I’ve been working like a dog this whole week, and though its been rewarding, I needed a break. I definitely didn’t need to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers on a Saturday night, during their 80’s-themed party and Goonies viewing. So I called up Todd and arranged to meet him down in Baltimore for the weekend. Shawn apparently ditched town to go to a wedding, so he and I drove around downtown Baltimore to Fells Point to go drinking with a bunch of sauced up east coast types. The next morning, we planned to go into D.C. to check it out, since it was only a 40 minute Amtrak ride away and neither of us had been before. The Amtrak website quoted us $23 dollars round trip, but somehow it ended up costing over 40. Since we took the shuttle out to Penn Station, we were basically stranded in Baltimore (not the best place to be stranded), so we went for it. Here’s Penn station: It has one of them old-timey schedule boards that rotates around to display gate numbers and such, which was kind of neat. The station was fairly quaint all around. Outside the station is this monstrostiy: We saw it coming back from drinking the night before, but didn’t know what the building was for. It was a surprise to see it coming off the shuttle. Union Station, on the other hand, was fancy as all get out. As you can see, there is construction going on outside the building. Apparently all of D.C. is under construction to some degree or other. It was especially bad at the capitol building, which was almost entirely devoid of tourists. The place was completely empty, which was surprising only a few days before the 4th. These pictures don’t […]

Ok, I’m back, and I’m blogging my heart out. To prove it, I made this entire post through my PDA. That’s right, shitty cell phone pics and everything. I am currently bound to my PDA, since my room here at Princeton does not currently have the internet. I feel like half a man. I was planning on making this post yesterday, but T-Mobile wont allow a PDA to view on line photo albums, so I was stuck with no way to access the pics. And, since I had been up for about 50 hours at that point, I didn’t have the heart to make a half-assed pictureless post. But today is the day, my friend, today is the day. I just realized that I can beam a picture from my cell to my pda via infrared. I made this discovery today, and it is one of the most exciting discoveries I have made in my adult life. So this is Princeton:www.http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/pics/prince.jpg At least, its one of the buildings here. Lots of fancy architecture. Lots of stairs. Lots of other summer camps running around at the moment, including an small army of sports camp kids I have to share a dorm cafeteria with, and this fun little group: This weekend is instructor orientation and training. Our students don’t arrive until Sunday afternoon, and I begin teaching on Monday. I’ve seen the room I’m teaching in, and it is rather impressive. Wood paneled walls, padded seats, the works. I didn’t take pictures (I hadn’t made my breakthrough discovery), and I can’t get back into the room until Monday, but I’ll show you soon enough. My TA Neal shares a lot of my interests, which means the students will be getting a summer’s worth of unshaven nerds talkin bout robots. Hopefully this goes […]

Alright, I’ve been slacking for too long, which is just not wise when so much stuff is coming down the pipe. For instance, I just got a tip on the following post on Language Log, a seemingly active linguist’s blog (thanks, dgamble). Geoffrey K. Pullum, a linguistics and humanities professor at UCSC, writes the following in response to a NYT article casually asserting that Google “understands language.” The very least one has to admit about machine understanding is that there is a big difference between a search engine algorithm and a genuine understander like you or me — and I’m not saying it necessarily reflects well on me. If you switch a Google-style search engine algorithm from working on English to working on Arabic, it will very largely work in the same way, provided only that you make available a large body of Arabic text from which it can draw its frequency information. (I have actually met people working at Google on machine processing of stories in Arabic. They do not know how to read Arabic. They don’t need to.) I, on the other hand, will become utterly useless after the switch. I will no longer be able to classify news stories at all (I don’t even know the Arabic writing system, so I can’t even see whether Iran is in a paragraph or not). Call the machines cleverer, or call me cleverer, I don’t care, but we’re not the same kind of animal, and it seems to me that the verb understand is utterly inappropriate as a term for what Google News algorithms do. |Link| What kinds of activities are appropriate for the verb ‘understand’? [Scanners] don’t read for content, get the drift of the story, compare the sense of the paragraphs with their background knowledge and common sense, […]

Engadget reports on Airbus’ plan on intalling robots to control planes in emergency situations. Emphasis is original. Pilots, not suprisingly, are none too pleased with the move; Air Line Pilots Association safety offical Larry Newman says it’s leading to pilots getting further and further away from the process of responding to emergencies themselves (well duh). Not to mention the whole, you know, robots making decisions that could directly affect hundreds or thousands of human lives thing. For its part, Boeing has said it will continue to rely on human pilots in case of emergencies.

Link via BoingBoing

Two items: Asimo turns to telepathy Japanese automaker Honda has developed technology that uses brain signals to control a robot’s moves, hoping to someday link a person’s thoughts with machines in everyday life. In a video demonstration in Tokyo, patterns of the changes in the brain taken by an MRI machine, like those used in hospitals, were relayed to a robotic hand. A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V-sign. Several seconds later, the robotic hand made the same movements. Further research would be needed to decode more complex movements. At least another five or 10 years are probably needed before Asimo starts moving according to our mental orders, according to Honda.Right now, Asimo’s metallic hand can’t even make a V-sign. The catch: Japan’s industry ministry plans to compile safety guidelines for next-generation robots as they will be providing services in the future in areas like nursing, security and cleaning, ministry officials said Saturday. The guidelines will require manufacturers to install enough sensors to minimize the risk of the robots running into people and use soft and light materials so they do not cause harm if they do so, the officials said. They will also be required to install emergency shut-off buttons, they said. Both links via Robot Gossip.

New on the blogroll: Robot Gossip. I was linked via Engadget’s coverage of India’s new plan for building a gigantic robot army. While I was trying to think of a tech support joke, though, I found a whole page full of much more interesting tidbits. For instance, this guy: which can manipulate otherwise awkward objects with the all the agility of an elephant’s trunk. See video of him in action here. Oh, DARPA, your moral ambiguity just makes me love you more. Also, this: Generated by a cute little robot with its own aesthetic criteria. I’m glad more of these are coming out, since it forces the issue. The algorithm combines initial randomness, positive feedback and a positive/negative increment of ‘color as pheromone’ mechanism based on a grid of nine RGB sensors. Also the ‘sense of rightness’ – to determine when the painting is ready – is achieved not by any linear method, time or sum, but through a kind of pattern recognition system. |Link| The best part, just like the filmmaking robot, is that it signs its own name:

Interesting interview with William Gibson by PRI about the NSA wiretapping scandal. You can listen to the entire interview here. Gibson comes in about 35 minutes in. I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some… The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won’t be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we’re driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them… I’m particularly enamored of the idea of a national security “bubble…” Technologies don’t emerge unless there’s someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge… I’ve been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I’ve noticed on the Internet that there aren’t many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway. I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, “Oh, they’re doing it anyway.” In some way our culture believes that, and it’s a real problem, because evidently they haven’t been doing it anyway, and now that they’ve started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response. […]

One of my biggest problems in philosophy is that not very many people do what I do. The Cyberneticists in the 50s came close, but the continental philosophers are prone to use ‘technology’ as shorthand for a discussion about whatever aspect of society they want to talk about, and consequently they never really engaged the problem of technology directly. I draw a lot of my own work from the analytic work in Phil Mind from the 80s and 90s (which in turn was a response to the AI guys in the 50s and 60s), but really thats only because that’s the literature I know the best; I am definitely taking oblique lines to that whole discussion. I’m sort of embarassed to admit it, but there are definite similarities between what I am working on and the Singularists. I’ve talked about the Singularity before, so I wont go into my quasi-Davidsonian spiel about how there’s no real sense to make of entirely incomprehensible intelligences. I’ve never really felt comfortable making these arguments, because I have trouble treating anyone calling themselves a ‘futurist’ or ‘transhumanist’ seriously. But apparently other people are taking them seriously, because they are having a big conference this weekend at Stanford. I don’t know how much credit to give this fact- their sponsors, aside from the hosting institution (?), are kind of ridiculous, and they quote people on the home page like Gates and Hawking who have nothing to do with the conference, which is rather disingenuous. Plus, I’m sure these guys take their increasing popularity and ‘success’ as evidence that their claims are accurate, which is just self-confirming bullshit. But then again, maybe I can see this as an employment opportunity. Make a name for myself arguing against these guys. I dunno. At the very least, I […]

about the singularity. So D&D is having a thread about the Singularity convention, and I posted the Ted Chaing short story “The Evolution of Human Science”, which is perhaps one of the more convincing discussion of the human condition in a posthuman world. Its only 3 pages, and I strongly recommend a read. In any case, the goons were busy jerking each other off over technology and how we can’t hope to ‘catch up’, and they ignored my post. So I posted a brief defense of Chaing’s portrait of the future: The point is that we don’t have to catch up, and there’s no reason to think that we can or need to. Even with a bunch of metahumans wandering around being incomprehensible, the human condition will be roughly the same: we will still be curious about our world, we will still employ our technology, science, and engineering techniques in attempt to increase the quality of life, and our technology will continue to have unforeseen consequences on our life. Its the human condition that we should be worried about, and the singularity gives us no reason to think that will change whatsoever. But once we admit that, the claims of the singularists boil down to ‘technology in the future will be CRAZY you have no idea’. Well, no shit. The reason why its so popular, though, is because we, as a society, have almost no tools or resources for explaining and understanding the technology we surround ourselves with, and Kurzweil is one of the first people to come around and give it some sort of sense. If it has a pattern, it is more stable and comforting. But the whole thing is still quasi-mystical cultish nonsense. deus novus machina To which Hemogoblin responded with this extremely elegant post: Hemogoblin posted: […]