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Robotic Space Workers of the Future
Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article named "Puckish robots pull together," Nature describes the work done at the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory (PRL) of the University of Southern California on self-reconfigurable teams of robots. There, Wei-Min Shen and his colleagues simulate the absence of gravity by creating a 2D representation of space by using an 'air-hockey table.' With jets of air flow blowing on the surface, the 30 cm-wide robots, working in pairs, evolve in a frictionless environment, pick elements such as girders to assemble structures like if they were in space. NASA will use these teams of autonomous robots to build space systems like 10 km-long arrays of solar panels and other huge spatial structures. You'll find more details, illustrations and references in this overview."
These hocky puck things remind me of another robot devoloped by nasa. They both like floating around in space, but nasa's has more of the little buddy going for it.
I think that this is great - low-cost zero gravity, or a 2-D version - it may open up more possibilities for people who want to experiment with the robots or the AI. Pesumably, more people will build the hardware, which would (hopefully) be good for the AI people as well.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
What happens to these massive space structures when a 3 inch rock or space junk going at hyperspeed punches through them. If I were building a space station I wouldn't be building windows, I would be thinking submarine with a thick hide. One day those guys in the space station are going to hear this *THONG* *THONG* as a rock enters and then exits the station punching through the walls and they are subsequently sucked up against the hole in the wall and have the flesh torn from their bones.
Same problem applies to getting places real fast, lets just say you can approach the speed of light, and that you can go into a cryogenic sleep or whatever. What happens when you plough through the ever-so-faint tail of a comet that consists of metalic rocks and the like.
Sure, you replace people with robots, and most systems with redundant and backup systems.
But for all those people blowing their load over commercial and civilian/tourist space flight. There isn't much you are going to do, or see. It will be just as viable as commercial and civilian/tourist submarines. Some, yes, but not that many. And not many things that aren't based around science and/or money making commercial ventures.
I wish people would realise that we are hundreds of years away from being a viable space faring race (should we so desire) and that there are some problems at home that we have to think through first.
Global warming - I don't care whether we caused it or if it's a natural cycle.... it's real we have to deal with it.
The carrying capacity (longterm sustainable population to resource ratio) of the earth is being exceeded and we aren't doing squat. There is no rationale to have more people, there is no reason why 500 million people in europe or america is better than 300 million... these numbers are meaningless. We need to halt population growth, big time. Population to resource ratio inequality usually leads to death, either by starvation or by war. Not a good future
Other climate effects we don't understand like currents in the sea that affect the whole global climate, errosion, salinity etc.
We have a million and one problems down here, and floating we monkeys into space doesn't solve ANY of them. I hate this romantic notion that it will be all like star-trek when we forge out into space. It WONT, it will be exactly like it is down here. The only way things are going to change is if they change down here first.
I don't want to troll to badly here. But tons of people are starving, our global political order is on the brink (brought there by a "peace loving" democracy no less), at home in liberal democracies we cover up the fact our education systems suck, our environment is polluted, we don't look after our sick and ill properly and we don't care about the homeless.
We need fewer great minds to be looking into the sky and more great minds to bent their will towards these problems. I'm sorry, but until that time... people looking through telescopes will always be immature little boys who are in a fantasy world and ignoring the problems at hand.
I suppose the same could be said for any technology enthusiast. Think about that. THAT, my freinds, is stuff that matters.
First I never said capitalism is good. What I'm saying is capitalism and robots can not co-exist. Humans become absolutely useless once robots become efficient. Yes at first robots increase jobs and productivity, but soon the knowledge and intelligence level required to continue to program/repair/ or stay above the robots will become too much for the average human to handle.
Can we all have A PHD from MIT/Harvard/Yale/etc? Competition with humans in the third world is enough, and the population keeps increasing every year meaning competition keeps increasing. How the hell are we supposed to compete with each other as 6 billion humans along with the machines?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Indeed, humans make their own mistakes. Darwin had a theory (mostly accepted) about how humans have develop the "instincts" that help them improve their performance and in some cases keep them alive. Some experiments in AI based on similar principles seem to have held promise (e.g. see When Robots Play Games). Perhaps the key is to have multiple teams of robots with slightly different designs such that an error by one team is less likely to be replicated by all.
So is this a true swarm relationship (as described, albeit badly, in Prey by Michael Crichton), or is it pair-only?
And can they get a divorce if one of the robots is cheating?
Stanford has had air-bearing robots to simulate space operations for over a decade. Theirs, though, carry an air tank and work against a flat granite slab.
How long before the AI is advanced enough for the computer/robots are able to identify flaws in their design and reprogram themselves accordingly. This kind of intelligence will allow 'robots' to evolve, superceding humans as the dominate species on earth. The will have all the assets that belong to humans, ie technology, brainpower, but none of the weaknesses, such as the neccesity of oxygen to exist.
Probably not in our lifetimes, but then the pace of technological development seems to be increasing exponentially...put it this way: take all the scientists that lived from year x to 1900: there are more scientists on earth today than in this total period.
Do you need a website upgrade?
Well, it's going to happen sooner or later; one day it might even be cost effective in the general case. I hope we can come up with a better way of dealing with it than you when it finally is; that's probably giving humans a bit too much credit though.
"what the hell is the average human useful for"? Who said we had to be useful anyway? We have to survive (well, not really, but let's pretend); whether we do that working our asses off or having fun while our technology does our work for us doesn't make a whole lot of difference.