Haunting the Web Since 1999
Per Discover, computers can now identify faces better than humans can. “The algorithm could someday be used in myriad applications including security, image retrieval, and biometric credentials for our computers and mobile devices.” Among other things.
A Prelude to WALL-E: In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson looks at the coming robotic takeover of the job market, whereby 47% of jobs could soon be automated. I for one welcome our new robot overlords — all the more reason why we need to start rethinking a social contract founded primarily on having full-time, two-income employment. We’re entering a new phase of human existence — we’d best start preparing for it. (Bionic man image via here.)
(Our work is never over.) In more promising future-tech news, scientists figure out a way to store quantum data for much longer than ever before. “Though surviving for 39 minutes may not sound like very long, it only requires one-hundred-thousandth of a second to perform an operation on a single qubit. So theoretically, over 20 million operations could be performed before the qubits’ data decayed by 1 percent.”
Er, right, but aren’t we forgetting something here? And don’t you people ever go to the movies? Scientists are apparently working toward drones that can make their own autonomous decisions about targets. “Though they do not yet exist, and are not possible with current technology, LARs are the subject of fierce debate in academia, the military and policy circles. Still, many treat their development as inevitability.”
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the world:
“Scientists at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have come up with one solution to the jellyfish problem: build robots to kill them. For the last three years, the team has been working to create robots that can travel the ocean, seeking out swarms of jellyfish using a camera and GPS. Once the jellyfish are located, the robots set about shredding the jellies with an underwater propeller.”
INITIATING PROTOCOL SHRED-ORGANBAGS 101101111…Due to a climate-change-fueled ascendance of jellyfish across the world, Korean scientists have unleashed automated robotic sentinels to mitigate the problem. “[T]he video at top is what they’re doing beneath the surface, using a specialized net and propeller. Be warned, it’s graphic. In preliminary tests, the robots could pulverize 2,000 pounds of jellyfish per hour.”
Sigh…this will all end in tears, people. Paging Kent Brockman.
It can only be attributable to human error: Also in the “This will end badly someday” department, programmers at Georgia Tech teach robots how to lie. No way this will cause problems. Wait, just a moment…just a moment…I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It’s going to go a hundred percent failure within seventy-two hours.
Those evil natured robots, they’re programmed to destroy us…So, yeah it’s hard to feel much of anything about Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech, other than that I saw more lifelike human performances in the Final Fantasy movie ten years ago. The guy is just forever lost in the uncanny valley to me. This will no doubt be a close election, and Romney could well win it by sheer dint of a bad economy and boatloads of under-the-table campaign cash. But I still find it hard to take his seriously as a candidate, and most of the time just end up feeling bad for his much more presidential father that the previously-moderate Mitt has become such an obvious sellout. (And, tbh, I’m much more worried about the truth-averse Paul Ryan’s no-doubt-bright future in his party than Romney’s bid this year. He’s the T-1000 to Romney’s T-800.)
In short, Romney has that generic, milquetoast liked-by-his-base-but-has-zero-crossover-appeal quality we’ve previously seen in Bob Dole and John Kerry, and just like Joe Biden’s “noun, verb, and 9/11” evisceration of Rudy 9ui11iani last cycle, Mike Huckabee already nailed Romney dead-to-rights in 2008 with his quip, “He looks like the guy who fired you.” I just don’t see Romney getting past that — and, if he does, it won’t be because of this speech.
In the most recent chapter of “Haven’t these scientists ever heard of Skynet?”, researchers at the University of Queensland are teaching robots to forge their own mutually-agreed-upon language. “Slowly, as the robots travel and talk, they narrow down their lexicon of place names until a mutual gazeteer of their world has been generated. The robots generated place names such as ‘kuzo’, ‘jaro’ and ‘fexo.’“
With a word of warning from The Prospect‘s Paul Waldman, Popular Science takes a gander at Boston Dynamics’ LittleDog. “LittleDog doesn’t just traverse the terrain; it learns as it goes, noting what works and what doesn’t and incorporating that knowledge into its foothold scoring system.“
“‘Nature is the final arbiter of truth,” said Seager, the Lawrence Livermore computer scientist, but ‘rather than doing experiments, a lot of times now we’re actually simulating those experiments and getting the data that way. We can now do as much scientific discovery with computational science as we could do before with observational science or theoretical science.‘” Developers tease the premiere of the first “petascale” computer, due out next year. It will be “capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second [and] akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined.” Well I, for one, welcome our new petascale overlords.
By way of my sister Tessa, a robotic gastronome determines human flesh tastes exactly like bacon (or possibly prosciutto.) Sigh…I was afraid of this. Once the machines acquire the taste, we’re all in deep, deep trouble. Or have they already figured it out, and cubicle culture is really just an attempt by the mechs to fatten us up for harvest? Hmmm…is it too late to install a vegetarian subroutine?