Critical Thought

Familiar but strange: Humanoid robots, virtual actors, and the Uncanny Valley

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:13:14 +0000

From science fiction and academia through assembly lines and telemedicine, robots have become both conceptually and physically ubiquitous. Technologically, robotics technology has advanced dramatically since the time of their namesake introduction in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a 1920 Czech-language science fiction (which nonetheless was conceptually quite visionary, since the robots it depicted were biological, and therefore essentially synthetic humans) I n which robot was the English version of robota, meaning forced labor, in turn derived from rab, or slave. Today’s virtual and physical robots, however – imbued with artificial intelligence, artificial muscles, vision and pattern recognition, speech recognition and synthesis, sensors and actuators, and increasingly sophisticated interactivity – seem to be approaching those envisioned in Isaac Asimov’s seminal work I, Robot (but still from their human-level-and-beyond artificial intelligence, and certainly nowhere near the living robots envisioned in R.U.R.) That said, however, something’s still glaringly missing – namely, the ability to seamlessly interact with humans and other robots in a spontaneous, natural way that does not rely exclusively on specific preprogrammed behaviors. This is far more difficult than it seems, owing largely to the challenge of computationally emulating evolutionarily-determined perceptually-and emotionally-mediated contextual engagement. Enter Social Robotics: the effort to make robots more…well, sociable.

Social Robotics has its roots in the mid-20^th century work of William Grey Walter, a neurophysiologist and roboticist who constructed autonomous electronic robots to demonstrate that complex behavior could arise from robust connectivity between just a few neurons. As robots became more sophisticated and animations more realistic, it was found that our empathy for these human analogues grew with their similarity to ourselves. But there’s a catch: As robots become increasingly humanoid in appearance and behavior past a certain point, a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley emerges.

…continued in my article on PhysOrg:

Social robotics: Beyond the uncanny valley

The Singularity is Near(er)

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 02:37:15 +0000

In its essence, technology can be seen as our perpetually evolving attempt to extend our sensorimotor cortex into physical reality: From the earliest spears and boomerangs augmenting our arms, horses and carts our legs, and fire our environment, we’re now investigating and manipulating the fabric of that reality – including the very components of life itself. Moreover, this progression has not been linear, but instead follows an iterative curve of inflection points demarcating disruptive changes in dominant societal paradigms. Suggested by mathematician Vernor Vinge in his acclaimed science fiction novel True Names (1981) and introduced explicitly in his essay The Coming Technological Singularity (1993), the term was popularized by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near (2005). The two even had a Singularity Chat in 2002.

While the Singularity is not to be confused with the astronomical description of an infinitesimal object of infinite density, it can be seen as a technological event horizon at which present models of the future may break down in the not-too-distant future when the accelerating rate of scientific discovery and technological innovation approaches a real-time asymptote. Beyond lies a future (be it utopian or dystopian) in which a key question emerges: Evolving at dramatically slower biological time scales, must Homo sapiens become Homo syntheticus in order to retain our position as the self-acclaimed crown of creation – or will that title be usurped by sentient Artificial Intelligence? The Singularity and all of its implications were recently addressed at Singularity Summit 2011 in New York City.

…continued in my two-part article at PhysOrg.com:

The future cometh: Science, technology and humanity at Singularity Summit 2011 (Part I)

The future cometh: Science, technology and humanity at Singularity Summit 2011 (Part II)

Breaking News! Transhumans descend on NYC! Designs unknown!

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:24:52 +0000

Well, OK, that would be Transhumanists. And yes, we’ll be converging on NYC with grand designs, but there’s nothing evil afoot.

We’ll be here on May 14-15 2011 for the Transhumanism Meets Design conference. You should join us.

UPDATE: Members of the the New York Transhumanist Association meetup group now have a discount! Go to the Meetup page to get the code.

FROM THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE:

On May 14-15 2011, Humanity+ International is partnering with Parsons The New School for Design in New York City to produce Transhumanism Meets Design, a conference exploring emerging technology, transdisciplinary design, culture and media theory, and biotech. The conference brings together futurists, cyberneticists, life extensionists, singularity advocates, A[G]I and robotics experts, human enhancement specialists, inventors, ethicists, philosophers, and theorists to meet with the creativity and rigorous scholarship of design at Parsons. Technological innovation permeates all aspects of society—from tiny water purification packets and portable LifeStraw filters, to GPS tracking devices, wearable Timex iPods and Gel-Kinsei high-tech running shoes. Because technology and society evolve together, it has become increasingly important to develop a greater understanding of how technology is shaping the course of our lives. We are faced with a need to continuously become more innovative in harnessing and controlling technology’s acceleration. Nevertheless, innovation develops in stages. When it speeds up, we are faced with an urge to become ever more resourceful. When it slows down there is an impending impatience to compete with the exuberance of China. There is no doubt that even the most conservative thinkers agree that we have stepped into an era of a massive change. The good news is that our human diversity continues to spawn inventiveness and novelty. Humanity+ @ Parsons NYC explores how society can establish innovative thinking through design to harness this adventurous ride into the future where Transhumanism Meets Design!

MORE INFORMATION:

Conference Registration

Humanity+ Website

Conference Website

Conference Program

Presentation Abstracts

Conference Press Release

Exocortical Cognition: Heads in the Cloud

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:07:06 +0000

Technological evolution can be defined as the ongoing projection of our sensorimotor cortex through augmentation of our physicality – i.e., devices that enhance our arms, legs, eyes, ears, and so on. It’s clear that the next (and at least penultimate) frontier is our emerging ability to directly augment and extend our brain.

The current extension of location-independent cloud computing from data to applications (as instantiated in personal, portable, connected computational platforms that increasingly act as portals to off-device resources) forms the foundation for what I’ve termed Exocortical Cognition: the end game of accelerating progress in neuroscience, genetics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum physics, and knowledge virtualization – all converging to externalize neocortical cognitive function.

In other words, the question will soon be: Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your head’s inside of. (Yes, JJ Gibson said it first, and in a different context – Ecological Psychology – but it’s remarkably relevant.)

Synthetic genomics will allow us to design artificial genomic sequences that express as novel tissues and organs with predetermined technological functionality. Such endogenously-expressed neocortical enplants (as opposed to exogenous implants requiring invasive surgery) with communications and neocortical/binary translation capabilities will allow transhumans to engage in a nonlocal cognitive environment where cognition will be distributed over a network of distributed location-irrelevant resources.

Moreover, concomitant advances in quantum computing and communications will leverage quantum entanglement to provide the ability to have such cognitive interconnectivity operate independently of the distance constraints and consequent time delays associated with standard signal propagation technologies.

Finally, the incorporation of entangled sensors and sentient robotics into the exocortical network will enable spatiotemporally-independent telepresence to effectively support multiple exoselves to operate simultaneously.

Think Outside the Box is dead. Long live Think Outside the Brain.

Art & Science: The Same, Only Different

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:14:42 +0000

Night & Day. Up & Down. Before & After.

Art & Science.

You get the idea. Aside from the increasing melding of science, technology and art – such as the transmodern molecular modeling-based art forms created by Shane Hope – Art and Science are often viewed as being different in so many ways that they appear essentially unrelated. Art is often seen as creative, intuitive, expressive, sensual, experiential, and emotional; Science, as methodical, logical, explicative, intellectual, cognitive, and rational.

Nevertheless, appearances can be deceiving – and a deeper ontological question remains: Are Art and Science related, and if so, how?

Alas, there’s a catch: The question is not quite right. We need to ask not how, but where. And to that question, there is an answer: In the human brain.

Enter consilience - defined as the linking together of principles from different disciplines, especially when forming a comprehensive theory – seeks to formulate a unified theory of knowledge. Although first used in 1840 to describe a feature of observational induction by William Whewell in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the term was popularized, broadened to include all arts, science and humanities, and – most importantly – given a foundation in neuroscience by biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

But wait – there’s more! In addition to Wilson’s pronouncement of neurobiological primacy, studies of brain activity using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans show that the same areas are active (they “light up,” so to speak) when subjects engage in a wide range of activities – listening to music, constructing a mathematical proof, viewing a painting, writing poetry, discovering a scientific principle – that they find pleasurable.

fMRI Brain Scan

In other words, Art and Science meet in sentiment, which occurs in well-defined areas of the brain. And for Wilson, “…science explains feeling, while art transmits it” (p.127) – but even more fundamentally, “the common property of science and art is the transmission of information…and…the respective modes of transmission in science and art can be made logically equivalent” (p.128).

There you have it.

Art & Science. The same, only different.

Back to the Future Redux

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:32:53 +0000

We’re obsessed with time. We spend, waste, count, measure, invest, lose, and take it. We think and write about time to no end.

And then there’s time travel.

Long the realm of science fiction and theoretical physics, we may be closing in a a way to determine if it’s actually possible. Enter Vanderbilt University theoretical physiciss Thomas Weiler and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho, who’ve envisioned an experimental observations that could be made possible by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

First a bit of background. In 2007, Weiler – with Vanderbilt’s James Dent, Heinrich Päs (Universität Dortmund) and Sandip Pakvasa (University of Hawaii) – wrote a paper entitled Neutrino Time Travel. The idea (based on investigations by Weiler, Päs and Pakvasa) was that so-called sterile neutrinos effectively traveled faster than light by tunneling though higher dimensions – a feat known as superluminal bulk shortcuts.

If this reminds you of string theory, you’re right. Their idea was based in part on the concept of branes, a construct in renowned Princeton physicist and sting theorist Ed Whitten‘s widely-discussed M-theory. Long story short, their tantalizing takeaway was that “In principle sterile neutrinos propagating in the extra dimension may be manipulated in a way to test the chronology protection conjecture experimentally.”

In other words, there may be a way to see if this is really happening.

Fast forward to the present and the LHC.

In their current paper, Causality-Violating Higgs Singlets at the LHC, Weiler and Ho turn to the yet-to-be-found Standard Model-bequeathing Higgs boson – or more precisely, the lesser-known but equally mysterious Higgs singlet, which particle physicists postulate will be created alongside the Higgs boson in the LHC’s high-energy particle collisions.

Illustration of singlet time travel theory. When a pair of protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, the resultant explosion may create a special type of particle, called a Higgs singlet, that is capable of traveling forward and back in time. It would do so by leaving familiar three-dimensional space to travel in an extra dimension. (Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt)

It’s the Higgs singlets, Weiler and Ho theorize, that accomplish this multidimensional dance to show up in the past or future without violating Einstein’s speed-of-light cap on the velocity of mass. It’s what’s the researchers describe as “analytic solutions to the geodesic equations of motion,” meaning that by exploiting higher spatial dimensions, the singlets avoid spacetime’s temporal restrictions.

Great! When can we leave? Why haven’t my great-great-grandkids visited?

Aye, there’s the rub: Higgs singlets are the only particles the authors hypothesize as having the properties suitable to getting there from here. That said, if they’re right and if we can figure out out to generate Higgs singlets in a controlled manner, zipping messages to the past and future might be achievable.

Still a pretty rad idea, though.

But wait! Doesn’t their basing their theory on M-theory – the theory-of-everything big daddy of string theory – prove string theory to be true? Wouldn’t it be time to stop dissing string theorists?

Patience, grasshopper. While time trippin’ Higgs singlets may indeed demonstrate that M- and string theories successfully predict actual events – in itself a monumental achievement – truth is another matter altogether. Let’s not forget that before Galileo, before Kepler, before Copernicus, there was the world according to Ptolemy: Earth was believed to be at the center of the universe and the celestial bodies attached to fixed spheres that rotated around us. Predictive? You bet. True? Not even close.

This correspondence (or lack of it) between theory and reality – despite any predictive or other pragmatic benefit that a theory provides – is a much deeper issue in the philosophy of science, and one which I’m gearing up to address. Stay tuned.

Bioinformatics in the Big Apple

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:28:03 +0000

On May 3, 2010 the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) held the Update on Medical IT: What Every Health Professional Needs to Know sponsored by NYAM Informatics Special Interest Group and Columbia University’s Center for Advanced Information Management (CAIM). The speakers were Dr. Edward H. Shortliffe, President & CEO American Medical Informatics Association and NYAM Trustee; Dr. George Hripcsak, Professor and Chair of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University; and Rachel Block, Deputy Commissioner Office of Health Information Technology Transformation in the New York State Department of Health. The point of the meeting was

…to address the current evolution of Health Information Technology fostered by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, [whose] goals include reduction of long-term costs by modernizing healthcare through the use of information technology.

Key items covered included

Federal government investment of $36 billion (in Medicare and Medicaid providers and through government agencies) to drive adoption of electronic health records by 2015
Development of government-certified systems that achieve meaningful use (more on this later)
Certification standards
Reporting protocols
Compliance with government-certified electronic health records (EHRs)

Sounds great…but, as usual, the devil’s in the details. Overall, the presentations were (admittedly by necessity) rather general – but this led to concerns and questions that the panel sometimes seemed reluctant to address. Ah, politics.

A key challenge: not merely measuring, but defining meaningful use. This turns out to be enormously complicated, as you can see here. The conundrum lies in identifying a “sweet spot” provides reliable quantitative metrics on ARRA-funded system implementation and use, while considering variations in practice environments. No mean feat.

Another gargantuan challenge is EHR compliance. Again, these reports not only have to be quantitative to be meaningful, but must also account for qualitative data, be compatible with systems from different manufacturers despite developmental compliant, and somehow deal with the proprietary EHR systems already in the field.

Let’s not even talk about security and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). No, really – let’s not. Except for HIPPA-2, which calls for changes in patients’ procedure payment and insurance notification options that the presenters acknowledged was difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

All this said, however, there’s progress being made, and the effort itself bodes well for an efficient, less costly and possibly universal (yes, international compliance is being explored) EHR system.

You can track the meaningful use discussion at the Meaningful Use Workgroup and review bioinformatics research at the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

http://www.cms.gov/apps/media/press/factsheet.asp?Counter=3564

Artificial Life: Cell on a Chip

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:08:00 +0000

In Technology Review: Cell on a Chip, Lauren Gravitz reports that researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, have created the first artificial cellular organelle. This “cell on a chip” will help researchers understand how our bodies produce the widely-used blood thinner heparin.

This is a critical step. After its discovery nearly a century ago, heparin remains almost impossible to create in a laboratory, and so is still made from pig intestines – a procedure susceptible to sometimes lethal contamination.

Fake cell: This microfluidics chip can replicate the activity of one of the eukaryotic cell’s most important, yet least understood, organelles–the Golgi apparatus. Researchers hope that it can help them understand how to create synthetic versions of important drugs such as heparin. Credit: Courtesy JACS

The central mystery is the process by which a cellular organelle called the Golgi apparatus, converts proteins to sugar-studded glycoproteins. To emulate the Golgi’s workings, researchers created their very own artificial cell organelle – a small microfluidics chip – that acts as a precise, controllable, (eventually) automated Golgi analogue.

Funding and serendipity aligned, bioengineered heparin may enter clinical trials within five years.

Transparent aluminum? Scottie lives!

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:20:31 +0000

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter.

University of Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminum (across the pond, it’s “alumimium”) by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminum’ is an exotic new state of matter that previously existed only in science fiction – specifically, in the original TV series, and again in Star Trek IV.

Aa short pulse from the FLASH laser - a new source of radiation ten billion times brighter than any existing synchrotron – “knocked out” a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample, leaving the metal’s crystalline structure intact but turning the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation. Potential applications include planetary science, astrophysics and nuclear fusion power.

A report of the research, “Turning solid aluminium transparent by intense soft X-ray photoionization,” appears in Nature Physics. (Note: abstract only if you don’t have a subscription or don’t purchase access.) The research was carried out by an international team led by Oxford University scientists Professor Justin Wark, Dr Bob Nagler, Dr Gianluca Gregori, William Murphy, Sam Vinko and Thomas Whitcher.

The Singularity Summit 2009: Coming to NYC in October!

Stuart Mason Dambrot — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:59:19 +0000

First used in its current sense by mathematician and scifi writer Vernor Vinge in 1993, and introduced to popular culture by technology futurist Ray Kurzweil 1n 2005, the Singularity is the theoretical future point of hyper-accelerating societal, scientific and economic change made possible by the emergence of machine superintelligence.

The premier dialog on the Singularity, the first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of human technological progress. It was founded as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic.

Since 2006, the scope of this dialog has expanded dramatically. In 2008, the Singularity entered mainstream consideration. IEEE Spectrum, a sober and mainstream technology publication (and my old alumnus as the Japan Correspondent some time back), issued a special report on the Singularity, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner remarked that “we’re making steady progress toward the Singularity” during his keynote to 2,000 people at the Intel Developer Forum. What was once a relatively unknown concept is now being discussed in corporate boardrooms.

I’m definitely going (obviously, to those who know me), and heartily recommend that you join this extraordinary group of visionaries in business, science, technology, design, and the arts, as our diverse and growing community explores this exciting topic. Your participation offers a world of powerful ideas, a unique networking opportunity, and access to an exclusive directory of your peers.