Robopocalypse Report #11

This time we have a droneless report!  Woo!  A first!  So we'll start with the next most photogenic of the Robopocalypse: the self driving car.

CNET runs an article about how the self driving car is driving innovation in computer objection recognition.

Future producer of self driving cars (well, almost there for highway driving now) Tesla had its Model S hacked.  This required physical access to the car unlike the other car hacks recently.  However, this is my greatest concern with the self driving car.  I would love to use it as a way to pick up my kids and drop them off for lessons and whatnot.  I cannot, not just because of the foreseeable requirement to have an adult 'driving' because I can all too easily see a hacker-kidnapper taking control of the car to deliver the kids inside wherever rather than to where they were supposed to go.

Would be self driving taxi car company Uber is apparently bleeding out money rather quickly and if reports are true, you have to wonder if they are going to survive long enough to field their fleet for the robopocalypse.

Moving away from the self driving car, MIT is working on improving the teleoperation of robots.  In some ways this is not new technology: it was even used for the Johnny 5 robot in Short Circuit 2.  However, I can only imagine with modern computers its far, far better.

There have been increasing calls to ban autonomous weapons.  Everyone is invoking the Terminator for this.  Others have started calling them weapons of mass destruction in their calls for a ban.  I had an essay I was working on about the overuse of the term 'mass extinction' on an old computer, but the computer was lost and I didn't have a backup.  It seems WMD is hitting that level, too.  OTOH, autonomous weapons?  What are we talking here?  The mythical forever flying machines with solar powered lasers?  Or a mine?  Anything which requires human permission before firing?  Or a 5th generation atlas with an AK?  The definition above is really, really broad and will never make it into reality based on what is being proposed here.  

The Japanese have their robo hotel with the really odd kiosks for checking in.  The brits have taken their own version of the hotel of the robopocalypse.  Here's a review of the "Hub by Premier Inn."

And to round out the Robopocalypse Report #11, IBM has purchased Merge Healthcare, a medical imagery company, for use with its Watson AI system for a cool BILLION dollars.  Watson is either going to make IBM incredibly wealthy or crash the company.  Is this IBM's 747 moment?

General Pawlikowski on the Pentagon's Offset Strategy: Autonomy, Refueling & Additive Manufacturing are key

Ellen Pawlikowski helps decide what weapons the Air Force buys and manages the buying process, so when the lieutenant general says she likes autonomy and 3-D printing as the most promising capabilities for her service to develop as part of the new offset strategy, it’s worth listening.

“This is Ellen Pawlikowski speaking,” she says in her E-ring office at the Pentagon, making sure we all know this is her personal opinion. She thinks autonomy — a cluster of technologies that allows weapons to execute missions without much human intervention — can “play a major role. It can allow me to get more numbers in things than I can get now.” And, as most generals will tell you, quantity possesses a quality all its own.

This is all about the Pentagon’s offset strategy, overseen by Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, designed to ensure America’s continued military dominance for a long time. Pawlikowski is the uniformed official who oversees the Air Force’s science and technology work, so much of the service’s offset strategy effort will be led by her.

“I can see a scenario where you’ve got an F-35 orchestrating an attack with 20 RPAs [remotely-piloted aircraft] that are weapons-equipped and that F-35, with all its sensors and communications, is essentially an orchestrator,” she says.

link.

Logical Limitations for Machine Ethics?

Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Authors:

Engleert et al

Abstract:

Lethal Autonomous Weapons promise to revolutionize warfare -- and raise a multitude of ethical and legal questions. It has thus been suggested to program values and principles of conduct (such as the Geneva Conventions) into the machines' control, thereby rendering them both physically and morally superior to human combatants.

We employ mathematical logic and theoretical computer science to explore fundamental limitations to the moral behaviour of intelligent machines in a series of "Gedankenexperiments": Refining and sharpening variants of the Trolley Problem leads us to construct an (admittedly artificial but) fully deterministic situation where a robot is presented with two choices: one morally clearly preferable over the other -- yet, based on the undecidability of the Halting problem, it provably cannot decide algorithmically which one. Our considerations have surprising implications to the question of responsibility and liability for an autonomous system's actions and lead to specific technical recommendations.

Soooo....does that imply PEOPLE are not Turing Machines???  *evil grin*