Scott Andes & Mark Muro | Brookings Institute
“The substantial variation of the degree to which countries deploy robots should provide clues. If robots are a substitute for human workers, then one would expect the countries with much higher investment rates in automation technology to have experienced greater employment loss in their manufacturing sectors…Yet the evidence suggests there is essentially no relationship between the change in manufacturing employment and robot use.” Read more
Andy Greenberg — Wired
It’s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.
On Friday, the secret-spilling group announced that it has finally relaunched a beta version of its leak submission system, a file-upload site that runs on the anonymity software Tor to allow uploaders to share documents and tips while protecting their identity from any network eavesdropper, and even from WikiLeaks itself. The relaunch of that page—which in the past served as the core of WikiLeaks’ transparency mission—comes four and a half years after WikiLeaks’ last submission system went down amid infighting between WikiLeaks’ leaders and several of its disenchanted staffers. Read more
Katie M. Palmer and Neel V. Patel — Wired
You’d be forgiven for forgetting, but Elon Musk and Richard Branson aren’t the only billionaire magnates at the helm of a spacecraft company, gunning to rule the future of privatized space flight. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been flying under the radar—but at long last, the company yesterday launched its flagship suborbital spacecraft from its West Texas proving grounds in a developmental test flight.
Video released by the company shows the spacecraft, called New Shepard, blasting off to an altitude of 307,000 feet before its crew capsule separates from a propulsion module. Named after the first US astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, the craft is meant to take off and land vertically, utilizing a reusable first-stage booster—the same approach SpaceX is using in its Falcon 9 rocket. Read more
By Phil McKenna — MIT Technology Review
Seeking to expand its business beyond electric vehicles, Tesla Motors will sell stationary batteries for residential, commercial, and utility use under a new brand, Tesla Energy.
Tesla is launching the home battery business partly because it’s already making vehicle batteries—and as a result it can benefit from the economies of scale that come from making both. Another reason is that the market for storage is expected to grow in concert with the use of solar power. Tesla needs both electric vehicles and solar power to boom if it hopes to fulfill the projected output from a vast $5 billion battery “gigafactory” it’s building in Nevada.
By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub
There’s something almost alchemical going on at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Scientists there have genetically transformed skin cells into heart cells and used them to 3D print mini-organs that beat just like your heart. Another darker organoid fused to a mini-heart mimics your liver.
The work, developed by Anthony Atala and his Wake Forest team for the “Body on a Chip” project, aims to simulate bodily systems by microfluidically linking up miniature organs—hearts, livers, blood vessels, and lungs—and testing new drug treatments and chemicals or studying the effects of viruses on them.
By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub
If you look closely enough, Earth has rings. NASA estimates there are some 500,000 pieces of space debris in orbit. Space junk, traveling up to ten times the speed of a bullet, endangers satellites and spacecraft—and it is very, very hard to remove. A team of scientists, however, think they have a way: Lasers.
A recent paper by Tokyo’s Riken institute proposes using a telescope on the International Space Station (ISS) to track small bits of space junk. A laser on the telescope would target and zap the junk, sending it crashing into the atmosphere, where it would vaporize—no longer a threat to humans or satellites. Read more
Posted in evolution, homo sapiens, robotics/AI | 1 Comment on Robotic EQ
Can an emotional component to artificial intelligence be a benefit?
Robots with passion! Emotional artificial intelligence! These concepts have been in books and movies lately. A recent example of this is the movie Ex Machina. Now, I’m not an AI expert, and cannot speak to the technological challenges of developing an intelligent machine, let alone an emotional one. I do however, know a bit about problem solving, and that does relate to both intelligence and emotions. It is this emotional component of problem solving that leads me to speculate on the potential implications to humanity if powerful AI’s were to have human emotions.
Why the question about emotions? In a roundabout way, it has to do with how we observe and judge intelligence. The popular way to measure intelligence in a computer is the Turing test. If it can fool a person through conversation, into thinking that the computer is a person, then it has human level intelligence. But we know that the Turing test by itself is insufficient to be a true intelligence test. Sounding human during dialog is not the primary method we use to gauge intelligence in other people or in other species. Problem solving seems to be a reliable test of intelligence either through IQ tests that involve problem solving, or through direct real world problem solving.
As an example of problem solving, we judge how intelligent a rat is by how fast it can navigate a maze to get to food. Let’s look at this in regards to the first few steps in problem solving.
Fundamental to any problem solving, is recognizing that a problem exists. In this example, the rat is hungry. It desires to be full. It can observe its current state (hungry) and compare it with its desired state (full) and determine that a problem exists. It is now motivated to take action.
Desire is intimately tied to emotion. Since it is desire that allows the determination of whether or not a problem exists, one can infer that emotions allow for the determination that a problem exists. Emotion is a motivator for action.
Once a problem is determined to exist, it is important to define the problem. In this simple example this step isn’t very complex. The rat desires food, and food is not present. It must find food, but its options for finding food are constrained by the confines of the maze. But the rat may have other things going on. It might be colder than it would prefer. This presents another problem. When confronted with multiple problems, the rat must prioritize which problem to address first. Problem prioritization again is in the realm of desires and emotions. It might be mildly unhappy with the temperature, but very unhappy with its hunger state. In this case one would expect that it will maximize its happiness by solving the food problem before curling up to solve its temperature problem. Emotions are again in play, driving behavior which we see as action.
The next steps in problem solving are to generate and implement a solution to the problem. In our rat example, it will most likely determine if this maze is similar to ones it has seen in the past, and try to run the maze as fast as it can to get to the food. Not a lot of emotion involved in these steps with the possible exception of happiness if it recognizes the maze. However, if we look at problems that people face, emotion is riddled in the process of developing and implementing solutions. In the real world environment, problem solving almost always involves working with other people. This is because they are either the cause of the problem, or are key to the problem’s solution, or both. These people have a great deal of emotions associated with them. Most problems require negation to solve. Negotiation by its nature is charged with emotion. To be effective in problem solving a person has to be able to interpret and understand the wants and desires (emotions) of others. This sounds a lot like empathy.
Now, let’s apply the emotional part of problem solving to artificial intelligence. The problem step of determining whether or not a problem exists doesn’t require emotion if the machine in question is a thermostat or a Roomba. A thermostat doesn’t have its own desired temperature to maintain. Its desired temperature is determined by a human and given to the thermostat. That human’s desires are a based on a combination of learned preferences from personal experience, and hardwired preferences based on millions of years of evolution. The thermostat is simply a tool.
Now the whole point behind an AI, especially an artificial general intelligence, is that it is not a thermostat. It is supposed to be intelligent. It must be able to problem solve in a real world environment that involves people. It has to be able to determine that problems exists and then prioritize those problems, without asking for a human to help it. It has to be able to socially interact with people. It must identify and understand their motivations and emotions in order to develop and implement solutions. It has to be able to make these choices which are based on desires, without the benefit of millions of years of evolution that shaped the desires that we have. If we want it to be able to truly pass for human level intelligence, it seems we’ll have to give it our best preferences and desires to start with.
A machine that cannot chose its goals, cannot change its goals. A machine without that choice, if given the goal of say maximizing pin production, will creatively and industriously attempt to convert the entire planet into pins. Such a machine cannot question instructions that are illegal or unethical. Here lies the dilemma. What is more dangerous, the risk that someone will program an AI that has no choice, to do bad things, or the risk that an AI will decide to do bad things on its own?
No doubt about it, this is a tough call. I’m sure some AIs will be built with minimal or no preferences with the intent that it will be simply a very smart tool. But without giving an AI a set of desires and preferences to start with that are comparable to those of humans, we will be interacting with a truly alien intelligence. I for one, would be happier with an AI that at least felt regret about killing someone, than I would be with an AI that didn’t.
Adam Rothstein | Motherboard
“In the city of the future, trains would rocket across overhead rails, airplanes would dive from the sky to land on the roof, and skyscrapers would stretch their sinewed limbs into the heavens to feel the hot pulse of radio waves beating across the planet. This artistic, but unbridled enthusiasm was the last century’s first expression of wholesale tech optimism.” Read more
by Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Mathematics and Science, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
When you are doing this picturing job, you will directly get close to Einstein’s heart. He only did not yet have this special sentinel available in 1907. Noether’s ultra-hard result of 1917 came 2 years in the wake of Einstein’s opus maximum that is being celebrated this year.
I need your kind help to improve on the following finding: “Noether’s Theorem + Einstein Equivalence Principle = c-global.” I have 5 steps to offer so far, the sixth would be your initiative.
(i) If true, this result amounts to a revolution in physics. For it removes an inconsistency that was reluctantly accepted by Einstein in 1907 in the absence of Noether’s theorem: the embarrassing conclusion that c is reduced downstairs in a constantly accelerating long rocketship in outer space described by special relativity. This drawback found in the equivalenve principle let Einstein fall silent on gravitation for 3 ½ years and retarded progress on general relativity afterwards. Two years in the latter’s wake came Emmy Noether’s “global conservation of angular momentum in nature.” Her formal result can be visualized geometrically:
Take a frictionless bicycle wheel suspended from its hub and lower it and pull it back up again in gravity.
Everything is pre-specified if this simple sentinel is pictured in the mind. Firstly, the rotation rate of this “clock” will go down reversibly like that of any other clock that is hauled downwards. Secondly, since angular momentum is conserved, the other two components besides rotation rate (mass and radius) cannot go both unchanged. It becomes a rewarding game to figure out what is bound to happen in this simple gedanken experiment.
(ii) The conserved angular momentum obeys a simple formula if the wheel has a constant horizontal (or vertical) orientation which orientation will be automatically preserved. The one-liner is given as Eq. (8.32) in Tipler’s big textbook, for example, but Madame du Chatelet could already have written it down in the 18th century:
L = ω m r^2
Since this expression is hard to remember by heart, the dialect word L’hombre (Spanish for “man”) can be helpful as a bridge. L is the conserved angular momentum, ω is the rotation rate, m the mass and r the radius of our horizontally rotating frictionless bicycle wheel.
If ω is halved (as is approximately valid on the surface of a neutron star with its almost unit-redshift): what about m and r , the two other components of the conserved L down there?
I propose that m is halved and r is doubled. The halved mass is the key. It follows from the halved frequency (and hence energy) of any photon emitted down there. These photons look non-reduced in their frequency locally. They remain locally transformable as usual into massive particles in accordance with quantum mechanics’ creation and annihilation operators. Thus if a sufficiently sturdy PET scan could be lowered onto the neutron star, it would still work there. The locally normal-appearing half-mass atoms possess a doubled Bohr radius (and hence size) according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Both facts, taken together, yield L’ = ½ ω ½ m (2r)^2 = L , in conformity with the above equation.
But this result of a doubled radius r of the halved-rotation-speed wheel downstairs, is ostensibly at variance with a well-known fact implicit in the theory which underlies the constantly accelerating Einstein rocketship: special relativity. The latter requires that light rays that connect points on a stationary solid object with the same points on the same object while the latter is moving away at constant orientation, travel along parallel lines. This railway tracks principle of special relativity demands that the doubled radius of the horizontally rotating wheel found valid downstairs must be optically masked when viewed from above. So our wheel indeed looks non-enlarged from above even though its radius r has doubled!
(iii) To check on this, let your Noether wheel for once rotate vertically rather than horizontall. Then the doubled radius will remain optically masked in the horizontal direction, but not so in the vertical direction: You now get a 2:1 vertical ellipse on the neutron star when looking down on the wheel from above.
The optical contraction of all horizontal directions, valid downstairs on our wheel, implies that when you look down from above, transversally moving light will be seen to “creep” at half speed on the surface of the Neutron star. This is what Einstein effectively found in 1907. Thus everything appears to be consistent.
But: does light really “creep” down there? We see that the answer is no. For the distance travelled downstairs is doubled compared to above as the optically compressed wheel teaches us. Hence c remains constant in spite of its apparent creeping. This new information was unavailable in 1907 owing to the absence of the Noether-wheel.
The newly retrieved global constancy of c in the equivalence principle comes not really as a surprise since the equivalence principle is based on special relativity with its constant c. This fact explains why Einstein fell silent on gravitation for more thanthree years after feeling forced to conclude that c is non-constant in the equivalence principle.
(iv) The retrieved globally constant c has an important implication: The vertical distance to the surface of the neutron star has increased. That is, the indentation into the curved “cloth of spacetime” has deepened. In other words, the famous empirical Shapiro-time-delay is complemented by a matching new Shapiro space dilation.
The stronger the gravitational pull, the deeper the trough. Therefore, the new globally constant c implies that the distance down to the “horizon” (surface) of a black hole is as infinite from above as the temporal distance for light going down or coming up is known to be since Oppenheimer and Snyder’s 1939 paper.
Hence black holes are never finished in finite outer time! At this point, I hear you ask: But is it not a well-known fact that an astronaut can fall onto (and into) a stellar black hole in finite time, as Oppenheimer and Snyder showed and as we all could witness in Kip Thorne’s carefully researched science fiction blockbuster movie Interstellar?
(v) The answer is a final Noetherian point: all clocks of the falling astronaut get infinitely slowed eventually, so that infinitely much outer time has elapsed on her to be hoped-for arrival down there, provided the universe will still exist by then. As to our lowered wheel, its rotation rate becomes zero on the horizon while the tangential velocity of the rim stays invariant as the wheel’s diameter approaches — invisibly-to-above — infinity (Sanayei effect).
My dear readers: what did we learn from points (i) to (v)? The Noether wheel teaches us several new things:
First, there exists no Hawking radiation by virtue of the new infinite distance of the horizon valid from without.
Second, general relativity must be re-scaled so that it no longer masks the global–c constraint. The Noether wheel thus entails that a new simpler-appearing, re-scaled version of general relativity exists – predictably without any remaining incompatibility with quantum mechanics. The holy grail of unification is therefore within reach: a bonanza for young physicists in the making.
Third, the often heard claim that angular momentum were conserved in general relativity in its present form is falsified by the example of the Noether wheel because the latter brings-in a previously lacking, in the limit of the horizon unbounded, size change as an intrinsic element of the theory.
Am I allowed to add a Footnote to this bonanza?
The recaptured c–global forms an apparently non-ignorable argument in favor of the renewal of a 7 years old safety report: specifically the so-called “LSAG” of the famous LHC–experiment near Geneva. The latter experiment is apart from its other goals designed with the aim in mind to produce miniature black holes down on earth. The Noether wheel’s c–global implies as we saw that black holes cannot Hawking evaporate since nothing can disappear behind a not yet existing horizon. The miniature black holes will rather grow exponentially inside earth in accord with a conference paper published in 2008.
This “dark implication” of the Noether wheel is the reason why I so publicly address you – the young generation – on Lifeboat today: because time is pressing. You may know that CERN has announced to double its (unprecedented in the history of the universe) almost stationary center-of-mass collision energy on a privileged celestial body (earth) in the hope to create Hawking-evaporating black holes on it. As we saw, such pre-Noetherian collision experiments are now scientifically outdated.
Not only a blemish, though: In light of the above Noether-wheel based result of c-global, any attempt at producing miniature black holes down on earth constitutes a “crime against humanity” if you understand what I mean. Are you – the youngest and therefore most open-minded citizens of our planet – able to provide help according to your own judgment? That is, can you perhaps think of a good idea how to persuade CERN to kindly respond to the Noether-based criticism of their announced doubling of their symmetric collision energy? CERN announced to start symmetric collisions in early June. And it in addition decided to non-renew its 7 years old — pre-Noetherian — Safety Report. Every person of course readily understands that it is humanly impossible to respond quickly to surprise evidence (like that of an iceberg named Noether being headed on a collision course) when you are the captain of an only slowly maneuverable ocean liner. Hence my question to you, dear young readers: Do you have any idea how the spotted iceberg can be brought to the attention of the captain?
I have a constructive proposal in mind: There is a female captain elected to take office next year. Would it make sense to try and contact her? Perhaps she sees – besides her being duty-bound – a way to call for a “brief thinking pause devoted to evaluating a formal Noetherian result” before the announced start of collisions in June gets its final okay? Who amongst you would support this kind request?
Quoted: “I recall reading somewhere that “Ethereum is to Bitcoin as an iPhone is to a calculator”, which is a pretty good analogy. Bitcoin proved to us that it was possible to keep a tamper-proof system synchronised across the globe. There really is no reason the same system can’t be applied to other problems in the same way we apply normal computers to them.
Ethereum is a single computer spread out over the internet, processing the information we all feed it together. I guess you could call it a ‘shared consciousness’ if you wanted to.
In this computer, information cannot be suppressed. In this computer, ideas and trust rule. Work and reputation are visible and independently verifiable. Anyone can contribute and everyone is automatically safe. Collaboration will overcome privatisation as people work together to build an open network of ideas contributing to the betterment of us all. They are calling it internet 3.0. And though web 2.0 was a thing in some ways, I think we’ll look back at everything up until this point as the first internet. The internet we built by adapting old communication lines into new ways of communicating. The internet we built when we were still used to centralising responsibility for things.”
Read the article here > http://pospi.spadgos.com/2014/11/30/injustice-ethereum-and-t…naissance/
