Robot In My Pocket

Along with the Department of Defense's mad scientist division at DARPA, our nation's military contractors also do their part to ensure that our future is filled with unimaginable terror. Household robot maker and military contractor iRobot makes robots that variously vacuum your rugs, clean out your gutters, disarm your IEDs, and invade your enemies' homes to riddle them with bullets. For now these functions are carried out by four specialized robots, but I'm sure they're working on the convergence piece.

They're also working on a cheap networked minibot named Ember to meet DARPA's LANdroid specs, seeking to create fleet of robots to disperse itself through a neighborhood, setting up a wireless network to transmit the information collected by whatever suite of sensors the user might choose to have installed. Ember is small and light, and iRobot hopes to make them robust enough to be hurled into action and cheap enough to be treated as disposable. As if I didn't have enough stuff to carry around in my cargo pockets.

The Three Laws and Then Some

Asimov had one critical failure in imagination when dreaming up his future worlds inhabited by robots, or maybe he was just giving humanity too much credit. He completely missed the possibility that the greatest initial demand for highly autonomous robots would come from the military. He may not have considered them, but the military is certainly not ignoring him. The Office of Naval Research has released the first full military report on the potential ethical considerations of using semi- and fully-autonomous robots in combat, "Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design" (.pdf). It's fascinating, if slightly disconcerting, but it's an important topic. Congress has mandated that 1/3 of deep-strike aircraft be automated by 2010, and the same portion of ground vehicles by 2015. Whether we decide to allow a gun-toting robot to pull its own trigger, questions of robot ethics are important for more mundane 'bots, too. The first fully-autonomous ground vehicles will likely be transports for convoy operations. Just autonomous trucks. But how will the truck react if a child runs into the street? What if there are crowds on the sidewalks? It seems straightforward that robots would be programmed to be pure utilitarians; after all, we can expect a computer to successfully calculate the course of action leading to the least human suffering, at any rate far better than a human operator can. Then again, human cost can't be the only consideration: if autonomous trucks can safely be forced to crash simply by jumping in front of them, they wouldn't serve their purpose very well. Any fully-autnomous robot bigger than a Roomba might have to make a life-or-death decision; we need to be ready to face the implications of that.

The Uncanniest Valley

Are all my readers familiar with the concept of the Uncanny Valley? Essentially, people are generally attracted to other people, and to things that resemble human beings such as Cabbage Patch dolls or vaguely humanoid robots, except for things that are a little too close to human, but still clearly not; this is the "Uncanny Valley". The phenomenon is a way of explaining the otherwise inexplicable revulsion people feel toward creepy-realistic porcelain dolls, clowns, zombies, corpses, and lifelike robots. Meanwhile, certain line of modern technology seems to be dead-set on plumbing the deepest depths of the Uncanny Valley, creating abominations like this:



This thing needs to be destroyed. (HT Mike Elgan). Also, is it just me, or does it look like a creepy android Paul Dano (who is himself wandering awfully close to the brink of the Uncanny Valley)?

Why Drones Still Don't Trump Terrorism

The widespread use of drones has dramatically changed the game in Iraq and Afghanistan, greatly reducing the force-protection burden of surgical strikes against high-value terrorists. Unfortunately, terrorists are still terrorists, and their fundamental advantage — their lack of concern for human life — still holds true, as William Saletan points out in Slate.

In other words, the terrorists may have found a trump card over the drones. The terrorists can't kill the pilots who operate the drones from the United States. But the terrorists can kill local civilians, thereby generating political pressure on the local government to pressure the United States to call off the drones. And because the drones are operated by humans who answer to other humans who are susceptible to pressure over the loss of life, the terrorists win.

The only way to end the moral sway the terrorists hold over us, Saletan notes, is to move from drones to fully autonomous robots. A lot of people seem to think this sort of thing is a joke, but it's not. Within a decade at the very latest, the Department of Defense will be facing pressure to allow autonomous military robots — which have already been demonstrated to be significantly better than human soldiers at differentiating civilians from enemy combatants — to pull the trigger themselves.

Robot Awakening Watch: Pentagon Seeks Pack-Hunting Robot Contract

This via WIRED's Danger Room, the Pentagon has put out a call for bids to develop "a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject". And to think, just last night we were discussing a capacitor bullet for anti-robot warfare. Gotta get on that.

The S-Word

Stephen Trimble shares a PowerPoint slide of the US Air Force's newest airborne networking strategy. Just don't call it SkyNet.