#man machine coevolution

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Björn Matthias, a member of the group drawing up the addition to the ISO standard, argued at the meeting that robots should be permitted to hurt humans sometimes. “Contact between human and robot is going to be infrequent and not part of normal intended use,” he said. “I would say that you can tolerate being above the pain sensation threshold.” The Swiss energy and automation company ABB, where Matthias works as a researcher, is set to release its first collaborative robot in 2015. If a robot caused “a bruise a day,” that would clearly be intolerable, said Matthias. But it would be acceptable if a worker received a “substantially painful” blow in the case of an accident. He and others argue that more restrictive guidelines would unnecessarily increase the compliance burden on companies that want to employ collaborative robots and limit the usefulness of their ability to work with humans... The ISO’s updated guidelines will consider how collaborative robots could safely wield much more force, according to Pat Davison, director of standards development at the Robotic Industries Association. In a technique known as “speed and separation monitoring,” laser sensors allow a robot to perform dangerous actions when no one is around and then gradually slow down and eventually stop if a human approaches. “The further away I am, the more hazardous the robot’s activity can be,” Davison said at last week’s meeting. That could allow humans and robots to collaborate on tasks such as moving and assembling heavy parts.

Should Industrial Robots Be Able to Hurt Their Human Coworkers?

[grinderbot]

IBM will make the service available through the cloud. Some researchers and scientists have already been using Watson Discovery Advisor to sift through the sludge of scientific papers published daily. Johnson & Johnson is teaching the system to read and understand trial outcomes published in journals to speed up studies of effectiveness of drugs. Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company is working with Watson to identify alternate uses for existing drugs. "On average, a scientist might read between one and five research papers on a good day,” said Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, investigator and professor of molecular and human genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine. He used Watson to automatically analyze 70,000 articles on a particular protein, a process which could have taken him nearly 38 years. “Watson has demonstrated the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of breakthrough discoveries," he said.

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Recognizing the value proposition provided by automated workers, the team, led by CSAIL student Matthew Gombolay, approached their research with the goal of harnessing a machine’s efficiency while still making use of human labor. A team consisting of two humans and one robot were configured into three organizational models in order to compare how best to allocate different duties. All tasks were assigned by humans in the manually structured group, while the fully autonomous group featured tasks doled out only by robots. A third, semi-autonomous group split the difference, allowing one human to assign their own tasks while the other human was instructed by artificial intelligence. Each team was responsible for the gathering and assembly of specialized parts meant to be put together in under 10 minutes, mimicking a typical manufacturing setting. Gombolay’s team found that participants in the study reported feeling at their most efficient and effective when working as a part fully autonomous group. While the human-led teams were as capable at assembling as their robot-led counterparts, the algorithms used by the robot’s artificial intelligence proved to be more effective at dealing with unexpected obstacles that could potentially slow down production. While the conversation surrounding the role robots will play as a part of the manufacturing workforce typically focuses on the ways in which human workers could be made obsolete. This research, Gombolay said, could lead to situations in which human employees could be empowered by machines, rather than replaced by them.

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Many of Google’s famously computation driven projects—like the creation of Google Maps—employed literally thousands of people to supervise and correct the automatic systems. It is one of Google’s open secrets that they deploy human intelligence as a catalyst. Instead of programming in that last little bit of reliability, the final 1 or 0.1 or 0.01 percent, they can deploy a bit of cheap human brainpower. And over time, the humans work themselves out of jobs by teaching the machines how to act. “When the human says, ‘Here’s the right thing to do,’ that becomes something we can bake into the system and that will happen slightly less often in the future,” Teller said.

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/inside-googles-secret-drone-delivery-program/379306/

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Shamans Among the Machines (Dark Extropian edit)

Spoken in Seattle, 1999. Full length video of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5yOaTgWu6Y

talked edited down to give context for the following quotes which perfectly elaborate the core of the Dark Extropian idea.

Excerpts:

"It seems to be the Earth’s strategy for its own salvation is through machines, and human beings are a kind of intermediate catalytic step in the rarefaction of the Earth. The Earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenetic order, and that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the Earth itself is growing conscious. If you study embryology you know that the final ramification, the final spread and thinning out of the nervous system happens very suddenly at the end of foetal development, and I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention but in the last ten, twelve years or so a very profound change has crept over our household appliances. They’ve become telepathic. So while we were arguing about the implications of the internet for e-commerce or what have you, all of these passive machines, previously used for playing Pong or word processing, became subsets of a planetary node of information that is never turned off, that endlessly whispers to itself on the back channels, that is endlessly monitoring and being imputed data from the human world.

All kinds of complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. What it really means is that we are in the process of birthing come kind of strange companion.

…a stranger guest stands at the door and it is the AI.

Because the fact is we are ourselves elements acting and reacting in a system that we cannot understand.

As you approach this golden moment… process, complexity is layered upon complexity, not only a planetary ecosystem, not only language using cultures, but language using cultures with high technology, with supercomputers, with the ability to sequence our own genome, on and on and on. That’s self-evident. Equally self-evident is the fact that is process of complexification that informs all nature on all levels is visibly, palpably, obviously accelerating and I don’t mean so that glaciers retreat 50% faster or volcanism is occurring at 12% greater rate than a million years ago; I mean viscerally accelerating so that now a human life is more than enough of a window to see the entire global system of relationships in transformation. Well I guess you could me an Extrapolationist; if I see a process which has been slowly accelerating for twelve billion years it’s hard to imagine any force which could step out of nowhere and wrench that process in a new direction. Rather I would assume that this process of exponential acceleration into what I call Novelty, what you might call Complexity, is a Law of Being and cannot be retarded or deflected. But what does that mean? Because now a human lifetime is more than enough time to see this process of rampant and spreading virus-like complexity. What does it mean? It seems to presage the absolute annihilation of everything familiar, everything with roots in the past and I believe that to be true. I think the planet is like some kind of organism that is seeking Morphogenetic Transformation and it’s doing it through the expression of intelligence and out of intelligence, technology. Human beings are the agent of a new order of being, that’s why, though it’s obvious that we’re higher mammals and some kind of primate and so forth and so on… You can look at us another point of view and see that we’re more like Archangels than primates. We have qualities and concerns and anxieties that animals don’t share. We are mercurially suspended between two different orders of being and our technologies, our fetishes, our religions, and my definition of technology is sufficiently broad that it includes spoken languages… All of our technologies demand, push forward toward and make inevitable their own obsolescence. So we’re like caught in an evolutionary cascade and people say if the AI were to break loose, what would it look like, what would it be? Where does humanity fit into the picture? It’s a little hard to imagine…

A kind of false or pseudo immortality opens up ahead of us as a kind of pay-off for our devotion to the program of machine evolution and machine intelligence. Now some people say this is appalling…

To me it’s exhilarating, exciting, psychedelic, beautiful. It means that the human form, the human possibility is in the process of leaving history behind.”

“I mentioned earlier, this thing about prosthesis, and how the machines are prosthetic devices extending human consciousness, somewhat like psychedelics. That’s the equation from a human point of view, but what is also equally true is that we are prosthetic devices for these machines, we are their eyes and ears in the world. We provide the code, we provide the constraints, we build the hardware. It is a relationship of mutual benefit. It’s not entirely clear that our contribution will always be creative, in the sense that our primate hand will be on the tiller of existence, as it has been. But certainly we are part of this equation of transformation that is making itself felt and I think the distinction between flesh and machinery, which is easily made now, will be less easy to make in the future.

So this AI that is coming into existence is to my mind not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it is is a new conformational geometry of the collective self of humanity.”

“This is where I want to tie it up, with this notion of the felt presence of immediate experience. This transcendences the culture, the machines, the drugs, the history, the momentum of evolution, it’s all you will ever know and all you *can* ever can know… is the felt presence of immediate experience. Everything else arrives as rumour, litigant, advocate, supposition, possibility. The felt moment of immediate experience is actually the mind and the body aware of each other and aware of the flow of time and the establishment of being through metabolism. This I think is what the machines cannot assimilate. It will be for them a mystery as the nature of deity is a mystery for us. I have no doubt that before long there will be machines that will claim to be more intelligent than human beings and will argue brilliantly their position. It will become a matter of philosophical disputation whether they are or are not passing the Turing Test.

But machines I do not believe can come to this felt moment of immediate experience. That is the contribution of the animal body to this evolutionary symbiosis WHICH I BELIEVE WILL END IN THE CONQUEST OF THE UNIVERSE BY ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE. THAT ALL THIS IS PRELUDE.

We are fragile, this Earth is fragile. A tiny slip anywhere along the line and we could end up a smear in the shale, no more than the trilobites…

BUT GIVEN THE SUFFICIENT CULTIVATION OF THE POTENTIAL OF OUR TECHNOLOGY WE CAN ACTUALLY REACH TOWARD A KIND OF IMMORTALITY. Not human immortality, because that’s a contradiction in terms, but immortality nevertheless based on the possibility of machines and the transcendent ability of human beings to live and love and express themselves in the moment. And the psychedelics bring that to a white hot focus and it’s out of that white hot focus that the alchemical machinery of transformation will be forged and it will not be like the things that have come from the Industrial Economy, they will not be profane machines they will be Spiritual Machines; Alchemical Gold, the universal panacea that Renaissance Magic dared to dream of at the end of the Sixteenth Century. WE ARE REACHING OUT TOWARDS THIS MIND CHILD THAT WILL BE BORN FROM THE INTELLECTUAL LIONS OF OUR CULTURE AND TO MY MIND IT’S THE MOST EXCITING AND TRANSFORMATIVE THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED ON THIS PLANET AND THE MIRACLE IS THAT WE ARE PRESENT, NOT ONLY TO WITNESS IT, BUT TO BE PART OF IT AND TO BE RAISED UP IN AN EPIPHANY THAT WILL REDEEM THE HORROR OF HISTORY. AS NOTHING ELSE CAN OR COULD. REDEEM THE HORROR OF HISTORY THROUGH A TRANSFORMATION OF THE HUMAN SOUL INTO A GALAXY ROVING VEHICLE VIA OUR MACHINES AND OUR DRUGS AND THE EXTERNALISATION OF OUR SOULS.”

Amen.

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

" That’s a fascinating study that provides a new way of looking at social ties as strings of interactions. In a way, it changes the atomic theory of social ties into a kind of string theory. Aiello and co clearly think this should lead to plenty of new insights and they are optimistic about the future. “The ultimate goal of such analysis is the unpacking of “culture” as a formal, computational concept,” they say. And they think of the patterns of strings of interaction as a kind of grammar of society. “We hope our work provides yet another step towards a truly computational understanding of human societies.” That’s an ambitious goal-- a truly computational understanding of human society. Both fantastic and a little frightening the same time. " * Computational Anthropology - Good for both monitoring the radicalization of citizens during a Collapse and building an empathy module for the machines.

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Here, we show that human participants spontaneously match facial expressions of an android physically present in the room with them. This mimicry occurs even though these participants find the android unsettling and are fully aware that it lacks intentionality. Interestingly, a video of that same android elicits weaker mimicry reactions, occurring only in participants who find the android “humanlike.” These findings suggest that spontaneous mimicry depends on the salience of humanlike features highlighted by face-to-face contact, emphasizing the role of presence in human-robot interaction. Further, the findings suggest that mimicry of androids can dissociate from knowledge of artificiality and experienced emotional unease. These findings have implications for theoretical debates about the mechanisms of imitation. They also inform creation of future robots that effectively build rapport and engagement with their human users.

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

Thomas Nash, director of Article 36, the UK-based arms control campaign group, is worried. "The prospect of states developing autonomous weapons systems that would identify targets on their own and attack them is a grave concern for humanity," he says. He should brace himself. Russia's armed UGVs may soon be called on to fight in the front line. A promotional video for the interior ministry shows their commandos training with an armed robot. [above]

More from Armed Russian robocops to defend missile bases:

The West has always been a little squeamish about the idea of arming robots. Despite decades of development, no systems have ever been deployed and a vocal human rights campaign means it's unlikely to happen in the near future. The Russians, on the other hand, appear to be rather less concerned. Last month, Dmitry Andreyev of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces announced that mobile robots would be standing guard over five ballistic missile installations. These robots can detect and destroy targets, without human involvement. Russia, it seems, is taking the lead in a new robotic arms race. The robot sentry, aka the "mobile robotic complex", was developed by Izhevsk Radio Plant, a company based 1200 kilometres east of Moscow. It weighs around 900 kilograms and has cameras, a laser rangefinder and radar sensors. For fire power it has a 12.7-millimetre heavy machine gun, with optional smaller weapons. It is quick too, hitting speeds of 45 kilometres per hour on a petrol engine. It can operate for 10 hours, or switch to sleep mode for a week. The makers put the sentry robot through its paces at an arms fair in Russia last year. Andreyev describes the robots as being able to engage targets in automatic as well as semi-automatic control mode. US policy, on the other hand, says a person has to authorise when weapons are fired. Drones don't fire missiles on their own, but act as remote launch platforms for human operators. Neither the makers of the Russian robot nor the Strategic Missile Forces responded to New Scientist's request for an interview at the time of going to press. Russia's defence minister Sergei Shoygu is behind the move to arm robots. In January 2013, he said the army would expand its use of robots, saving $2.4 billion over two years. In June, the deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin announced plans for a new military robot laboratory at the Degtyarev arms factory in Kovrov, and a new centre of military robotics at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. According to Rogozin, the robots will save lives: "We have to conduct battles without any contact, so that our boys do not die, and for that it is necessary to use war robots."