Terminator Anxiety? How to stop worring about Robots Taking Over the World

Do you worry about robots taking over the world? Are you concerned that the Terminator movies are prophetic and that the robot apocalypse is just around the corner.

Not going to happen.

Why? Because robots are increadably stupid and they don't have any mechanisms to become smarter. Basically, current artificial intelligence is not. Intelligent that is -- we are no closer to replicating the thought processes in even the smallest ant than we were in 1968 when Arthur C. Clarke conceived of HAL.


As part of my job I get to work with, see, play with, and go to conferences to talk about the smartest, most capable robots and AI systems in the world. I also have a lot of exeperience with supercomputers. I've built AI systems and spent years as an AI researcher. And I'm convinced that we are all wet when it comes to computers and robots behaving intelligently. We are no only not on the right road to building a self-aware computer, we have not even found the right concepts to discuss it.

You may have seen a lot of new articles like this one, that say that soon computers will be built that surpass the human brain in compute power.

That is complete and utter BS.

While it may be possible to equal a brain's worth of number crunching, we are nowhere near creating a system that equals the brain's total bandwidth and memory capacity - because we are using the wrong materials. Let's look at a computer. We store information in a computer in binary code - 1's and 0's, on or off states. It takes millions of those ones and zeros to just encode a picture, and that's just the visual information.

Our brains, on the other hand, are completely analog systems. A single channel, rather than being on or off, can convey a complete range of values with millions of possibilities. (NOTE: some neurlogical SME will jump in at this point and say, "Wait! Neurons are either on or off" -- that's the wrong way to say it. Neurons either transmit or don't (true) but when they transmit, they provide a range of data, not just a single value.) So rather than having a memory cell that has a single bit of data that is either on or off, we have a single value that has a whole range - and can be a color, a smell, a sound, a touch, a muscle memory, a texture, a weight, and so on. So the total BANDWIDTH of the neural system is enormous. So while the computer can process the data - you can't get that much data in or out as fast as a brain.

To avoid getting too long on this post, let me summarize in a simple statement.

Untill we grow our computers from analog components
and teach them rather than program them
and a robot can learn to identify and manipulate objects just like a baby
we are not doing Artificial Intelligence

and you have nothing to worry about.

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Life Sized Gundam invades Tokyo

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the "reality mecha" anime video, toy, and video game franchise, Bandai built a full size, 60 foot tall Gundam Giant Robot in Tokyo.

Unfortunately it does not move, walk, fight, or launch itself into space.

But it is really cool.

For those of you who have not heard of it, Gundam is the long running series of anime (Japanese Animation) series about "realistic giant robots" that have spawned thousands of model kits, of which my son is an avid collector. There have been several different series, including my favorite all time series title, "War in the Pocket".



What a delight to see a full scale model take shape.

I've been sitting on an article about giant humanoid robots for some time now -- maybe its time to trot it out. I'll just say that I'm generally in favor of giant robots as a concept.

Thanks to Cinematical

UPDATE: there is a cool new way to see this robot that I have to say is very impressive from a lot of perspectives (pun intentional) see the Microsoft PhotoSynth version of this project. Let me know what you think!
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My Magazine Addiction

I have a problem that seems to be totally out of control. I went out of town for just four days last week on a business trip. When I returned, I had 9 magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read. That, of course, would be in addition to the four magazines I bought to read on the plane.

AAAAAGGGHH


I have to admit that I like magazines. Its not just that I write for one (Robot Magazine) but that I like reading them. It does help that several of them are free. Since I'm a chief engineer and make a lot of decisions on R&D, I get people sending me free stuff on desktop engineering, embedded computers, COTS products (Commercial Off the Shelf) and so on. On the personal interest side, I read Flying and Private Pilot and get AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association). Popular Mechanics is just a guilty pleasure, although I wish their articles were longer. And I now get Aviation Week and Space Technology, a truly wonderful publication. To tell you the truth, I rarely read the articles in many magazines I get. But I do look at all of the advertising. As a robot designer, I need a lot of estoeric stuff for my projects -- lately I've been looking at hyperspectrial imaging systems and ground penetrating radar, for example. So I find a lot of my "stuff" advertised in the magazines I read. And a lot of it is only advertised in magazines. So I do get a lot of value and I hope this encourages all those people who send me free magazines to continue and to tell their advertisers that at least one person reads every single ad. Now I just need to summon the will power to not save. every. single. magazine. forever.

I think I'm going to need a bigger... trash can.

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Getting Started

I'm often asked what robot to choose in order to get started in robotics as a hobby. There are two very good choices. I started with the OOPIC, a robot microcontroller, and scratch-built two small robots with that. They now make a more complete kit called an "OOBUG". You can find it here. This kit concetrates on the programming end of robotics, and does not require much in the way of building skills.

My second choice would be the fully programmable version of the VEX robotics system. It takes more of an "erector set" approach to robots, and encourages tinkering and making different things, as it has lots of cool metal parts, wheels, and gears. I think it is only available now by mail order. You don't want the "explorer" or Vex Red system because it is not programmable and you are quite limited in what you can do. The Vex systm is easy to experiment with and can be reconfigured in lots of ways. I've had great success adding different sensors to it, like IRPD's (infrared proximity sensors), or bumper switches.

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