(I reworked the CONOPS post into a D&D thread. Hopefully this gets some responses.) There have been plenty of articles recently published debating the merits of Korea’s soon-to-be drafted Robot Ethics Charter. We had a thread a few weeks ago on this very topic that didn’t go anywhere. I don’t want this thread to be about the charter itself, but about the fundamental issues the charter means to address: how machines ought to behave. I think everyone will agree that the way the media reports technological and scientific news is embarrassing at best and deeply misleading at worst. For example, every article linked above cites Asimov as the primary cultural touchstone for this debate. Everyone has their own opinion on Asimov’s laws, though most people agree that they are terribly out of date and implausible. But I think we can agree with the fact that the Laws represent a poor starting point for a discussion of what machines should and shouldn’t do, given current and near-future technology and the tasks we set for the machines. It is well-known that the US military plans to make at least a third of his combat ground vehicles autonomous by 2015, and such autonomous machines will pay no attention to even the intent of the Laws. So leave Asimov aside. The Naval Surface Warfare Center has recently proposed a CONOPS (Warning: PDF) for the use of autonomous weapons systems: NAVSEA POSTED: Let the machines target other machines – Specifically, let’s design our armed unmanned systems to automatically ID, target, and neutralize or destroy the weapons used by our enemies – not the people using the weapons. – This gives us the possibility of disarming a threat force without the need for killing them. – We can equip our machines with non-lethal technologies for the […]

This is just too smart. Clocky The alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don’t wake up. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time. At the height of my laziness, I would set two alarms in different corners of my room, set to go off at slightly different times, and with snooze times of 7 and 9 minutes, respectively. The resulting dissonance was usually enough to get me up within 45 minutes of the first alarm going off, but it was a pretty elaborate, noisy process. Clocky seems like the perfect solution. Edit: now with video!

I’m stupid and got involved in another argument over Wikipedia, again. And I’m also vain, so I’m documenting the discussion below. Comments are welcome. D&D: Wikilolocaust (Note: it is a predictably shitty thread, and my comments don’t appear for several pages. Spare the trouble of actually reading it) danno posted: The English-language Wikipedia has 1.67 million articles. For the sake of argument, let’s say that on average an hour of work has gone into each article. Let’s also say that the type of labor that goes into Wikipedia is worth $15 an hour. Multiply and you get $25 million worth of free labor the project has been able to harness. Now I know I pulled those numbers out of my ass, but my point is that Wikipedia isn’t some infant project trying to make its way on the Web. It’s had six years with thousands of people contributing millions of dollars worth of resources. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to start holding expectations as to its quality. I’m hesitant to get involved in this shitstorm of a thread, but- Look, Wikipedia is already a success, end of story. That success isn’t judged on the quality or quantity of the articles, because both those attributes are in constant flux. Individual articles can be criticized in any number of ways, and in any number of dimensions, according to the protocols set forth by the Wikipedia community. And, perhaps most importantly, those protocols are also in flux and can be changed by the community. It is true that these rules are regulated by an insulated community that is strongly resistant to outside influence, and who devalue traditional forms of authority. But it is wrong to say that it does not accept any form of authority; the authority is just nonstandard. As such, it […]

I’ve had this thread stirring in my head for a while. I’m still not sure it is entirely ripe yet, but I felt I should put this out there and see what the world thinks. I think there is a real article in here somewhere, and I fully expect to see articles in the press along these lines in the coming months, but I haven’t seen any good commentary on this issue recently. If you stumble across any recent articles on this general theme, please link them here. I’ll do the same, but until then this will just be a repository for some of my scattered thoughts. The inspiration for this manifesto started with the Al Gore interview on The Daily Show a few weeks ago. The interview ended with a discussion of the internet, which Gore called “the single greatest source of hope that we will be able to fix what ails the conversation of democracy.” But Gore followed that up with something that really intrigued me: If the internet had been as strong 6 years ago as it is now, maybe there would have been a lot more attention paid to the real facts and we would not have our troops stuck over there in a civil war. Before we get into a debate over whether Gore’s alternate history is accurate, it is worth taking a few things into account. Six years ago is right at the tail end of the dot com bubble. Google was still the search engine for the nerdy elite and was just beginning the early stages of setting up an advertising model. Wikipedia ran MySQL on a single server. People said “www”, and seeing a web address in a commercial was still something of a novelty. In other words, the internet was a […]

There are just too many great quotes from this article, so just read the whole thing: Bots on the ground The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become an unprecedented field study in human relationships with intelligent machines. These conflicts are the first in history to see widespread deployment of thousands of battle bots. Flying bots range in size from Learjets to eagles. Some ground bots are like small tanks. Others are the size of two-pound dumbbells, designed to be thrown through a window to scope out the inside of a room. Bots search caves for bad guys, clear roads of improvised explosive devices, scoot under cars to look for bombs, spy on the enemy and, sometimes, kill humans. Even more startling than these machines’ capabilities, however, are the effects they have on their friendly keepers who, for example, award their bots “battlefield promotions” and “purple hearts.” “Ours was called Sgt. Talon,” says Sgt. Michael Maxson of the 737th Ordnance Company (EOD). “We always wanted him as our main robot. Every time he was working, nothing bad ever happened. He always got the job done. He took a couple of detonations in front of his face and didn’t stop working. One time, he actually did break down in a mission, and we sent another robot in and it got blown to pieces. It’s like he shut down because he knew something bad would happen.” The troops promoted the robot to staff sergeant — a high honor, since that usually means a squad leader. They also awarded it three “purple hearts.” Humans have long displayed an uncanny ability to make emotional connections with their manufactured helpmates. Car owners for generations have named their vehicles. In “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks risks his life to save a volleyball named Wilson, who has become […]

I’m probably going to show this video to my students over the summer as we discuss various definitions of technology. I’ve used this example before to illustrate technology as manufacturing; for some reason this is the picture in my head when I think ‘manufacturing’. They don’t make crayons like this any more, of course, but I especially like how tactile this video is: lots of hands grabbing bundles of crayons and moving them around really gives you a sense of the weight of the crayons in bulk, and a pretty good idea at the steps involved in crayon creation. I’ve referenced this montage in my 101 class, without having the video handy, under the assumption that enough people have seen Sesame Street and Electric Company to recognize the reference. But maybe I’m just old. Is this video familiar? If it isn’t, and I said “The Sesame Street montage of how crayons are made”, would you at least have a sense of what I’m talking about?

The title is a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). Here’s the relevant passage: The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. I interpret Haraway’s quote quite literally: our best machines are made of pure energy, of the same stuff as sunshine. Think of fiber optics, or of all the signals that fill the air broadcasting information at some frequency of the electromagnetic […]

Watch this.