Emergent Technology

Robert said:
SpotMini: headless robotic dog to go on sale in 2019
Former Google robotics outfit Boston Dynamics announces 30kg quadruped will be available to buy for an as yet unknown price
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People have been weaponising these robots? Who could have possibly predicted such a thing?

Boston Dynamics *really* does not want you to add weapons to its robots​

Open letter cites concerns about misuse of "widely available" commercial robots among the public.​

Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, looks at Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot in January 2022.


Boston Dynamics and several other robotics companies have pledged not to weaponize "general purpose robots" according to an open letter released publicly on Thursday and first reported by Axios. Although with sizable caveats in place, the letter focuses mostly on unauthorized public misuse of their products.
In the letter, titled "General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized," six companies (Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, Unitree Robotics) spell out concerns about "risks of harm and serious ethical issues" from the weaponization of their general purpose products, fearing that it will "harm public trust in the technology."
For their part, the robot manufacturers write, "We pledge that we will not weaponize our advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software we develop that enables advanced robotics and we will not support others to do so."
 
they just don't feel pain when they stumble.
 

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot grows a set of hands, attempts construction work​

Atlas goes for "inertially significant" lifts, learns all about Newton's third law.​

The gymnastic dismount at the end is a nice flourish:
Boston Dynamics' Atlas—the world's most advanced humanoid robot—is learning some new tricks. The company has finally given Atlas some proper hands, and in Boston Dynamics' latest YouTube video, Atlas is attempting to do some actual work. It also released another behind-the-scenes video showing some of the work that goes into Atlas. And when things don't go right, we see some spectacular slams the robot takes in its efforts to advance humanoid robotics.
As a humanoid robot, Atlas has mostly been focused on locomotion, starting with walking in a lab, then walking on every kind of unstable terrain imaginable, then doing some sick parkour tricks. Locomotion is all about the legs, though, and the upper half seemed mostly like an afterthought, with the arms only used to swing around for balance. Atlas previously didn't even have hands—the last time we saw it, there were only two incomplete-looking ball grippers at the end of its arms.
 

Deepfakes for scrawl: With handwriting synthesis, no pen is necessary​

Free neural network demo generates dynamic, downloadable handwriting on the fly.​

An example of computer-synthesized handwriting generated by Calligrapher.ai.

An example of computer-synthesized handwriting generated by Calligrapher.ai.

Thanks to a free web app called calligrapher.ai, anyone can simulate handwriting with a neural network that runs in a browser via JavaScript. After typing a sentence, the site renders it as handwriting in nine different styles, each of which is adjustable with properties such as speed, legibility, and stroke width. It also allows downloading the resulting faux handwriting sample in an SVG vector file.

The demo is particularly interesting because it doesn't use a font. Typefaces that look like handwriting have been around for over 80 years, but each letter comes out as a duplicate no matter how many times you use it.
During the past decade, computer scientists have relaxed those restrictions by discovering new ways to simulate the dynamic variety of human handwriting using neural networks.
 

Hydrogen From Seawater: Australian Research Team Says It's Cracked It​

Could this be a key change on the road to carbon neutrality?​

As alternative fuel sources go, hydrogen has a lot fo promise. Unfortunately, in the world we currently inhabit in February, 2023, the majority of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels. So-called “green hydrogen” is a technical possibility, but the cost to produce it is prohibitively expensive. As long as that remains the case, few companies will go down that road. There has to be a better way, doesn’t there?

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia say that they’ve found such a solution. More than that, they say that they’ve found a way to make sustainable hydrogen from sea water—which, if their research proves correct and actionable, could be a massive and scalable game-changer.
 
Robert said:

Hydrogen From Seawater: Australian Research Team Says It's Cracked It​

Could this be a key change on the road to carbon neutrality?​

As alternative fuel sources go, hydrogen has a lot fo promise. Unfortunately, in the world we currently inhabit in February, 2023, the majority of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels. So-called “green hydrogen” is a technical possibility, but the cost to produce it is prohibitively expensive. As long as that remains the case, few companies will go down that road. There has to be a better way, doesn’t there?

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia say that they’ve found such a solution. More than that, they say that they’ve found a way to make sustainable hydrogen from sea water—which, if their research proves correct and actionable, could be a massive and scalable game-changer.
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To be carbon neutral you still need to electrolyze the water with non-carbon electricity like solar or wind or nuclear. What annoys me about so many of these articles is that the give the impression that "green hydrogen" is an energy source. Hydrogen from hydrocarbons IS a source even though you lose a good bit of energy in the hydrocarbons by stripping off the hydrogen - but "green hydrogen" is just an energy storage technology and you still need to get the original energy FROM somewhere.
And since "green hydrogen" is only really an energy storage technology we need to figure out how to actually store hydrogen in a useful way before we can start thinking about where we should get it from.
 
Haven't had a chance to look into this but at first glance it seems pretty impressive and potentially creepy.

Google’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commands​

ChatGPT-style AI model adds vision to guide a robot without special training.​


A robotic arm controlled by PaLM-E reaches for a bag of chips in a demonstration video.

A robotic arm controlled by PaLM-E reaches for a bag of chips in a demonstration video

On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.
 

OpenAI checked to see whether GPT-4 could take over the world​

"ARC's evaluation has much lower probability of leading to an AI takeover than the deployment itself.​

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As part of pre-release safety testing for its new GPT-4 AI model, launched Tuesday, OpenAI allowed an AI testing group to assess the potential risks of the model's emergent capabilities—including "power-seeking behavior," self-replication, and self-improvement.
While the testing group found that GPT-4 was "ineffective at the autonomous replication task," the nature of the experiments raises eye-opening questions about the safety of future AI systems.
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I, for one, welcome... etc.

Obligatory Arnie pic:
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Deep Fake News! Strap yourselves in; the next few months are going to be interesting.

AI platform allegedly bans journalist over fake Trump arrest images​

Trump family names are also seemingly blocked on AI-imager Midjourney.​

AI-generated photo faking Donald Trump's possible arrest, created by Eliot Higgins using Midjourney v5.

AI-generated photo faking Donald Trump's possible arrest, created by Eliot Higgins using Midjourney v5.

Yesterday, about 50 AI-generated images imagining what former President Donald Trump’s arrest would look like spread across Twitter. The images caused confusion for some users because the Midjourney v5 engine used to create them generates such realistic-looking content.
Today, the Midjourney user behind the images—Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins—alleged to Buzzfeed News that he was banned from Midjourney over the images. Buzzfeed also reported that Midjourney has banned the word “arrest” from being used in text prompts to generate images.
Midjourney has not yet confirmed the ban. An Ars test indicates that prompts using Donald Trump’s name also seem to be blocked on the engine, generating instead an error message saying that the prompt was blocked because “it may conflict with our content policy.” We got the same error message when we used prompts including other Trump family names and all the presidents’ names. However, other celebrity names, like former NFL player Tom Brady, are still seemingly acceptable in prompts.
 
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