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P.W. Singer at TED

Remember to check out the Wired for War Symposium at CTLab Review!

Also check out How to Maintain America’s Strategic Advantage co-authored by my twitteramigo Zach Tumin of Harvard’s Leadership for a Network World (LNW) Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

This is good, once you get past the pedestrian observations about the economic crisis:

Shortly after my previous post on the subject, the concept of warrior robots has picked up steam.

Office of Naval Research – “Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics and Design” (PDF)

The Times of London –  “Military’s Killer Robots must Learn Warrior Code”

FOXnews – “Expert: Robots Will Fight Wars of Future“

I’m as big a fan of technofuturistic science as the next reader of Danger Room but National Defense Magazine ‘s article really is breezily optimistic:

Reverse Engineering the Brain May Accelerate Robotics Research 

….Machines that walk upright will assist civilians and the military alike, said Stefan Schaal, associate professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Southern California.“We should at some point be able to create an artificial human being and I think humanoid robots are currently the first step toward that,” he said at the Army Science conference.“This is going to happen,” he predicted. “And it’s going to happen in this century.”It may not be as “polished” as the iRobot movie, he added.While other experts noted that there are huge technological hurdles to overcome, basic research continues on several critical technologies such as vision, movement and computational models that will allow robots to “think” like humans.A parallel effort to map – or reverse engineer – the human brain is going to give robotics experts inspiration that will allow them to create these advanced models, researchers at the conference said.The National Academy of Engineering is spearheading this “Grand Challenge.” Just as researchers successfully mapped the human genome earlier in the decade, the engineering community – not normally thought of as being a part of the life science discipline – says there will be a clear benefit to a Herculean effort to figure out exactly how the human mind works.“If we could determine the software of the human brain, we could embed all sorts of systems so as to provide human like quality for machines,” said John Parmentola, director of research and laboratory management at the Army office of the deputy assistant secretary for research and technology.Neural models will enable robots to better perceive, think, plan and act, said James Albus of the Krasnow Institute at George Mason University, Va.

“Significant economic and military applications will develop undoubtedly early in this century and in fact are already developing,” he said.
 

Read the rest here.

The part that makes me a tad skeptical is the “reverse engineering” of the brain. This is no small task. “Wetware” isn’t hardware and the wetware here is dynamically adaptive and to an extent individualized within parameters we do not yet fully understand. Unless I am missing something ( please correct me if I am) in terms of difficulty, reverse engineering the brain would appear to be harder than almost any other question that could possibly be related to the whole field of robotics itself. 

While scientists have learned more about the human brain in the last 10 years that the previous 10,000, brain science is still in it’s infancy. The exciting MRI scan studies are primarily exercises in positively identifying correlation of brain activity with specific cognitive and physical tasks; what these studies mean in terms of application requires extrapolative speculation and experimentation.

By all means guys, go for it! I’m behind the effort 100 % as the spillover benefits are going to be enormous. However, I’d wager that this strategy is not the fastest route to functionally useful, autonomously acting, robots on a societal scale.

ADDENDUM:

I just picked up P.W. Singer ‘s new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  Flipping through it quickly, I will say this is an extremely cool book designed to appeal to war nerds, tech geeks and defense policy wonks alike ( For example, if you read Singer’s ref to “the Big Cebrowski” and get it, well, then this book is for you). Some well known figures in the blogosphere also make it into Singer’s book but to find out who, you’ll have to go get a copy. 🙂

ADDENDUM II. 

Jeff Hawkins at TED.com on the revolutionary potential of brain science:

Sam wages a different kind of cyberwar:

Evil Google: What you don’t know just might hurt you

Google as a company has a policy”You can make money without doing evil“, but the question is with a corner on the search market of the Internet and rolling out a variety of tools is that motto even possible to uphold. In a dictatorial and autocratic world where the span of the Internet crosses international borders can Google even claim to be “nice”.

To make our case that you may be in grave jeopardy up to and including national security consider this. What if the government bound by law not to gather personal information about citizens (Privacy Act 1974 could instead just purchase a large volume of information about citizens. Just such a deal was made by the government to purchase what it could not gather from ChoicePoint. Of course, ChoicePoint is the company that also sold records and personal identification information to Nigerian scam artists. Also, ChoicePoint is not above purportedly acting in an illegal manner as a corporation. We as individuals though think we have nothing to hide. That might be the case if the rest of the world was as ethical as we think we are.

And Sam has more:

….When challenged by this argument the luddites among us will of course say they do not even use GMAIL so therefore they are safe from the minions and Googliers. Of course they are right up until Google actually started taking pictures in our back yards. There is nothing like having our private lives instantiated on the web for the entire world to peruse.  You may have no expectation of privacy, but the recording of events, without your knowledge is a violation of your privacy. An argument that can be fought by different nations from different cultures. Do not worry though. Google was more than willing to violate peoples property rights to impact their privacy rights as they sought to record things they should not have had access too. One aspect is that regardless of how you feel about the technologies privacy aspects these same tools can be used by terrorists to impact national security . Of course when you have a satellite partially purchased by and used to assist the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Of course Google Earth can look down on our back yards behind our fences we erect for privacy to peer into our lives without our knowledge .

Read the rest here.

With governmental units trying to find all kinds of reasons to acquire records our DNA, we may soon see our own unique genomic code being used in massive databases to the financial benefit everyone else who can pay for the aggregation of data and to our own disadvantage. Corporations and government bureaucrats using such information (or misusing it, leaking it, altering it, deleting some of it) to make life-altering decisions for individuals or groups, most likely in secret, without notification or review. Can’t happen? Think about the shenanigans that can be inflicted (and are) upon critics and political opponents with the data already at the government’s disposal by vindictive idiots with access .

Does that worry you ?