Saturday, May 03, 2003

A-Life: The Rise Of The Machines.   (Sci-Fi Today)   Links to a trio of articles in Sci-Fi Today on robot development efforts, past and future. First up is a Newsweek excerpt from the book "GEARHEADS: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports" by Brad Stone. Then there is an article about a military contract to program a battalion of 120 already constructed military robots with a swarm intelligence software upgrade to enable them to mimic the organized behavior of insects. Finally a rather technical paper about the Hybrot, a small robot that moves about using the brain signals of a rat. Science fiction will have to work hard to top some of these real world occurrences. 11:59:31 PM    comment [] A-Life: Recent Advance in Cognitive Systems   The European Commission has identified Cognitive Systems as one of the priorities for the new generation of research projects to be developed from 2003 to 2008. The stated objective is to construct physically instantiated or embodied systems that can perceive, understand (the semantics of information conveyed through their perceptual input) and interact with their environment, and evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-(situation and task) specific knowledge.   (from the introduction to this special issue, "Towards an Integration of Symbolic and Sensor-Motor Intelligence?")   ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The April 2003 issue is dedicated to research about cognitive systems. It contains no less than 21 articles which are all available online.   This link comes from Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends weblog, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to technology watchers. He has also posted a page entitled "A Gallery of Cognitive Systems" which contains a selection of stories, including abstracts and illustrations. 11:58:23 PM    comment [] SOCIETY: Intelligent Apes, Foolish Choices   (Jared Diamond)   “…the Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether — if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now — people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.”     (SOURCE: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?, edge.org) The author, Jared Diamond, wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. He is working on a new book, Ecocide, for publication in 2004. The edge.org link has video of a speech given by the author. Thanks to /. for the link. 11:56:25 PM    comment [] TECH: Intelligent Apes, Foolish Choices II   (Steve Talbott)   “You can't read the futuristic scenarios and personal hopes of the re-engineers of humanity without being struck by the utter childishness of it all. Genetic modifications that will save us from the necessity of bodily excretion; nano-contrived plants that look exactly like orchids but can grow in frigid climes; robots that wait on us like slaves; a cyber-nano- genetically engineered "elite race of people who are smart, agile, and disease-resistant"; nanobot swarms able to wander the human bloodstream and keep us eternally healthy; technological horns of plenty that will convert every "desolate" village into "a Garden of Eden, with widescreen TVs and cappuccino machines for all"....and so on ad infinitum.   And many of these visions come from the same people who delight in ridiculing the "childish hopes" of the traditionally religious!”   (SOURCE: ME AND MY DOUBLE HELIXES, Netfuture #144) The article are Talbott’s notes on Bill McKibben’s new book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. There is an excert from the book here. Talbott’s Netfuture newsletter is an always thoughtful take on the responsible use and management of technology. 11:55:11 PM    comment [] TECH: Computer Risks   “Malfunctions caused by bizarre and frustrating glitches are becoming harder and harder to escape now that software controls everything from stoves to cell phones, trains, cars and power plants. Yet computer code could be a lot more reliable - if only the industry were more willing to make it so, experts say. And many believe it would help if software makers were held accountable for sloppy programming. <> <> <> Last year, a study commissioned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that software errors cost the U.S. economy about $59.5 billion annually, or about 0.6 percent of the gross domestic product. More than half the costs are borne by software users, the rest by developers and vendors.”   (SOURCE: Spread of Buggy Software Raises Questions, Washington Post)   There are some links at the end of the article, including one to Peter Neuman’s Computer Risks forum, the latest issue of which is here. Thanks to the Smart Mobs weblog for the heads up. 11:53:19 PM    comment [] Now Playing: Steve Roach and Byron Metcalfe: The Serpent's Lair (2000, Projekt Records) Tonight's blogging soundtrack. Dark, throbbing ambient/tribal soundscapes that take me on journeys into the heart of the pulsing now, beyond the ring pass not of consensus reality and into the realm where spirit dwells, and all things become possible. 10:22:40 PM    comment []

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