaw.

Cue up the Ripsaw’s greatest hits on YouTube, and you can watch the unmanned tank tear across muddy fields at 60 mph, jump 50 feet, and crush birch trees. But right now, as its remote driver inches it back and forth for a photo shoot, it’s like watching Babe Ruth forced to bunt with the bases loaded. The Ripsaw, lurching and belching black puffs of smoke, somehow seems restless.

Like their creation, identical twins Geoff and Mike Howe, 34, don’t like to sit still for long. At age seven, they built a log cabin. Ten years later, they converted a school bus into a drivable, transforming stage for their heavy-metal band, Two Much Trouble. In 2000 they couldn’t agree on their next project: Geoff favored a jet-turbine-powered off-road truck; Mike, the world’s fastest tracked vehicle. “That weekend, Mike calls me down to his garage,” Geoff says. “He’s already got the suspension built for the Ripsaw. So we went with that.”

Every engineer they consulted said they couldn’t best the 42mph top speed of an M1A Abrams, the most powerful tank in the world. Other tanks are built to protect the people inside, with frames made of heavy armored-steel plates. Designed for rugged unmanned missions, the Ripsaw just needed to go fast, so the brothers started trimming weight. First they built a frame of welded steel tubes, like the ones used by Nascar, that provides 50 percent more strength at half the weight.

Ripsaw: How It Works: To glide over rough terrain at top speed, the Ripsaw has shock absorbers that provide 14 inches of travel. But when the suspension compresses, it creates slack that could cause a track to come off, potentially flipping the vehicle. So the inventors devised a spring-loaded wheel at the front that extends to keep the tracks taut. The Ripsaw has never thrown a track Bland Designs

Behind the Wheel: The Ripsaw’s six cameras send live, 360-degree video to a control room, where program manager Will McMaster steers the tank John B. Carnett

When you reinvent the tank, finding ready-made parts is no easy task, and a tread light enough to spin at 60 mph and strong enough to hold together at that speed didn’t exist. So the Howes hand-shaped steel cleats and redesigned the mechanism for connecting them in a track. (Because the patent for the mechanism, one of eight on Ripsaw components, is still pending, they will reveal only that they didn’t use the typical pin-and-bushing system of connecting treads.) The two-pound cleats weigh about 90 percent less than similarly scaled tank cleats. With the combined weight savings, the Ripsaw’s 650-horsepower V8 engine cranks out nine times as much horsepower per pound as an M1A Abrams.

While working their day jobs — Mike as a financial adviser, Geoff as a foreman at a utilities plant — the self-taught engineers hauled the Ripsaw prototype from their workshop in Maine to the 2005 Washington Auto Show, where they showed it to army officials interested in developing weaponized unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). That led to a demonstration for Maine Senator Susan Collins, who helped the Howes secure $1.25 million from the Department of Defense.The brothers founded Howe and Howe Technologies in 2006 and set to work upgrading various Ripsaw systems, including a differential drive train that automatically doles out the right amount of power to each track for turns. The following year they handed it over to the Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), which paired it with a remote-control M240 machine gun and put the entire system through months of strenuous tests. “What really set it apart from other UGVs was its speed,” says Bhavanjot Singh, the ARDEC project manager overseeing the Ripsaw’s development. Other UGVs top out at around 20 mph, but the Ripsaw can keep up with a pack of Humvees.

Over the Hill: Despite the best efforts of inventors Mike [left] and Geoff Howe, the Ripsaw has proven unbreakable. It did once break a suspension mount — and drove on for hours without trouble John B. Carnett

Back on the field, the tank has been readied for the photo. The program manager for Howe and Howe Technologies, Will McMaster, who is sitting at the Ripsaw’s controls around the corner and roughly a football field away, drives it straight over a three-foot-tall concrete wall. The brothers think that when the $760,000 Ripsaw is ready for mass production this summer, feats like this will give them a lead over other companies vying for a military UGV contract. “Every other UGV is small and uses [artificial intelligence] to avoid obstacles,” Mike says. “The Ripsaw doesn’t have to avoid obstacles; it drives over them.“

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March 12, 2009 10:00 AM PDT

Q&A: The robot wars have arrived

by Candace Lombardi

P.W. Singer

P.W. Singer

Just as the computer and ARPAnet evolved into the PC and Internet, robots are poised to integrate into everyday life in ways we can’t even imagine, thanks in large part to research funded by the U.S. military.

Many people are excited about the military’s newfound interest and funding of robotics, but few are considering its ramifications on war in general.

P.W. Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, went behind the scenes of the robotics world to write “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.”

Singer took time from his book tour to talk with CNET about the start of a revolution tech insiders predicted, but so many others missed.

Q: Your book is purposely not the typical think tank book. It’s filled with just as many humorous anecdotes about people’s personal lives and pop culture as it is with statistics, technology, and history. You say you did this because robotic development has been greatly influenced by the human imagination?
Singer: Look, to write on robots in my field is a risky thing. Robots were seen as this thing of science fiction even though they’re not. So I decided to double down, you know? If I was going to risk it in one way, why not in another way? It’s my own insurgency on the boring, staid way people talk about this incredibly important thing, which is war. Most of the books on war and its dynamics–to be blunt–are, oddly enough, boring. And it means the public doesn’t actually have an understanding of the dynamics as they should.

It seems like we’re just at the beginning here. You quote Bill Gates comparing robots now to what computers were in the eighties.
Singer: Yes, the military is a primary buyer right now and it’s using them (robots) for a limited set of applications. And yes, in each area we prove they can be utilized you’ll see a massive expansion. That’s all correct, but then I think it’s even beyond what he was saying. No one sitting back with a computer in 1980 said, “Oh, yes, these things are going to have a ripple effect on our society and politics such that there’s going to be a political debate about privacy in an online world, and mothers in Peoria are going to be concerned about child predators on this thing called Facebook.” It’ll be the same way with the impact on war and in robotics; a ripple effect in areas we’re not even aware of yet.

Right now, rudimentary as they are, we have autonomous and remote-controlled robots while most of the people we’re fighting don’t. What’s that doing to our image?
Singer: The leading newspaper editor in Lebanon described–and he’s actually describing this as there is a drone above him at the time–that these things show you’re afraid, you’re not man enough to fight us face-to-face, it shows your cowardice, all we have to do to defeat you is just kill a few of your soldiers.

It’s playing like cowardice?
Singer: Yeah, it’s like every revolution. You know, when gunpowder is first used people think that’s cowardly. Then they figure it out and it has all sorts of other ripple effects.

What’s war going to look like once robot warriors become autonomous and ubiquitous for both sides?
Singer: I think if we’re looking at the realm of science fiction, less so “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and more so the world of “Blade Runner” where it’s this mix between incredible technologies, but also the dirt and grime of poverty in the city. I guess this shows where I come down on these issues. The future of war is more and more machines, but it’s still also insurgencies, terrorism, you name it.

What seems most likely in this scenario–at least in the near term–is this continuation of teams of robots and humans working together, each doing what they’re good at…Maybe the human as the quarterback and the robots as the players with the humans calling out plays, making decisions, and the robots carrying them out. However, just like on a football field, things change. The wide receivers can alter the play, and that seems to be where we’re headed.

How will robot warfare change our international laws of war? If an autonomous robot mistakenly takes out 20 little girls playing soccer in the street and people are outraged, is the programmer going to get the blame? The manufacturer? The commander who sent in the robot fleet?
Singer: That’s the essence of the problem of trying to apply a set of laws that are so old they qualify for Medicare to these kind of 21st-century dilemmas that come with this 21st-century technology. It’s also the kind of question that you might have once only asked at Comic-Con and now it’s a very real live question at the Pentagon.

I went around trying to get the answer to this sort of question meeting with people not only in the military but also in the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch. We’re at a loss as to how to answer that question right now. The robotics companies are only thinking in terms of product liability…and international law is simply overwhelmed or basically ignorant of this technology. There’s a great scene in the book where two senior leaders within Human Rights Watch get in an argument in front of me of which laws might be most useful in such a situation.

Is this where they bring up Star Trek?
Singer: Yeah, one’s bringing up the Geneva Conventions and the other one’s pointing to the Star Trek Prime Directive.

You say in your book that except for a few refusenicks, most scientists are definitely not subscribing to Isaac Asimov’s laws. What then generally are the ethics of these roboticists?
Singer: The people who are building these systems are excited by the possibilities of the technology. But the field of robotics, it’s a very young field. It’s not like medicine that has an ethical code. It’s not done what the field of genetics has, where it’s begun to wrestle with the ethics of what they’re working on and the ripple effects it has on the society. That’s not happening in the robotics field, except in isolated instances.

What military robotic tech is likely to migrate over to local law enforcement or the consumer world?
Singer: I think we’re already starting to see some of the early stages of that…I think this is the other part that Gates was saying: we get to the point where we stop calling them computers. You know, I have a computer in my pocket right now. It’s a cell phone. I just don’t call it a computer. The new Lexus parallel-parks itself. Do we call it a robot car? No, but it’s kind of doing something robotic.

You know, I’m the guy coming out of the world of political science, so it opens up these fun debates. Take the question of ethics and robots. How about me? Is it my second amendment right to have a gun-armed robot? I mean, I’m not hiring my own gun robots, but Homeland Security is already flying drones, and police departments are already purchasing them.

Explain how robotic warfare is “open source” warfare.
Singer: It’s much like what’s happened in the software industry going open source, the idea that this technology is not something that requires a massive industrial structure to build. Much like open source software, not only can almost anyone access it, but also anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit, and in this case of very wicked entrepreneurial spirit, can improve upon it. All sorts of actors, not just high-end military, can access high-end military technologies…Hezbollah is not a state. However, Hezbollah flew four drones at Israel. Take this down to the individual level and I think one of the darkest quotes comes from the DARPA scientist who said, and I quote, “For $50,000 I could shut down Manhattan.” The potential of an al-Qaeda 2.0 is made far more lethal with these technologies, but also the next generation of a Timothy McVeigh or Unabomber is multiplying their capability with these technologies.

The U.S. military said in a statement this week that it plans to pull 12,000 troops out of Iraq by the fall. Do you think robots will have a hand in helping to get to that number?
Singer: Most definitely.

How?
Singer: The utilization of the Predator operations is allowing us to accomplish certain goals there without troops on the grounds.

Is this going to lead to more of what you call the cubicle warriors or the armchair warriors? They’re in the U.S. operating on this end, and then going to their kid’s PTA meeting at the end of the day?
Singer: Oh, most definitely. Look, the Air Force this year is putting out more unmanned pilots that manned pilots.

Explain how soldiers now come ready-trained because of our video games.
Singer: The military is very smartly free-riding off of the video game industry, off the designs in terms of the human interface, using the Xbox controllers, PlayStation controllers. The Microsofts and Sonys of the world have spent millions designing the system that fits perfectly in your hand. Why not use it? They’re also free-riding off this entire generation that’s come in already trained in the use of these systems.

There’s another aspect though, which is the mentality people bring to bear when using these systems. It really struck me when one of the people involved in Predator operations described what it was like to take out an enemy from afar, what it was like to kill. He said, “It’s like a video game.” That’s a very odd reference, but also a telling reference for this experience of killing and how it’s changing in our generation.

It’s making them more removed from the morality of it?
Singer: It’s the fundamental difference between the bomber pilots of WWII and even the bomber pilots of today. It’s disconnection from risk on both a physical and psychological plain.

When my grandfather went to war in the Pacific, he went to a place where there was such danger he might not ever come home again. You compare that to the drone pilot experience. Not only what it’s like to kill, but the whole experience of going to war is getting up, getting into their Toyota Corolla, going in to work, killing enemy combatants from afar, getting in their car, and driving home. So 20 minutes after being at war, they’re back at home and talking to their kid about their homework at the dinner table. So this whole meaning of the term “going to war” that’s held true for 5,000 years is changing.

What do you think is the most dangerous military robot out there now?
Singer: It all hinges on the definition of the term dangerous. The system that’s been most incredibly lethal in terms of consequences on the battlefield so far if you ask military commanders is the Predator. They describe it as the most useful system, manned or unmanned, in our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven out of the twenty al-Qaeda leaders we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten via a drone strike. Now, dangerous can have other meanings. The work on evolutionary software scares the shit out of me.

You’re saying we’re gonna get to a HAL situation?
Singer: Maybe it’s just cause I’ve grown up on a diet of all that sci-fi, but the evolutionary software stuff does spook me out a little bit. Oh, and robots that can replicate themselves. We’re not there yet, but that’s another like “whoa!”

People have finally got the attention of companies and governments to look ahead to 2020, 2040, 2050 in terms of the environment and green technology. But as you said in your book, that’s not happening with robotics issues. Why do you think that is?
Singer: When it comes to the issue of war, we’re exceptionally uncomfortable looking forward, mainly because so many people have gotten it so wrong. People in policymaker positions, policy adviser positions, and the people making the decisions are woefully ignorant in what’s happening in technology not only five years from now, not only now, but where we were five years ago. You have people describing robotics as “mere science fiction” when we’re talking about having already 12,000 (robots) on the ground, 7,000 in the air. During this book tour, I was in this meeting with a very senior Pentagon adviser, top of the field, very big name. He said, “Yeah this technology stuff is so amazing. I bet one day we’ll have this technology where like one day the Internet will be able to look like a video game, and it will be three-dimensional, I’ll bet.”

(laughing) And meanwhile, your wife’s at Linden Labs.
Singer: (laughing) Yeah, it’s Second Life. And that’s not anything new.

At least five years old, yeah.
Singer: And you don’t have to be a technology person to be aware of it. I mean, it’s been covered by CNN. It appeared on “The Office” and “CSI.” You just have to be aware of pop culture to know. And so it was this thing that he was describing as it might happen one day, and it happened five years ago. Then the people that do work on the technology and are aware of it, they tend to either be: head-in-the-sand in terms of “I’m just working on my thing, I don’t care about the effects of it”; or “I’m optimistic. Oh these systems are great. They’re only gonna work out for the best.” They forget that this is a real world. They’re kind of like the atomic scientists.

Obviously the hope is that robots will do all the dirty work of warfare. But warfare is inherently messy, unpredictable, and often worse than expectations. How would a roboticized war be any different in that respect?
Singer: In no way. That’s the fundamental argument of the book. While we may have Moore’s Law in place, we still haven’t gotten rid of Murphy’s Law. So we have a technology that is giving us incredible capabilities that we couldn’t even have imagined a few years ago, let alone had in place. But the fog of war is not being lifted as Rumsfeld once claimed absurdly.

You may be getting new technological capabilities, but you are also creating new human dilemmas. And it’s those dilemmas that are really the revolutionary aspect of this. What are the laws that surround this and how do you insure accountability in this setting? At what point do we have to become concerned about our weapons becoming a threat to ourselves? This future of war is again a mix of more and more machines being used to fight, but the wars themselves are still about our human realities. They’re still driven by our human failings, and the ripple effects are still because of our human politics, our human laws. And it’s the cross between the two that we have to understand.

Candace Lombardi is a journalist who divides her time between the U.S. and the U.K. Whether it’s cars, robots, personal gadgets, or industrial machines, she enjoys examining the moving parts that keep our world rotating. Email her at [email protected]. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.

Jetfuel powerpack, armour… shoulder turret?

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

Posted in Science, 27th February 2009 12:18 GMT

Free whitepaper – Data center projects: standardized process

US weaponry globocorp Lockheed is pleased to announce the unveiling of its newly-acquired powered exoskeleton intended to confer superhuman strength and endurance upon US soldiers.

Needless to say, corporate promo vid of the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC™) is available:

The exoskeleton is based on a design from Berkeley Bionics of California, but Lockheed say they have brought significant pimpage to the basic HULC. The enhanced version is now on show at the Association of the United States’ Army Winter Symposium in Florida.

“With our enhancements to the HULC system, Soldiers will be able to carry loads up to 200 pounds with minimal effort,” according to Lockheed’s Rich Russell.

From the vid, the HULC certainly seems a step forward on Raytheon’s rival XOS mechwarrior suit, which at last report still trails an inconvenient power cable to the nearest wall socket.

Not so the HULC; four pounds of lithium polymer batteries will run the exoskeleton for an hour walking at 3mph, according to Lockheed. Speed marching at up to 7mph reduces this somewhat; a battery-draining “burst” at 10mph is the maximum speed.

The user can hump 200lb with relative ease while marching in a HULC, however, well in excess of even the heaviest combat loads normally carried by modern infantry. There’d be scope to carry a few spare batteries. Even if the machine runs out of juice, Lockheed claims that its reinforcement and shock absorption still helps with load carrying rather than hindering.

There are various optional extras, too. The HULC can be fitted with armour plating, heating or cooling systems, sensors and “other custom attachments”. We particularly liked that last one: our personal request would be a powered gun or missile mount of some kind above the shoulder, linked to a helmet or monocle laser sight.

One does note that remote-controlled gun mounts weighing as little as 55lb are available, able to handle various kinds of normally tripod- or bipod-mounted heavy weapons.

You’d need more power, but that’s on offer. According to the Lockheed spec sheet (pdf) there’s an extended-endurance HULC fitted with a “silent” generator running on JP8 jet fuel. A tankful will run this suit for three days, marching eight hours per day — though presumably at the cost of some payload.

Doubtless other power options could be developed: Lockheed says the HULC needs 250 watts on average.

It’s important to note that the HULC is basically a legs and body system only: there’s no enhancement to the user’s arms, though an over-shoulder frame can be fitted allowing a wearer to hoist heavy objects such as artilery shells with the aid of a lifting strop.

The HULC may not be quite ready for prime time yet. But the military exoskeleton as a concept does seem to be getting to the stage of usefulness, at least in niche situations for specific jobs.

The BigDog petrol packmule, an alternative strategy for helping footsoldiers carry their increasingly heavy loads, may now have a serious rival. ®



Two of Britain’s leading environmental thinkers say it is time to develop a quick technical fix for climate change. Writing in the journal Nature, Science Museum head Chris Rapley and Gaia theorist James Lovelock suggest looking at boosting ocean take-up of CO2.
…
Floating pipes reaching down from the top of the ocean into colder water below move up and down with the swell.

As the pipe moves down, cold water flows up and out onto the ocean surface. A simple valve blocks any downward flow when the pipe is moving upwards.

Colder water is more “productive” — it contains more life, and so in principle can absorb more carbon.

Finally some practical solutions are being introduced to mitigate global warming. The BBC article mention the US company, Atmocean, that is already testing such a system.

Read the articles from BBC or the New York Times based on the same article from Nature.