Tag: Terminator

Harvard creates indestructible robot

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

t1000Boffins, who clearly have never seen any Terminator movie, have come up with an indestructible robot which is also super soft.

Also indicating that they never saw any 1980s slasher flims they have made it soft, like a child’s soft-toy thus creating Terminator chucky.

Of course, that is not what Harvard’s School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering are calling it. They are proud that “the world’s first untethered soft robot” can stand up and walk away from its designers, can walk through snow, fire and even be run over by a car.

They think that such robots might one day serve as a search and rescue tool following disasters, not create disasters by trying to take over the world.

A team of researchers that included Kevin Galloway, Michael Karpelson, Bobak Mosadegh, Robert Shepherd, Michael Tolley, and Michael Wehner scaled up earlier soft-robot designs, enabling a single robot to carry on its back all the equipment it needs to operate — micro-compressors, control systems, and batteries.

Tolley , a research associate in materials science and mechanical engineering at the Wyss Institute and the study’s first author, said that the earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine in some applications.

One of the hardest things for the researchers was challenging people’s concept of what a robot has to look like.

“We think the reason people have settled on using metal and rigid materials for robots is because they’re easier to model and control. This work is very inspired by nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the basis for robots.”

The robot is a half-meter in length and capable of carrying as much as 7½ pounds on its back. Giving the untethered robot the strength needed to carry mechanical components meant air pressures as high as 16 pounds per square inch. To deal with the increased pressure, the robot had to be made of tougher stuff.

They used a “composite” silicone rubber made from stiff rubber impregnated with hollow glass microspheres to reduce the robot’s weight. The robot’s bottom was made from Kevlar fabric to ensure it was tough and lightweight. It is very important to have a touch and lightweight bottom.

Researchers tested the robot in snow, submerged it in water, walked it through flames, and even ran it over with a car. It could not be killed.

The researchers think that because the robot is soft and cuddly, humans are more likely to interact with it and it opens up many more opportunities.

 

 

NSA recruits cyberbots

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

TerminatorWhistleblower Edward Snowden claims that the NSA is building a cyberbot which could wage an automatic cyber-war without needing humans.

Snowden said that the agency is developing a cyber defence system that would instantly and autonomously neutralise foreign cyberattacks against the US, and could be used to launch retaliatory strikes.

Dubbed MonsterMind, the project makes it clear that US spooks do not read enough science fiction and have no real idea about what could possibly go wrong.

Snowden told Wired  that the system involves algorithms which would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyse it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat.

Apparently, it is not exactly rocket science. If the NSA knows how a malicious algorithm generates certain attacks, this activity may produce patterns of metadata that can be spotted.

However it is a little like a digital version of the Star Wars initiative President Reagan proposed in the 1980s in that it would probably cost a bomb and never actually do what it says it will.

To make matters worse, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire—automatically, without human intervention—against the attacker. However, whatever way it does this, it could break the internet and there will almost certainly be collateral damage.

For example if the hacker operated through a proxy in a third party country, MonsterMind would cheerfully destroy computers in that country. Microsoft has experience of the effects of following such a policy, when it attempted to take out two botnets it disabled thousands of domains that had nothing to do with the malicious activity Microsoft was trying to stop.

Spotting malicious attacks in the manner Snowden describes would, he says, require the NSA to collect and analyze all network traffic flows in order to design an algorithm that distinguishes normal traffic flow from anomalous, malicious traffic.

This would mean that the NSA would have to be intercepting all traffic flows and violating the Fourth Amendment.

It would also require sensors placed on the internet backbone to detect anomalous activity.

 

Humanity will be replaced by machines

Posted on July 7, 2014 by - News

TheTerminatorLouis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution” and nothing to do with orange juice has warned that since there is no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be, machines will start to replace humans as the top species in 2040.

Del Monte,had a cheerful chat to Business Insider.

He said that humanity and machines will reach a point when a singularity is possible between 2040, though Del Monte says it might be as late as 2045.

He said that it will not be a ‘Terminator’ scenario, or a war.  In the early part of the post-singularity world, one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts. We’ll see the machines as a useful tool. Productivity in business based on automation will be increased dramatically in various countries. In China it doubled, just based on GDP per employee due to use of machines.”

He said that by the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs who will have the promise of immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we’ll think we’ve never had it better. The concern he has is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous.

Del Monte believes machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves.

Eventually they might view humanity in the same way we view harmful insects. Humans are an unstable species that creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses.

He said he wrote the book as “a warning.” Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more capable, and we’re adopting it as quickly as it appears. A pacemaker operation is “quite routine,” he said, but “it uses sensors and AI to regulate your heart.”

AI machines can learn self-preservation and whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.