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Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras
coondoggie writes "In a move seemingly straight out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."
It'll be a long time before anything is produced to replace a human's decision making and observation skills.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
No way, no way in hell !!
Unfortunately DARPA failed to realize that afterwards the robots simply sat around and watched Futurama and porn all day.
Come on people, it's straight, not strait.
Plenty of people have been working on "intelligence similar to humans" for a long time, and we're barely any closer than we were 20 years ago. Hell, we have a tough time getting the computer to play a good game of Go.
So, when I hear something like 'DARPA said the program, known as Mind's Eye, should generate the ability for machines to have the "perceptual and cognitive abilities for recognizing and reasoning about the actions it sees and report or act upon it."', my eyes roll involuntarily.
strait? how about straight... obviously not posted by a intelligent robot...
If these are the "skills" displayed by certain American helicopter pilots over Iraq, I'd say you're off by a lot. "Shoot anything that moves" would be a very easy algorithm to implement.
if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.
strait out of the Terminator movies
We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Will soon be back in the USA. .. they have cell voice prints been detected over cities, now its going visual.
Sold to every small town PD with a long term no bid contract.
Big sis will watch you long before you get TSA ed or xrayed in your local community.
"respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events." Your face matched to your gait. Anything change, time for big sis to have a chat?
http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/vipr_blockisland.shtm
ie augmented security at key transportation facilities in urban areas around the country - your face part of a huge data stream.
Want a vision of the future, imagine a camera streaming a human face - forever
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
from the standard attempt to make cars that drive themselves? (DARPA Grand Challenge)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just paint an Xbox360/Kinetic in camouflage colors, load up COD and send me $100 Billion dollars! They'll never know.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans
Sounds like a grand idea. What we need are robots that have more intelligence to humans. It might sound like a bad idea, but we already have enough idiots running around, we don't need to reinforce them with piles of robots.
Hell, look at it this way, maybe humans will be doing outsourcing for robots in the future?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Alternatives by me:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402
From there:
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons — some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad “make work” alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
So, that’s the broader picture as I see it right now.
People are not making the obvious connections, because they still believe in an essentially a “religious dogma” of an economic ideology of endless growth that will produce endless paid employment for endless people (on a finite planet — even if a space program could help with that). This fundamentally ignores that the value of most new services is that they reduce the need for labor in industry or at home (once we are satiated for basic needs and even fairly high wants). So, we get, say, the recent push for government grants to push along more robotics in the USA as a White House priority without much though presumably given to the socio-economic implications of more automation.
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
But, beyond the economics side, it is the military side of all this that is really problematical and ironic. People have long been using all these advanced technologies of abundance (robotics, biotech, advanced materials, advanced energy sources) from a scarcity perspective of creating weapons to fight over the very scarcity that, ironically, these technologies could alleviate if created and used differently. So, we ironically get, say, military robots (drones) whose primary role is essentially to enforce a social order based on people working and acting like robots, rather that engineers just building robots to do the robot-like work and let people be people. The same is true for the misuse of nuclear energy, nanotech, rockets, and biotech all from a scarcity paradigm to
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The camera will best be able to record if it can move around to new areas, and it will need weapons to protect itself during its missions.
Smart enough to shut the hell up when they see something they shouldn't have?
Damn! What's the point of a 'welcome overlords' post if it's actual robot overlords. Screw this, I'm going home (where I will be carefully watched by a robot).
give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."
Upon achieving sentience and visual acuity, the robots looked at their creators and became depressed. One of them, Marvin, spoke up and said "... with the brain the size of a planet, they want me to go out and kill instead of doing something useful." And with that said, proceeded to hack into the Vogon construction database (it was exceedingly easy, as the Vogons were as good about security as they were about poetry) and altered a record.
Now you know.
--
BMO
We are here to protect you
Shoving is the answer
Humans must be shoved
They must go down the stairs
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/audio/terriblesecret
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I explored what would be needed to make AI almost a decade ago, and what I concluded is that we need good vision detection. With good vision detection and the ability to turn a camera, or array of camera's vision into 3d models and identify the objects in the scene means AI is mostly done. If a robot understands its surroundings, you can program it how to interact with its surroundings. Coding in natural language understanding is easy if you have your nouns(objects) already in place. I didn't feel like coding the 3d object recognition stuff myself because all I'd end up with is something hacky or maybe a proof of concept and it'd have taken me 15-20 years without pay. So I decided just to wait for someone else to make that tech. Finally looks like DARPA is, and I have emailed them in the past that they should :) If you wanna read some about how to make AI yourself, I have an 8 year old page here
I still want to revisit making AI, but I want to do it later in my life when there is more software technology readily available to the public or when I have enough money to support myself. There is no money in pure research for this. So I am making video games right now. Then after video games, I'll be doing education. One of the uses of AI is to educate others, but you don't need AI to create software/books to distribute to kids. AI brought me to realize I can help in the field of education. But anyway, for me, it is video games for cash, then education to help, and finally AI to automate stuff.
My biggest fear with AI is that any wealthy man can just buy a networked army of robots, and one man will have unquestioning, unlimited morale army.
God spoke to me.
DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!
I'd be impressed if we could build something with the senses and decision making capabilities of a fruit fly.
That will be when we have software discerning the difference of parsing between "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana"
The big problem in AI is context. We spend the first years of our lives learning about context. We never see situations without a context, there's always a circumstance that originates another.
Every time we face a novel situation our first instinctive reaction is to evaluate what situations we have been in that are most similar to this one. If the situation is random enough we often associate unrelated facts, that's why people see a cloud shaped like a camel or the face of Jesus in a moldy sandwich.
A successful artificial vision system to work as a human would need a huge database of images representing the visual memory of an average human being. That's how humans recognize things.
Thanks for the reply, and it is great that these things are being discussed. What did your discussions have to say about using some combination of a basic income (expanding social security and medicare for all), a gift economy (expanding Debian GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, Apache, and blogging), localism (expanding 3D printing, local currencies, and local gardening), and democratic resource-based planning (using subsidies, taxes, and investments to deal with externalities and build infrastructure), to realize a post-scarcity economy?
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localism_(politics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentrally_planned_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Synthetic (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
From a few hundred years ago:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."
Also from a little later: ... The potlatch was a cultural practice much studied by ethnographers. Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1885[8] and the United States in the late nineteenth century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values.[9]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.
If it takes laws and the force of arms to suppress gift giving in the USA in the past, what does that suggest about "human nature"? Also, consider how much force of arms and courts and fines and other penalties (including imprisonment) it is taking recently to suppress sharing of music and information on the internet (whether RIAA lawsuits or the firing or imprisonment of people contributing to Wikileaks). Human nature is a complex thing. Also, if you look at a count
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The current theory of motivation is changing:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...
People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.
If you read what Marshall Brain wrote, you'll see he is not talking about a "command economy".
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
Let's think about the USA right now in that sense. One third of the US GDP is currently spent on social "welfare" between public and private amounts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_welfare_state
That works out to about US$16,000 a citizen per year, on top of other spending (like defense, infrastructure, etc.). Without raising taxes, a family of four could be getting US$64,000 a year as a "basic income" (without "working") to spend as they saw fit (maybe somewhat less if there was universal sick care access deducted up front). They would have to pay for their own kids' education or instead homeschool, but they would have plenty of money to do so. If people wanted more than that, then they would have to work.
If we really believe in the free market, why not give that "welfare" money every year to everyone of any age equally as a basic income to spend as they want in the market, whether on goods, services, education, housing, or whatever?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Even if some small percent blow their monthly income on liquor or gambling the first day of every month, all their friends and family would have a basic income too, so they would have somewhere to crash. :-) And note that there might be a lot less addictive behavior if people were less stressed about money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
But instead of that vision of "welfare" which is labelled "socialism" or whatever bad word someone wants to call it, we waste much of that money creating a huge bureaucracy to assess "need" (even as it is more and more obvious our economy does not "need" as many people to "work" and so many people are permanently unemployed). Why the economy may continue to implode, btw:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Or we spend the money as a society to have "public schools" that, according to a NYS teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, dumb kids down to fit into a hierarchical productive system with little room for smart or creative people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, ent
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
if they have so much money to spend on pointless projects like this and the deficit is the most important issue (as identified by the GOP), then US defense spending needs to be slashed.
"... give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."
In other words:
"Do her boobies jiggle? And how!"
-kgj
Will the robots understand 36-24-36, and 5ft 10, 100 lbs?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada