a thaumaturgical compendium

You know how to get my attention:

encephalopod robot dirigibles

Those three keywords are enough to get me excited. But who wouldn’t get excited by this:

I realize this has already been posted everywhere, but it is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time, so I’ll put it here in case you haven’s seen it yet:

NewScientistTech has a story on cockroach replicants that infiltrate cockroach societies and become their leaders. The article notes:

The researchers behind the robot believe it could be used to catch cockroaches and that bots designed to mimic other animals could one day work on farms controlling flocks of sheep and chickens by similar means.

Yeah. Sheep and chickens. That’s right.

It’s an interesting premise, though. Science fiction always has the robots as these “Terminator” type killing machines. The best way to end humanity is to trade on our herd mentality.

(via Gizmodo)

I have said it before and will say it again: the future challenge will be how robotics is integrated into our society. It seems that androids are seeing a resurgence, which is a bit of a surprise to me. But the most interesting area is biomimicking robots of different sorts.

I’ve posted videos before. Here is a really nice collection from Tech Blog: Top 10 Coolest Robots. Be sure to check out the two amazing amphibious robots and the wall climber. (You can then move on to the 10 strangest.)

Continuing the theme of lifelike robots, BoingBoing points to a lifelike Philip K. Dick replibot, who is able to identify friends, and imitate the author’s own personality, just as Dick predicted in his own We Can Build You. Imagine having Abraham Lincoln as a guest speaker for third-grade history.

In last night’s seminar, we spoke a bit about the uncanny valley. How’s this for an example: a robot covered in “skinlike silicone,” was presented at the 2005 World Expo in Japan:

Internal sensors allow the android to react “naturally.” It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it’s the little, “unconscious” movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans.

Well, that ruins my plans for robot slapping. I guess I can always go after kitchen appliances.

Slashdot is linking to a (slashdotted) article on the use of shotguns by robot soldiers. Really, this is hardly a surprise. It’s been predicted for some time now that once robots have some more experience in the field they would likely be armed in some way.

I recently had an interesting discussion with some graduate students from engineering and computer science, at a university with a lot of defense-funded research (not UB). They said something funny, that they didn’t think they would have to deal with ethical issues when they went into robots and AI research. Leaving aside that remark (which, to my mind, is a little scary in itself), they noted that there used to be a little bit more of a sugary coating to research funding, but that this coating was quickly disappearing.

One of the claims they made is that funding agencies, and especially DARPA, changed significantly the kind of funding they did after 9/11, focussing more clearly on military applications rather than basic research. It would be wrong, I think, to claim that DOD and DARPA have traditionally funded a lot of basic research, and there is a history of DARPA in particular, being forced to fund more practical work.

But is seems that any pretense of “dual use” has been dropped for the time being. I have seen funding at NSF that was looking for ways of identifying communities quickly become finding communities of terrorists. Autonomous robot navigation research now includes robots who are proficient at identifying and hitting targets with paintballs. In explaining the DARPA challenge last year, someone made an allusion to the fact that the terrain and distance were similar to what might be found between two particular Iraqi cities.

As a result, some of the researchers on this campus have quietly stepped away from some kinds of government funding. The majority, however, continue to engage in such projects. It’s hard not to do. Naturally, you can do a lot more work when you have the funding to pay for assistants, capital expenditures, people, and time. Moreover, the university expects you to seek such funding because the cut they siphon off helps to keep the university running. The military-university complex is obviously not a new thing, but it seems that the connection—at least on many campuses—is becoming far clearer.