… but it came to this. They were destroyed by business optimised for scarcity. Deliberately. They got rid of the guy who’s baby it was, then they borrowed money until they ran out, then they destroyed it.
If this was an (open-sourced) software project, it would be given to the community.
When I was in London once I found an entire skip of Thomas Dolby singles… 1000s of boxes – each with a black-and-decker put through them. This is what intellectual property does. It has to destroy abundance to work.
I expected the robots to be hyper-self-conscious about the other robots criticising their work, and so becoming a overcritical themselves so tensions built up and built up, and a single misjudged comment set off a huge quadracopter fight and when the people in the lab-coats came in the the next morning there’s loads of quadracopter feathers everywhere and all of them are gone except for one fat one.
3D Printing looks like it might be becoming the New Lego… ie: sooner or later, everything has a 3D Printed variant… and you haven’t really “arrived” until someone has made you in Lego.
The first one is the learning round, the 2nd is the “learned” round. When it knows what to do. It goes like the clappers. I especially like the way it does a fancy little 1/2 spin when it’s finished.
I think these mouse-races are vaguely interesting – because they demonstrate something… that as usual, I can’t quite put my finger on… something to do with the difference between bits and atoms.
I’m drifting (or at least attempting to drift) from programming to micro-industry. From bits to atoms… and one of the things that is really striking is the shift in headspace required. With bits, once you learn something it’s done. “To Name Something Is To Have Done With It”. Once you learn something, you can abstract it away… “It Is Known” – which means you never have to think about it again.
Don’t work so well with atoms. You can nearly do it… with the CNC end of things – which is (in case you were wondering) to do with the purity and uniformity and “unnaturalness” of the materials that are used… but I’ve been making those golden mean calipers for 2.5 years now, and I’m still learning techniques etc. One of the revolutionary tectonic undercurrents of the current age is the drive to turn hardware problems into software problems. That is what CNC (in it’s myriad forms) does. Software is easier than hardware – in part because of the abstraction thing. Once something is learned, it is known, and can be given a name and “invoked” but never thought of again. Software has a bias towards single-iteration learning.
I think there might also be some relevance to AI – as in machine intelligence that learns as it goes – from feedback that it gets from somewhere. My new Niece is a type of AI… a couple of months old… and it’ll take years of full-time training to get her to work properly. There’s a slightly older model – a couple of years… which is a vast improvement on the new one, but which still has soooo many years before she becomes fully-functional, that it’s bewildering. It’s a process of massive multi-iteration learning. A huge programming job.
So anyway, that new mouse is learning how to do something that requires a single iteration. Normal reality is not so accommodating – and is so complicated and unreliable that it will probably take an AI to negotiate it… or a mix of hard-coding and AI (which is what we meat-bots tend to have). The the alternative is controlling then environment (the art of politics) – which is what lego is, and laser-cut perspex is and what this maze is and so on. Existing industrial robots.
Maybe that’s another huge tectonic undercurrent of the robotics revolution – creating systems with reduced needs for controlled environments. Until that becomes the norm, then the creation of controlled environments/inputs is probably going to be at least as big as the creation of the machines that will operate within them.
This post is a loose collation of things that have turned up recently to do with the encroaching sensor-revolution.
Someone, somewhere else has pointed out that we’ve had successive waves of tech revolution, eg:
– the Computer Revolution brought about by cheap microprocessors
– the Communications Revolution brought about by cheap laser-switching.
– the Robotics Revolution brought about by cheap sensors
The last one is just beginning… the others have been going for a while, but are not anywhere near played out yet.
I think maybe there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about what robotics actually is – at this moment “robot” seems to include absolutely anything automated, and anything remotely controlled as well. Most washing machines are robots by the very loose definition that seems to pass in the blogosphere. In another corner is anything anthropomorphic, and in another, the more traditional “single-arm” robots that have been used in manufacturing for decades.
I think though that the dominant robotic form won’t resemble “droids” so much as “internet-leakage”… the much heralded “internet of things”. The internet is escaping… it’s getting out of the box… the boxes, and it’s ingesting and assimilating anything that uses electricity. We are right at the very very beginning of this… but it’s coming. I think that the robotics revolution is going to have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavour to it – and the dominant form is not going to be a droid or a manufacturing arm, but (like the internet itself) a human/machine hybrid.
Home automation/monitoring is going to be huge. It’s going to be… defacto… default. I’ve gone on about this before, and (still) to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think it’s being done properly… and I think maybe it won’t every be… because it will always be evolving – so it needs to be a platform, much the same as the internet itself. The same way that there are huge numbers of web-developers, there should be huge numbers of home-app developers.
And this is where it starts. This is the physical compliment to Pachube.com
2) Siri has escaped – so that’s good news, I suppose – I don’t think Siri is a proper AI though. There are also alternatives to Siri… but I don’t think they are proper AIs either. By proper AI, I mean something that gets smarter… rather than something that is merely smart.
On the subject of Siri though – here it is being used to control a thermostat
This is what I mean about “getting it right”… the UI of this dial thing gets it right I think. The Semi-AI aspect of it is interesting – if it is linked to the brain-power of the web.
Looks like a thumb-drive, but has connectivity gear (wifi, bluetooth) built into it. Plug it into any screen, use a bluetooth keyboard and you’ve got a computer. It’s quad-core as well – so it’s got a bit of clout (for the moment). I think sometime soon the internet is going to eat broadcast television – ie: the box in the corner is going to get it’s info from the web, rather than broadcasters… this is going to make a huge different to the balance of power – which is probably no bad thing, because right now, the 4th Estate are not doing their jobs.
Jawbone – a thing that measures… various things, coupled with software that measures various other things – which sounds like a bit of a chore to be honest, but if this can help people sleep better, then it’s going to sell by the truckload. I’d buy one.
This is another thing we’re going see a lot of – and god knows we (victims of first-world problems) need it.
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I have a feeling that the essence of the Monitor/Control is the feedback loop… and that feedback loops might deliver results greater than the sums of their parts. Just a suspicion. I think this is the essence of consciousness – the feedback loop. Just a suspicion.
The woman being given the Silent Treatment being the university chancellor who ordered the police clearing of the protest.
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There has (inevitably) been talk about violence, and the 2nd amendment and when to shoot back and so on. The key thing here though is how this will play out if we win: We win if we attract sufficient biomass for political leaders (new or existing) to take up our cause. Then the “the government” changes by election… with or without the incumbent’s resignation.
A step along the way to achieving this is winning over the legacy-media – the mass media, which also happens by biomass… when simply too many people know that Emperors New Clothes don’t exist for them to carry on pretending.
That is how we win – anything involving violent confrontation with OUR police and OUR armed forces is very very problematic.
So… it’s an exercise in getting people on-board. It is a war of ideas, and of truth against lies… and we have truth on our side. To this end, violence is very, very problematic… violence is simply too easy for THEIR media to turn into The Story, and for it to backfire. THEIR media cannot do this with peaceful protest. They try, and they try, and they try… a march with a million people… if one single person kicks over a trash-can, that’s The Story. We’ve seen this a thousand times. The key is to make a theatrical event that is not twistable, but which is still riveting television.
Everything needs to be seen within the context of a media event. We have to understand the theatre in which we’re operating… that it is theatre.
And it works – I went on a silent protest back in the 80s – big march at night, no talking at all, just a single solemnly banging drum. This was against apartheid in South Africa. We won.
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I’m not against violence for it’s own sake – I’m not a pacifist… I’d like to kill these fuckers. I’m Scottish – I’d like to kill them with a fucking claymore… I think there comes a point where violence is a morally justifiable, and in many ways, we have already passed that point… but violence is not how we’re going to win, and we could lose it that way.
Although these are basically “Carrying Stuff About” bots, which is no bad thing I suppose. At least these ones are actually doing something – there was this ludicrous thing a couple of weeks back where someone made some “concept” thing where hexapods were going to do swarm-gardening… and loads of blogs reported it as though it was fact. Nope. Not fact. Barmy idea. It’s going to be a long time before gardening robots can function in anything other than environments specially designed for them… like these carrying-stuff-about bots. Very controlled environment… flat floors, uniform plant-pots etc etc.
What happens though if a pot falls over? Hmmm? What then? If something out of the ordinary happens?
They lose their minds, that’s what. They’re a long way from being able to weed, and incinerate bugs etc… and by a long way, I mean about 5-10 years. Everything seems to be about 5-10 years away. It’s a kind of permanently receding singularity… which is basically the mid-point of the sci-fi singularity… ie: between now, and the point where technology has become so bizarre we can’t begin to predict what it will be like.
The Sci-Fi Demi-Singularity then. Between the foreseeable and the unforeseeable futures. 5-10 years.
It’s a big protest in Poland – I don’t think the drone is a police one… the uploader has other videos – it looks like one of these
And is not in fact DIY… they’re made by a Polish company
I can see how these things would be invaluable on either side – being Kettled? No problem – there’s 10000 of us and only 400 of you. I bet repressive regimes like England or America make them illegal. I bet we wind up with anti microcopter microcopters (or jets or jammers or whatever). That’s what happened with planes… firstly they were used only as surveillance… then as “nuisance-bombers”… then for fighting other planes… and then as a primary tactical piece on the board. It’s a kind of inevitable progression… from herbivore to predator.
I think it’s really interesting that this first one of these flying over a protest (in one country at least) is not in fact owned by the forces of old and evil… but by someone else. An entrepreneur? A hobbyist?
I had kindof imagined that these were going to be used for tourism… that you’d be able to hire one in Prague… sitting at home in (where ever it is) and cruise about looking at the sights etc. I guess we have better things to do. Still… welcome to Poland… cobbled streets, old buildings etc. God I miss Europe.
And you know… if you can hire these… in “trouble spots”, journalism is never going to be the same again – which is no bad thing. Mind you – if you could hire these in “trouble spots”, then there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t be armed, and joining in. In the 1930s people from the UK went to fight the fascists in Spain. Armchair-drones may allow us to do the same thing again – without getting out of our armchairs.
Cool hack (maybe); wonderfully untogether video – starting with describing Josh’s “crude” brain activity (which gets funnier each time I see it) to the blast of feedback and a random nerd appearing out of nowhere at the end.
I’m not entirely sure that they’re not taking the piss to be honest. All the other blogs seem to be taking it seriously, but it would be so easy just to mock it up etc. Then again, I’ve seen examples of this before (years ago)… brain control things have been around for a while. Not sure why they’d need a speech synthesiser that sounds like Stephen Hawking if Siri can already talk, but there you go.
They say it’s on kickstarter, but I can’t find it. Then again, Kickstarter’s navigation is terrible.
Sign of the times – big scale, mathematically-linked but unique shapes… laser-cutter/CNC makes all this a hell of a lot easier than it once was – although you do need a bit of a budget for it… and the thing above goes way beyond this – making a kind of Faery-Steam-Punk… like Swiss-Watchmaker-Punk.
