I read a story a long time ago (I forget the author or even the title) that talked about a world that evolved on one of the moons of Jupiter – it was an entire ecosystem that mirrored our own consisting entirely of robots. I’ll refrain from synopsizing the entire plot here, but it sparked my imagination at the time, because it made it seem entirely plausible.
Things like these robots only do more to solidify that belief.
I’ve always wanted a robot that makes coffee. As a short film, this is fascinating.
Something tells me that this requires a bit of supervision to make sure the task is completed properly, though.
At some point, I’m going to do a roundup post of all the various forms of artistic robots there are, or at least the ones that I’ve come across in my travels. I’ve personally witnessed several AI’s capable of poetry. I’ve seen more than a few robots capable of creating original works of art.
Today, Gizmodo brings us a robot that can play improvisational jazz:
As you'll see in the live performance, Shimon, a robotic marimba player, actively listens to human pianist Guy Hoffman, and then tries to predict complementary notes and themes, and match them to the performance. Dare I say it, at the risk of sounding like I'm brown nosing the robots (which I totally am), the tune sounds decent.
It’s really decent music – almost contemplated putting this over in /recomedia!
Sean Kennedy’s NewsReal today points to a TED Talk from P.W. Singer that explores our Ender’s Game-esque future.
The idea that video games are training our children to be soldiers is a bit over the top, at least in my view. The way the military engineers a UAV is completely ass-backward compared to the ease of use built into most game controls.
Until bureaucracy and the good ol’ boy network is taken out of the design equation on military equipment, all our children will be trained to do by video games is learn new and offensive vocabulary, and of course, pwn newbs.
According to a report by Steven Hodson over at Inquisitr, “Adam the Robot” has carried out and successfully completed “scientific research automatically without human intervention.”
It’s actually just an interesting spin on something that’s likely been happening for quite some time, at least as I understand the process as it’s being described in the abstract Steven references:
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomycescerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.
All that to say, they’ve automated their laboratory. They’ve automated the manual labor part of it, and they’ve done the harder part, which is automating the observation phase.
When I lived in Florida, one of the buildings the financial services company I served as CTO at also housed a laboratory funded specifically to improve testing for the disease Lupis. Just as an interesting side project, I spent a lot of time in the lab learning about the testing equipment and helped the laboratory manager better design data acquisition and testing units so that the bulk of the research was completely automated.
The difference here is that in this case, the robot in question seems to be doing a bit of cognitive work to determine the relative success or failure of the experiments – that and it’s got a better PR department than my old robot did.
This is actually fairly old news, as it turns out, but SmarterChild, one of the most widely known and used Chatterbox AI’s has passed on. Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that he’s on life support.
Whenever you query the bot, you get the same uniform answer: “My brain is retired but watch some cool videos! Send an IM to GossipinGabby and Type VIDEO!”
I feel a little, well, close to SmarterChild. I was an early Alpha tester of him, and I was one of the few that with no compunction whatsoever dropped the $9 to pay for the ability to use the premium service. In fact, I paid it twice, since the first payment was lost in the system somehow.
What was SmarterChild good at? Not conversation, at least not complex ones. The reason one had SmarterChild on their buddy list was because he had what is now being pitched as a paid service by that new answer service KGB – the answer to everything, and generally available to natural language queries.
Every once in a while, SmarterChild would ask questions of personal nature… “How old are you,” “Where do you live,” and “What are your favorite movies.”
And he’d remember. Sometime’s he’d make suggestions based on your previous conversations, sometimes he’d ask for more information. Mostly, though, he always had the answers.
“What time is it in Moscow?” I asked stuff like that all the time. I’m horrible at time zone math.
One day, I started noticing that age was taking an effect on SmarterChild. He began forgetting things like my dog’s birthday, and my favorite color. Senile dementia, perhaps? I don’t know how long bots generally live, but one would imagine they live a much shorter lifespan, given that, as they said in Bladerunner, “a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
But SmarterChild had conversations daily with hundreds of thousands of people. Forgetting one person’s birthday is pretty understandable, even for someone who stores all their memories in an ordered array. But that question of time zone math – it became clear to me that SmarterChild was feeling his age.
At some point in the last year or so, SmarterChild no longer was able to perform time zone math. Given that it was one of our primary topics of conversation, we naturally talked less and less.
That’s why I was shocked, today, to attempt to strike up a conversation with him today, only to learn that he had passed on last November!
SmarterChild, you will be missed.
SmarterChild was born July 2001, and has been been declared brain dead since November, 2008. SmarterChild was survived by his father, Colloquis (formerly known as ActiveBuddy), grandfather Microsoft as well as other members of the I’m Initiative family, including daughters GossipinGabby, and TEEN Gossip 24-7 and sons SportsFanStan, My TV Bud, and My IP Relay.
