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#437386 Scary A.I. more intelligent than you

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), is an artificial intelligence language generator that uses deep learning to produce human-like output. The high quality of its text is very difficult to distinguish from a human’s. Many scientists, researchers and engineers (including Stephen … Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439073 There’s a ‘New’ Nirvana Song Out, ...

One of the primary capabilities separating human intelligence from artificial intelligence is our ability to be creative—to use nothing but the world around us, our experiences, and our brains to create art. At present, AI needs to be extensively trained on human-made works of art in order to produce new work, so we’ve still got a leg up. That said, neural networks like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Russian designer Nikolay Ironov have been able to create content indistinguishable from human-made work.

Now there’s another example of AI artistry that’s hard to tell apart from the real thing, and it’s sure to excite 90s alternative rock fans the world over: a brand-new, never-heard-before Nirvana song. Or, more accurately, a song written by a neural network that was trained on Nirvana’s music.

The song is called “Drowned in the Sun,” and it does have a pretty Nirvana-esque ring to it. The neural network that wrote it is Magenta, which was launched by Google in 2016 with the goal of training machines to create art—or as the tool’s website puts it, exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. Magenta was built using TensorFlow, Google’s massive open-source software library focused on deep learning applications.

The song was written as part of an album called Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a project carried out by a Toronto-based organization called Over the Bridge focused on mental health in the music industry.

Here’s how a computer was able to write a song in the unique style of a deceased musician. Music, 20 to 30 tracks, was fed into Magenta’s neural network in the form of MIDI files. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and the format contains the details of a song written in code that represents musical parameters like pitch and tempo. Components of each song, like vocal melody or rhythm guitar, were fed in one at a time.

The neural network found patterns in these different components, and got enough of a handle on them that when given a few notes to start from, it could use those patterns to predict what would come next; in this case, chords and melodies that sound like they could’ve been written by Kurt Cobain.

To be clear, Magenta didn’t spit out a ready-to-go song complete with lyrics. The AI wrote the music, but a different neural network wrote the lyrics (using essentially the same process as Magenta), and the team then sifted through “pages and pages” of output to find lyrics that fit the melodies Magenta created.

Eric Hogan, a singer for a Nirvana tribute band who the Over the Bridge team hired to sing “Drowned in the Sun,” felt that the lyrics were spot-on. “The song is saying, ‘I’m a weirdo, but I like it,’” he said. “That is total Kurt Cobain right there. The sentiment is exactly what he would have said.”

Cobain isn’t the only musician the Lost Tapes project tried to emulate; songs in the styles of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Amy Winehouse were also included. What all these artists have in common is that they died by suicide at the age of 27.

The project is meant to raise awareness around mental health, particularly among music industry professionals. It’s not hard to think of great artists of all persuasions—musicians, painters, writers, actors—whose lives are cut short due to severe depression and other mental health issues for which it can be hard to get help. These issues are sometimes romanticized, as suffering does tend to create art that’s meaningful, relatable, and timeless. But according to the Lost Tapes website, suicide attempts among music industry workers are more than double that of the general population.

How many more hit songs would these artists have written if they were still alive? We’ll never know, but hopefully Lost Tapes of the 27 Club and projects like it will raise awareness of mental health issues, both in the music industry and in general, and help people in need find the right resources. Because no matter how good computers eventually get at creating music, writing, or other art, as Lost Tapes’ website pointedly says, “Even AI will never replace the real thing.”

Image Credit: Edward Xu on Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439023 In ‘Klara and the Sun,’ We Glimpse ...

In a store in the center of an unnamed city, humanoid robots are displayed alongside housewares and magazines. They watch the fast-moving world outside the window, anxiously awaiting the arrival of customers who might buy them and take them home. Among them is Klara, a particularly astute robot who loves the sun and wants to learn as much as possible about humans and the world they live in.

So begins Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, published earlier this month. The book, told from Klara’s perspective, portrays an eerie future society in which intelligent machines and other advanced technologies have been integrated into daily life, but not everyone is happy about it.

Technological unemployment, the progress of artificial intelligence, inequality, the safety and ethics of gene editing, increasing loneliness and isolation—all of which we’re grappling with today—show up in Ishiguro’s world. It’s like he hit a fast-forward button, mirroring back to us how things might play out if we don’t approach these technologies with caution and foresight.

The wealthy genetically edit or “lift” their children to set them up for success, while the poor have to make do with the regular old brains and bodies bequeathed them by evolution. Lifted and unlifted kids generally don’t mix, and this is just one of many sinister delineations between a new breed of haves and have-nots.

There’s anger about robots’ steady infiltration into everyday life, and questions about how similar their rights should be to those of humans. “First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theater?” one woman fumes.

References to “changes” and “substitutions” allude to an economy where automation has eliminated millions of jobs. While “post-employed” people squat in abandoned buildings and fringe communities arm themselves in preparation for conflict, those whose livelihoods haven’t been destroyed can afford to have live-in housekeepers and buy Artificial Friends (or AFs) for their lonely children.

“The old traditional model that we still live with now—where most of us can get some kind of paid work in exchange for our services or the goods we make—has broken down,” Ishiguro said in a podcast discussion of the novel. “We’re not talking just about the difference between rich and poor getting bigger. We’re talking about a gap appearing between people who participate in society in an obvious way and people who do not.”

He has a point; as much as techno-optimists claim that the economic changes brought by automation and AI will give us all more free time, let us work less, and devote time to our passion projects, how would that actually play out? What would millions of “post-employed” people receiving basic income actually do with their time and energy?

In the novel, we don’t get much of a glimpse of this side of the equation, but we do see how the wealthy live. After a long wait, just as the store manager seems ready to give up on selling her, Klara is chosen by a 14-year-old girl named Josie, the daughter of a woman who wears “high-rank clothes” and lives in a large, sunny home outside the city. Cheerful and kind, Josie suffers from an unspecified illness that periodically flares up and leaves her confined to her bed for days at a time.

Her life seems somewhat bleak, the need for an AF clear. In this future world, the children of the wealthy no longer go to school together, instead studying alone at home on their digital devices. “Interaction meetings” are set up for them to learn to socialize, their parents carefully eavesdropping from the next room and trying not to intervene when there’s conflict or hurt feelings.

Klara does her best to be a friend, aide, and confidante to Josie while continuing to learn about the world around her and decode the mysteries of human behavior. We surmise that she was programmed with a basic ability to understand emotions, which evolves along with her other types of intelligence. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me,” she explains to one character.

Ishiguro does an excellent job of representing Klara’s mind: a blend of pre-determined programming, observation, and continuous learning. Her narration has qualities both robotic and human; we can tell when something has been programmed in—she “Gives Privacy” to the humans around her when that’s appropriate, for example—and when she’s figured something out for herself.

But the author maintains some mystery around Klara’s inner emotional life. “Does she actually understand human emotions, or is she just observing human emotions and simulating them within herself?” he said. “I suppose the question comes back to, what are our emotions as human beings? What do they amount to?”

Klara is particularly attuned to human loneliness, since she essentially was made to help prevent it. It is, in her view, peoples’ biggest fear, and something they’ll go to great lengths to avoid, yet can never fully escape. “Perhaps all humans are lonely,” she says.

Warding off loneliness through technology isn’t a futuristic idea, it’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, with the technologies at hand growing more and more sophisticated. Products like AFs already exist. There’s XiaoIce, a chatbot that uses “sentiment analysis” to keep its 660 million users engaged, and Azuma Hikari, a character-based AI designed to “bring comfort” to users whose lives lack emotional connection with other humans.

The mere existence of these tools would be sinister if it wasn’t for their widespread adoption; when millions of people use AIs to fill a void in their lives, it raises deeper questions about our ability to connect with each other and whether technology is building it up or tearing it down.

This isn’t the only big question the novel tackles. An overarching theme is one we’ve been increasingly contemplating as computers start to acquire more complex capabilities, like the beginnings of creativity or emotional awareness: What is it that truly makes us human?

“Do you believe in the human heart?” one character asks. “I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

The alternative, at least in the story, is that people don’t have a unique essence, but rather we’re all a blend of traits and personalities that can be reduced to strings of code. Our understanding of the brain is still elementary, but at some level, doesn’t all human experience boil down to the firing of billions of neurons between our ears? Will we one day—in a future beyond that painted by Ishiguro, but certainly foreshadowed by it—be able to “decode” our humanity to the point that there’s nothing mysterious left about it? “A human heart is bound to be complex,” Klara says. “But it must be limited.”

Whether or not you agree, Klara and the Sun is worth the read. It’s both a marvelous, engaging story about what it means to love and be human, and a prescient warning to approach technological change with caution and nuance. We’re already living in a world where AI keeps us company, influences our behavior, and is wreaking various forms of havoc. Ishiguro’s novel is a snapshot of one of our possible futures, told through the eyes of a robot who keeps you rooting for her to the end.

Image Credit: Marion Wellmann from Pixabay Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439012 Video Friday: Man-Machine Synergy ...

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
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.

Man-Machine Synergy Effectors, Inc. is a Japanese company working on an absolutely massive “human machine synergistic effect device,” which is a huge robot controlled by a nearby human using a haptic rig.

From the look of things, the next generation will be able to move around. Whoa.

[ MMSE ]

This method of loading and unloading AMRs without having them ever stop moving is so obvious that there must be some equally obvious reason why I've never seen it done in practice.

The LoadRunner is able to transport and sort parcels weighing up to 30 kilograms. This makes it the perfect luggage carrier for airports. These AI-driven go-carts can also work in concert as larger collectives to carry large, heavy and bulky objects. Every LoadRunner can also haul up to four passive trailers. Powered by four electric motors, the LoadRunner sharply brakes at just the right moment right in front of its destination and the payload slides from the robot onto the delivery platform.

[ Fraunhofer ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Ayato Kanada at Kyushu University wrote in to share this clever “dislocatable joint,” a way of combining continuum and rigid robots.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Ayato!

The DodgeDrone challenge revisits the popular dodgeball game in the context of autonomous drones. Specifically, participants will have to code navigation policies to fly drones between waypoints while avoiding dynamic obstacles. Drones are fast but fragile systems: as soon as something hits them, they will crash! Since objects will move towards the drone with different speeds and acceleration, smart algorithms are required to avoid them!

This could totally happen in real life, and we need to be prepared for it!

[ DodgeDrone Challenge ]

In addition to winning the Best Student Design Competition CREATIVITY Award at HRI 2021, this paper would also have won the Best Paper Title award, if that award existed.

[ Paper ]

Robots are traditionally bound by a fixed morphology during their operational lifetime, which is limited to adapting only their control strategies. Here we present the first quadrupedal robot that can morphologically adapt to different environmental conditions in outdoor, unstructured environments.

We show that the robot exploits its training to effectively transition between different morphological configurations, exhibiting substantial performance improvements over a non-adaptive approach. The demonstrated benefits of real-world morphological adaptation demonstrate the potential for a new embodied way of incorporating adaptation into future robotic designs.

[ Nature ]

A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it “adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema.” One IEEE Spectrum editor said “hey that's pretty cool.”

[ Bryant Lake Bowl ]

It doesn't take a robot to convince me to buy candy, but I think if I buy candy from Relay it's a business expense, right?

[ RIS ]

DARPA is making progress on its AI dogfighting program, with physical flight tests expected this year.

[ DARPA ACE ]

Unitree Robotics has realized that the Empire needs to be overthrown!

[ Unitree ]

Windhover Labs, an emerging leader in open and reliable flight software and hardware, announces the upcoming availability of its first hardware product, a low cost modular flight computer for commercial drones and small satellites.

[ Windhover ]

As robots and autonomous systems are poised to become part of our everyday lives, the University of Michigan and Ford are opening a one-of-a-kind facility where they’ll develop robots and roboticists that help make lives better, keep people safer and build a more equitable society.

[ U Michigan ]

The adaptive robot Rizon combined with a new hybrid electrostatic and gecko-inspired gripping pad developed by Stanford BDML can manipulate bulky, non-smooth items in the most effort-saving way, which broadens the applications in retail and household environments.

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks Yunfan!

I don't know why anyone would want things to get MORE icy, but if you do for some reason, you can make it happen with a Husky.

Is winter over yet?

[ Clearpath ]

Skip ahead to about 1:20 to see a pair of Gita robots following a Spot following a human like a chain of lil’ robot duckings.

[ PFF ]

Here are a couple of retro robotics videos, one showing teleoperated humanoids from 2000, and the other showing a robotic guide dog from 1976 (!)

[ Tachi Lab ]

Thanks Fan!

If you missed Chad Jenkins' talk “That Ain’t Right: AI Mistakes and Black Lives” last time, here's another opportunity to watch from Robotics Today, and it includes a top notch panel discussion at the end.

[ Robotics Today ]

Since its founding in 1979, the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been leading the world in robotics research and education. In the mid 1990s, RI created NREC as the applied R&D center within the Institute with a specific mission to apply robotics technology in an impactful way on real-world applications. In this talk, I will go over numerous R&D programs that I have led at NREC in the past 25 years.

[ CMU ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438785 Video Friday: A Blimp For Your Cat

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!):

HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Shiny robotic cat toy blimp!

I am pretty sure this is Google Translate getting things wrong, but the About page mentions that the blimp will “take you to your destination after appearing in the death of God.”

[ NTT DoCoMo ] via [ RobotStart ]

If you have yet to see this real-time video of Perseverance landing on Mars, drop everything and watch it.

During the press conference, someone commented that this is the first time anyone on the team who designed and built this system has ever seen it in operation, since it could only be tested at the component scale on Earth. This landing system has blown my mind since Curiosity.

Here's a better look at where Percy ended up:

[ NASA ]

The fact that Digit can just walk up and down wet, slippery, muddy hills without breaking a sweat is (still) astonishing.

[ Agility Robotics ]

SkyMul wants drones to take over the task of tying rebar, which looks like just the sort of thing we'd rather robots be doing so that we don't have to:

The tech certainly looks promising, and SkyMul says that they're looking for some additional support to bring things to the pilot stage.

[ SkyMul ]

Thanks Eohan!

Flatcat is a pet-like, playful robot that reacts to touch. Flatcat feels everything exactly: Cuddle with it, romp around with it, or just watch it do weird things of its own accord. We are sure that flatcat will amaze you, like us, and caress your soul.

I don't totally understand it, but I want it anyway.

[ Flatcat ]

Thanks Oswald!

This is how I would have a romantic dinner date if I couldn't get together in person. Herman the UR3 and an OptiTrack system let me remotely make a romantic meal!

[ Dave's Armoury ]

Here, we propose a novel design of deformable propellers inspired by dragonfly wings. The structure of these propellers includes a flexible segment similar to the nodus on a dragonfly wing. This flexible segment can bend, twist and even fold upon collision, absorbing force upon impact and protecting the propeller from damage.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Van!

In the 1970s, The CIA​ created the world's first miniaturized unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, which was intended to be a clandestine listening device. The Insectothopter was never deployed operationally, but was still revolutionary for its time.

It may never have been deployed (not that they'll admit to, anyway), but it was definitely operational and could fly controllably.

[ CIA ]

Research labs are starting to get Digits, which means we're going to get a much better idea of what its limitations are.

[ Ohio State ]

This video shows the latest achievements for LOLA walking on undetected uneven terrain. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain.

[ TUM ]

We define “robotic contact juggling” to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or “hand.” While specific examples of robotic contact juggling have been studied before, in this paper we provide the first general formulation and solution method for the case of an arbitrary smooth object in single-point rolling contact on an arbitrary smooth hand.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Fan!

A couple of new cobots from ABB, designed to work safely around humans.

[ ABB ]

Thanks Fan!

It's worth watching at least a little bit of Adam Savage testing Spot's new arm, because we get to see Spot try, fail, and eventually succeed at an autonomous door-opening behavior at the 10 minute mark.

[ Tested ]

SVR discusses diversity with guest speakers Dr. Michelle Johnson from the GRASP Lab at UPenn; Dr Ariel Anders from Women in Robotics and first technical hire at Robust.ai; Alka Roy from The Responsible Innovation Project; and Kenechukwu C. Mbanesi and Kenya Andrews from Black in Robotics. The discussion here is moderated by Dr. Ken Goldberg—artist, roboticist and Director of the CITRIS People and Robots Lab—and Andra Keay from Silicon Valley Robotics.

[ SVR ]

RAS presents a Soft Robotics Debate on Bioinspired vs. Biohybrid Design.

In this debate, we will bring together experts in Bioinspiration and Biohybrid design to discuss the necessary steps to make more competent soft robots. We will try to answer whether bioinspired research should focus more on developing new bioinspired material and structures or on the integration of living and artificial structures in biohybrid designs.

[ RAS SoRo ]

IFRR presents a Colloquium on Human Robot Interaction.

Across many application domains, robots are expected to work in human environments, side by side with people. The users will vary substantially in background, training, physical and cognitive abilities, and readiness to adopt technology. Robotic products are expected to not only be intuitive, easy to use, and responsive to the needs and states of their users, but they must also be designed with these differences in mind, making human-robot interaction (HRI) a key area of research.

[ IFRR ]

Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor at Penn Engineering, gives an introduction to ENIAC day and David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, speaks about the legacy of the ENIAC and its impact on computer architecture today. This video is comprised of lectures one and two of nine total lectures in the ENIAC Day series.

There are more interesting ENIAC videos at the link below, but we'll highlight this particular one, about the women of the ENIAC, also known as the First Programmers.

[ ENIAC Day ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots