Kari Paul | Motherboard
”When a human being is killed by an autonomous machine, who takes the blame? Human rights non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch says it is virtually impossible to tell, and that presents unprecedented danger in the future of warfare. The group released a report today showing how difficult it will be to hold commanders, operators, programmers or manufacturers legally responsible for crimes committed by autonomous machines under current legislature.” Read more
By Richard Moss — Gizmag
Scientists have been working since 2008 to develop technology based on memristors (short for memory resistors), which promise computers that need never boot up and function more akin to the human brain – like neurons, they can retain information and perform logic operations. Now scientists at Northwestern University have made a new breakthrough that may make possible brain-like computing capabilities.
Memristors are considered exciting for more than their potential to create brain-like computers. Unlike flash memory, they’re fast. Unlike random access memory (RAM), they remember their state – whatever information they held – when they lose power. They also require less energy to operate, rarely crash, and are immune to radiation. The trouble is that they are two-terminal electronic devices, which results in them being tunable only through changes in the voltage applied externally. Read more
Alex Davies — Wired
An autonomous car just drove across the country.
Nine days after leaving San Francisco, a blue car packed with tech from a company you’ve probably never heard of rolled into New York City after crossing 15 states and 3,400 miles to make history. The car did 99 percent of the driving on its own, yielding to the carbon-based life form behind the wheel only when it was time to leave the highway and hit city streets.
This amazing feat, by the automotive supplier Delphi, underscores the great leaps this technology has taken in recent years, and just how close it is to becoming a part of our lives. Yes, many regulatory and legislative questions must be answered, and it remains to be seen whether consumers are ready to cede control of their cars, but the hardware is, without doubt, up to the task. Read More
A realistic and desirable human destination would produce a different space program than what we have today.
“We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.” This is NASA’s Vision Statement. This is NASA’s reason for being, its purpose. This is a vision statement for science and knowledge. This vision statement was crafted in a solar system that has only one planet that is environmentally friendly to human life.
Thanks to the ongoing search for exoplanets, we’ve identified several planets in our galaxy that are Earth sized and in their star’s habitable zone. Based on statistics, potentially billions more are waiting to be found. We are just now developing the technology to detect them. But we’re nowhere near having the technology needed to get to visit them. They are simply too far away.
Now here is where I’d like to pose a what if question: What if there was another habitable planet just like Earth, right here in our own solar system? What would Earth’s space programs look like, if anyone with a good telescope could look up and see another world with oceans, and continents, and clouds, and green forests? I think that it is safe to say that space programs in this imaginary solar system would be vastly different than ours today. This is conjecture, but it seems likely that the vision statement above, would be more in line with making that new world available for humanity.
Of course the key difference between our present reality and this imaginary scenario is the existence of an obviously desirable destination relatively close by to Earth. This lack of obviously desirable destinations has shaped space programs into the form we see them today. The science oriented form described in the current NASA vision statement is a good example.
It has been said that leadership begins with a vision. To be compelling, a vision describes a desirable end state to be obtained. In the case of the fictional scenario with another Earth like planet in the solar system, that leadership vision might include making it possible for people to move freely to this new world.
As an analogy, in the mid 1800’s, the transcontinental vision (paraphrased) was to secure the U.S. position on the Pacific through a speedy and direct means of travel from one coast to the other. That vision did not include establishing and building the city of San Francisco! The prior existence of San Francisco, enabled the vision of a transcontinental railroad.
Since our situation lacks a visible desirable destination, a bit more effort is required in the vision department. We know that the solar system contains all the resources we need in order to construct vast places for people to live. Immense structures with forests, streams and farmland as advocated by Dr. Gerard O’Neill back in the 1970’s are all possible. We can achieve the same vision of having another habitable planet in this solar system, we just have to add the intermediate step of a vision to develop the manufacturing capability to construct our own desirable destinations!
Using the transcontinental vision as a guide, it is premature for the space vision to focus on sending millions of people out into space, since apart from the International Space Station, there are no destinations yet! No, to get to the transcontinental vision for space, we first need a vision of building a San Francisco in space! But in order for that vision to be considered, it must be realistic. The focus would be on developing the tools and robots necessary to rapidly and economically build up in-space manufacturing industries that can begin the construction of the first villages that will grow into the human cities.
Even though we do not have another Earth in our solar system, it is possible to envision the creation of other Earth equivalents. This leap in leadership would produce a vision unlike what we have now. This new vision, focused on manufacturing and development utilizing the resources of our solar system, would empower capabilities for even greater accomplishments in the future.
By Nick Ellis — SingularityHub
Years ago, my brother, Matt, explained to me that there are three ways to push out the productivity curve: technology, capital, or people.
When we increase productivity, we increase wealth. However, when we discuss how these three forces impact the labor market, we often focus singularly on how technology either creates or destroys jobs and wealth.
Our fear – not entirely misplaced – is that robots will render most of us useless, and in doing so, cleave society into those who control the machines (educated titans of industry), and those who fall victim to them (uneducated poor workers). In this future, the majority of humans – helpless and tired – fall by the way-side on the road to progress.
The Mont Order Club hosted its first video conference in February 2015, as shown below.
Suggested topics included transhumanism, antistatism, world events, movements, collaboration, and alternative media. The Mont Order is an affiliation of dissident writers and groups who share similar views on transnationalism and transhumanism as positive and inevitable developments.
Participants:
For more information on Mont Order participants, see the Mont Order page at Beliefnet.
— nature.com
There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking have in recent months warned of the dangers of intelligent robots becoming too powerful for humans to control. The ethical conundrum of intelligent machines and how they relate to humans has long been a theme of science fiction, and has been vividly portrayed in films such as 1982’s Blade Runner and this year’s Ex Machina.Read more
It’s increasingly looking like the plane that crashed Monday in France, killing 150 people, went down because one of the pilots turned off the autopilot and intentionally crashed it into the ground. Why are we still letting humans fly passenger planes?
The short answer is, we’re not really. It’s no secret that planes are already highly automated, and, with technology that’s available today (but that isn’t installed on the Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings that crashed), it would have been possible for someone in a ground station somewhere to have wrested control of the plane from those on board and reestablished autopilot (or to have piloted the plane from the ground)Read more
One of the things that I’ve always liked about Star Trek, is the concept of a galaxy spanning civilization. I would expect that before we ever get to that point, we will have a civilization that spans our solar system. Having a solar system spanning civilization has many advantages. It would give us access to resources many times greater than what is found here on Earth. It also provides the opportunity for civilization to expand, and in a worst case scenario, help ensure the survival of humanity.
Millions of people living in spacious environmentally controlled cities on planetary surfaces and in rotating cylinders in free space, with industry that extends from Mercury to the comets is to me, a grand vision worthy of an ambitious civilization. But trying to make that vision a reality will be difficult. The International Space Station has the capacity to house just six people and cost approximately $100B to put in place. With a little simple division, that works out to about $17B per inhabitant! If we used that admittedly crude figure, it would cost $17 trillion to build a 1,000 person habitat in Earth orbit. Clearly, the approach we used to build the ISS will not work for building a solar system civilization!
The ISS model relies on building everything on Earth, and launching it into space. A different model championed by Dr. Philip Metzger, would develop industrial capacity in space, using resources close to home, such as from the Moon. This has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of building and maintaining systems in space. But how to develop that industrial capacity? Remember we can’t afford to launch and house thousands of workers from Earth. The answer it would seem, is with advanced robotics and advanced manufacturing.
But is even this possible? The good news is that advanced robotics and advanced manufacturing are already being rapidly developed here on Earth. The driver for this development is economics, not space. These new tools will still have to be modified to work in the harsh environment of space, and with resources that are different from what are commonly used here on Earth. While learning to adapt those technologies to the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system is not trivial, it is certainly better that having to develop them from scratch!
Advanced robots are already having a very positive impact on our economy and play a significant role in what is referred to as next shoring. Next shoring is the move to bring manufacturing closer to the customer. For U.S. customers, that means the return of manufacturing to the U.S. This only makes business sense if the manufacturing costs are as low or lower here, than elsewhere. It is evident that the labor share of manufacturing is lower in those countries that have a high degree of automation. We are getting closer and closer to the cost of materials and transportation being the main drivers in manufactured goods. This is just what we would like to see happen for our solar system civilization. Developing materials and transportation systems from local resources through automation will drive down the cost of opening up the solar system.
While this is great news for developing space, there are implications for our terrestrial civilization. Remember the push for automation in manufacturing isn’t driven by a space need, it is driven by Earthly economics. That means getting to market faster with a better product and at a lower cost. The implication to our terrestrial civilization is twofold. First, manufacturing corporations see greater productivity per employee. This makes sense in that you can increase productivity by adding robots while maintaining or even reducing the workforce. This equates to greater profits and happier shareholders! The downside of that increased productivity however, is a reduction in job growth, if not an outright decline. The very technologies that will make a solar system civilization possible may very well stifle the job market here.
Are people worried about this? You bet they are! This issue became apparent at the 2015 SXSW Festival in Texas. At that event a protest (a staged marketing stunt as reported in IO9) to “stop the robots,” occurred. Much to the surprise of the organizers, this protest generated a lot more attention than they planned, and was picked up by multiple news organizations. It would seem that this interest is driven by very real personal concerns that people have about losing jobs to robots.
Now this is where things get interesting. Economics is driving the development of advanced robots. These advanced robots enable space development but can potentially hurt the job market. From a systems viewpoint, we cannot champion the arrival of advanced robots as a boon for both industry and space development, without considering the potential downside.
People need jobs, and not surprisingly, they particularly like important work. We need to welcome the benefits that advanced robotics bring and at the same time, we need to be proactive in stepping up to the challenges that come along with the benefits. There are lots of ways to address this issue, but it is apparent from the concern shown at SXSW, that this is a conversation that needs to begin sooner rather than later.
We do live in a changing world, which is changing at an ever increasing pace. As leaders, we can chose to either react to the changes being brought on by a growing robotic workforce, or we can chose to lead the transformation of our institutions to successfully accommodate that change. If we chose to lead, the first step, as identified by Professor John Kotter, is a sense of urgency. That sense seems already to be building. Next steps are to develop a vision for ways to accommodate the necessary changes, and building coalitions necessary to implement it. It might be wise to start looking at these steps now.
Like any complex problem, multiple approaches will most likely be needed in order to address workforce disruption. With broad discussion, planning and leadership now, we can mitigate the downside issues, while enabling a strengthened economy now and a bright future among the stars.
Mark
Christine Magee — TechCrunch
If Hollywood’s depiction of artificial intelligence were accurate, we would be falling in love with operating systems, sharing our homes with Stepford wives, and fending off cyborg attacks by now. While movies like Ex Machina and Her stoke the fears and desires of our imaginations, new innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence are bringing our visions of tomorrow closer to today.
You can now take a ride in a Google autonomous car, order dinner from a robot butler at a hotel in Cupertino, and buy a personal quadcopter drone for under a thousand bucks. These robots aren’t quite the cylons from Battlestar Galactica or the space bots from Interstellar, but there’s no question that we’re getting close.