Sincere thanks for getting the point of the story (and for not expecting all coverage of robots and AI to be wild speculation about the next century or millennium).
It's definitely not much more complex than that. The only technical innovation is the use of computer vision to recognize that a door has opened. But this thing is designed to operate almost continuously, and probably costs exponentially less to build. Those experimental bots almost always insanely expensive, and constantly breaking down.
Do you encounter any robots that do that? iRobot's AVA, or even those bots in hospitals, will stop and wait for a clear path, but it would take some really bad engineering, and a deep urge to be sued, to build a robot that plays chicken with pedestrians,
This bot specifically weaves around obstacles, instead of coming to a dead stop like a big dummy.
One of the things I didn't include in the story, since it was more of a hunch on the part of the robot's makers than anything based on the pilot, is the notion that people might be more likely to make service item requests if they don't have to deal with a human. That could be because they don't want to worry about tipping someone for bringing an item, like a toothbrush, that's ostensibly free, or because they simply don't want to deal with someone after a long trip. Or, and this is where some data would be valuable, there's the anecdotal "evidence" of female hotel guests just not being comfortable with opening the door to a stranger, if it's not absolutely essential. Again, not exactly a concrete benefit, but I think it makes a good deal of sense.
I was expecting way, way more "but Skynet" comments here. The fact that so many commenters have a clear-headed perspective on AI, and what AI safety actual means, is fantastic. Good to know the reporters I'm attacking are being read with the proper amount of skepticism.
I really think the stubbornly fearful need to come to terms with their SF consumption, and how Hollywood has every reason to present more apocalyptic AI scenarios than beneficial, or even neutral ones. And apart from SF, where are you getting your facts? What are your theories based on? If it's from stories and journalists who aren't putting in the work, and are clearly just focusing on the wacky end-times outcomes, then you're just plagiarizing from the long history of evil robot fiction.
Also, remember that Musk is not a computer scientist, and does not work with AI. I'll post about this soon, but his claims that Vicarious is actively safeguarding against bootstrapped AI are false, based on statements from Vicarious' own founders. Even brilliant minds can be embarrassingly wrong.
Damn well put. AI is too complex to understand without a ton of study, so the assumption is always that general AI is right around the corner. Same with Jetpacks, flying cars, private space, and everything else that might turn life into the cover of a SF paperback.
Agreed. Seems pretty goofy to assume not just superintelligence, but clannish machine malevolence. Seems way more useful to work in concert, and eventually integrate.
This system works very differently, though. In a way, Watson is aiming for a more intellectual goal, a kind of evidence-based cognition. And in Watson's most useful applications, it grinds through data, and spits out possible answers and conclusions for review by humans.
Robo Brain doesn't care about creating human-digestible conclusions or advice. It's translating human-speak, basically, into robot action, machine-readable results that tell bots how to physically perform certain tasks.
Yeah, I've made it my mission to try to tamp down the general hysteria, when it comes to coverage of really interesting robotics projects. But I spent a solid hour writing and deleting stupid SF-fueled intros to this story. It feels like a movie—not a very good one—that's on the verge of writing itself. Like all you'd have to do is give it the wrong chunk of data culled from the internet, and it would mobilize a machine army that *only* knows how to commit atrocities.
Force-feeding was a bit of a silly choice, on my part, but something about the process felt similar. It's not like they unleash Robo Brain on the internet, and let it hoover up whatever it pleases (and bully for that, given what's on the internet). They also don't let the machine filter out topics that it doesn't care for. So if we're going to anthropomorphize this system—which, of course we are, since we're a narcissistic species—it seems more like the Gluttony victim from Se7en than a willing participant.
Hopefully it'll become enamored of those hot ladies w/ guns videos, and direct all of its replicants to saunter into battle, hip-firing in their bikinis.
Awesome.
It does make me wonder whether the various researchers watch any of the videos in their entirety, before feeding them into Robo Brain. I should have asked the guy I spoke to.
I agree. I think that's a serious, serious concern, or should be. It's also proof (to me) that full autonomy is only going to work when some sort of mandate requires that all cars are robotic. Pretty Draconian, since it means making driving illegal. Until that happens, it'll be region or lane-specific autonomy, if anything.
But those Google cars are extremely coddled.
1) They're always relying on pre-loaded LIDAR data, so always on routes that Google has mapped ahead of time. It's going to take a very long time to establish a fully comprehensive, national LIDAR map, and even when it's completed, it'll have to be updated constantly.
2) They aren't driving in extreme weather conditions.
3) They're driving in a very limited radius—no one's taking them on a cross-country trip, dealing with unfamiliar and poorly marked roads. So that's 700,000 miles in a highly controlled environment.
4) And 700,000 miles is pretty skimpy, isn't it, when it comes to gauging the problems that arise with cars, and with drivers (human or otherwise)? It's not as though everyone gets into a potentially fatal accident every 500,000 miles. But when you combine all vehicles and all those drivers, and consider the total number of cars on the road, that's where the number of total collisions start to get scary. I have no doubt that robotic cars will reduce crashes, and, if they really become the rule, not the exception, will save a crazy amount of lives (and money). Still, it's not like these things are going to be creeping along at 20 mph. At 65 mph, physics can kick your ass real quick.
Did you read my original story, though? I wasn't proposing that autonomous cars will or should be magically transformed into ethical beings. I was just picking up Patrick Lin's notion, that we may have to do what current programmers do, in other capacities—work through tons and tons of branching in-then statements, making a staggering amount of decisions ahead of time, and then embed those in the robots before they're deployed. That assumes a lot of stuff, like incredibly advanced sensors and sophisticated networks, in order to detect and "solve" certain ethical problems, but even at a more basic level, shouldn't we decide, in advance, how a car should respond to a pedestrian darting into traffic, if there's no time or room to simply avoid a collision (with someone)?
I mentioned this in another response, but I don't necessarily think the Goliath is in the same league as the Teletank, as far as gun-toting ground bots go. I should have specified that, though, in the piece.
I probably should have clarified, but if you read the piece, I was talking about armed the unprecedented—and still unique—use armed UGVs, like ground bots with guns. No one else has done that. The Goliath, on other hand, was a rolling bomb. You could call that an armed UGV, but, to me, that's like calling a Tomahawk an armed UAV.
Slashdot Mirror
Sincere thanks for getting the point of the story (and for not expecting all coverage of robots and AI to be wild speculation about the next century or millennium).
It's definitely not much more complex than that. The only technical innovation is the use of computer vision to recognize that a door has opened. But this thing is designed to operate almost continuously, and probably costs exponentially less to build. Those experimental bots almost always insanely expensive, and constantly breaking down.
Do you encounter any robots that do that? iRobot's AVA, or even those bots in hospitals, will stop and wait for a clear path, but it would take some really bad engineering, and a deep urge to be sued, to build a robot that plays chicken with pedestrians, This bot specifically weaves around obstacles, instead of coming to a dead stop like a big dummy.
Really sorry about that. Letting my editors know right now, but has that been the case for a while?
One of the things I didn't include in the story, since it was more of a hunch on the part of the robot's makers than anything based on the pilot, is the notion that people might be more likely to make service item requests if they don't have to deal with a human. That could be because they don't want to worry about tipping someone for bringing an item, like a toothbrush, that's ostensibly free, or because they simply don't want to deal with someone after a long trip. Or, and this is where some data would be valuable, there's the anecdotal "evidence" of female hotel guests just not being comfortable with opening the door to a stranger, if it's not absolutely essential. Again, not exactly a concrete benefit, but I think it makes a good deal of sense.
This sort of bot isn't sophisticated enough to replace a human runner.
You are great, and so is your name.
I was expecting way, way more "but Skynet" comments here. The fact that so many commenters have a clear-headed perspective on AI, and what AI safety actual means, is fantastic. Good to know the reporters I'm attacking are being read with the proper amount of skepticism. I really think the stubbornly fearful need to come to terms with their SF consumption, and how Hollywood has every reason to present more apocalyptic AI scenarios than beneficial, or even neutral ones. And apart from SF, where are you getting your facts? What are your theories based on? If it's from stories and journalists who aren't putting in the work, and are clearly just focusing on the wacky end-times outcomes, then you're just plagiarizing from the long history of evil robot fiction. Also, remember that Musk is not a computer scientist, and does not work with AI. I'll post about this soon, but his claims that Vicarious is actively safeguarding against bootstrapped AI are false, based on statements from Vicarious' own founders. Even brilliant minds can be embarrassingly wrong.
Damn well put. AI is too complex to understand without a ton of study, so the assumption is always that general AI is right around the corner. Same with Jetpacks, flying cars, private space, and everything else that might turn life into the cover of a SF paperback.
Agreed. Seems pretty goofy to assume not just superintelligence, but clannish machine malevolence. Seems way more useful to work in concert, and eventually integrate.
This system works very differently, though. In a way, Watson is aiming for a more intellectual goal, a kind of evidence-based cognition. And in Watson's most useful applications, it grinds through data, and spits out possible answers and conclusions for review by humans. Robo Brain doesn't care about creating human-digestible conclusions or advice. It's translating human-speak, basically, into robot action, machine-readable results that tell bots how to physically perform certain tasks.
Yeah, I've made it my mission to try to tamp down the general hysteria, when it comes to coverage of really interesting robotics projects. But I spent a solid hour writing and deleting stupid SF-fueled intros to this story. It feels like a movie—not a very good one—that's on the verge of writing itself. Like all you'd have to do is give it the wrong chunk of data culled from the internet, and it would mobilize a machine army that *only* knows how to commit atrocities.
Force-feeding was a bit of a silly choice, on my part, but something about the process felt similar. It's not like they unleash Robo Brain on the internet, and let it hoover up whatever it pleases (and bully for that, given what's on the internet). They also don't let the machine filter out topics that it doesn't care for. So if we're going to anthropomorphize this system—which, of course we are, since we're a narcissistic species—it seems more like the Gluttony victim from Se7en than a willing participant.
Hopefully it'll become enamored of those hot ladies w/ guns videos, and direct all of its replicants to saunter into battle, hip-firing in their bikinis.
Awesome. It does make me wonder whether the various researchers watch any of the videos in their entirety, before feeding them into Robo Brain. I should have asked the guy I spoke to.
I agree. I think that's a serious, serious concern, or should be. It's also proof (to me) that full autonomy is only going to work when some sort of mandate requires that all cars are robotic. Pretty Draconian, since it means making driving illegal. Until that happens, it'll be region or lane-specific autonomy, if anything.
But I didn't use kill in the headline...
Yeah, pretty hackish of me. Sorry about that.
But those Google cars are extremely coddled. 1) They're always relying on pre-loaded LIDAR data, so always on routes that Google has mapped ahead of time. It's going to take a very long time to establish a fully comprehensive, national LIDAR map, and even when it's completed, it'll have to be updated constantly. 2) They aren't driving in extreme weather conditions. 3) They're driving in a very limited radius—no one's taking them on a cross-country trip, dealing with unfamiliar and poorly marked roads. So that's 700,000 miles in a highly controlled environment. 4) And 700,000 miles is pretty skimpy, isn't it, when it comes to gauging the problems that arise with cars, and with drivers (human or otherwise)? It's not as though everyone gets into a potentially fatal accident every 500,000 miles. But when you combine all vehicles and all those drivers, and consider the total number of cars on the road, that's where the number of total collisions start to get scary. I have no doubt that robotic cars will reduce crashes, and, if they really become the rule, not the exception, will save a crazy amount of lives (and money). Still, it's not like these things are going to be creeping along at 20 mph. At 65 mph, physics can kick your ass real quick.
Did you read my original story, though? I wasn't proposing that autonomous cars will or should be magically transformed into ethical beings. I was just picking up Patrick Lin's notion, that we may have to do what current programmers do, in other capacities—work through tons and tons of branching in-then statements, making a staggering amount of decisions ahead of time, and then embed those in the robots before they're deployed. That assumes a lot of stuff, like incredibly advanced sensors and sophisticated networks, in order to detect and "solve" certain ethical problems, but even at a more basic level, shouldn't we decide, in advance, how a car should respond to a pedestrian darting into traffic, if there's no time or room to simply avoid a collision (with someone)?
I get into that, at least a little, in the story. That when it's the AI that's acting as master, it's still a story of oppression and slave revolt.
I mentioned this in another response, but I don't necessarily think the Goliath is in the same league as the Teletank, as far as gun-toting ground bots go. I should have specified that, though, in the piece.
Guessing you've moved on, but the link above is location-specific. You could try this one: http://www.popsci.com/blog-net...
I probably should have clarified, but if you read the piece, I was talking about armed the unprecedented—and still unique—use armed UGVs, like ground bots with guns. No one else has done that. The Goliath, on other hand, was a rolling bomb. You could call that an armed UGV, but, to me, that's like calling a Tomahawk an armed UAV.
I meant way, way fewer. Like dozens of tanks and over a hundred planes for the Finns, versus thousands of both on the Russian side.