Ashley Wood: Part Comics Artist Part Machine | Septagon Studios Comic Blog: Comic Creation Trends, Resources and News.

Can we make sure the superintelligent machines are friendly?

Part four in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

—Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk (pdf)

Surviving the twenty-first century is probably the toughest challenge that the human race has ever faced, and probably the toughest we will ever face. Last week Michael Anissimov spoke about the possibility of molecular nanotechnology—a technology that gives human beings the capability to do untold harm to each other, but the technology of smarter-than-human intelligence that I spoke about two weeks ago really is the ultimate Pandora’s Box. In my article, I emphasized that it was intelligence that got human beings where we are today. We have the unique and amazing ability to understand the world from an abstract point of view—and that is why we keep lions in cages, rather than the other way around.

Most people who have thought seriously about what smarter-than-human intelligence will do to the human race speak of dire consequences. For example, consider the problem of creating a self-improving software AI that breaks encryption codes.

read more: Birthing Gods – Singularity 101 – GOOD.

Insect Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems: “

The Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles. via spatialrobot

“

(Via Interactive Architecture dot Org.)

Build Your Own War Bot – Wired How-To Wiki

Take a look at how drastically warfare has changed in the last decade and you’ll understand why the U.S. military is increasingly turning to robots to do its dirtiest work. Dangerous missions once performed by human beings, such scouting for the enemy and defusing bombs, now fall to a wide range of bots known as Unmanned Vehicles, or UVs.

UVs come in all shapes, sizes and prices — from four-pound, hand-launched Raven aerial drones costing just $30,000 to Global Hawk spy planes with the wingspan of a 737 and a whopping $100-million price tag. Tens of thousands of UVs are in military service worldwide, and now you can get in on the action, too. Using a combination of hobbyist radio-controlled airplanes and trucks, cheap cellphones, digital cameras and off-the-shelf software, you can produce robots that perform basic tasks.

Although not quite as capable as their military counterparts — your creations will likely be dealing with sleeping cats rather than armed terrorists — these bots can deliver some impressive results.

(Via Wired, via DatDatDat.)

Muscle Suit for Carpenters Unveiled In Japan: “Geniuses at Nagayo University in Japan unveiled a prototype ROBOTIC MUSCLE SUIT designed to help carpenters fit ceiling boards in place. This particular carpentry task is unnatural to the human body and takes a lot of brute force. It requires that the board be pressed against the ceiling with one hand while screwed in place with the other. The robot suit takes on most of the load, so the carpenter doesn’t have to. Hey, sitting around at a computer all day is also an unnatural act. Where’s MY robot suit?”

(Via The Raw Feed.)

Giant things that blog: “

After the BLDGBLOG lecture at UCL last week, Mark, Russell, James and myself retired to the Malborough Arms for post-match analysis; and Russell dropped on us the fact that Roll-Royce’s jet engines are now prolific bloggers.

They twitter about what they are doing back home to Derby from wherever they are above the globe, 33000 feet up.

At the risk of sounding a bit like one of the guest publications on ‘Have I got news for you’, here’s a quote from Aviation Maintenance Magazine that Rusell found to back-up his pub-fact

‘Engine diagnostics, and predictive analysis that our technical people are doing, feed into the operations control room, the hub of global fleet support for large engines, to see how they are performing, combined with flight log monitoring.’

The company is able to monitor 3,000 engines in real time, collating technical data streamed via satellite in flight.’

Of course, there must be an entire swathe of giant things that blog, and have been blogging since the dawn of telemetry; but it still seems faintly magical.

“

(Via Blackbeltjones/Work.)

You Don’t Matter: “

‘

The Plotting Machine

A plotting machine converted into an output device, that can draw, scratch or cut with almost any traditional drawing technique, in order to achieve aesthetics looking neither drawn by hand nor produced with only a computer. Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces …

‘

‘

“

(Via manystuff.org.)

Turn an old cellphone into a robot’s brain: “ From New Scientist:

‘Software engineer Jatinderjit Singh built a simple robot out of Lego Technics parts, a cheap micro-controller, and an infrared interface, then attached a cellphone so that it could control the robot’s wheels and arms via the IR link.

His ‘tele-operated mobile internet robot’ or TeMo can be controlled from anywhere in the world where there’s cellphone network coverage, using a tiny web server and a graphical interface installed on the phone.

The robot also sends images from the phone’s camera back via the web link to let the controller see what they are doing, and Singh hopes to have video running soon.’

Watch the video.

“

(Via textually.org.)

Edward Ihnatowicz – The Senster: “

Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the UK in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movement sensors to react to the behaviour of the visitors. It was one of the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.

Alex Zivanovic, a Visiting Scholar at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, has been researching the work of Edward Ihnatowicz and building an excellent archive which is available online. I am so pleased that Alex is taking the time to research thoroughly how Ihnatowicz not just built the Senster but developed its behaviours. It was a truely ground breaking piece of work that is still a source of inspiration for artists and roboticists today.

Photo Gallery | System Details including Original Code | Structural Design

Ihnatowicz’s interest in the kinetics stemmed from his conviction that the behaviour of something tells us far more about it than its appearance. This led him to build the Senster, one of the most influential kinetic sculptures ever made. It consisted of a fifteen-foot-long steel frame articulated in six different places, with the joints all powered by hydraulics. On the Senster’s ‘head’ were an array of microphones and a Doppler radar system.

The Honeywell mini-computer controlling the mechanism was programmed to make it react to three things: moderate and low sounds, loud sounds, and fast motion. Moderate sounds the head would move towards, loud sounds it would pull back from, and fast motion it would track. The result was an uncanny resemblance to a living thing, and the crowds at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, Holland, where it was on show reacted with enormous excitement. Children would shout and wave at it, call it names, and even throw things. Ihnatowicz explains that its movements seemed to stem from situations that people recognized.

In the quiet of the early morning the machine would be found with its head down, listening to the faint noise of its own hydraulic pumps. Then if a girl walked by the head would follow her, looking at her legs. Ihnatowicz described his own first stomach-turning experience of the machine when he had just got it working: he unconsciously cleared his throat, and the head came right up to him as if to ask, ‘Are you all right?’ He also noticed a curious aspect of the effect the Senster had on people. When he was testing it he gave it various random patterns of motion to go through.

Children who saw it operating in this mode found it very frightening, but no one was ever frightened when it was working in the museum with its proper software, responding to sounds and movement. Although the Senster was dismantled some years ago, many people who saw it still remember vividly what a strong impression it made on them. Edward Ihnatowicz died in 1988. Alex Zivanovic currently continues to build on the archive as well as running science and technology education events and his own firm AZ Consultants, supporting the development of mechatronics projects for medical and industrial applications.

Edward Ihnatowicz Archive

“

(Via Interactive Architecture dot Org.)

Michael Wihart – Soft Architectural Machines: “

Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.

‘The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectural thinking needs to be constantly questioned in order to reveal if architecture can be a source for the sentimental titillation. The embarrassing meanders of architecture into the challenge of the feasibility must be extended into the poetry of spatial mediation. the process of designing can no longer be solely functional and operational. The creation of an architecture which is embedded in the mythical knowledge of the future enables us to extend the sentiment of in-habitation into the realm of co-existence.’

‘Certainly this vision can be engaged to fulfil the concupiscence of a few heroic models but the question if this architecture can establish a casing of affirmative cultural emergence which is the source and site for the engagement of individuals with the fate of their co-habitants, is a different one. Architecture therefore stands for the manifestation of the ambivalence of the transience and the after-effect of the notion of co-existence. But when architects by themselves abandon and forget to realise fantasies which have always already been lost in the dawn of the socialisation, where then will we find the sites for the staging of our sentiments?’

“

(Via Interactive Architecture dot Org.)