Jeffrey
15th December 2013, 17:31
Thought this needed it's own Google-related thread.
Hey Jeff,
Check this out, mate.
Google just bought Boston Dynamics, you know, that crazy robot making company.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/14/5209622/google-has-bought-robotics-company-boston-dynamics
Raf.
Yes, Google has been very busy lately, acquiring many robotics companies
http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/08/google-officially-enters-the-robotics-business-with-acquisition-of-seven-startups/
As the article mentions, they wish to take robotics to "the next level", making it far more accessible to everyone.
Google is the biggest internet company in the world. They've been absorbing companies like crazy. Motorola and Boston Dynamics being notable examples. Along with the other acquisitions and distinguished new hires, they are no doubt at the bleeding edge of A.I. and robotics.
In the past two years the company has hired Regina Dugan, Ray Kurzweil, and Geoffrey Hinton. Google[x] Labs is thought to be at the forefront of artificial intelligence and robotics.
At Google there are people like:
Larry Page
An American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin.
Quoted as saying, "We have some people at Google who are trying to build artificial intelligence, and to do it at a large scale [...] I don't think it's that far off."
Sergey Brin
An American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies.
Oversees projects at Google[x] Labs. Reportedly worked on at the lab is a list of 100 projects pertaining to future technologies such as a self-driving car, augmented reality glasses, internet service via balloons in the stratosphere, a neural network that uses semi-supervised learning, enabling speech recognition and extraction of objects from video - for instance detecting if a cat is in a frame of video, and the Web of Things.
Eric Schmidt
An American software engineer, businessman, and the executive chairman of Google.
During an interview aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google," Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" He replied: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."
In 2013 Schmidt stated that the government surveillance in the United States was the "nature of our society" and that he was not going to "pass judgment on that".
In 2013, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of the Google Ideas think tank, published The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, which discusses the geopolitical implications of increasingly widespread Internet use and access to information.
Regina Dugan
Obtained her doctorate degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Virginia Tech.
An American inventor and businesswoman. She served as the 19th Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). She was appointed to that position on July 20, 2009 and was the first female DARPA director. In March 2012, she left her position to take an executive role at Google.
Currently heading special projects for Google-owned Motorola.
Ray Kurzweil
An American author, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google.
Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.
Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, as has been displayed in his vast collection of public talks, wherein he has shared his primarily optimistic outlooks on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
Kurzweil's latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, was released on November 13, 2012. In it Kurzweil describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and details how duplicating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence.
Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several Singularity-themed organizations. In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[36] In October 2005, Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.[37] On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford.[38] In May 2013, Kurzweil was the keynote speaker at the 2013 proceeding of the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment (RISE) international conference in Seoul, Korea Republic.
In February 2009, Kurzweil, in collaboration with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, announced the creation of the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials.
Geoffrey Hinton
A British-born computer scientist and psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks [...] Graduated from Cambridge in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology, and from Edinburgh in 1978, with a PhD in artificial intelligence
He is the co-inventor of the backpropagation and contrastive divergence training algorithms and is an important figure in the deep learning movement.
Sebastian Thrun
Educator, programmer, robotics developer and computer scientist from Germany [...] He is a Google VP and Fellow, and a part-time Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.
Thrun is also known for his work on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping.
Johnny Chung Lee
Completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and was named one of the world's top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35) in 2008.
Lee is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher currently working at Google. Lee is best known for his work on Kinect development, extending the functionality of the Wii Remote controller of the Wii video game console, most notably by taking advantage of its high resolution IR camera. Lee's other projects include an interactive whiteboard, 3D head tracking, finger tracking, and a DIY telepresence robot.
Andrew Ng
Researches primarily in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which developed one of the most capable autonomous helicopters in the world.
Ng is also the author or co-author of over 100 published papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields, and some of his work in computer vision has been featured in a series of press releases and reviews [...] For his work in Artificial Intelligence, he is also a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award.
In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project at Google, which developed very large scale artificial neural networks using Google's distributed compute infrastructure. Among its notable results was a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms on 16,000 CPU cores, that learned to recognize higher-level concepts, such as cats, after watching only YouTube videos, and without ever having been told what a "cat" is. The project's technology is currently also used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system.
All of the information above was extracted from Wikipedia profiles.
Within the past year, Google has absorbed eight robotics companies (excerpted material from: All hail the GoogleBots (http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/04/all-hail-the-googlebots-heres-a-look-at-the-7-robot-companies-google-just-acquired/)).
Meka Robotics: Designing robots that work alongside humans
aNpWol7YPCQ
-----------
Redwood Robotics: Strong, cheap robotic arms
Also taking a look at industrial robots is Redwood Robotics, which is working on the next generation of robotic arms. A joint venture between West Coast-based Willow Garage, SRI, and Meka Robotics (which Google also acquired), Redwood Robotics says its goal is to use robots “to reduce the stress of dull and repetitive tasks.”
-----------
Bot & Dolly
xWJCxxKuTOw
-----------
Industrial Perception: Making the future of robo-vision
nHohqPChqjc
-----------
Schaft: Strong, compact humanoid robots
http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/SCHAFT-robot-japan-humanoid-620-1365622921766.png
-----------
Boston Dynamics
wE3fmFTtP9g
2jvLalY6ubc
Yj7DgklsZDk
uOuH_X3lFMU
-- END EXCERPTS --
Google now owns all of these companies. Two of which are competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge: http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/
Remember, Google is the largest internet company in the world.
Here's a brief description of a Google[x] project called the Web of Things.
The Web of Things is a vision inspired from the Internet of Things where everyday devices and objects, i.e. objects that contain an embedded device or computer, are connected by fully integrating them to the Web. Examples of smart devices and objects are wireless sensor networks, ambient devices, household appliances, RFID tagged objects, etc.
Unlike in the many systems that exist for the Internet of Things, the Web of Things is about re-using the Web standards to connect the quickly expanding eco-system of embedded devices built into everyday smart objects.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Things
Hmmm ... rising inter-connectivity and complexity.
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66184-IMPORTANT-RFID-tatoo-and-whole-walking-body-RFID
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66167-URGENT--It-will-be-here-soon--Please-be-AWARE--The-Growth-of-the-Internet-&p=771418&viewfull=1#post771418
It seems that Google is a few acquisitions away from becoming U.S.R. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Robots_and_Mechanical_Men) or Cyberdyne Systems.
Jeffrey
15th December 2013, 21:47
Great thread Jeff and the vision is getting more clear every day. Here an exemple of some recent innovation in virtual reality. This stuff is getting to the point where it's capable (zero latency) to trick the mind in the virtual.. Imagine this kind of stuff at a nano-implant level..
Yes, things are beginning to converge ...
While the Oculus Rift and the mass arrival of VR will be cool, it's going to have a detrimental effect on society and human to human interactions. Not looking forward to it.
See the latter half of this post: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66167-URGENT--It-will-be-here-soon--Please-be-AWARE--The-Growth-of-the-Internet-&p=770491&viewfull=1#post770491
I used to think Google was awesome and a pioneer for the advancement of the human race, but now all that has changed. Skynet will be here soon enough and the machines will rise.
Manuel De Landa and Billy Joy would agree with you.
-----------
Why the future doesn't need us.
By Billy Joy | April 2000
From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.
Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.
I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.
While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.
It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.
I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machine's decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
In the book, you don't discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target.
Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.
Kaczynski's dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong, will." (Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.
The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.
[...]
At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world's largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University. Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's argument. For example:
The Short Run (Early 2000s)
Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.
In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.
There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces non-market behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.
A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be "ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries" by passing laws decreeing that they be "nice," and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be "once transformed into an unbounded super-intelligent robot." Moravec's view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction.
[...]
I was also reminded of the Borg of Star Trek, a hive of partly biological, partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn't I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren't other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?
Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.
Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.
[...]
The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups.
[...]
I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
Nothing about the way I got involved with computers suggested to me that I was going to be facing these kinds of issues.
[...]
I excelled in mathematics in high school, and when I went to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive.
[...]
From all this, I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather, had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the ability of great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial Revolution has immeasurably improved everyone's life over the last couple hundred years, and I always expected my career to involve the building of worthwhile solutions to real problems, one problem at a time.
I have not been disappointed. My work has had more impact than I had ever hoped for and has been more widely used than I could have reasonably expected. I have spent the last 20 years still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal that has met with even less relative success). Despite some progress, the problems that remain seem even more daunting.
But while I was aware of the moral dilemmas surrounding technology's consequences in fields like weapons research, I did not expect that I would confront such issues in my own field, or at least not so soon.
Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.
I have long realized that the big advances in information technology come not from the work of computer scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers, but from that of physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineer and device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the incredible possibilities of molecular electronics.
[...]
But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.
As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor.
In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to "think" so clearly absent that, even as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future.
But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.
Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?
The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas, Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot species.
How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines.
But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.
Genetic engineering promises to revolutionize agriculture by increasing crop yields while reducing the use of pesticides; to create tens of thousands of novel species of bacteria, plants, viruses, and animals; to replace reproduction, or supplement it, with cloning; to create cures for many diseases, increasing our life span and our quality of life; and much, much more. We now know with certainty that these profound changes in the biological sciences are imminent and will challenge all our notions of what life is.
Technologies such as human cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.
[...]
Awareness of the dangers inherent in genetic engineering is beginning to grow, as reflected in the Lovins' editorial. The general public is aware of, and uneasy about, genetically modified foods, and seems to be rejecting the notion that such foods should be permitted to be unlabeled.
But genetic engineering technology is already very far along. As the Lovins note, the USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for unlimited release; more than half of the world's soybeans and a third of its corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life.
[...]
Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This was new news, at least to me, and I think to many people - and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back to Engines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called "Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become "engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then. (Having anticipated and described many technical and political problems with nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s "to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies" - most important, nanotechnology.)
The enabling breakthrough to assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20 years. Molecular electronics - the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual molecules are circuit elements - should mature quickly and become enormously lucrative within this decade, causing a large incremental investment in all nanotechnologies.
Unfortunately, as with nuclear technology, it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear military and terrorist uses, and you need not be suicidal to release a massively destructive nanotechnological device - such devices can be built to be selectively destructive, affecting, for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of people who are genetically distinct.
An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.
As Drexler explained:
"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. Oops.
It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence harder - or even impossible - to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman in Nature titled "Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It" discusses the discovery that a 32-amino-acid peptide can "autocatalyse its own synthesis." We don't know how widespread this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at "a route to self-reproducing molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing."
In truth, we have had in hand for years clear warnings of the dangers inherent in widespread knowledge of GNR technologies - of the possibility of knowledge alone enabling mass destruction. But these warnings haven't been widely publicized; the public discussions have been clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.
The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.
This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others.
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds - a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.
That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, in Pale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan's contribution was not least that of simple common sense - an attribute that, along with humility, many of the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack.
I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the overuse of antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse and had a commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were absolutely necessary, was bad for you.
It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost 70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or even understanding - ourselves.
I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril. The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly humbles me.
We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation are troubling.
[...]
We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite a large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a calculation by Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. A revised calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a three-in-a-million chance. (Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect of atmospheric ignition entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned about the result of Trinity that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the southwest part of the state of New Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear danger of starting a nuclear arms race.
Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki [...] Yet the overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman Dyson later said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no."
It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of emotion: first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the people that had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account should another bomb be dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima.
[...]
Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."
[...]
Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentary The Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."
Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition - despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.
[...]
In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but from all of these technologies? How high are the extinction risks?
The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk of human extinction is at least 30 percent, while Ray Kurzweil believes we have "a better than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has "always been accused of being an optimist." Not only are these estimates not encouraging, but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction.
Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that we simply move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the galaxy using von Neumann probes, which hop from star system to star system, replicating as they go. This step will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years from now (or sooner if our solar system is disastrously impacted by the impending collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years), but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec at their word it might be necessary by the middle of this century.
What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly in order for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of those (most of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the stars, isn't it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked.
[...]
Clarke continued: "Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles."
In Engines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nano-technological shield - a form of immune system for the biosphere - to defend against dangerous replicators of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created. But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous - nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself.
Similar difficulties apply to the construction of shields against robotics and genetic engineering. These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are trying to protect against.
These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
Yes, I know, knowledge is good, as is the search for new truths. We have been seeking knowledge since ancient times. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple statement: "All men by nature desire to know." We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on the value of open access to information, and recognize the problems that arise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge. In recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge.
But despite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs.
It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face - the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction.
If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous - then we might understand what we can and should relinquish. Otherwise, we can easily imagine an arms race developing over GNR technologies, as it did with the NBC technologies in the 20th century. This is perhaps the greatest risk, for once such a race begins, it's very hard to end it. This time - unlike during the Manhattan Project - we aren't in a war, facing an implacable enemy that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know.
I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by our collective values, ethics, and morals. If we had gained more collective wisdom over the past few thousand years, then a dialogue to this end would be more practical, and the incredible powers we are about to unleash would not be nearly so troubling.
One would think we might be driven to such a dialogue by our instinct for self-preservation. Individuals clearly have this desire, yet as a species our behavior seems to be not in our favor. In dealing with the nuclear threat, we often spoke dishonestly to ourselves and to each other, thereby greatly increasing the risks. Whether this was politically motivated, or because we chose not to think ahead, or because when faced with such grave threats we acted irrationally out of fear, I do not know, but it does not bode well.
The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.
As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?
We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't trying yet, and the last chance to assert control - the fail-safe point - is rapidly approaching. We have our first pet robots, as well as commercially available genetic engineering techniques, and our nanoscale techniques are advancing rapidly. While the development of these technologies proceeds through a number of steps, it isn't necessarily the case - as happened in the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test - that the last step in proving a technology is large and hard. The breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal.
[...]
Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We are fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the BWC and other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that are naturally much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities.
I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face: The nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military uses, and monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with which radioactivity could be measured. Research on military applications could be performed at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept secret as long as possible.
The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses; given their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in national laboratories.
[...]
Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would answer the call - 50 years after Hiroshima - by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the most senior of the surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that all scientists "cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction."
In the 21st century, this requires vigilance and personal responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass destruction.
Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material needs - and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone.
Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality, while perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream.
I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar Jacques Attali, whose book Lignes d'horizons (Millennium, in the English translation) helped inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as previously described in this magazine. In his new book Fraternités, Attali describes how our dreams of utopia have changed over time:
"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to the company of gods and to Eternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal City where Liberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they sought Equality."
Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in tension in our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia, Fraternity, whose foundation is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.
This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.
Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and societies that seems consonant with Attali's Fraternity utopia.
The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key - that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.
Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as "the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope."
Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.
It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. I see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and relinquishment and in those people I have discovered who are as concerned as I am about our current predicament. I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility - not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.
But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte - as if awareness of what could happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before, and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments are already old hat.
I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns? I am aware of how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about so authoritatively. But does this mean it has reached people? Does this mean we can discount the dangers before us?
Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.
[...]
Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us.
My immediate hope is to participate in a much larger discussion of the issues raised here, with people from many different backgrounds, in settings not predisposed to fear or favor technology for its own sake.
As a start, I have twice raised many of these issues at events sponsored by the Aspen Institute and have separately proposed that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences take them up as an extension of its work with the Pugwash Conferences. (These have been held since 1957 to discuss arms control, especially of nuclear weapons, and to formulate workable policies.)
It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was out of the bottle - roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable.
So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up late again - it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the spell and free them from the stone.
Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html?pg=11&topic=&topic_set=
-----------
That article was written over ten years ago. Manuel De Landa's concerns and foresight were revealed over twenty years ago. Things are accelerating.
De Landa's views are represented by the excerpts here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66167-URGENT--It-will-be-here-soon--Please-be-AWARE--The-Growth-of-the-Internet-&p=767963&viewfull=1#post767963), from his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
We must raise the collective awareness of these issues and pause. We can begin again when we understand more about the spiritual nature of reality. Then, maybe we can begin building hearts for machines instead of brains and go from there.
We need to spread the word. Shedding light on these concerns is exactly what needs to happen because it's this overlooked potential that is lurking in the dark.
If indeed we have already crossed the threshold, we need to be spiritually prepared for the future and concentrate on healing ourselves and, collectively, the planet.
Jeffrey
17th December 2013, 14:22
http://english.lider.mk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/robot_google.jpg
-----------
Google's amazing robot beasts could get to know you a little too well
By Aaron Pressman
The field of robotics is zooming past the lumbering assembly line machines of today, quite literally with machines that can run, jump and climb. But the new breed of robots uses vast amounts of data about the world in addition to their high-tech motors, springs and sensors.
That’s likely why Google (GOOG) is getting into the business. The search giant last week bought Boston Dynamics, marking its eighth acquisition of a robotics company in the past six months, the New York Times reported over the weekend. But while Google’s previous acquisitions were companies that made bits and parts of robots, the Boston Dynamics deal makes clear that Google’s true ambition is human-like robots interacting with ordinary people.
“The only reason to buy this company is to make complete androids, systems that can walk around on our sidewalks and right up to our homes," says Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the book Robot Futures. Such bots could be incredibly helpful, but also incredibly invasive as they send data and pictures back to Google, he says.
Started by former MIT professor Marc Raibert, Boston Dynamics so far has designed animal-like machines that can carry heavy packs, climb mountains and even run at high speed. The company’s Wildcat robot can gallop at 16 miles per hour, as shown in a video posted to Youtube and viewed over 15 million times.
The Cheetah can run even faster, at an astounding 28.3 miles per hour.
Founder Marc Raibert has said that, since he joined the private sector, he no longer measures his influence by how many other academics cite his work, but intead by how many views his company's videos attract on YouTube. He should be able to grab even more attention now that he'll be working for YouTube's owner.
News of Google's latest purchase also helped generate more excitement among investors about the future of robotics. Shares of iRobot (IRBT), which makes the Roomba robot vacuum, jumped 7% on Monday.
Most of Boston Dynamics' agile beasts were built as military research projects, but the company also worked on more consumer-friendly efforts, such as Sony’s Aibo robot dog. A future product using Boston Dynamics technology could be a set of assistive legs for wheelchair-bound people, Nourbakhsh says. Also likely, as many have speculated, are delivery robots and other machines that will have human shape to best fit into the human world, he says.
With constant connections to computer servers over the Internet, the robots will be able to act as two-way connections between the digital and physical worlds. Such robots will get cues on how to behave with knowledge of a person’s preferences as collected by Google and, at the same time, send data back to Google of observations in the real world.
Reams of data are also the key to Google’s self-driving cars. Building robotic cars that navigated only by analyzing their surroundings in real time would be extremely difficult. But giving the robotic car detailed maps and annotated pictures simplifies the task immensely, as Google’s head of research Peter Norvig explained in the New York Times Magazine on December 15.
The flip side of data-driven robots is data-collecting robots, and that has some privacy advocates worried about Google’s activities. A robot in the home could have unprecedented access to a family’s activities and preferences.
“Eventually, you might be able to market things with such detail to each individual that it would be nearly impossible to say no,” warns Nourbakhsh. “Then, we have basically become the robots.”
Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/google-s-robots-could-get-to-know-you-a-little-too-well-203641746.html
http://www.topnews.in/files/Google_Logo.jpg
[From, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines]:
Similarly, after a certain critical point is reached in the number of computers connected to a network (a threshold of connectivity), the network itself becomes capable of spontaneously generating computational processes not planned by its designers. For instance, in many computer networks (like the ARPANET, discussed in Chapter One), there is not a central computer handling the traffic of messages. Instead, the messages themselves possess enough "local intelligence" to find their way around in the net and reach their destination. In more recent schemes of network control, messages are not only allowed to travel on their own, but also to interact with each other to trade and barter resources (computer memory, processing time).
De Landa was referring to the ARPANET back in 1991. Now, we have the internet in all of it's interconnected totality. De Landa continues:
In a very concrete sense, the development of a network capable of withstanding the pressures of war involved the creation of a scheme of control that would allow the network to self-organize. That is, in the ARPANET there is no centralized agency directing the traffic of information. Instead, the flows of information are allowed to organize themselves: "The controlling agent in a 'packet-switched' network like the ARPANET was not a central computer somewhere, not even the 'message processor' that mediated between computers, but the packets of information, the messages themselves." What this means is that the messages which circulate through the ARPANET contained enough "local intelligence" to find their own destination without the need of centralized traffic control.
In short, the efficient management of information traffic in a computer network involved substituting a central source of command embodied in the hardware of some computer, by a form of "collective decision-making" embodied in the software of the machine: the packets of information themselves had to act as "independent software objects" and be allowed to make their own decisions regarding the best way of accomplishing their objectives. Although independent software objects have many functions and names (actors, demons, knowledge sources, etc.), we will call them all "demons," because they are not controlled by a master program or a central computer but rather "invoked" into action by changes in their environment. Demons are, indeed, a means of allowing a computer network to self-organize.
[...]
Demons are, indeed, beginning to form "computational societies" that resemble ecological systems such as insect colonies or social systems such as markets. Past a certain threshold of connectivity the membrane which computer networks are creating over the surface of the planet begins to "come to life." Independent software objects will soon begin to constitute even more complex computational societies in which demons trade with one another, bid and compete for resources, seed and spawn processes spontaneously and so on. The biosphere, as we have seen, is pregnant with singularities that spontaneously give rise to processes of self-organization. Similarly, the portion of the "mechanosphere" constituted by computer networks, once it has crossed a certain critical point of connectivity, begins to be inhabited by symmetry-breaking singularities, which give rise to emergent properties in the system. These system "can encourage the development of intelligent [software] objects, but there is also a sense in which the systems themselves will become intelligent.
As of late, over 60% of internet traffic is non-human.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2013/12/bothumandiv/8c6ef1351.jpg
See also: Internet Bot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot)
Powered by vBulletin™ Version 4.1.1 Copyright © 2025 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.