Tag Archives: epic

#439100 Video Friday: Robotic Eyeball Camera

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

What if seeing devices looked like us? Eyecam is a prototype exploring the potential future design of sensing devices. Eyecam is a webcam shaped like a human eye that can see, blink, look around and observe us.

And it's open source, so you can build your own!

[ Eyecam ]

Looks like Festo will be turning some of its bionic robots into educational kits, which is a pretty cool idea.

[ Bionics4Education ]

Underwater soft robots are challenging to model and control because of their high degrees of freedom and their intricate coupling with water. In this paper, we present a method that leverages the recent development in differentiable simulation coupled with a differentiable, analytical hydrodynamic model to assist with the modeling and control of an underwater soft robot. We apply this method to Starfish, a customized soft robot design that is easy to fabricate and intuitive to manipulate.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

Rainbow Robotics, the company who made HUBO, has a new collaborative robot arm.

[ Rainbow Robotics ]

Thanks Fan!

We develop an integrated robotic platform for advanced collaborative robots and demonstrates an application of multiple robots collaboratively transporting an object to different positions in a factory environment. The proposed platform integrates a drone, a mobile manipulator robot, and a dual-arm robot to work autonomously, while also collaborating with a human worker. The platform also demonstrates the potential of a novel manufacturing process, which incorporates adaptive and collaborative intelligence to improve the efficiency of mass customization for the factory of the future.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

In Sevastopol State University the team of the Laboratory of Underwater Robotics and Control Systems and Research and Production Association “Android Technika” performed tests of an underwater anropomorphic manipulator robot.

[ Sevastopol State ]

Thanks Fan!

Taiwanese company TCI Gene created a COVID test system based on their fully automated and enclosed gene testing machine QVS-96S. The system includes two ABB robots and carries out 1800 tests per day, operating 24/7. Every hour 96 virus samples tests are made with an accuracy of 99.99%.

[ ABB ]

A short video showing how a Halodi Robotics can be used in a commercial guarding application.

[ Halodi ]

During the past five years, under the NASA Early Space Innovations program, we have been developing new design optimization methods for underactuated robot hands, aiming to achieve versatile manipulation in highly constrained environments. We have prototyped hands for NASA’s Astrobee robot, an in-orbit assistive free flyer for the International Space Station.

[ ROAM Lab ]

The new, improved OTTO 1500 is a workhorse AMR designed to move heavy payloads through demanding environments faster than any other AMR on the market, with zero compromise to safety.

[ ROAM Lab ]

Very, very high performance sensing and actuation to pull this off.

[ Ishikawa Group ]

We introduce a conversational social robot designed for long-term in-home use to help with loneliness. We present a novel robot behavior design to have simple self-reflection conversations with people to improve wellness, while still being feasible, deployable, and safe.

[ HCI Lab ]

We are one of the 5 winners of the Start-up Challenge. This video illustrates what we achieved during the Swisscom 5G exploration week. Our proof-of-concept tele-excavation system is composed of a Menzi Muck M545 walking excavator automated & customized by Robotic Systems Lab and IBEX motion platform as the operator station. The operator and remote machine are connected for the first time via a 5G network infrastructure which was brought to our test field by Swisscom.

[ RSL ]

This video shows LOLA balancing on different terrain when being pushed in different directions. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain (hard ground is assumed).

[ TUM ]

Autonomous driving when you cannot see the road at all because it's buried in snow is some serious autonomous driving.

[ Norlab ]

A hierarchical and robust framework for learning bipedal locomotion is presented and successfully implemented on the 3D biped robot Digit. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by successfully transferring the learned policy in simulation to the Digit robot hardware, realizing sustained walking gaits under external force disturbances and challenging terrains not included during the training process.

[ OSU ]

This is a video summary of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue's deployments under the direction of emergency response agencies to more than 30 disasters in five countries from 2001 (9/11 World Trade Center) to 2018 (Hurricane Michael). It includes the first use of ground robots for a disaster (WTC, 2001), the first use of small unmanned aerial systems (Hurricane Katrina 2005), and the first use of water surface vehicles (Hurricane Wilma, 2005).

[ CRASAR ]

In March, a team from the Oxford Robotics Institute collected a week of epic off-road driving data, as part of the Sense-Assess-eXplain (SAX) project.

[ Oxford Robotics ]

As a part of the AAAI 2021 Spring Symposium Series, HEBI Robotics was invited to present an Industry Talk on the symposium's topic: Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild. Included in this presentation was a short case study on one of our upcoming mobile robots that is being designed to successfully navigate unstructured environments where today's robots struggle.

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Hardik!

This Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar is from Chad Jenkins at the University of Michigan, on “Semantic Robot Programming… and Maybe Making the World a Better Place.”

I will present our efforts towards accessible and general methods of robot programming from the demonstrations of human users. Our recent work has focused on Semantic Robot Programming (SRP), a declarative paradigm for robot programming by demonstration that builds on semantic mapping. In contrast to procedural methods for motion imitation in configuration space, SRP is suited to generalize user demonstrations of goal scenes in workspace, such as for manipulation in cluttered environments. SRP extends our efforts to crowdsource robot learning from demonstration at scale through messaging protocols suited to web/cloud robotics. With such scaling of robotics in mind, prospects for cultivating both equal opportunity and technological excellence will be discussed in the context of broadening and strengthening Title IX and Title VI.

[ UMD ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439070 Are Digital Humans the Next Step in ...

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ’s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables the avatar to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to craft a response. Before the avatar utters a word, specific emotions and facial expressions are encoded within the response.

UneeQ may be part of a larger trend towards humanizing computing. ObEN’s digital avatars serve as virtual identities for celebrities, influencers, gaming characters, and other entities in the media and entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Soul Machines is taking a more biological approach, with a “digital brain” that simulates aspects of the human brain to modulate the emotions “felt” and “expressed” by its “digital people.” Amelia is employing a similar methodology in building its “digital employees.” It emulates parts of the brain involved with memory to respond to queries and, with each interaction, learns to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences.

Shiwali Mohan, an AI systems scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, is skeptical of these digital beings. “They’re humanlike in their looks and the way they sound, but that in itself is not being human,” she says. “Being human is also how you think, how you approach problems, and how you break them down; and that takes a lot of algorithmic design. Designing for human-level intelligence is a different endeavor than designing graphics that behave like humans. If you think about the problems we’re trying to design these avatars for, we might not need something that looks like a human—it may not even be the right solution path.”

And even if these avatars appear near-human, they still evoke an uncanny valley feeling. “If something looks like a human, we have high expectations of them, but they might behave differently in ways that humans just instinctively know how other humans react. These differences give rise to the uncanny valley feeling,” says Mohan.

Yet the demand is there, with Amelia seeing high adoption of its digital employees across the financial, health care, and retail sectors. “We find that banks and insurance companies, which are so risk-averse, are leading the adoption of such disruptive technologies because they understand that the risk of non-adoption is much greater than the risk of early adoption,” says Chetan Dube, Amelia’s CEO. “Unless they innovate their business models and make them much more efficient digitally, they might be left behind.” Dube adds that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital employees in health care and retail as well.

Amelia, Soul Machines, and UneeQ are taking their digital beings a step further, enabling organizations to create avatars themselves using low-code or no-code platforms: Digital Employee Builder for Amelia, Creator for UneeQ, and Digital DNA Studio for Soul Machines. Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by Epic Games, is doing the same with MetaHuman Creator, a tool that allows anyone to create photorealistic digital humans. “The biggest motivation for Digital Employee Builder is to democratize AI,” Dube says.

Mohan is cautious about this approach. “AI has problems with bias creeping in from data sets and into the way it speaks. The AI community is still trying to figure out how to measure and counter that bias,” she says. “[Companies] have to have an AI expert on board that can recommend the right things to build for.”

Despite being wary of the technology, Mohan supports the purpose behind these virtual beings and is optimistic about where they’re headed. “We do need these tools that support humans in different kinds of things. I think the vision is the pro, and I’m behind that vision,” she says. “As we develop more sophisticated AI technology, we would then have to implement novel ways of interacting with that technology. Hopefully, all of that is designed to support humans in their goals.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437892 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

ENVIRONMENT
Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth
Stephanie Pappas | Scientific American
“Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on Earth. Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet.”

SPACE
So, It Turns Out SpaceX Is Pretty Good at Rocketing
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“As the Sun sank toward the South Texas horizon, a fantastical-looking spaceship rose into the reddening sky. It was, in a word, epic. …This was one heck of a test-flight that addressed a number of unknowns about Starship, which is the upper stage of SpaceX’s new launch system and may one day land humans on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Tiny Four-Bit Computers Are All You Need to Train AI
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“The work…could increase the speed and cut the energy costs needed to train deep learning by more than sevenfold. It could also make training powerful AI models possible on smartphones and other small devices, which would improve privacy by helping to keep personal data on a local device. And it would make the process more accessible to researchers outside big, resource-rich tech companies.”

ENERGY
Did Quantum Scape Just Solve a 40-Year-Old Battery Problem?
Daniel Oberhaus | Wired
“[The properties of solid state batteries] would send…energy density through the roof, enable ultra-fast charging, and would eliminate the risk of battery fires. But for the past 40 years, no one has been able to make a solid-state battery that delivers on this promise—until earlier this year, when a secretive startup called QuantumScape claimed to have solved the problem. Now it has the data to prove it.”

ROBOTICS
Hyundai Buys Boston Dynamics for Nearly $1 Billion. Now What?
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“I hope that Boston Dynamics is unique enough that the kinds of rules that normally apply to robotics companies (or companies in general) can be set aside, at least somewhat, but I also worry that what made Boston Dynamics great was the explicit funding for the kinds of radical ideas that eventually resulted in robots like Atlas and Spot. Can Hyundai continue giving Boston Dynamics the support and freedom that they need to keep doing the kinds of things that have made them legendary? I certainly hope so.”

BIOTECH
CRISPR and Another Genetic Strategy Fix Cell Defects in Two Common Blood Disorders
Jocelyn Kaiser | Science
“It is a double milestone: new evidence that cures are possible for many people born with sickle cell disease and another serious blood disorder, beta-thalassemia, and a first for the genome editor CRISPR. Today, in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and tomorrow at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting, teams report that two strategies for directly fixing malfunctioning blood cells have dramatically improved the health of a handful of people with these genetic diseases.”

ETHICS
The Dark Side of Big Tech’s Funding for AI Research
Tom Simonite | Wired
“Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google is a powerful reminder of how thoroughly companies dominate the field, with the biggest computers and the most resources. …[Meredith] Whittaker of AI Now says properly probing the societal effects of AI is fundamentally incompatible with corporate labs. ‘That kind of research that looks at the power and politics of AI is and must be inherently adversarial to the firms that are profiting from this technology.’i”

Image credit: Karsten Winegeart / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437709 iRobot Announces Major Software Update, ...

Since the release of the very first Roomba in 2002, iRobot’s long-term goal has been to deliver cleaner floors in a way that’s effortless and invisible. Which sounds pretty great, right? And arguably, iRobot has managed to do exactly this, with its most recent generation of robot vacuums that make their own maps and empty their own dustbins. For those of us who trust our robots, this is awesome, but iRobot has gradually been realizing that many Roomba users either don’t want this level of autonomy, or aren’t ready for it.

Today, iRobot is announcing a major new update to its app that represents a significant shift of its overall approach to home robot autonomy. Humans are being brought back into the loop through software that tries to learn when, where, and how you clean so that your Roomba can adapt itself to your life rather than the other way around.

To understand why this is such a shift for iRobot, let’s take a very brief look back at how the Roomba interface has evolved over the last couple of decades. The first generation of Roomba had three buttons on it that allowed (or required) the user to select whether the room being vacuumed was small or medium or large in size. iRobot ditched that system one generation later, replacing the room size buttons with one single “clean” button. Programmable scheduling meant that users no longer needed to push any buttons at all, and with Roombas able to find their way back to their docking stations, all you needed to do was empty the dustbin. And with the most recent few generations (the S and i series), the dustbin emptying is also done for you, reducing direct interaction with the robot to once a month or less.

Image: iRobot

iRobot CEO Colin Angle believes that working toward more intelligent human-robot collaboration is “the brave new frontier” of AI. “This whole journey has been earning the right to take this next step, because a robot can’t be responsive if it’s incompetent,” he says. “But thinking that autonomy was the destination was where I was just completely wrong.”

The point that the top-end Roombas are at now reflects a goal that iRobot has been working toward since 2002: With autonomy, scheduling, and the clean base to empty the bin, you can set up your Roomba to vacuum when you’re not home, giving you cleaner floors every single day without you even being aware that the Roomba is hard at work while you’re out. It’s not just hands-off, it’s brain-off. No noise, no fuss, just things being cleaner thanks to the efforts of a robot that does its best to be invisible to you. Personally, I’ve been completely sold on this idea for home robots, and iRobot CEO Colin Angle was as well.

“I probably told you that the perfect Roomba is the Roomba that you never see, you never touch, you just come home everyday and it’s done the right thing,” Angle told us. “But customers don’t want that—they want to be able to control what the robot does. We started to hear this a couple years ago, and it took a while before it sunk in, but it made sense.”

How? Angle compares it to having a human come into your house to clean, but you weren’t allowed to tell them where or when to do their job. Maybe after a while, you’ll build up the amount of trust necessary for that to work, but in the short term, it would likely be frustrating. And people get frustrated with their Roombas for this reason. “The desire to have more control over what the robot does kept coming up, and for me, it required a pretty big shift in my view of what intelligence we were trying to build. Autonomy is not intelligence. We need to do something more.”

That something more, Angle says, is a partnership as opposed to autonomy. It’s an acknowledgement that not everyone has the same level of trust in robots as the people who build them. It’s an understanding that people want to have a feeling of control over their homes, that they have set up the way that they want, and that they’ve been cleaning the way that they want, and a robot shouldn’t just come in and do its own thing.

This change in direction also represents a substantial shift in resources for iRobot, and the company has pivoted two-thirds of its engineering organization to focus on software-based collaborative intelligence rather than hardware.

“Until the robot proves that it knows enough about your home and about the way that you want your home cleaned,” Angle says, “you can’t move forward.” He adds that this is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect, but even if they’d wanted to address the issue before, they didn’t have the technology to solve the problem. Now they do. “This whole journey has been earning the right to take this next step, because a robot can’t be responsive if it’s incompetent,” Angle says. “But thinking that autonomy was the destination was where I was just completely wrong.”

The previous iteration of the iRobot app (and Roombas themselves) are built around one big fat CLEAN button. The new approach instead tries to figure out in much more detail where the robot should clean, and when, using a mixture of autonomous technology and interaction with the user.

Where to Clean
Knowing where to clean depends on your Roomba having a detailed and accurate map of its environment. For several generations now, Roombas have been using visual mapping and localization (VSLAM) to build persistent maps of your home. These maps have been used to tell the Roomba to clean in specific rooms, but that’s about it. With the new update, Roombas with cameras will be able to recognize some objects and features in your home, including chairs, tables, couches, and even countertops. The robots will use these features to identify where messes tend to happen so that they can focus on those areas—like around the dining room table or along the front of the couch.

We should take a minute here to clarify how the Roomba is using its camera. The original (primary?) purpose of the camera was for VSLAM, where the robot would take photos of your home, downsample them into QR-code-like patterns of light and dark, and then use those (with the assistance of other sensors) to navigate. Now the camera is also being used to take pictures of other stuff around your house to make that map more useful.

Photo: iRobot

The robots will now try to fit into the kinds of cleaning routines that many people already have established. For example, the app may suggest an “after dinner” routine that cleans just around the kitchen and dining room table.

This is done through machine learning using a library of images of common household objects from a floor perspective that iRobot had to develop from scratch. Angle clarified for us that this is all done via a neural net that runs on the robot, and that “no recognizable images are ever stored on the robot or kept, and no images ever leave the robot.” Worst case, if all the data iRobot has about your home gets somehow stolen, the hacker would only know that (for example) your dining room has a table in it and the approximate size and location of that table, because the map iRobot has of your place only stores symbolic representations rather than images.

Another useful new feature is intended to help manage the “evil Roomba places” (as Angle puts it) that every home has that cause Roombas to get stuck. If the place is evil enough that Roomba has to call you for help because it gave up completely, Roomba will now remember, and suggest that either you make some changes or that it stops cleaning there, which seems reasonable.

When to Clean
It turns out that the primary cause of mission failure for Roombas is not that they get stuck or that they run out of battery—it’s user cancellation, usually because the robot is getting in the way or being noisy when you don’t want it to be. “If you kill a Roomba’s job because it annoys you,” points out Angle, “how is that robot being a good partner? I think it’s an epic fail.” Of course, it’s not the robot’s fault, because Roombas only clean when we tell them to, which Angle says is part of the problem. “People actually aren’t very good at making their own schedules—they tend to oversimplify, and not think through what their schedules are actually about, which leads to lots of [figurative] Roomba death.”

To help you figure out when the robot should actually be cleaning, the new app will look for patterns in when you ask the robot to clean, and then recommend a schedule based on those patterns. That might mean the robot cleans different areas at different times every day of the week. The app will also make scheduling recommendations that are event-based as well, integrated with other smart home devices. Would you prefer the Roomba to clean every time you leave the house? The app can integrate with your security system (or garage door, or any number of other things) and take care of that for you.

More generally, Roomba will now try to fit into the kinds of cleaning routines that many people already have established. For example, the app may suggest an “after dinner” routine that cleans just around the kitchen and dining room table. The app will also, to some extent, pay attention to the environment and season. It might suggest increasing your vacuuming frequency if pollen counts are especially high, or if it’s pet shedding season and you have a dog. Unfortunately, Roomba isn’t (yet?) capable of recognizing dogs on its own, so the app has to cheat a little bit by asking you some basic questions.

A Smarter App

Image: iRobot

The previous iteration of the iRobot app (and Roombas themselves) are built around one big fat CLEAN button. The new approach instead tries to figure out in much more detail where the robot should clean, and when, using a mixture of autonomous technology and interaction with the user.

The app update, which should be available starting today, is free. The scheduling and recommendations will work on every Roomba model, although for object recognition and anything related to mapping, you’ll need one of the more recent and fancier models with a camera. Future app updates will happen on a more aggressive schedule. Major app releases should happen every six months, with incremental updates happening even more frequently than that.

Angle also told us that overall, this change in direction also represents a substantial shift in resources for iRobot, and the company has pivoted two-thirds of its engineering organization to focus on software-based collaborative intelligence rather than hardware. “It’s not like we’re done doing hardware,” Angle assured us. “But we do think about hardware differently. We view our robots as platforms that have longer life cycles, and each platform will be able to support multiple generations of software. We’ve kind of decoupled robot intelligence from hardware, and that’s a change.”

Angle believes that working toward more intelligent collaboration between humans and robots is “the brave new frontier of artificial intelligence. I expect it to be the frontier for a reasonable amount of time to come,” he adds. “We have a lot of work to do to create the type of easy-to-use experience that consumer robots need.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436491 The Year’s Most Fascinating Tech ...

Last Saturday we took a look at some of the most-read Singularity Hub articles from 2019. This week, we’re featuring some of our favorite articles from the last year. As opposed to short pieces about what’s happening, these are long reads about why it matters and what’s coming next. Some of them make the news while others frame the news, go deep on big ideas, go behind the scenes, or explore the human side of technological progress.

We hope you find them as fascinating, inspiring, and illuminating as we did.

DeepMind and Google: The Battle to Control Artificial Intelligence
Hal Hodson | 1843
“[DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis] Hassabis thought DeepMind would be a hybrid: it would have the drive of a startup, the brains of the greatest universities, and the deep pockets of one of the world’s most valuable companies. Every element was in place to hasten the arrival of [artificial general intelligence] and solve the causes of human misery.”

The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley
Katrina Brooker | Fast Company
“Billionaire Masayoshi Son—not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg—has the most audacious vision for an AI-powered utopia where machines control how we live. And he’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize it. Are you ready to live in Masa World?”

AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld
Kevin Kelly | Wired
“Eventually this melded world will be the size of our planet. It will be humanity’s greatest achievement, creating new levels of wealth, new social problems, and uncountable opportunities for billions of people. There are no experts yet to make this world; you are not late.”

Behind the Scenes of a Radical New Cancer Cure
Ilana Yurkiewicz | Undark
“I remember the first time I watched a patient get his Day 0 infusion. It felt anti-climactic. The entire process took about 15 minutes. The CAR-T cells are invisible to the naked eye, housed in a small plastic bag containing clear liquid. ‘That’s it?’ my patient asked when the nurse said it was over. The infusion part is easy. The hard part is everything that comes next.”

The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies
Siddhartha Mukherjee | The New Yorker
“We like to imagine medical revolutions as, well, revolutionary—propelled forward through leaps of genius and technological innovation. But they are also evolutionary, nudged forward through the optimization of design and manufacture.”

Impossible Foods’ Rising Empire of Almost Meat
Chris Ip | Engadget
“Impossible says it wants to ultimately create a parallel universe of ersatz animal products from steak to eggs. …Yet as Impossible ventures deeper into the culinary uncanny valley, it also needs society to discard a fundamental cultural idea that dates back millennia and accept a new truth: Meat doesn’t have to come from animals.”

Inside the Amazon Warehouse Where Humans and Machines Become One
Matt Simon | Wired
“Seen from above, the scale of the system is dizzying. My robot, a little orange slab known as a ‘drive’ (or more formally and mythically, Pegasus), is just one of hundreds of its kind swarming a 125,000-square-foot ‘field’ pockmarked with chutes. It’s a symphony of electric whirring, with robots pausing for one another at intersections and delivering their packages to the slides.”

Boston Dynamics’ Robots Are Preparing to Leave the Lab—Is the World Ready?
James Vincent | The Verge
“After decades of kicking machines in parking lots, the company is set to launch its first ever commercial bot later this year: the quadrupedal Spot. It’s a crucial test for a company that’s spent decades pursuing long-sighted R&D. And more importantly, the success—or failure—of Spot will tell us a lot about our own robot future. Are we ready for machines to walk among us?”

I Cut the ‘Big Five’ Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell
Kashmir Hill | Gizmodo
“Critics of the big tech companies are often told, ‘If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.’ I did this experiment to find out if that is possible, and I found out that it’s not—with the exception of Apple. …These companies are unavoidable because they control internet infrastructure, online commerce, and information flows.”

Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Paul Ford | Wired
“The mysteries of software caught my eye when I was a boy, and I still see it with the same wonder, even though I’m now an adult. Proudshamed, yes, but I still love it, the mess of it, the code and toolkits, down to the pixels and the processors, and up to the buses and bridges. I love the whole made world. But I can’t deny that the miracle is over, and that there is an unbelievable amount of work left for us to do.”

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts
David Epstein | The Atlantic
“In business, esteemed (and lavishly compensated) forecasters routinely are wildly wrong in their predictions of everything from the next stock-market correction to the next housing boom. Reliable insight into the future is possible, however. It just requires a style of thinking that’s uncommon among experts who are certain that their deep knowledge has granted them a special grasp of what is to come.”

The Most Controversial Tree in the World
Rowan Jacobson | Pacific Standard
“…we are all GMOs, the beneficiaries of freakishly unlikely genetic mash-ups, and the real Island of Dr. Moreau is that blue-green botanical garden positioned third from the sun. Rather than changing the nature of nature, as I once thought, this might just be the very nature of nature.”

How an Augmented Reality Game Escalated Into Real-World Spy Warfare
Elizabeth Ballou | Vice
“In Ingress, players accept that every park and train station could be the site of an epic showdown, but that’s only the first step. The magic happens when other people accept that, too. When players feel like that magic is real, there are few limits to what they’ll do or where they’ll go for the sake of the game. ”

The Shady Cryptocurrency Boom on the Post-Soviet Frontier
Hannah Lucinda Smith | Wired
“…although the tourists won’t guess it as they stand at Kuchurgan’s gates, admiring how the evening light reflects off the silver plaque of Lenin, this plant is pumping out juice to a modern-day gold rush: a cryptocurrency boom that is underway all across the former Soviet Union, from the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to time-warp enclaves like Transnistria and freshly annexed Crimea.”

Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition
Ross Andersen | The Atlantic
“This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. …For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.”

I Wrote This on a 30-Year-Old Computer
Ian Bogost | The Atlantic
“[Back then] computing was an accompaniment to life, rather than the sieve through which all ideas and activities must filter. That makes using this 30-year-old device a surprising joy, one worth longing for on behalf of what it was at the time, rather than for the future it inaugurated.”

Image Credit: Wes Hicks / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots