Yeti crab

Harlequin shrimp (page 357). Heaps of Yeti crabs here

Chapter 26: Yeti Crab

NPR's On Point featured this chapter as an excerpt on the page for their show, Fantastic Creatures.

 page 355: An introduction to deep sea vents here.  The deepest discovered so far is 5000 metres down in the Cayman trough.

page 359: robot...nurturance...killer app.  See, for example, When are we going to learn to trust robots?, Robot warriors: Lethal machines coming of age,  Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners and Wildlife that isn't alive.

page 362: Panspermia. Two geneticists have applied Moore's Law to life instead of computers, and says their data suggests that life could have preceded the earth's formation.

page 362 the building blocks of life...already present in space. These may have included pyrophosphite, a likely precursor for ATP. A "black rain" made from pulverised comets may have [also] seeded Jupiter's moons, including Europa, with the raw ingredients for life.


This is the twenty-seventh in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

"Dance, tiny robots"

Bruno Masonnier at TED

Yeti crab

Thirty-fifth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 26: Yeti crab

page 355: (marginal note) Carl Woese died in December.  One overview of the man and his ideas here.  Last year, Prof. Woese kindly approved quotes from A New Biology for a New Century on page 140 and 376 of this book.

page 356: variations upon the crustacean body form. A striking example can be seen in these photos of a spider crab and a ghost shrimp. One of my favourites is the Harlequin shrimp:

page 359: robots and our attitudes towards them...the start of a mechanical Cambrian explosion.  The military is a major driver. See, for example, the DARPA robot challenge and AlphaDog. Debate on the use of drones, and what comes next is extensive. See here, here or here. In a recent overview Peter W. Singer suggests that:

the biggest ripple effect of the robot...is in reshaping the narrative in [the] realm of war. We are seeing a reordering of how we conceptualize war, how we talk about it, and how we report it.

Robert Ito details some of the quirks of interactions between humans and social robots.  Izabella Kaminska considers the robot economy and the new rentier class. Noah Smith has some suggestions as to how to fairly distribute income and wealth in the age of the robots.

page 360: the place where life emerged from non-life.  Previous posts on this topic are collected under the label Origin.  See also The beginnings of life: Chemistry’s grand question.  Jack Szostack suggests that somewhere on Earth, over 3.5 billion years ago, a bubble of fat spontaneously broke into smaller ones, giving rise to one of life's most fundamental properties - the ability to make copies of itself.

page 362: a stream of order. Vlatko Vidral makes a case for information as the surprise theory of everything.

page 364: travel to the bottom of the sea. The biggest driver for doing so is likely to be resource extraction. See A Gold Rush in the Abyss and this article arguing exploration is inevitable. More reports here and here.

28 degrees of freedom

GFE Platform, Boston Dynamics

The DARPA Robotics Challenge, one of the most rigorous tests of robotic ability ever conceived, kicked off on [24 October]. The contest sets teams of engineers from around the US and the world a set of Herculean robot trials that promise to take automatons' abilities far beyond anything that's come before.

The emphasis is on testing robots' abilities to work in difficult situations in environments designed for humans. "It's the grandest, the most exciting, and possibly the most important robotics project ever," says Dennis Hong [who] leads a team that plan to field the humanoid THOR (Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot) [which] will be in training over the next year, learning tough skills like scrambling over debris, driving cars and climbing ladders. 

-- report

Cry Havoc and let slip the AlphaDogs of war

For Singularity Hub this is awesome

All Watched Over by Dragonflies, Fleas and Dogs

Military technology, unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of the march towards self-determining machines (see Technology Quarterly). Its evolution is producing an extraordinary variety of species. The Sand Flea can leap through a window or onto a roof, filming all the while. It then rolls along on wheels until it needs to jump again. RiSE, a six-legged robo-cockroach, can climb walls. LS3, a dog-like robot, trots behind a human over rough terrain, carrying up to 180kg of supplies. SUGV, a briefcase-sized robot, can identify a man in a crowd and follow him. There is a flying surveillance drone the weight of a wedding ring, and one that carries 2.7 tonnes of bombs.

-- Robot ethics: morals and the machine

P.S. 10 June. David Graeber writes:

One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.

'Cheetah'

You, robot

2012 is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the second world war code-breaker who dreamed up the test in 1950 while pondering the notion of a thinking machine, so expect a flurry of competitions in his honour. Bear in mind, though, that the Turing test is a poor gauge for today's AIs. For one thing, the test's demand that a program capture the nuances of human speech makes it too hard. At the same time, it is too narrow: with bots influencing the stock market, landing planes and poised to start driving cars, why focus only on linguistic smarts? One alternative is a suite of mini Turing tests each designed to evaluate machine intelligence in a specific arena. For example, a newly created visual Turing test assesses a bot's ability to understand the spatial relationships between objects in an image against that of a human. Others want to stop using humans as the benchmark. Using a universal, mathematical definition of intelligence, it could soon be possible to score people and computers on a scale untainted by human bias. Such universal tests should even be able to spot a bot that is far smarter than a human.

-- Paul Marks

Beyond the horseless carriage

And now we’re doing something incredible. We’re literally creating potentially an entirely new species. If you believe both the scientists and the science fiction authors out there, that’s what they think we’re doing. But, if we’re being honest about it, the reason that we’re doing all this is just to get better at destroying one another.

-- P W Singer

Happy feet

As The Browser asks, how long before one of these gets weaponised?

 

But, writes Justin Mullins (Squishybots...), the chances are that something with a squishy body and tentacles is likely to be closer to the real future of robotics. 'For many tasks that we actually want robots to do, a hard body or humanoid shape just isn't cutting it. So researchers are rethinking the fundamentals of what a smart machine is.'

'I am not a robot. I am a unicorn'

'Humans,' notes Brian Christian, 'appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique.'

Evolving robots

[The] long-term goal is to create robots that can evolve like biological creatures, so EndlessForms is designed to explore what kind of biological body shapes the model can produce. Forget designing your own objects - what about 3D-printed pets?

-- from Evolve your own objects for 3D Printing

New beasts and angels

Until recently, most robots could be thought of as belonging to one of two phyla. The Widgetophora, equipped with claws, grabs and wheels, stuck to the essentials and did not try too hard to look like anything other than machines (think R2-D2). The Anthropoidea, by contrast, did their best to look like their creators—sporting arms with proper hands, legs with real feet, and faces (think C-3PO). The few animal-like robots that fell between these extremes were usually built to resemble pets (Sony’s robot dog, AIBO, for example) and were, in truth, not much more than just amusing toys.

They are toys no longer, though

-- from Zoobotics at The Economist.  Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Barbara Ehrenreich contemplates The Fog of (Robot) of War

Treebot

Tree climbing robot: report

Justin

The Gorgon Stare

Just in time for the spring offensives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Air Force should deliver the marvelously named Gorgon Stare sensor.

The first three Gorgon Stare pods, mounted on Reaper MQ-​​9s, will make to Afghanistan around March or April... Gorgon Stare uses five electro-​​optical and four infrared cameras to take pictures from different angles. Those are put together to build a larger picture. That provides more detail and more flexibility than the current cameras, but perhaps its biggest advantage will be the ability to provide 10 video images to 10 different operators at the same time.

--DoD Buzz via TomDispatch

The living world

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan argue that the possession of emotions or consciousness should be a key concern when thinking about how to handle animals and increasingly sentient robots. [1]

But how far should the circle of concern extend? Should, for example, ecosystems -- the results of interactions between living and non-living systems -- have rights and not just instrumental value? In the epic of Gilgamesh the whole forest is sacred.

Footnote

[1] But, as noted in many places including here, robots still have a very long way to go.

(Related posts include Ghost and shadows, The age of criminal and compassionate machines, and A new kind of mind.)

The image, added on 15 Dec, is from here.

A new world

Robotic hand 'breakthrough'

Robot good robot bad

Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh.

She turned and looked squarely at the robot. With a sly smile, she moved her weak arm toward the remaining magazines on the desk and mimed putting one into the rack. She then stuck her tongue out at the machine.

Matarić said, “She is cheating. She is totally thrilled, because she thinks she cheated the robot.” The robot, though, was on to the game. A reflective white band that Mary wore on her leg allowed the robot to follow her movements. A thin motion sensor attached to her sleeve transmitted Mary’s gestures to the robot, so that it knew almost instantly whether she was raising her arm and in what motion. A sensor in the rack signalled the robot when a magazine was properly placed, and the robot communicated with Mary only when she performed the task correctly.

Although the task lasted about an hour, the novelty of the interaction did not seem to wane. In a debriefing after the study, Mary said, “When I’m at home, my husband is useless. He just says, ‘Do it.’ I much prefer the robot to my husband.”

-- from Robots that Care by Jerome Groopman.

"Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on...an endless war" [says Mary Dudziak]...

...there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing with drones has become official U.S. policy. "The thing we were complaining about from Israel a few years ago we now embrace", [Gary Solis] says. Now, he notes, nobody in government calls it assassination...

...It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes , and fourteen months, before the C.I.A succeeded in killing Baitullah Mehsud. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty one additional people were killed.

-- from The Predator War by Jane Mayer.

Bionic monkeys

[This is] the first demonstration that the brain can form a motor memory to control a disembodied device in a way that mirrors how it controls its own body.

-- Emergence of a Stable Cortical Map for Neuroprosthetic Control, NYT report.