Robot Evolution, for your watching pleasure, because we’re freakin’ busy over here:

[Thanks Rochelle!]

Robot Evolution May be Mirroring The Evolution of Life

According to [Han Moravec, founder of the CarNAYgie Mellon's Robotics Institute], our robot creations are evolving similar to how life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By his calculations, by mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the scope of robots.

Well? Go on, discuss. . .you in the back there, speak up.

. . .to give you all a heads- up about an event happening in mere short weeks in San Francisco: The official premiere of the Doggie Diner Head Trip, a documentary film by Truth Serum and Central Services productions!

It is a gorgeous documentary chronicling a cross-country odyssey through the highways and byways of America, trailing the Holy Trinity Of The Dogminican Order. It is notable for capturing a vanishing era in American History: the institution of the roadside attraction and the freedom for freaks to sit in Piggly Wiggly parking lots for hours and hours and not be arrested.

Here’s the trailer:

The whole shebang begins at 2pm on Saturday, January 26th at Rhythmix Cultural Works in Alameda, California. There will be performers from near and far, live show by the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, and we;ll probably figure out a way to get into a lot of trouble before the day is out, because we get bored.

Why is this interesting to SB readers? Well first of all: bicycles perverted for a noble purpose. That’s reasonably technical. Also: This documentary was produced by our dear friends Johnny Law and Fletcher Fleudujeon, and Mr. Robotics and I traveled across country in the bus for the documentary.

We spent quality time broken down in notable Autozone parking lots across the nation, I fought sleep deprivation and aliens driving the chase vehicle across New Mexico in the dead of night, hoping the truckers would see me before they hit the bus (which didn’t have hazard lights and did a top speed of 45 mph on a downslope with a tailwind). Mr. Robotics wore that stupid wig, and kept kicking $tephen Ra$pa in the head while he was sleeping, and there was a haircut given with razor-sharp nail scissors in a moving vehicle while we evaded the cops.

You just won’t see this in the film.

See what you could get away pre-9/11 in a San-Francisco-Values-loaded 1947 Gillig school bus (RIP Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby). Come on down and say you were there when, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen much anymore, people.

Warren Ellis channels all robots, everywhere, when he repackages the Three Laws:

Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan?

[Thanks Matt! (via Le Boing)]

It’s also a crushing debate, a hitting debate, a debate that is hung by its tail, a debate that squeals and wiggles with irritation and pathetic helplessness.

We are of course, speaking of the recent video of Pleo being abused in a variety of exciting different ways.

Faithful Reader Daneel mentioned the post from Le Boing, and asked “What kind of ethical questions does it raise about the way we treat robots with AI?”

Well Daneel, that is a long, convoluted, and heated discussion fraught with dogma and subjective interpretation of the nature of life and intelligence itself. Meaning, there should be beer on hand before we even think about discussing this in any meaningful way.

On the other hand, you are asking exactly the wrong person, because I must say that torturing Pleos is one of secret guilty pleasures that I do in public all the time, mostly at robot shows, and mostly to show off Pleo’s lifelike response to real-world situations.

Also, Mr. Robotics is the director of partner development for Pleo. He got a Pleo and sent out a bunch to various roboticists and software people. Most of these people had a very strong urge to skin pleo to see all the goings-on and workings underneath.

I guess what I am saying is, people who work with robots all the time tend not to anthropomorphize them, except under very special circumstances. Most robot people are more interested in taking the thing apart and seeing how it goes together, and technology and theory that goes behind how the robot does what it does. They are engineers, not philosophers or science fiction authors.

At this point in time, AI is just that - artificial. There is no real underlying personality or real wants and needs associated with a robot that makes mewling noises, just a sound chip and some lines of code. It’s a representation of life. Eliza doesn’t care if you interrupt her or call her names. Your Aibo won’t care if you leave it off for a long time. Of course in the most telling example, a combat robot doesn’t give a good god damn if its parts are sprayed out all over the arena in a bloody display of crowd-driven blood lust (and the people cheer! you see all the levels going on here?). And yes, combat robots have lots and lots of programming behind them. They are not just R/C cars.

A robot that tugs at the heartstrings and engenders feelings of protectiveness and adoration is really just extremely good coding and product design. But it’s just one step removed from a marionette. With the marionette, you see the puppeteer. With a robot, the puppeteer wrote some code and put it on a chip. You don’t see the programmer like you do the puppeteer, but the robot has no more real feelings than the wooden marionette. If you burn a marionette, no one complains that you’re killing a living thing (sure, you might be destroying a great piece of art, but it’s not a life form.) Robots like Pleo shift the materials from wood and string to silicon and plastic, but beyond that, they’re the same. Which is in no way to say that they’re not valuable as human companions, or that you shouldn’t get them. We at SuicideBots love marionettes. We love puppet shows. We love robots. We just don’t think that when they act hurt, should we as humans respond as though they actually are hurt.

It’s only an illusion of life, a fantasy made real by the puppeteer and his audience. Two steps removed from an actor playing Hamlet on stage (he’s not really dead at the end.) The software engineers behind robots trick you into empathy just as would Sir Laurence Olivier on stage or the way David Copperfield tricks you into believing that the Statue of Liberty disappeared (it didn’t.)

As an adult, you see a teddy bear for what it is - a cute bundle of cotton and paint. Lifeless. Cute, but without soul or feelings. But try telling that to a three year old. To them, it’s just as alive as a Pleo is to you. And if I smack the Teddy Bear, little Suzy will cry - but Teddy won’t. Her feelings were hurt, but Teddy’s weren’t (because Teddy has none). So when Pleo is tortured, some feelings may get hurt, but they aren’t Pleo’s. Again, everyone should do buy one. They’re incredibly cool (again, disclosure - Mr. Robotics consults for them.) But “cool” does not equal “sentient.”

Of course all of this is written with the caveat that if Johnny 5 comes up to us tomorrow and says “No disassemble!” we’re not going to laugh and fire a shotgun into his face. That would be rude. Our technology, however, is not there yet.

As I said tis debate is fraught with nuance and the human condition, so I am sure this will piss someone off somewhere.

Comments?

HoooBoy.

9 South African Soliders were killed in an exercise which involved an autonomous Oerlikon GDF-005 anti-aircraft machine. The machine went haywire, spraying the soldiers with bullets after it appeared to become jammed during the exercise.

Sources say it was a software error.

(The video above is from a few years back but is making the rounds with this story. Info Here.)

Helen? Are you Sure?

[via Wired]

So cunning, so delicate:

There’s actually very little I can add to this, so just go check it out. kthnx.

The Revolution is at hand!

The Communist Robot Manifesto

Yeah, we don’t know either, but they have a store!!

Gather ’round children, Uncle Chicken is inviting us into his humble abode to witness and exclaim at the various inventions the modern world has endowed upon we, its humble servants.

Dorkbot SF is this evening at Chez Poulet and has a host of exciting tidbits to whet your electronics appetite.

First up, we have Rudy Rucker The Elder, speaking on his new Psipunk trilogy and how electronic telepathy is just around the corner.

Next is Daniela Steinsapir speaking on the highfalutin’ topic of Conceptual Information Arts, and recycling junk into art.

Rudy Jr. will be the Guest MC, so bring your krautrock twitching shoes and a biscuit for Dammit The Amazing Wonderdog, who will receive visitors before the festivities.

Snacks by Unicorn Precinct XIII, Open Dorks after the main presenters, bring your gadgets!

The event is free, donations for the venue are appreciated, cash bar for 21+, No Confetti Please, Clowns welcome.

From the buried annals of the turbulent backwaters of tech gadgetry, we bring you:

Johnny 5 In Legos:

Seriously. There is moistness going on here at the mention of his Lego differential. And the moving laser. and the line follower. And the raising and lowering torso. Um.

OH MY GOD THIS HAS A LANGUAGE MODULE DOWNLOADS!! AND VIDEOS!!

Hey, who knew there was a Lego Mindstorms Webring? Check it out folks!

If any Lego people pay us a visit here at SB, why not come show your stuff off at RoboGames?

Amazing model thought up and done by Daniele Benedettelli.

Excavated from Zedomax

Ally Sheedy fixation by Mr. Robotics.

What’s the one utterly pointless yet oddly compelling personal mode of transportation that everyone gigles at but secretly lusts after?

No, not the Segway.

It’s the Personal Hovercraft!

Not that the personal hovercraft is in any way dumb, it’s mostly the staid-looking guys in tweeds that really increase the dumb quotient.

As a contrast, here is a hovercraft that is most definitely not dumb, in fact, it is decidedly lethal.

Mark Pauline’s Hovercraft for SRL is roughly ten feet long, eight feet wide, and propelled by some white-hot, pain-loud pulse jet engines. Not good for riding. Good for scaring the crap out of unsuspecting hipsters standing next to the barriers at an SRL show, however.

[Thanks Random Good Stuff!]

The Navy Times reports that University of Idaho research engineers are developing autonomous subs that can talk to each other:

If that ain’t cute enough, the engineers have indulged in some Nerd Pride:

“We named the computer boards from characters in Star Trek,” researcher Thomas Bean said. “The command board we call Capt. Kirk. The board that controls the motor we call Scotty, and the communications board is Lt. Uhura.”

There’s also some nice distributed information research as the central aim of this project:

“Our research is aimed at getting the vehicles to collaborate and cooperate, to work together and communicate what they find, so if we lose one, we won’t lose the information we have on board.”

SB must confess that one of things that originally got her into robots in general (and marine disasters in particular, but that’s another blog) was the use of sweet-ass ROV technology for the 1985 discovery of the Titanic by Robert Ballard’s team and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Who says oceanography can’t be sex-ay?

Lowering Argo

Argo and Jason were the machines that did the grunt work of scanning the sea floor for wreckage. The Titanic was a big girl, but over 150 square miles in the North Atlantic, big girls tend to get lost. The original research vessel, Le Suroit, originally missed the Titanic’s wreckage by just 300 yards. Enter Argo, WHOI’s video-equipped deep-water ROV. With Argo’s help and a dedicated cross-national team of researchers, they found the ship and took fabulous pictures.

More good about this little Titanic tangent here and here.

For those of you interested in developing your very own communicating AUVs, the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center (MATE) in Monterey, California, hosts an annual series of ROV competition for middle and high-school aged kids. They are super fun for one and all, and this year SB and Mr. Robotics are slated to help with judging and troubleshooting mechanical failure!

The Monterey regional competition is on April 14th, 2007 on the campus of Monterey Peninsula college. Come on down and see what school-age kids can do with a camera and some air-filled PVC pipe!

Update Above To The Update Below: Violet Blue has more thoughts on her website, which links to more thoughts on other people’s websites, whoo hoo ripple effect (BTW: Some of Violet’s Site is NSFW).

The Industrious Violet Blue has a Very Good column in SFGate this morning about stupidness in the blogging world:

Imagine being a girl and working really hard to earn the reputation of a respected voice in the world of tech journalism and blogging — a world populated by disproportionately more men than women — and to find yourself the target object of a hate-filled Web site. The tone and content of the hate site centers around sexually threatening you, suggesting ways you could be killed and have your corpse defiled, stating that you are a “slut” and that your gender is also in question. Your straight male colleagues don’t have this problem.

Then the person running the hate site blogs about every word you say, every time you make a post or publish an article. And targets your friends. And posts the names of your family and Google satellite maps of your family’s homes. They deface your Wikipedia page at every opportunity, with sexual slurs, objectifying you at every possible chance. It’s enough to make a girl choose not to be a tech journalist.

Speaking as a chick who builds robots, the shock and incredulity that we can do such a thing is latent, rampant and annoying. When it’s downright threatening, you (yes, YOU) should be outraged.

UPDATE: SFGate is exploring this more. Pipe up on the Culture Blog.

Hey Kids,

No, this post is not about robots per se, but it is about people who like robots and the people who like people who like robots (I am loathe to use the word “Community”, it give me hives, you know what I mean).

After Friday’s devastating storms and tornadoes in and around Deland, Florida, we were noticing the jarring absence of our good friend and compulsive commenter, Suicidebots Regular #42, Radioactive Jam.


Pix courtesy Floridiana

Luckily, after a bit of poking around, we found out that Mr. and Mrs. Jam are all right, having experienced nothing more serious than a bummer of a commute and a bit of wet weather:

As much as I’d like to see the Suicide Bots Action Force mobilized (if nothing else just to see what happens when…) I cannot tell a lie: no tornadic effects in our immediate vicinity. All the bad stuff happened several miles to the south of us; we’re among the fortunate.

Hard, hard times for many people, though. Friends of friends among the fatalities. And while one local official’s remarks seemed kind of stupid - “this tornado had no conscience” or something similar - the indiscriminate nature of… well, nature… is sobering.

This is a PSA to say that if you have some spare paypal cash lying around, give to the Red Cross or Burners Without Borders or some other disaster relief situation or group that makes you happy. You or your family might need them someday in case you ever become a statistic.

Yeah, it’s a small disaster compared to things like hurricane Katrina and genocide in Sudan and everything, but you never know what might happen next and who it may affect.

Okay, maybe some of you aren’t so into the squishy meat puppet sentimentality thing, so I will come at you from another angle:

Radioactive Jam is one of my biggest sticker customers.

So if nothing else, give to disaster relief so he’ll keep Suicidebots.com in business.