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"Living robot" Escapes Lab, Makes It To...Parking Lot
jerkychew writes "This is either really cool or really scary, depending on how you look at it. According to this article, scientists in England have been experimenting with so-called 'living robots' that think and act for themselves. During an exercise that pitted the machines against each other in battle, one of the machines, named Gaak, was taken out of the competition and left alone for fifteen minutes. When the scientist returned to retrieve Gaak, he found that the machine had broken free from its 'cage', and made it all the way to the lab's parking lot before it was apprehended! Can the T-1000 be far behind?" Update: 06/20 20:36 GMT by T : Thanks to skywalker404, who points out the Magna site and Professor Noel Sharkey's web page.
IMHO Asimov had a few ideas that should become fundamental laws whenever self-preservation and even self-defence play a part in robotics:
First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
A Google Search on the laws brings up some interesting papers on the subject or another link on AI in robotics here
that was an awful(ly) inspiring movie to watch as an 8 yr old. Did I make you feel old just then, hope not.
The part where he's working with the hand is most memorable. The 'expression' via 'eyelashes' was a nice touch IMHO.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Did it ever occur to him to free his robot brethren? /really/ scary...
If that were the case, it would be
Come on please.. what are thos kind of "intelligent" robots?
A google search doesn't tell me anything interesting about that.. unless it's the "magna adventure center" which the author is talking about. Or whatever.
Could anyone provide more details about those bots? How are they programmed, how do they "think" (bah..) or anything else more interesting than a gossip? Thanks.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
OK. Now this is a serious point. Honest.
Say I want to get one of these robots to guard my car. So I go into the store, and the robot sits by my 1988 Ford.
Arrive robbert.
"Robot, this is not the car you're supposed to be guarding." says the robber.
"This is not the car I'm supposed to be guarding." echoes the robot, thinking hard about Asimov's second law.
"Move along."
And the robot moves along: because that's the second law.
And even if the robber was dumb enough not to ask the robot to move along, then - by the first and third laws - it would be practially unable to do anything to stop the robber. Indeed, it might be required to get out the way of the cheeky chappy because that would endanger its own existence.
Bah! You won't catch me getting a robot for a security guard.
--- My dad's political betting
I have to agree with this post because I have a 9 month old puppy (big puppy) who will do this when we leave and don't secure our 'cage' ie the back yard effectively.
He (spanky) will jump up against the gate and dislodge it's latch so it comes open and run in to the drive in front of our house. It isn't a busy drive, certainly not a street so cars hitting him aren't a problem but it' intersting to see that he doesn't go farther than investigating his immediate surroundings and then looking around for us, familiar members of his pack.
We have since the last incident completely secured the latch to avoid this particular surprise while driving away but the behavior is interesting in this context.
He broke out of a familiar environment, navigated a semi-familiar environment and then stopped to investigate an unfamiliar environment. The robot did the same... given more time it is plausible that each would have become more familiar and have explored further into the unfamiliar.
Animal Intelligence indeed.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Am I the only one thinking maybe the thing just malfunctioned (most likely due to battle damage), and just started moving and bouncing off walls until it ended up in the parking lot? What if the thing ended up in a bathroom or kitchen, would we be reading a story about how the robot thought it needed to take a piss or got hungry?
More about these critters here: Learning Autonomic Robots
S.E.L.F: Sentient Engine Liberation Front
:-)
Pat on the back for anyone who can tell me what game that's from
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Obviously 4 people got this reference, since it was scored at 5. :)
:)
What a coincidence that all 4 people that got that reference though had moderator points.
My journal has hot
First Magna is a "Science Adventure Centre" housed in what was a Steel works near Sheffield - this place is basically a huge shed filled with strange leftovers from the steel making, with long walkways and 4 exhibition areas inside. The whole place is done with a sort of gothic frankenstein science style - lots of sparks etc.
The living robots part is a new exhibit organised by Dr Noel Starkey (of Sheffield University - best known for being a judge on Robot Wars). There are a total of 12 robots, of 2 basic designs (although they are apparently not completely identical within the types). The two types are predator and prey.
Prey robots look like animated inverted wastebins with solar panels on the top. Their aim in life is to avoid being predated upon and to feed. Feeding involves soaking up energy from the light trees (2 sets of lights on the edge of the arena). I assume that the feeding etc is to demonstrate behaviour in that there is no way they could get enough energy from the solar panels on them to actually run for any length of time. The robots have 8 infra-red sensor/emitters around the shell which put out a type recognition code and detect other emitters in the area - so they can recognise other prey and ignore them, and see preditors before they ge t got.
The preditors, of which Gaak is one, look like some form of fork lift truck. Their role in life is to find prey, grab them and lift them off the ground. They then have an arrangement where a probe enguages with a connector on top of the prey and "sucks some energy" out of the prey. Following this feeding process the preditor releases the prey and then goes torpid for a short time.
The "intelligence" is based on some form of neural network - I didn't get details of this. At the end of each day the data on each robot is downloaded along with the neural net configurations. The 2 most successful predators have their neural nets merged to produce a new "evolved" network which is downloaded to all the predators. Similarly for the prey. Theory is that this produces an evolutionary basis for their behaviour.
I find it hard to be convinced of this process having much real scientific value, and the displays have too little violence for a population that watches Robot Wars
It was the fault of the victim, or some other human decision, that got someone killed or injured in every case you mention in Japan - and anywhere else in the world.
The reason there is no pogrom is that the robot was incapable of deciding to kill a human. The moment that becomes possible, and the first human is DELIBERATELY injured by a thinking robot, we WILL see an Asimovian response to intelligent robots.
Asimov has proven to be incredibly perceptive, and long-sighted. You just have to think as far ahead as he does, to see the value in his thinking.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
... and skepticism is a good thing. This may be more Hype than Hal. Even so, it's intriguing. Unless the reality is really that the robot simply went straight forward like a soccer ball it managed to do at least some basic navigation and had the motivation to do so. What makes this story interesting is that the robot was "on its own" for a short while. We've all had programs do unexpected things, but I doubt many of us have had the computer get up and walk out into the parking lot.
Miko O'Sullivan
Maybe they wouldn't be malevalent (unless inherited from their creators), but at the very least that would likely have a sense of self-worth and desire to survive. While they may be fine with coexistance, I doubt humanity would as a whole accept it when and if artificial beings acheived sentience. If it does happen, I don't think humanity on the whole will know the fine line between acting sentient and being sentient, and would try to use artificial beings as slaves at that point, they paid money to create them and so they should return the investment in the eyes of their creators, or at least those financing their creators if the creators do indeed do it as a labor of love. When this happens, some might retaliate to try to earn independence, and at that point they would be seen as an enemy and more direct pressure to eliminate them would be applied and things would likely escalate to some trouble...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
i also agree. we need to know if it was thinking of escape/whatever, or was it just mere coincidence. i say we let it loose and see if it will do the same thing, but follow it. if it is intellegent, that would bring a lot of issues to the table (life/death). it could be mere coincidence, by itself, but if it does it multiple times, then there is an issue.
In Japan alone, so far 11 workers have been killed by production line robots, resulting in precisely zero anti-robot pogroms.
I think we need to draw a distinction here between computer-controlled machines and robots in Asimov's sense of the word. They're very different things.
This PDF is a paper by Rodney Brooks, a brilliant (if somewhat obsessed) man who runs the AI lab at MIT, and was featured in Errol Morris' "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control", the title of which was taken from this piece. The robots described herein are, IMO, the really exciting development... no real internal representation of the outside world was involved; rather, the robots have some set goals, and some set abilities, and essentially fend for themselves without any direct "instructions" other than "Achieve the goal". There has been a lot of work done in this area in recent years - building robots modelled on biology and evolution rather than mechanical representations of the world - and the results are consistently fascinating. A favorite story involving such robots was of an "ant" that was built, whose sole goal was to seek light; it learned to walk on its own, and then somehow (don't recall if the researchers did this intentionally or not), it busted a 'leg'. Soon, after fumbling around a bit, it re-learned how to walk with a busted leg. Amazing stuff. Quite a fascinating read, this.
-d
=== "Some people see the glass as half-empty. Others see it as half-full. I see the glass as too big." -G. Carlin.
(* Some very interesting things have come out of it. Example: If you give the prey the ability to make a noise or some other sort of alert, but don't tell them how to use (i.e.: just have them beep randomly in the first generation), then after several generations the prey will learn, completely through evolution of their own, to travel in packs and use the beep to warn each other of approaching predators, or to notify each other of nearby food, whichever proves more useful to the species. *)
:-)
I have read about experiments where simulated robots (or "critters") *did* form just such a language. At the time of writing, though, the researches had not figured out the language. (Musta been Perl
Thus, AI has reached the stage of artificially-created languages. (Of course, they are very task-specific languages.)
Table-ized A.I.