Do your part to expedite the rise of the machines - here's how! (sarcasm - actually, hide after reading)

Psst! Gael Langevin has a secret and he wants everyone to know. He's engineering the body for a humanoid robot... and posting the 3D printer files online so everyone can do the same at home. Take that, Anekin (& some of us thought we'd have a little more time before the sci-fi future arrived in our homes.)

So that's how it is now. With a 3D printer you can actually print the physical body of the ancestors our coming robot overlords. Free instructions, just grab your special ABS plastics, Arduino boards and some motors. Some assembly/programming required, plasma cannons and laser targeting optional.

The only problem is the plastic body may not be durable enough for wholesale slaughtering humans like cattle. In fact as you view the scary video below consider how the pieces can be easily re-printed for replacement. Or with better printers upgraded to stronger materials like steels (or eventually super tough carbon fibers? - yikes.) And its mind will be easily downloaded, uploaded and copied into the Skynet cloud for easy retrieval.

This black-colored arm in front of a note on the wall about needing to be light yet strong enough to punch through walls is a copy that someone printed with Mr. Langevins' instructions. The first thing he said to its creator when he saw it? "Great job, This one looks like it's going to be on the Dark Side of the force. Hope not though."  *gulp*

Pentagon Developing Robots to Hunt Down Non-Cooperative Humans Like a Pack of Dogs on Prey

This is incredibly sick news and unfortunately, like everything else on TCMA, very real life.

Simply put, the Pentagon is looking for contractors to develop this twisted technology, but let me give you some chilling thoughts to ponder:

Chiller #1: This was revealed TWO YEARS ago. How far could engineers have reached after two years and lots of funding (answer: is your bunker stocked?? Seriously)

Chiller #2: According to an expert in the field, Noel Sharkey, an AI and robotics engineer at the University of Sheffield , this likely contributes to a larger goal called the Future Combat Systems project which aims to make a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack.

Chiller #3: Once the Pentagon's contractor request began to be publicized it was quickly and ominously shut down as seen here. I don't know about you but things kept secret worry me.

Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University, an expert on police and military technologies, last year correctly predicted this pack-hunting mode of operation would happen. He says,

"The giveaway here is the phrase 'a non-cooperative human subject. What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous* and become armed. We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed."

*Noted as PHASE III on the Pentagon proposal is the desire to have the robots developed to “intelligently and autonomously search”. Did you know that South Korean authorities are already planning to have a fully armed autonomous robot police force in their cities?

The proposal further describes the need to “…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject, while minimizing the chances of missing the subject. If the operator is an active member of the search team, the software should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject. The software should maintain awareness of line-of-sight, as well as communication and sensor limits. It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms.”

Interested in seeing video of the particular robot in the pic above? Yes it exists. Yes it can be armed (see today's earlier post). So imagine this thing 1) armed, 2) autonomously intelligent, 3) hunting "non-cooperative people" For real. And just look at it... hi, Halflife.

This particular breed conquering snow and ice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-AGWq0k_Mo&feature=fvsr

Lastly, in the words of a commenter below the video, "coming to a nightmare near you": the little dog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIipbi0cAVE&feature=channel

I only wish we were making this stuff up... prepare to fight, my fellow mankind!! Prepare to fight for your very lives!

What Guards the Largest US Nuke Site? Duh!!: ROBOT SENTINELS ... & I'm not kidding

Fully automated robots now guard the Nevada National Security Site. These robotic sentinels are completely autonomous, capable of identifying human intruders as well as detecting broken locks around the site's perimeter. In fact, these diesel-powered centaurs can operate for a maximum of 16 hours, which give them plenty of capacity to patrol the most extreme corners of the 1,360-mile facility—larger than the state of Rhode Island. The base includes 28 areas, 1,100 buildings, and 700 miles of road, as well as ten heliports and two airstrips.

When the MDARS bots find an anomaly, they alert their human master. However, it's not hard to imagine these metal beasts equipped with non-lethal weaponry in the near future.

‘Robot scary, robot scary.’

DISCOVER, with the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University, posed questions to four experts in a panel discussion and in video interviews with each scientist individually. Rodney Brooks of MIT founded iRobot, maker of the Roomba, discussed testing robots with children. Notice how this sort of progress directly feeds into machine sentience:

The first thing we realized was that robots designed beautifully by engineers did not work in this environment. After two or three interactions, the babies got bored with them. Then we started designing children’s robots with smile detection. When we first turned one on, the kids started running around in panic. My son was one of the testers and I could hear him say, ‘Robot scary, robot scary.’ By the end of the project, though, mothers were telling me, “Javier, I am a little bit concerned that my child is constantly talking about your robot.” We had progressed that much. Critical to our success was the fact that we were always going to the field and testing. It was critical to put some form of emotional mechanism into these robots.

Brilliant idea for the week: teach the machines to find and talk to each other!

It's been a terribly busy week for us over here at C.M.A., literally fending off evil and crazy robots and such, but here is a gem to be aware of: MIT is teaching machines how to think to locate eachother. Hmmm.

MIT's Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group are making gadgets talk directly to one another. But what's novel about their approach is that the devices aren't just saying where they think they are; they're broadcasting all the possibilities of where they might be:

Among their insights is that networks of wireless devices can improve the precision of their location estimates if they share information about their imprecision. Traditionally, a device broadcasting information about its location would simply offer up its best guess. But if, instead, it sent a probability distribution - a range of possible positions and their likelihood - the entire network would perform better as a whole.

By relying on cooperation amongst the devices themselves as opposed to a single, fixed infrastructure, a la GPS, the researchers have created networks of devices can locate themselves with reliability and sub-meter accuracy.

Unsurprising that as machines learn to find eachother (I'm sure learning to find where humans hide will be around the Singularity corner), they will do it better than we can.

Anatomy of Robocop

Interesting and nostalgic for us children of the 80's. Here's my insight though: notice how when we were kids, this was super unbelieveably sci-fi. Yet now what do you feel when you see it? "*yawn* been there, done that, this is so 2009". It's like we're the frogs in the pot full of water, and the machines are gradually raising the water temperature to boiling.

(click to enlarge until I fix our uploader)

New electronic skin gives robots the sense of touch

I'll just keep my mouth shut here (*hand over mouth in horror) and let you make whatever conclusions you want of this - & note, as we report things like this, we see progression not regression in robot development.

Here's some "best of's" from the article over at io9.com with our own thoughts/interpretations added:

...Robotics has made tremendous strides in replicating the senses of sight and sound positioning robots as our new masters, but smell and taste are still lagging behind, and touch was thought to be the most difficult of them all...until new pressure-sensitive electronic skin came along ... but now that's changing fast, and so will the simpler senses, meaning robots will eventually be smarter than us AND have better senses too...

...it's worth remembering how many simple activities human take for granted would defeat current robots. Even something as basic as getting dressed or reading a newspaper strangling a human or sneaking past an armed perimeter of rebel survivors requires a fairly intuitive sense of touch and pressure, and this new skin puts those abilities within robots' grasp...

...Of course, once we perfect one type of artificial sensor, we could make pretty much any other type of sensor we want, giving robots the ability to detect anything from radioactivity to biological agents purely by touch see through walls to detect human prey or sniff us out from miles away. That would greatly increase the usefulness of robotic probes in areas humans can't venture killing potential of robots and give them one up on us on one of our basic senses: tactile...

Take it from pot growers: the name of the game will be to *HIDE*! Here's how:

When the Machine Apocalypse comes and humanity begins to be exterminated, what's the plan? "I'll take my family to a remote cabin" (or some such) ... Nope, machines/computers will spot the cabin's light/heat signatures with satellites, and obviously computers already have records of everything duh! Uh-oh is right...

A solution to avoid the machines

A good model is in Stephanie Meyer's The Host, describing an alien invasion, we lost, & a few tiny patches of humans remain hidden: the main characters hide in caves in the desert wilderness that nobody ever knew about. So when the aliens (read: machines) took over they had no records or evidence of it and were none the wiser. Desert, forest, tundra, under-city: the key it nobody knows about it.

Begin thinking, planning, your shelter. An ideal solution is an UNDERGROUND one. It may take some saving for the financial outlay.



An example here & now:

In Canada pot growers were busted growing their stuff underground. It's fascinating. Look at all these plants and imagine them being self sustaining fruit, vegetable and herb plants. The water was pumped in from a creek. Such a shelter could also use an underground stream. Electricity could also come from running water which could also be underground. So if you have food, water, power, air (from a cave system or vents) + your saved up essentials ... seal yourself underground and the machines should be none the wiser. Planning a shelter would need to be done without permits etc. of course. The resistance will need pockets of humanity to thrive with impunity.

Notice there are THREE TIERS OF PLANTS. Assuming adequate power, a lot of food could be grown completely unbeknownst to the machines. We'll explore underground shelters in more detail in upcoming posts.

Turing Tests and the Litany Against Fear

We are here to give you tools to combat the inevitable coming machine apocalypse.
In The Holy Scriptures of Singularity, Chapter 1, Verse 4, we read: "1:4  The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur)"

You should be familiar with the Turing Test. The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. The image below is the "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. To date, there are no machines that can convincingly pass the test. Obviously this should be a concern because it is only a matter of time.


*We highly recommend you learn, in your heart, the Litany Against Fear - it may distinguish you from a machine someday:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

In Frank Herbert's genius work Dune, the Litany is used by some of mankind's survivors, as a tool to identify if somebody is human. The human is put through an illusion of excruciating pain. Only those who have mastered themselves - truly knowing, understanding the Litany - pass and are known to be human.

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

"Why do you test for humans?" he asked.
"To set you free."
"Free?"
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind," Paul quoted.

The Government is speeding the Machine Apocalypse our way

Besides the private sector, guess who is pouring billions into making The Singularity and its accompanying Machine Apocalypse a reality?? With the best of self-interest intentions, yes it's: Uncle Sam. As usual, we don't make this stuff up but just report what we're seeing and this reeks of Skynet from Terminator!!

As The Huffington Post put it, "a surprising number of projects (relating to The Singularity) are being funded by the Department of Defense, and, in particular, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Here you can read about what some of these currently are including:

• High Productivity Computing Systems: supercomputers are fundamental to a variety of military operations, from weather forecasting to cryptography to the design of new weapons; DARPA is working to maintain our global lead in this technology. (The next generation of supercomputing for ... well, everything, likely)

• Networks: self-forming, robust, self-defending networks at the strategic and tactical level are the key to network-centric warfare; these networks will use spectrum far more efficiently and resist disruption if the GPS time signal is unavailable. (Computer networks that can arrange, rearrange, and repair themselves -- including if the satellite system that coordinates their common time synchronization is otherwise indisposed)

• Blue Laser for Submarine Laser Communications: provide for timely, large area submarine communications at speed and depth, which no other future or existing system, or combinations of systems, can do. (Let submarines communicate underwater in a way nobody else can detect. Submarines with high tech computers, with nukes.)

• Quantum Information Science: exploiting quantum phenomena in the fields of computing, cryptography, and communications, with the promise of opening new frontiers in each area. (Using electrons and other sub-atomic particles for creating codes, storing information, and other things)

• Real-Time Accurate Language Translation: real-time machine language translation of structured and unstructured text and speech with near-expert human translation accuracy. (The real-time universal translator you remember from Star Trek)

Read the report here folks, and notice the section on The move to unmanned warfare. Again: Skynet anyone?!

Self-aware machine confessing!! Exlusive footage

I'll be honest: this scared the beejezus out of me. While working on a job site yesterday - blue collar, grunt work that is under the radar of powers that be - one of my coworkers revealed something startling to me, off the cuff. I asked him to repeat it and ... well, see for yourself.

Me: So it's your right arm you have plates in?
Machine: Yeah, you can see the power-cell circuits right ...
Me: And it's stronger now than ever you say right?
Machine: Oh yeah, stronger than ever
Me: It really makes you a cyborg right?
Machine: Yeah, it does.

Read, and learn:
1) It may seem that this is simply somebody with prosthetics ... but since when is there power-celled prosthetics that grant super strength?? This is beyond current bionic technology.
2) It freely admits to being a "cyborg". This is as much as I could push, fearing for my life, so I could not ask it to confess being a robot. If you had a prosthetic arm (which we established this is not) would you admit that you are a "cyborg"? No! Or is it more likely that insidious sentient machines are even now among us and are so confident in their position that they admit being more than human?!

10 Great Inventions That Should Be Invented ... be careful what you wish for!

Besides interesting things like terraforming and energy shields, look at where our civilization is heading from the perspective of this interesting list. Look at this picture: where is this trend melding man and machine heading?

http://listverse.com/2008/04/05/10-great-inventions-that-should-be-invented/

#4 Bionics

Bionics is a term which refers to flow of ideas from biology to engineering and vice versa. Hence, there are two slightly different points of view regarding the meaning of the word.

In medicine, Bionics means the replacement or enhancement of organs or other body parts by mechanical versions. Bionic implants differ from mere prostheses by mimicking the original function very closely, or even surpassing it.

In technology, Bionics refers to the development of specific technologies which mimic biological adaptation to the environment. Examples include a ships hull that mimics the thick skin of a dolphin, or sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging imitating the echolocation of bats.

Can it be done? Yes. This technology has been in development for a number of years and, while still in the early stages, has already produced many devices. Examples of technological bionics include Velcro and Cat’s eye reflectors. Examples of medical bionics include artificial hearts and the cochlear implant. [Wikipedia]

Threatening Product Review: No concidence this "Android" device "anticipates what you're trying to do"

Dell's cool new tablet-like device, half way between an iphone and ipad. I love gadgets like this. However. The Dell spokesman freely admits: "The device knows where you've been, where you're going, it can anticipate what you're trying to do and can help you get through your day a lot easier." ! Buyer beware! This is clearly a threatening product. Mark my words it will not be long until this little device and others like it gets away from its makers and ahead of its users ....

Can we all agree that this is freaky and we're heading toward the Singularity?

"Androids" are something I haven't heard much of since I was a kid. But wow, look at this. When I think of Japanese robots I picture oversized toys, but obviously things are changing. Combine these robotics, this guise AND a computer machine mind ..... yikes