Robopocalypse Report #111

Drones:

The first global standards for drones have been unveiled.

A 737 seems to have been damaged by a midair impact with a drone.

Amazon promised drone delivery in five years...five years ago.  Where are they?

In Britain, the Gatwick airport was seriously impacted by one or more drones flying through restricted air space.  The Army was deployed.  People were arrested and then released.  A British Minister stated new detection equipment is needed.

Drones are being used in Britain to spot European nightjar nests.

The Dauntless cargo UAV can lift 200 lbs.

Regular drones are being used to monitor and track sharks.

Drones can be used to replace several cameras in film making and even used in animation.

Foldable drones could be used in rescues because they can fly through smaller holes.

Google/Alphabet's Project Wing drones will start delivery trials in Finland next year.

Google/Alphabet is working to make those drones quieter.

Indonesian rescuers are using drones after the recent tsunami.

The NYPD will start using drones.

The number of drone flights in Russia are projected to increase 16 fold from 2015 to 2020.

Russia has demonstrated a new cargo drone with claims it is capable of carrying 400 kg (880 lbs) 350 km (~220 miles).

The Self Repairing Cities Project continues to develop 3d printing drones that repair potholes.

Self Driving Cars:

Congress did not pass its self driving car laws before the end of 2018.

How self driving cars handle tricky highway merges.

Self driving cars are here.  Here just depends on where you live.

Audi is using Luminar's lidar for its self driving cars.

Baidu is testing its self driving cars with the Unity game.

Bosch is developing self driving tech.  Even betting on it.

GM Cruise's has a new boss, Dan Ammann.

Honda is testing off road self driving work vehicles.

Kroger has launched a self driving vehicle based service for grocery delivery in Arizona with Nuro's help.

Levandowski, the troublesome ex Google, ex Uber self driving car engineer who founded a church that believes AI is the savior, claims to have ridden a self driving car from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over 3000 miles.

A Lyft patent shows how their self driving cars might communicate.

May Mobility is another self driving car startup.

Rinspeed has shrunk its self driving pod.

Tesla celebrates over 1 billion miles using Autopilot.

Musk is stating Tesla's Autopilot will recognize emergency vehicles shortly.

Musk misused Tesla's Autopilot on the tv show 60 minutes.

Tesla is testing its Autopilot system for successful navigation of traffic lights and roundabouts.

TuSimple's cameras can see farther than lidars can for self driving cars.

Uber apparently ignored warnings about its safety before the death of the woman in Arizona.

Uber got permission to return its self driving cars to the road in Pennsylvania in a scaled down test.

Volvo's self driving trucks will be hauling limestone from a mine.

As reported before, Waymo has returned safety drivers to its self driving cars.

Waymo has already launched its self driving car service in Phoenix.  They still have safety drivers as noted above.

People are harassing Waymo's self driving cars.

Zoox has won approval to carry passengers in its self driving vehicles in California.

3d Printing:

3d printed houses vary from mud huts to luxury mansions.

A software bots are able to recreate famous paintings in 3d printing.

An Australian woman has received a 3d printed jaw after a tumor removal.

Bugatti is testing 3d printed titanium parts for its cars.

A Bulgarian patient has received a 3d printed rib, a first for that country.

A custom 3d printer makes better microfluidic devices.

Harvard Innovation Labs has set up the MakerFleet 3d printer farm.

3d printed scaffolds could help bones heal.

3d printed homes may be the future of architecture.

An Italian bioengineer figured out how to 3d print a steak from vegetable proteins.

A new paper states there needs to be a better way to allow more people to design 3d printed components.

Norwegian researchers compared the results of 3d printing in both a factory setting and in a military cargo container. 

Robotics:

A new type of robotic hand can play the piano with more human like motion.

Where are the SciFi promised home robots?

Amazon is launching a cloud-based robotics testing platform.

Amazon is trying to get developers to make the control software for small robotic car.

24 Amazon workers were sent to the hospital when a warehouse robot broke open a can of bear spray.

Arm is building chips with a sense of smell.

BART is a type of bar tending robot.

DHL will spend $300 million to quadruple the robots in their warehouses.

European scientists have made an artificial neuron from nanowire.

Studying fish will help robotics.

Harvard developed a robot that can climb on ceilings.

A new huggable robot about to go on sale looks eerily like Cheburashka.

Intel has developed a wheelchair controlled by facial expressions.

Kiwi, a delivery bot, caught fire in Berkeley, California.

Larvalbot has been seeding the Great Barrier Reef with coral.

Postmates unveiled its robotic delivery bot.

A Robotic rice planter is being sent to the fields.

Toyota has invested in the autonomous ship company, Sea Machine Robotics.

The Velox robot skates over ice, but does so in way that creeps some people out.

Waitrose and Partner's parent company is testing in robotic farming equipment.

Walmart is rolling out 360 mopping robots as janitors for its stores by the end of January.  The same robots are in use at airports in Boston, Miami, San Diego, and Seattle,

Walmart is also supposed to be testing a burger flipping robot.

Youbionic has added 3d printed arms to a Boston Dynamics Mini Spot robot.

The Z6 robot is an unfolding hexapod.

Cyborgism:

Meet Elowan, the first(?) mobile cyborg houseplant.

Researchers have developed a new hydrogel electrode for brain implants.

A new artificial joint allows lower arm amputees to have wrist movements.

Software Bots:

US law makers are seeking to introduce bills to make certain actions illegal for bots during the holiday season.

100 AI researchers could not get visas to Canada for a conference.

Canada and France want to study the global impacts of AI.

Alibaba's Voice Assistant is way better than Google's.

An Amazon Alexa had a software error that allowed another user in another house to spy on one house hold.

Alexa is gaining self teaching algorithms to be able to learn from the people its communicating with to better understand them.

The BBC asked two software bots to come up with christmas dishes that were inspired by cultures around the world.

In China, a facial recognition software bot took an ad on the bus for a jaywalker.

Digital assistants are getting better, but have a long, long ways to go.

Europe actually publishes the most papers on AI, not China or the US.

Can software bots actually clean up Facebook?

Google's head of AI research wants bots to think more like a brain does.

Google's not being as open as it ought over the Duplex calls.

Google's Deep Mind can predict the 3d shape of proteins.

Google Deep Mind now has a generalized game playing system for any sort of game.

IBM is looking at Watson for human resources.

The Japanese have developed an automated technique for coloring anime.

Memristers are making circuits that mimic synapses better.

Microsoft wants to stop facial recognition AI's 'race to the bottom.'

MIT and Facebook are teaming up to use bots to give everyone who does NOT have a address in the world one.

Musicians are using software bots to master songs.

NBCUniversal is attempting to use software bots to make their ads more relevant.

Communication between two neural networks is being worked on.

Nvidia has developed a software bot to generate cityscapes in real time.

Nvidia has also released its new machine learning chip.

Oregon State University is looking at using machine learning to work on energy storage.

Texas A&M is using software bots for material science.

The UK is looking at AI to predict and prevent violent crime:  pre crime, here we come.

Software bots can be used to detect water leaks in city water systems.

Software bots can accelerate cancer discoveries.

Software bots can be trained without negative data.

Software bots can reduce the gadolinium dose needed for MRIs.

A new software bot can track biological age on multiple levels.

Bots are also being used to tell how healthy you will be in old age.

Software bots have mapped every last solar panel in the US.

Software bots are being used for hiring now and its producing some unorthodox results.

A new form of machine vision uses software bots to recognize objects like people do.

Software bots are being used to determine if you could have a potentially life threatening skin infection.

Software bots are being used to notice details in low exposure images.

Software bots are being used to design peptides.

Software bots can sort cancer cells now.

Codeveloping hardware and software makes neural nets less power hungry.

Technology companies and employees are pushing back against software bots, or at least putting limits on them.  Some.

Tumblr is banning porn on its site and has developed a software bot to find and delete it.  It's really bad at its job.

Automation:

2018 was the year bots began taking over service jobs.

Automation is changing work.

Amazon is testing its cashierless system on larger stores than their Amazon Go.

Amazon wants to open its Go stores in company lobbies.

Space Tango plans a orbital robotic factory.

META:

Can an AI conference shed its sexist behavior?

Germany will attempt a universal basic income experiment in 2019.

New models can sense when and if people trust robots. Think of them as your robotic rat friends.

While the robopocalypse may be upon us, the singularity has a long, long ways to go.

Do not fear the robotic overlords!  Embrace them as coworkers!

The year in the robopocalypse.

Robopocalypse #20: The Sharing Economy is Doomed by the Bots, Just Watch Uber

Welcome to the Robopocalypse Report!  This is my news update on the onrushing robotic revolution in our economy.   I'll sometimes make editorial comments about the links, but for now this is larger a list of the news rather than a lot of commentary.

In the age of the drones,  the laws have not caught up.
 The FAA is the gating factor for drone based deliveries.

Drones are continuing to be a problem for commercial and medical flights.

On the other hand, Alaska has embarked on a major push to make drones an important part of its economy and Hawaii is wondering if it ought to as well.

On the self driving cars side, CNET dedicates an issue to "Riding in cars with bots."

The Washington Post gushes over Google's self driving cars.

The insurance industry thinks the manufacturers of self driving cars ought to bear the costs of liability.

Related to the self driving cars, Google will start delivering groceries in San Francisco this next year.

Why is Uber betting big on self driving cars?  hmm.  Maybe it has to do with the fact Uber wants to get rid of those drivers who are sharing their cars?  heh.  Pretty funny that they are financing directly their own replacement.  Doubly so since Uber's drivers are not classified as employees in California. 

The Woz thinks self driving cars could be the next big thing for Apple.

In 3d printing, a whole new technique, Laser-based Direct Metal Deposition, has been unveiled.  

A new 3d fabrication technique has been inspired by Japanese origami.

XYZ Printing has a new 3d scanner.

An American construction company owner has 3d printed a suite in a hotel he owns in the Philippines.

Navies may start 3d printing ships.

3d Systems' Fabricate is designed specifically for textile manufacturing.

The market for 3d printed medical devices is expected to be $2.13 billion by 2020.

The entire global market for 3d printing in 2014 was $3.8 billion.

On the robotics side, a Dutch company has created a vending machine that makes fresh french fries.

NEATO releases a new robotic vacuum cleaner that joins up via the buzzwordy the Internet of Things.  Just wait for the hacker to start chasing you around with the vacuum!  Kinda like this...

SAM, brick laying bot, is doing a job in DC for those of you interested in checking it out.

There's an interesting essay on building enthusiasm for bots in construction.

At Fort Bragg, they are testing out building an aerial gunnery range with bots.

Agriculture wishes they had bots for certain crops in a big way.

Just where how are the bots going to be used on the farm?

Where are the bots working in the diary and fishing industries?

How much fast will the agri bot industry grow through 2019?

In Australia three $150k bots replaced 60 welders.

In general software bots, not even IT workers are going to be safe.

Is the robopocalypse coming for the accountants?

On the artificial intelligence side, Scientific American asks the question of whether or not AI will ever be smarter than people.

They also ponder what will happen when AI gets involved with healthcare. 

On the economics of the robopocalypse, the financial sector seems to be unhappy with the idea of the robopocalypse.  Or at least some folks in thre are.

What does the robopocalypse have in common with the industrial revolution?

Why haven't the bots already taken our jobs?

On the legal side, a would-be Japanese John Connor was arrested.

Is it legal to go John Connor on that drone bugging you? 

Robopocalypse Report #10

Welcome to the tenth Robopocalypse Report!  This is where I highlight some of the different technologies which are up and coming in the bot arena, software and hardware, that are going to add to the coming economic disruption or at least change that I have nicknamed the Robopocalypse.

Drones! Drones!  Drones!  We normally start with drones.  BUT NOT THIS TIME!  

The Robopocalypse isn't all doom and gloom (actually its rather the opposite, but people take convincing).  Robotics is helping and will help the disabled in vast, vast ways.  

Ok, now onto the drones!

Google is pulling its drone development out of NM and back to the SF Bay Area.

There has been some hoopla over the fact a drone carrying drugs, cell phones, etc crashed in a prison attempting a delivery in South Carolina!

The European Aviation Safety Agency (aka Euro FAA) has called for input on the rules they are drafting for drone use.

The FAA has now approved over 1008 UAV exemptions. 

Unfortunately, twits keep going where they ought to know better with their drones.  In this case JFK airport in NYC.  If they are not careful, they'll end up with a regulation and legal backlash making drones virtually banned.

The Koreans have researched how to take out drones via sound waves.

Scientists have also been using drones to fly through whale spouts to collect samples.

You also know drones have gone mainstream when a drone is decked out as the Human Torch to promote the Fantastic Four film.

Governor Brown signed laws relating to self driving cars in California this past week and showed up in a Google car for the event.  See awkward AP video above.

It is being speculated that driverless cabs will end traffic and help significantly with parking in cities.  This feels like the 'electricity too cheap to meter' from the past, but I could be wrong.

Then...Tesla:

That's their new electrical charger prototype.  Obviously, Dr Octopus works at Tesla.

Moving on to more general robotics information, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed robotic whiskers for use much like mammals do.

MIT has developed an algorithm to allow robotic grippers to use their environment to grasp items they are having difficulty with.

Moving to software, researchers at UCL have developed AI to predict fine wine prices.

CNET has an Everything You Need to Know About the Robopocalypse article.

TIme to Talk Intelligently About AI: “Watson doesn't know it won Jeopardy!”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk worries it is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, “AI could be a big danger in the not-too-distant future.” Fear mongering about AI has also hit the box office in recent films such as Her and Transcendence.

So as an active researcher in the field for over 20 years, and now the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, why am I not afraid?

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals, and have its own will, and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game. It assumes that with intelligence comes free will, but I believe those two things are entirely different.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations. A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets, or keeping up to date on medical research. Like calculators, AI tools require human input and human directions.

Now, autonomous computer programs exist and some are scary — such as viruses or cyber-weapons. But they are not intelligent. And most intelligent software is highly specialized; the program that can beat humans in narrow tasks, such as playing Jeopardy, has zero autonomy. IBM’s Watson is not champing at the bit to take on Wheel of Fortune next. Moreover, AI software is not conscious. As the philosopher John Searle put it, “Watson doesn't know it won Jeopardy!”

Anti-AI sentiment is often couched in hypothetical terms, as in Hawking’s recent comment that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” The problem with hypothetical statements is that they ignore reality—the emergence of “full artificial intelligence” over the next twenty-five years is far less likely than an asteroid striking the earth and annihilating us.

So where does this confusion between autonomy and intelligence come from? From our fears of becoming irrelevant in the world. If AI (and its cousin, automation) takes over our jobs, then what meaning (to say nothing of income) will we have as a species? Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we have been afraid of mechanical men, and according to Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, we will probably become even more afraid as mechanical men become closer to us, a phenomenon he called the Frankenstein Complex.

link.

Deep Mind Project at Google Unveils Neural Turing Machines

Neural Turing Machines

Authors:

Graves et al

Abstract:

We extend the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results demonstrate that Neural Turing Machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples.

pop sci write up.

Interesting if True: Machine Learning Used on Quantum Computer

Experimental Realization of Quantum Artificial Intelligence

Authors:

Li et al

Abstract:

Machines are possible to have some artificial intelligence like human beings owing to particular algorithms or software. Such machines could learn knowledge from what people taught them and do works according to the knowledge. In practical learning cases, the data is often extremely complicated and large, thus classical learning machines often need huge computational resources. Quantum machine learning algorithm, on the other hand, could be exponentially faster than classical machines using quantum parallelism. Here, we demonstrate a quantum machine learning algorithm on a four-qubit NMR test bench to solve an optical character recognition problem, also known as the handwriting recognition. The quantum machine learns standard character fonts and then recognize handwritten characters from a set with two candidates. To our best knowledge, this is the first artificial intelligence realized on a quantum processor. Due to the widespreading importance of artificial intelligence and its tremendous consuming of computational resources, quantum speedup would be extremely attractive against the challenges from the Big Data.

pop sci write up.

DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! One in Three Jobs to be Lost to Robopocalypse by 2025

Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

This is Gartner being provocative, as it is typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.

Take drones, for instance.

"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.

"Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world -- these are smart machines," said Sondergaard.

Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.

"Knowledge work will be automated," said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots.

"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."

link.

US Navy Wants Artificial Intelligence in F/A-XX Sixth Generation Fighter

Artificial intelligence will likely feature prominently onboard the Pentagon’s next-generation successors to the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.

“AI is going to be huge,” said one U.S. Navy official familiar with the service’s F/A-XX effort to replace the Super Hornet starting around 2030.

Further, while there are significant differences between the U.S. Air Force’s vision for its F-X air superiority fighter and the Navy’s F/A-XX, the two services agree on some fundamental aspects about what characteristics the jet will need to share.

“I think we all agree that we have to work on PNT [Positioning, Navigation and Timing], comms, big data movement between both services,” the official said.

It is unclear how advanced technology like artificial intelligence might help a tactical fighter accomplish its mission. But it is possible that the AI would be a decision aid to the pilot in a way similar in concept to how advanced sensor fusion onboard jets like the F-22 and Lockheed Martin F-35 work now.

However, the visions for both the Navy and Air Force are technologically ambitious and there are differences between the services that still need to be resolved.

link.

a Ted Talk Refuting the Singularity...by an AI Researcher

Robopocalypse: IBM Makes 'Creative' Computer AI

Can computers be creative? That’s a question likely to generate controversial answers. It also raises and some important issues too, like how to define creativity.

Seemingly unafraid of the controversy, IBM has darted into the fray by answering this poser with with a resounding ‘yes’. Computers can be creative, they say, and to prove it they have built a computational creativity machine that produces results that a knowledgeable human would consider novel, useful and even valuable—the hallmarks of genuine creativity.

IBM’s chosen field for this endeavour is cooking. The company’s creativity machine produces recipes based on chosen ingredients or cooking styles. And they’ve asked professional chefs to evaluate the results and say the feedback is promising.

link.

Here Comes Skynet: DARPA Tackles Machine Learning

Machine learning – the ability of computers to understand data, manage results, and infer insights from uncertain information – is the force behind many recent revolutions in computing. Email spam filters, smartphone personal assistants and self-driving vehicles are all based on research advances in machine learning. Unfortunately, even as the demand for these capabilities is accelerating, every new application requires a Herculean effort. Even a team of specially-trained machine learning experts makes only painfully slow progress due to the lack of tools to build these systems.

The Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning (PPAML) program was launched to address this challenge. Probabilistic programming is a new programming paradigm for managing uncertain information. By incorporating it into machine learning, PPAML seeks to greatly increase the number of people who can successfully build machine learning applications and make machine learning experts radically more effective. Moreover, the program seeks to create more economical, robust and powerful applications that need less data to produce more accurate results – features inconceivable with today’s technology.

“We want to do for machine learning what the advent of high-level program languages 50 years ago did for the software development community as a whole,” said Kathleen Fisher, DARPA program manager.

“Our goal is that future machine learning projects won’t require people to know everything about both the domain of interest and machine learning to build useful machine learning applications. Through new probabilistic programming languages specifically tailored to probabilistic inference, we hope to decisively reduce the current barriers to machine learning and foster a boom in innovation, productivity and effectiveness.”

1.  DARPA is doing it.  That means its a DARPA hard problem and has a small percentage likelihood of suceeding.

 2.  I'm being flippant about skynet.  I don't think this will work. 

3.  I have always found it ... odd...interesting...weird...that folks believe that R&D for stuff like AI happens in places that are ones that stockpile weapons of any sort or develop anything of the sort either.