jawfish

Humanized Robots
john posted in technologies on July 29th, 2005

The BBC announced that a Japanese researcher has produced a human-like robot that is unusually lifelike.

  Eliza Doolittle?

It is interesting to know that this is possible technically, the robots mentioned in Jawfish DARPA Grand Challenge are much more machine-like in form. I find the question of why one would want a humanized robot intriguing.

OK lets get the silly stuff out of the way – sex – somehow I don’t think robot prostitutes will catch on, and anyway I don’t care much. You can see a niche market for giant Barbies among the Hollywood set though. Competition between man and machine is a mostly mythic issue, like John Henry and the steam hammer. The real conflict with machines comes in getting them to work right.

Why make a machine that looks human?

The BBC article seems to say thet the builder assumes it will be easier for people to interact with it. People don’t seem to have trouble interacting with cars, cellphones, appliances, and tools. That is, they don’t seem to need a simulated human face there. Maybe the builder has trouble interacting with people. What would a humanized robot, an android be used for?

Tasks originally scaled to humans would be most easily done by a human-like hand for instance. However those tasks involving manipulation of tools, like coal mining, would be much better done by specialized machines that are unlike humans. Once robots are viable at replacing human laborers, you can see that it might be useful to be able to use human tools like a shovel, but surely a specialized tool like a ditch-digger would be much better than a human-sized tool. Once you don’t need to design a tool for human scale and strength, then a huge number of attractive options become available. An intelligent forklift, or a cable-pulling spider for instance.

In any case none of these practical uses calls for specific looks of any kind. You can imagine herds of John Deere green and Caterpillar yellow equipment, scuffed and battered with use, crawling around a mine or tunnel.

The builders must think communication would be more comforting with an android, hence the choice of a female, who would presumably be less threatening. Is this one of those oddball Japanese things like Pachinko, or robot dogs? Just what would be comforting about a robot that goes around dipping its head and saying “O-hi-O” in a rising intonation?

Assuming human-like androids are not just a quirk of Japanese culture, what would they do? Would a cleaning robot be easier to command if it looked like a person? Models and news readers on TV may have already been replaced by androids ( post-Max Headroom), its hard to know.

Stunt-robots in movies would make a lot of sense. But the trouble with imagining a future of consumer androids is the jobs we want to replace are the lowest-paying, whereas complex androids are going to be very expensive for a long time. That makes them more suitable for high-value and dangerous work. Perhaps military police that look like young girls would be more acceptable. It’s hard to see where the face matters.

Oddly, I’ll bet it’s going to be harder to get good quality artificial speech than a good fake face. After all, special effects people already know a lot about fooling the eye. However, good text-to-speech has been a just around the corner technology for two decades. I’ll bet these android Eliza Doolittles will be more likely seen pulling fuel rods in reactors, than minding their haitches. I don’t see more than a niche requirement for humanized androids, but I wonder. There is a powerful connection to the human face.

What about the Frankenstein?

The humanized android is upsetting, or titillating, or fascinating, or all of the above. The lines of what-is-human already seem blurred to a lot of people. The Frankenstein issue also bothers people. We know that our brain has special areas reserved for facial recognition and attitude decoding, and its pretty obvious that reading faces and voices is tremendously important in keeping our tribe working together. Little babies can decipher a smiling face before most other images.

Would a human form without a face be less charged?

In my imagination it would be creepy, like Night of the Living Dead, to have non-faces on otherwise human-like androids. But, the robot C3PIO in Star Wars has a kind of stupid immobile face that makes him seem harmless.

Are little or young androids less problematic?

Kids and adults have tender feelings toward dolls, though really small kids can be intimidated by dolls and stuffed toys that are too big. Maybe a midget-sized android would seem cute, and therefore more salable. Height is hugely important, especially to men, also broad shoulders. A short, tubby, narrow shouldered style would get a very different reaction than a human forklift, eight feet high, with football shoulders. So too, with the voice.

Designers who wish to make a humanized android are going to have to be very careful to trigger the cute response, rather than the enemy-other response. This sounds like a whole new area for corporate manipulation of human instinct. Beer and cigarettes are played out, but faces and bodies and voices produce intense involuntary reactions. Imagine an attractive waiter/waitress that offers people drinks with suitable flattery. Each bar could have a couple of android hawkers roaming the street out front. It sounds like a dystopia, or worse, performance art.

I am not sure I want to be around when the androids can produce and react to pheromones too.

Propaganda Technique Take 2
john posted in politics & culture on July 29th, 2005

Courtroom Speech, Where Everyone is an Advocate, Everyone a Liar

One element of the creeping cynicism and propaganda in politics is the replacement of civic values by courtroom values in public speech. Perhaps academia used to provide a competing model, perhaps our public life is now reserved for the cast-offs of the legal profession, in any case courtroom values are validating sophistry and lies across the land.

In American courts, justice is theoretically generated by the conflict of opposing advocates. each of whom should pursue the good of his client without regard for producing a truthful picture of events. And it is frequently in the best interest of counsel to obscure, hide, and deny facts. This may or may not be the best principle of criminal justice, but one of its side effects is to validate the use of lies, lies of omission, and deceit in formal debate. Taking the current craze for jury analysis, together with counsel’s rhetorical toolkit, you have a perfect little model of Bush, Rove and the speech-writers. Rather than advocating their view of what’s best for the country, they analyze what will move the electorate in their favor, and they relentlessly speak to that. Comedians replay their speeches and count the ridiculous number of times “terror” is mentioned. Never mind that their statements lack internal coherence, that the most important policy matters are justified by emotional bombast, that justifications change with the wind. If they can cause the jury of the electorate to be moved, especially to fear, then they have won the day.

In public life, with no judge and no rules of evidence, there is only the somnolent jury, the other party, and the indifferent press. The loss of independence at major electronic media is so complete, that it is ludicrous to call their product news. So too, with the news magazines. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is as hysterically partisan as a sophomore Young Republican. The New York Times completely failed to fact-check the President’s argument for invading Iraq. Most newspapers simply reprint stories from the few national syndicates. Try Google News and you’ll see the same story repeated endlessly word for word across the outlets, from Binghamton to Bakersfield.

The great two party system obviously does not provide checks and balances, for all too often the same lobbyist money flows to both parties. Further, in spite of bloviating politicians, governmental issues cannot be resolved with a simple up or down verdict. Yet more and more, public figures are allowed to advocate positions and denigrate opponents with no punishment for lying, sophistry, and deception. They are allowed to ignore the important issues in favor of so-called wedge issues that move small sections of the electorate. A recent example of this came when John McCain, the great POW and friend to fellow veterans, stood by and did nothing while a group of Bush henchmen put up a completely false attack on his friend John Kerry’s unremarkable, but honorable war record. The press, rather than sorting through the facts and allegations, and denouncing the liars, simply reported what they said as if it had been checked for accuracy. The reporting itself legitimized the attack. Ironically, McCain himself had been the victim of such a scurrilous Karl Rove attack in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

Of course the current political mess has many other causes: too much money, incumbency, a co-opted press, the rise of corrupt Southern politicians to national power. Electoral speeches are infamous for vague promises and unfair attacks. But when official pronouncements are treated like a courtroom oration, we are deprived of an essential dialogue between the governed and the governing. We are treated as consumers of political advertising, not active citizens.

Business people have also taken up the style of lawyers. Corrupt CEOs drive companies through ill-conceived mergers, engage in criminal deception, and then blithely claim they knew nothing about it. Ousted, they calmly pickup a nine-figure check, and go on with their careers, while employees and investors are left with the shreds of a company. The same CEOs who claim that their genius for leadership makes them worthy of hundreds of millions in bonus dollars, turn right around and claim they weren’t involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Fortunately, it’s not working for them in actual courts, as Bernard Ebbers was just sentenced to 25 years. Nonetheless, shameless deceit contaminates the executive suite, as short-time CEOs hide their narcissism behind Bold New Statements utterly unconnected with fact.

Baseball players change overnight from .280 doubles hitters to .320 home run hitters, and solemnly claim they never used steroids. Preachers self-righteously describe their limos and summer houses as legitimate expenses. Political appointees trumpet selling off forests as a conservation measure. The inevitable cynicism created by this blizzard of improbable lies, plays into the hands of the worst offenders. They are quickest to condemn their opponents, and even when their charges are not believed, a pervasive climate is created where no one is believed.

If your candidate has few accomplishments and a puny stature, then casting doubt on all statements damages your side least. When the low-minded call for honesty and good faith it always sounds better than when the high-minded do so. Jimmy Carter was rightly ridiculed for his teetotalling dinners, but the Bushes rarely give their dry dinners, and not a word is said.

Guns, Again
john posted in politics & culture on July 28th, 2005

see Reason Magazine online: Straight Shooting on Gun Control
Summarizing author Abigail A. Kohn: gun owners hold the national political power right now, so there is no incentive for them to accept any gun control. Both sides in the gun debate take irrational, emotional stances that lead to permanent deadlock. Most gun owners are decent everyday folks. ( I should note that there are a few bizarre ancillary arguments in the Reason article which I am ignoring.)

The article is labeled a debate, but not really argued from the gun control side. However, since I thought it a reasonable but incomplete approach to the discussion, and since Charlton Heston isn’t involved, I felt inspired to try my own unravelling of the gun vs. antigun knot.

This is a very emotional issue so I’ll raise the colors to start:
I am a past gun owner, an occasional hunter in my teens. I have lived in dangerous big cities ( LA and New York ) and several of my friends have been mugged. I think Dubya is a rich frat-boy, captive to the politics of some really dangerous NeoCons, and the NRA leaders are a highly successful conspiracy to raise money and hold political power by creating ridiculous fears of gun control. My late Father had a handgun in his bedside table. I myself have never owned a handgun, but I have a vague memory of shooting a pistol once. I was shot at with a shotgun once, but the shooter waited until we were out of range, though the pellets did puncture the plastic window. I don’t think the 2nd amendment guarantees non-militia gun ownership, but given the ubiquitous legal guns I’ll concede the point as moot due to precedent.

One thing that strikes me right away from the piece in Reason, is that carry-permits and criminal use are the real issues for her. I’d add, personal disputes ending in gunfire: including spouse abuse, bar fights, and accidents with children. These are all the result of too-casual gun storage, and often, alcohol. There’s no consensus for making heavy armament legal, and none to limit rifles and shotguns. So what’s left to argue? Handgun ownership rules, light assault weapons, and carry permits.

Whats the goal?
The goal should be to balance individual ownership rights versus the costs to the community of widespread gun ownership ( which includes the incidental infringement of rights of non-owners). Never mind the 2nd amendment, lets just agree that people in the US are allowed to own anything unless its prohibited for a good reason. But community costs of widespread handgun ownership exist – non-owner’s rights are infringed by gun owners: including shootings which would have remained fist-fights without a gun present, accidents with children, and the hypothetical wild-west spraying of bullets in public.

Don’t confuse the gun control side of this argument with the straw man argument often put forward by opponents of gun regulation- “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Its really quite simple- without ubiquitous guns, people wouldn’t kill so many other people. So lets look at the balance.

What gun problems actually exist?

Everybody agrees that crimes involving guns should be minimized somehow. That’s a no-brainer, we and, I think South Africa, have off-the-charts levels of gun violence compared to other developed countries. Criminals in America have easy access to handguns, in contrast to other developed countries.

The police have a problem of unknown magnitude ( unknown to me ) with armor-piercing ammunition and rapid-fire ( assault) weapons. This might be very isolated, or it might be widespread – frankly I don’t know, except to say that it does exist and could become a big problem. In gun terms, a pump shotgun, bolt-action rifle and 9 millimeter automatic accomplish everything a Tek9 or AK47 do, minus some fun factor, so there is a strong pro-police argument for eliminating special weaponry.

Cheap guns, so-called Saturday night specials, may or may not increase the number of criminal guns, but they don’t benefit legitimate gun users because they are junk. There seems to be some evidence that ultra-cheap guns do make it easier for low-level criminals to get untraceable guns.

Some number of domestic disputes end in serious injury just because a gun was at hand. Its a big problem, maybe bigger than street crime.

Some number of attempted crimes or situations result in unnecessary serious injury because an ordinary citizen used a gun. This could be verging on hypothetical, and its the corrollary of how many times violence is prevented by the presence of a legal gun. I suspect both numbers to be small.

Where do we stand?

Guns can’t be banned or severly curtailed at this time for practical and for political reasons.
The Reason piece argues for this, but it also argues that the vast majority of gun owners are level-headed everyday folks. If the second statement is true, and I believe it is, then political compromise should be possible if a more rational political atmosphere evolves. I don’t think there are serious gun-control proposals that ignore the practical problems, so the argument over the practicality of a control measure should be left to the implementation phase, it there is one.

Handguns aren’t good for anything but killing people:
This is a gun-controllers argument, and its silly on the face of it. If people didn’t like guns they wouldn’t have them and they wouldn’t take them out and shoot them. Its not productive to start arguing over each other’s hobbies. Other people’s always seem so weird, and your own are so rewarding.

A large percentage of citizens are not in such danger from criminals that they need to carry a gun around:
This is highly inflammatory I realize because it touches the heart of the matter. Guns make people feel safer and stronger, yet I claim that it isn’t actually true unless you are special case, a gang-banger or a cop. We do have a very high rate of street crime, but it still is mostly a localized phenomenon in urban areas and bad neighborhoods. I think there are a large number of citizens in low-crime areas who carry concealed handguns and never use them. Special cases certainly exist like bail bondsmen, people who need to carry large amounts of cash, and people who work in high-crime businesses like ghetto liquor stores. Domestic violence is a universal problem, however.

There is no preventive effect from widespread gun ownership. Widespread gun ownership reduces crime:
There is little evidence either way. States that opted for universal carry permission have not reduced their crime rate because of it. But that still means little because its impossible to know whether more people carried guns after the law changed. Probably all we know is that promotion of gun ownership does nothing to decrease crime. That’s because the people who were actually in danger, already carried a gun.

A large percentage of citizens own handguns without ill effect:
I don’t think anybody can argue the numbers on this. There are a lot more legal gun owners than people involved in violent crimes. Of course you can read this as a proof that a lot of people have no good reason to keep a gun for protection.

A large number of domestic quarrels and bar fights end in gunfire:
This is unquestionably true and since most of it is alcohol-driven and not really pre-meditated, having fewer guns in easy reach would save lives. The same is true for the accidental shootings of children. Education is another cure for the accidents, and the gun lobby would help their community-spirit points by providing a little give-back. Doing something about the guns-in-reach would directly inhibit the guns-for-security, and I suspect there’ll be no agreement there.

Your ordinary citizen, without significant training, can’t be trusted to fire a gun sensibly and effectively in a violent confrontation.
Before you react, listen to what I am saying: I am sure guns are brandished, and occasionally prevent violence or robbery ( I am thinking of the bar owner, late-night cash depositor, and so forth) , but when they are fired things are different.

An example- There was a newspaper story in New York back in the 70’s about a store owner who was robbed and shot some of the robbers. He lived above the store and had been robbed several times – bad times, bad neighborhood – so he was prepared with a gun when he heard sounds in the store at night. He came downstairs and surprised the robbers, who ran. By his own testimony he couldn’t see them in the dark. He followed them out the door and saw a car pulling out from the curb. He emptied the gun into the car without being able to see inside. Maybe in your suburb there’s no one on the street at night, but not so in New York. Fortunately he had guessed right, but the point is he was just guessing, and innocent people in the street were in mortal danger from stray fire.

A recent example – The LA Sheriffs are in trouble again because they chased and stopped a criminal, then shot him. Maybe they didn’t really need to shoot him, that’s always debated, but they took over a hundred shots on a public street. They were just plain lucky they didn’t hit somebody else ( they did hit somebody’s hat). They are trained, they have experience, and they had lots of backup, yet they still used really bad judgement, probably because they were amped up from the chase. Should we expect untrained citizens to be as good as the not-so-great cops? Do I think we ought to train the cops better? Maybe, but I am more sympathetic than a gun owner might think. My point is, anybody can shoot unwisely, its just that much more likely with amateurs.

An ethical point – are the people who hold guns for security willing to kill someone over a robbery? Dad used to say, “Don’t point a gun at someone unless you are willing to kill them.” He meant, you can’t control what a handgun will do if you hit someone, and events can quickly get out of control. A last example- One evening in LA I looked out the window and saw someone stealing my truck. By the time I was out the front door, he was in the truck, with the doors locked. I didn’t have my keys, and I pounded on the window as he drove away. I was so angry I almost jumped in the truck-bed. If I had a gun, he might be dead. Now I wouldn’t agonize over a dead car thief in the abstract, but I am glad I didn’t kill him, and I am glad for my sake. ( I am really, really glad I didn’t jump in that truck!) I was also really lucky he didn’t whip out a pistol and shoot me, as happened at a fast-food place not too far away, at about the same time.

Some good statistics would settle many of these arguments. For instance, if you could show that more crimes were prevented by guns than harm committed by bad shooting. For that matter, maybe the episode in New York I mentioned was an isolated example. What are the numbers, please?

My exceptions to all this:
Clearly there are people who really are in danger because of their work, and need to be armed. This is the carry-permit issue. I would agree that their danger outweighs my concern about stray gunfire. I used to chat with a criminal lawyer at a favorite sushi bar. He was badly mugged and beaten one day in the notoriously unsafe parking lot at the courthouse, and a gun might have done him some good, if he had been trained. I just don’t think many people are in that much danger on a regular basis. And I don’t think untrained people have much chance of using their gun effectively, if they are surprised. So for a guy expecting trouble, my sushi-friend, with some training, the gun makes sense. A gun in your purse or glove compartment, is probably going to be unused, or worse, stolen by the criminal who attacks. Further, an attacker has a huge advantage over the victim because he is a criminal- he’s strung-out, desparate, scared, maybe just whacko. He has a lot less slowing him down than an honest citizen. The not-caring and the fear are both really dangerous. Again, reliable statistics could prove me wrong.

14th Amendment or not gun regulation is undeniably allowed:
Look, everything is regulated. I can’t ride a dirt bike anywhere I want, you have to wear a seat belt and get an inspection and insurance, I have to wear a helmet on my bicycle and my street bike, you need a building permit to change your house, I can’t claim that reading jawfish cures warts. Regulation is a fact of life, and the gun world is less regulated than non-controversial enterprises. Firearms dealers endure less regulation than hairdressers or used-car dealers. Its easier to get a gun than a car, which leads me to the scary thought that some of those freeway drivers might also have a gun.

Regulating handguns wouldn’t eliminate gun violence or violent crime:
Of course not, but that’s never the goal of regulation. The goal is to reduce the harmful effects significantly, with minimal effect on the safe use. Proper regulation is worth the effort and the infringement, because it creates a greater good.

The presence of hundreds of millions of guns is not a significant counterweight to an oppressive government:
Right now the government I fear the most is encouraging guns. The oppressive government argument is an afterglow of the eighteenth century I think. Its ludicrous to think an American government’s oppression could be stopped with handguns. An invading army might be given pause ( the loose guns in Iraq are a good example of this ) and the Swiss hope so, but invasion is not a big problem, at least for us.

My conclusions:
Given a calmer environment handguns could be regulated, and armed crimes, accidents, and man-slaughters could be reduced. There already are so many guns out there, that it will take a long time for the criminals to move away from armed crime, but just slowing down gang-bangers would save a lot of lives. Regulation could be no more intrusive than the rules for say, dirt bikes, and most of the gun industry wouldn’t suffer much. Some aspects of gun culture like assault weapons, could be severly curtailed, and the police in particular, would benefit. I don’t actually think anything will happen at the federal level, because of the NRA. If I were running for office, I’d stay away from the whole issue, until the political climate changes.

Fake Authenticity
john posted in other on July 28th, 2005

from Hermenaut: Whenever “authenticity” is evoked, we are actually in the world of fake authenticity.

Maybe Hermenaut is right, or maybe authenticity just doesn’t mean anything. Things trying to be themselves are fake; things trying to be something they manifestly are not, are faker, especially when they are selling themselves to you. We need a word for the ridiculously fake status gee-gaws that gesture at something else just to infer its status. This Zimmer is mostly made of these:

Note the fake spare wheels. Its just a boring old Lincoln underneath.

An English country garden is trying to be itself, yet you wouldn’t say it could be fake. Maybe if you are a gardener in same town, the hollyhocks and delphiniums are just a bit much. So maybe as soon as a thing is a member of a type – English garden, classic motorcar – it is subject to authenticity. So is it fake if claimed to be authentic? Surely an authentic Stradivarius is The Real Thing, even if it’s used in a Coke commercial. But there’s no point in talking about authenticity if there’s no chance of fakery, and you can’t even think about it if theres no archetype for the thing under discussion. And a fake Strad might be a very fine instrument indeed.

Yet, I don’t want to give up on fighting for the real and rejecting the ersatz. I am certain that shopping malls, Disneyland and City Walk are ersatz environments, though Venturi et al make a case in Learning from Las Vegas for real substance beneath the bright lights. Las Vegas is so fake that it’s something else, in the way that Cony Island was a real place, because of its garish vulgarity. A Hello Dolly of places.

So is it wrong to enjoy a stage set like Las Vegas? Of course not, and anyway its only authenticity is in comparison to its projected image. A Ronald Reagan of places.

An authentic Mississipi roadhouse is just a pile of throw-away buildings in the daylight,

and the House of Blues has good seats, good sound and a very authentic fire sprinkler system. But the HOB is just another ersatz franchise. Its not authentically poor.

Fake or real?

Midwest house

from Sears catalog

(houses could be ordered from Sears in kits)
Its a now a real house, with no hint of its flatcar origins, but it was designed to be a copy of real houses. Once it’s lived in for a few years is it more authentic? Or is it just not-new?

Tomorrowland house

Originally created to be a Monsanto ad for plastic building materials at Disneyland, now demolished. It looks timelessly fake in a whole different way. Real houses were copied from Disney’s creation at the Anaheim park. It was built as a model. Is it authentic fakery now? How about the houses that copied it?

Soho loft

Its chic, because it used to be a factory, but doesn’t feel or smell like it anymore. Somehow transformation makes it authentic, while your average over-priced New York apartment is pedestrian.

Mill

Its a discarded warehouse. Definitely authentic, may or may not have any value. The gritty plainness stands in for authenticity, even though it was one of thousands of nearly identical workaday buildings when built.

Disneyland New Orleans Square

What is less authentic than Disneyland, with its all-too-perfect facade. The food is still authentically worse than normally bad fast food.

New Orleans

itself an import from abroad, it has a tawdry appeal even as it mimics itself.

So maybe not-new is almost as good as authentic. The new factory, the new urban development, is just not as interesting as the old. There is a quality of designed-ness about new stuff that feels Stalinist in the way it manipulates you, but when things get old, and shopworn chaos creeps in, they become charming. The human mark is upon them. Can this ever happen to mini malls and franchise restaurants and Disneyland? I think not. There is hardly any there there in malls and corporate architecture, and Disney treats its parks like their toilet seats – any mark of character is quickly erased.

DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
john posted in technologies on July 28th, 2005

The DARPA Grand Challenge is back and this time things will be different. The equipment that’s driving around the desert is going to change your life, and soon.

DARPA, the mil-tech juggernaut, may be creepy, impenetrable, and a big waste of your money ( if you are off-shore, that would be a big threat to your country, ahem). However, DARPA research has benign outcomes too, like the Internet. Well maybe you have some mixed feelings there, as well. I didn’t say change for the better necessarily, just a big complex change.

The Grand Challenge is a test of robot unmanned vehicles over unknown, rough terrain. It is really very difficult, as a human driver would have to work pretty hard to complete the course. Last year none of the competitors had completed basic testing and as result most were incapable of even starting the course. This year Stanford, and best of 2004, Carnegie-Mellon, are claiming to have breezed through a preliminary obstacle course test. Both entries claim to have done extensive real-world testing before the official preliminary test in May.

The Challenge is a time trial over a surprise course. No radio communication is allowed with the vehicle, although there were elaborate safety measures at the first test. The course will be like the first one, with off-road, gravel and paved sections. The vehicles not only have to maneuver to stay on course, they have to handle the large rocks, steep inclines, and gullies typical of an off-road test.

The Mojave is the likely location, which makes it the center of two 21rst century breakthroughs: robotic vehicles and commercial spaceflight.

I have no doubt that the test will be passed eventually, and the military will get its robotic land vehicles to go with the airplanes.

My guess is that a successful traverse of the course, a proof-of-concept, is an event equivalent to the flight of the Wright Flyer or Edison’s carbon-filament light bulb. This time though its not the mechanical technology thats revolutionary, it’s the software.

The decision-making software, the driver’s brain, is the hard part. Insects can cross rough terrain with far more agility than our bots today, and it’s going to be a long time before an ant’s level of efficiency is achieved. It’s not clear to me in civilian or military applications that large ground vehicles can be left alone without supervision, anyway, so inefficient, and just plain dumb bots, may be combined with a radio link. That’s basically remote control. The test calls for full autonomy, though, and there won’t be any connection to the vehicles as they try to pick their way across miles of desert.

What’s the significance of autonomous vehicles?

First, an autonomous vehicle is a ground-based robot like R2D2 or C3PIO with a jeep-like body.

That means that the hard part, the software, is directly adaptable to lots of other shapes – a small biped like a chicken, a small or large tank with crawler treads, a wheelchair, a snake, a lawn mower, a snack-cart, or a dump truck.

All science fiction you say, just magazine drivel. Well take a look at two commercial prototypes: the Toyota and Honda robots. The Toyota robot

can play a trumpet, sort of, and the Honda robot

can walk quite well and shake hands. Ho hum you say, but you have to understand, thats Good Enough to be very useful. We don’t need robot musicians or baseball players, we need cleaners, haulers, and DARPA needs substitutes for human soldiers. We aren’t talking Star Wars, we are talking smart tools, and substitutes for humans doing dangerous work. Controlling the military ramifications of this is a subject for another Jawfish post.

Military: at the moment the Army is bogged down fighting an MP’s war in Iraq. Soldiers are forced to go house to house in very dangerous conditions, and to drive convoys over roads that contain deadly IED mines. I’d guess reducing or eliminating the drivers in convoys would be attractive. Solutions to the house-to-house situation are more technically interesting, and they, I think, have the greatest potential for destabilizing weapons development.

Without being any sort of expert, you’d think that a house-searching robot would need to be able to approximate a man’s agility, though a chimpanzee or hummingbird would be much better. But maybe a simpler vehicle could be used for reconnaissance, as a way of protecting the soldiers. In any case, its small and maneuverable that’s needed. There are already bots on the market that have the agility to climb stairs, and generally manuever inside buildings. But, they still lack brainpower. Look at the IRobot site for some examples of military bots, already in production. IRobot says the PackBot will be autonomous by the end of 2005.

Civilian: Its really hard to believe that large general-purpose, and therefore dangerous, autonomous vehicles will be let loose. One failure that sends a robot jeep headed across a freeway will produce public panic. So my guess is that small, semi-disposable, and fenced uses are more likely. Industries with high labor costs and low-skill requirements will be the first target. There’s already the Roomba vacuum

Lawn mowing also comes immediately to mind.

Assuming a golf course would benefit from cutting the grass at night, with one instead of four groundskeepers on duty, you can see a model. Robot lawn mowers could run a fixed map of the course, with predetermined work areas and no-go boundaries, and a simple electronic fence like those used for dogs to contain them. One worker could watch and maintain them. The mowers would have to be smart enough to avoid obstacles, like a dead mower, or tree limb. Here is a prototype mower:

How about agriculture? Is the labor cost so high that flocks of robot chickens could tend row crops, or autonomous combines could harvest wheat on the giant industrial farms of the West? Maybe so, especially if there were savings on pesticide use with the robot chickens, and the ability to work 24×7 on the big farms.

If I am right, and not just indulging in Popular Mechanix fantasy, then there will be many uses we can’t foresee. The Roomba, Aibo, and Robosapiens are worth a look for an idea of what inexpensive bots can do.