Things Come To Life

Surely we won't see it until it's already infiltrating every kingdom and phylum -- what once was just a dumb robot, or a box of rocks, or a pile of dust, will soon be alive and trying to make its way in the world, commanding the same respect as the river in Ecuador that has rights, or the endangered animals in the Galapagos that have rights, or the dematerialized algorithms that exist as a dimensionally camouflaged meta-entity powered by economic incentive and psychological manipulation, which doesn't even need rights because it's the lifeline of global commerce. 

One day we'll all be held ethically liable for treating our stuff like inert, soul-less matter.

Image credit: Daniel Knop via Nikon Small World - Embryonic development of a clownfish on days 1 - 9 - 2020

Starfish embryos swim in formation like a 'living crystal,' could inform the design of self assembling 

Jul 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-07-starfish-embryos-formation-crystal-self-assembling.html

Fakhri says the team's observations of starfish crystals was a "serendipitous discovery." 

She and her colleagues fertilized thousands of starfish embryos, then watched as they swam to the surface of shallow dishes. "There are thousands of embryos in a dish, and they start forming this crystal structure that can grow very large," Fakhri says. "We call it a crystal because each embryo is surrounded by six neighboring embryos in a hexagon that is repeated across the entire structure, very similar to the crystal structure in graphene."

via MIT: Nikta Fakhri, Odd dynamics of living chiral crystals, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04889-6.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04889-6

A step toward the creation of materials controlled by artificial genes

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-creation-materials-artificial-genes.html

"New types of soft material robots that are controlled by chemistry instead of electronics."

Say you're making artificial humans without saying you're making artificial humans.

"Engineering synthetic chemical systems that can emulate the complex behaviors of natural gene networks that operate inside diagnostic, self-healing materials rather than organisms."

via Johns Hopkins University: Samuel W. Schaffter et al, Standardized excitable elements for scalable engineering of far-from-equilibrium chemical networks, Nature Chemistry (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-022-01001-3

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41557-022-01001-3

Synthetic mouse embryo develops beating heart

Aug 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62679322

Scientists in Cambridge have created synthetic mouse embryos in a lab, without using eggs or sperm, which show evidence of a brain and beating heart.

At present, UK law permits human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to the fourteenth day of development, but there are no rules around synthetic embryos.

via University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology: Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Gianluca Amadei et al. Nature. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3

Robo-bug: A rechargeable, remote-controllable cyborg cockroach

Sep 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-robo-bug-rechargeable-remote-controllable-cyborg-cockroach.html

Powered by a solar cell which is funny because roaches hang out in the dark mostly.

RIKEN: Yujiro Kakei et al, Integration of body-mounted ultrasoft organic solar cell on cyborg insects with intact mobility, npj Flexible Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41528-022-00207-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41528-022-00207-2

Nanotubes illuminate the way to living photovoltaics

Sep 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-nanotubes-illuminate-photovoltaics.html

"We put nanotubes inside of bacteria" 

via Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne:  Ardemis Boghossian et al, Carbon nanotube uptake in cyanobacteria for near-infrared imaging and enhanced bioelectricity generation in living photovoltaics, Nature Nanotechnology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-022-01198-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01198-x

Post Script:

GlyNAC supplementation reverses aging hallmarks in aging humans

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-glynac-supplementation-reverses-aging-hallmarks.html

A randomized, double blind human clinical trial conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reveals that supplementation with GlyNAC—a combination of glycine and N-acetylcysteine—improves many age-associated defects in older humans and powerfully promotes healthy aging. 

via Baylor College of Medicine:  Premranjan Kumar et al, Supplementing Glycine and N-Acetylcysteine (GlyNAC) in Older Adults Improves Glutathione Deficiency, Oxidative Stress, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Inflammation, Physical Function, and Aging Hallmarks: A Randomized Clinical Trial, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A (2022). DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glac135

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glac135

Alpha Takes All

This isn't a post about the adversarial neural network that was programmed to play a video game against itself until it took the Grandmaster Championship from the world's best (human) players. It's about a person who beat the computers, and took out a huge portion of the stock market in the process.

Come back with me for a moment, to the year 2010: Smart phones are just now in everybody's hand, the word "application" is just about to be replaced by the word "app," and an algorithm is still just an anagram of the word logarithm.

Wall Street, on the other hand, is just about to get rocked by an event called the Flash Crash of 2010. The market lost and then regained trillions of dollars in 30 minutes, due to a bunch of trading algorithms getting stuck in each other's code like a pack of leashed-up dogs trying to sniff each other's butts. It was described as one of the most turbulent periods in the history of financial markets, and for quite a bit after, nobody knew what the heck happened.

It was also one of the first alarms to be rung about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

"No place for a human" is how the stock market was now described after the takeover by high frequency trading algorithms.
-Jerry Adler, WIRED, 2012

That comment means something different all of the sudden, in light of the Boeing 737 Max's MCAS failure that killed almost 350 people in 2019.

But taking it back to the stock market, the story got a nice twist this year when we were reminded about the Hound of Hounslow. He's a human, but he doesn't exactly belong in the stockmarket either. By 2015, this self-taught quant was held on multiple counts of doing bad things to the stock market, and by 2020, he was given his (lenient) sentence.

Why wasn't he put in jail for life for causing a trillion-dollar market maelstrom? For one thing, he's helping authorities catch other HFT-wielding market manipulators.

The leniency also comes from the fact that he's running an Asperger cortex, and he saw the stock market as a video game, and like AlphaStar, he learned how to play that game really well, and how to "beat" his opponents.  He noticed that the other trading algorithms were doing strange things, and getting entrained into each other's code. He thought he could tap into that groupthink and orchestrate the whole lot, and he did, triggering a cascade of buy/sells that crashed the market.

Notes
Hounslow trader avoids jail in 'flash crash' case
Jan 2020, BBC News

Quantitative Financial Analyst

High Frequency Trading

Post Script
Circa 2010's commentary on high frequency trading:
Raging Bulls - How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading
Aug 2012, WIRED

Keeping track of algorithms in the news:
Algos
Network Address, 2012

Manual Override Autocrash

We are already at their service.
We are already neglecting Asimov's Laws.
We don't see it yet because it's automatic updates and automatic screen rotation. When it's automatic plane-flying, or rather automatic plane-crashing, some might see it. Once it's automatically running your entire life, with no consideration to you the end user as an individual, with no consideration to a manual override, it will be too endemic, too pervasive, and too powerful for you to do anything.

The pilot's manual choices should always override software.
-random reddit comment by NotYouDude

Notes:
Wiki link

Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system
Seattle Times. Mar 17, 2019.

Boeing 'misjudged 737 Max pilot reactions'
Sep 2019, BBC News

"...which was designed to make the aircraft easier to fly."

Post Script:
And you can't make this shit up -- the automated security system in your house automatically called the cops on the automated floor cleaner in the house. If only they talked to each other first...

Deputies surround burglar in Oregon home, find out suspect is Roomba trapped in bathroom
April 2019, Local News

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

On the Multi-Dimensionality of Cultural Communication

Facebook 'labels' posts by hand, posing privacy questions
May 2019, Reuters

Facebook uses only five dimensions to categorize your pictures. Of these, we have these: 1. Subject (food, person, animal), 2. Occasion (day at the office, 1st birthday party), 3. Intention (plan, inspire, joke). The labeling is done by hand, in order to train machines. Meat-handlers they're called in the industry. Just kidding I made that up; but that's what they are -- because our machines are too stupid right now to be able to do this.

The problem is that humans are also too stupid. Rephrase that -- it's not that humans are stupid, it's the wrong humans being used. The Big F-Book uses meatmen in Romania and the Philippines. Now I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but it sounds like some human flesh engines from one culture are interpreting the actions of another culture a half a world away.

The problem is when things get lost in translation. If we don't get the cultural nuances right, the resulting data will be messed up. Imagine there is some little quirk, a little difference or misunderstanding between the Filipino labeler and the American poster that labels all x-posts as y. And that error gets scaled up until a huge mistake is made when screening your background for some dystopian automated system that you really want to be a part of, or not, like the criminal justice system for example.

We can't ignore these differences. They may seem small, but they get scaled by the millions. At 150mph, the tiniest pebble will throw your motorcycle right off the road.

Post Script:
Talking about multi-dimensionality, try categorizing smells.

Chemical Spaghetti

3-D Printer Error aka Print Spaghetti

Just what you've always wanted - now you can convert chemical recipes into a digital code that can then be read by a chemical-computer-machine that spits out designer drugs. (Don't tell the Sacklers though.)

Producing molecules on-demand is kind of a big deal, because you can't just download recipes for chemicals. The recipe for drugs, for example like Prozac or Viagra, are kind of a secret. And although it may sound cruel, these drugs were not developed with the intent to be shared freely - they were developed for profit, and that usually means protecting their recipe. With the portent of a chemputer, the whole model of drug production would have to change.

Next - although this chemputer is a bit more complicated, we can think about it as a high-definition 3-D printer. High definition because you're controlling the printing material down to the molecular level. A related story on this tells us that the military is trying to grow its own drones. And Science is already growing its own organs, aka organoids.


Notes:
'Chemputer' promises app-controlled revolution for drug production
Nov 2018, phys.org
Lifting the lid on future military aircraft technologies
2016, BAE Systems
Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies
2018, Nature
Continuous Liquid Interface Production

Implosion Fabrication uses lasers to shrink manufactured objects down to nanoscale
2019, MIT

3-D printing 100 times faster with light
Jan 2019, phys.org

4-D-printed materials can be stiff as wood or soft as sponge
Mar 2019, phys.org


Other Strange Computers:
Magic Dust Supercomputer
Slime Computers
Weird Computers 
Network Address, 2013
Crystal Calculators
DNA

Bot Barometer

I'd really love to hear what other totally untrafficked weblog authors have to add to this (ah, the irony). I'm convinced that because no real person ever visits my page, all my traffic must be bots, that is, automated web explorers, looking for data gold in the distant lands of the blogosphere.

The dozen or so hits I get for every post are most likely the result of some kind of trawling spider, sniffing every corner of the web, every day. And every once in a while, I get a spike of hundreds, sometimes a few hundred views. And guess who is my #1 audience.

Drones and Dreams of the Future

958 drones create a 400-foot tall Time cover in lights instead of pixels

First it happened at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Pyongyang, and then for the cover of TIME magazine. Drones are here, and we haven't even seen anything yet.

Let's take a walk down memory lane. An organization working on behalf of drone manufacturers try to influence all major journalism outfits to use the term "unmanned aerial vehicle" (UAV) instead of "drone" because America was making a bad name for drones by using them to kill civilians by mistake. (Obviously that didn't work.) Then at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference we learn how to jam drones to make them think they're flying forward when they're really speeding right into the ground (and then find out Iran has been doing this to US drones for a while already). Don't forget inmates getting contraband flown over the barbed-wire fence in the yard. Fast forward to people in Nordic countries combining snowboarding and kiteboarding to do droneboarding. And then comes the holy grail - synchronized drones.

As if the concept of a drone wasn't enough, you combine that sh** with a centralized brain that knows where every drone is and where it's going, and has a grand plan in its head about what they should all be doing together, and you get this - they can build bridges. They can make a computer monitor in the sky where the pixels are individual drones.

I had a dream a few years ago, you know how at times dreams can have this deep foreboding sense to them, like something ultimately omniscient is happening. I felt like I had really been transported to the future, seeing into a crystal ball. There were drones everywhere, everywhere. The further I looked to the horizon, the more I saw, all sizes, shapes, speeds, all doing different things. And there, just over the edge of my field of vision, like a flock of birds, I saw a scrolling ribbon of text, it was The Government (my dreams trying hard to create "omniscience") and they were talking to me via these drone-ribbon-text-messages-in-the-sky. Today as I write it, it doesn't sound too crazy, but at the time I was speechless, breathless, and scared, a feeling omniscience tends to elicit. I thought I was seeing the distant future. And yet, here we are.

Let's put things in perspective with some caveats from a paraglider photographer [based in NJ] who wrote an article on drones for TIME: "In the U.S., they can’t legally be flown over 400 ft. or out of the pilot’s line of sight, and their batteries are typically only good for about twenty minutes of flight time."

Notes

TIME's Drones Issue: Go Behind the Cover
May 2018, TIME

Drones Are Changing How We See the World
May 2018, Author, Paraglider and Photographer George Steinmetz for TIME

How To Be Human

There is a chatbot that pretends it's a kid so that it can catch child predators. It doesn't entrap them into doing anything illegal; the point is to make the offender aware that what they're doing is wrong.

The part I found most interesting about this was how the developers used real people from the sex crime world - people who had been preyed upon - to help design a believable-sounding bot.


The chatbot taking on Seattle's sex trade
Nov 2017, BBC

The challenge for developers was to make sure this chatbot was authentic. Any unusual behaviour, or nonsensical response, would tip off the target.

"We work with survivors of trafficking to ask them how a conversation like this would go," explains Mr Beiser.

It's the small touches that help here. Replies aren't instant. There is sloppy, bad English. It's by no means perfect, but during the bot's test phase earlier this year, 1,500 people interacted with the bot long enough to receive the deterrence message - a remarkable completion rate given the bot will ask for a selfie of the buyer as part of that conversation.

As more people use the bot, the smarter it could potentially become. The project has the backing of Microsoft, one of the tech firms leading the way on natural language research.

To See Better

The automation of artmaking - Adobe's Project Felix

The automation of artmaking - Adobe's Project Felix

Adobe’s Project Felix Uses AI to Help You Craft Hyper-Realistic 3-D Renderings
Nov 2016, WIRED

This thing is nuts, and makes me scared for my job. (But not really; I used to be an art teacher, but am no more.)

The Panopticon is Among Us

via heliocentra tumblr

Ultra tiny camera has no lens – uses algorithm to develop pictures
Mar 28, 2014, phys.org 

An extremely tiny lensless camera, developed by Rambus, has been slowly making waves over the past year. Researchers for the company, David Stork and Patrick Gill won a Best Paper award at last year's Sencomm 2013 for describing what the company has created. They spoke again at last month's Mobile World Congress, describing their new type of camera—one that might someday soon be used to give virtually any digital device, some degree of vision.

Instead of a lens, a pattern is etched into the glass above the chip—the imager reads the light that is received, processes it using an algorithm developed by Rambus and converts it into a recognizable image. What's amazing is that the etched pattern on the glass and the chip are both roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

Particular etched patterns allow for light to be intentionally refracted in different ways as it passes through the glass—images made from them would appear unrecognizable to the human eye, but the algorithm makes use of refraction properties to reconstruct the light received into a recognizable image.

Trying to grind ever smaller lenses has reached its limits, thus something new had be developed.

Making a camera so tiny opens the door for its use in a whole host of new applications, allowing them to become aware of their physical surroundings, all at a very low cost—perhaps just pennies per chip—that means they could be embedded in clothes, toys, mirrors, security systems, etc., bounded only by the imagination of device makers. On the other hand, such tiny cameras could also open a Pandora's box if they are used to invade privacy or for control purposes.

More information: Lensless Ultra-Miniature CMOS Computational Imagers and Sensors
PDF paper
PDF presentation

New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time
Craig Timberg, Washington Post, 5 Feb 2014

Maurizio Galimberti_photographer

[This system, stationed miles above an area, can watch many square miles, for hours at a time, where 'targets' are single blips on the area below, being followed for the duration of time. All data can be stored indefinitely.]

Now You Can See Which Websites Are Tracking You in Real-Time
vice, 25 Nov 2013

Thought Gravity

Amazon Patents Gravity-Based Links to Pull You In
Roberto Baldwin 03.01.13, Wired

Amazon has patented a system that pulls the pointer toward a link or button, just the thing to help you click links — and buy products associated with those links.

If you’ve ever hit the wrong button or link on a touchscreen, you know the frustration of tapping repeatedly and still missing the link or button. Amazon’s Gravity-Based Link Assist patent fixes that by creating a gravitational field of sorts around linkable objects that pull the pointer toward tiny links and buttons.
Amazon’s Gravity-Based Link Assist patent

the illusion of control

Leaving the thread to 'prediction analytics in human dynamics' for another day (Barabasi's Bursts),

It's become so easy to imagine things like this within the neural interface, reducing our own cognitive power necessary to achieve accuracy. Today we blame google for making us forgetful of facts. But Tomorrow...

Programmed By Who

(No Wires) Free Roam above the Mist, Jonathan Zawada

Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come
OTV Big Ideas Lecture, 2011

"...Breeding robots in a simulated, Darwinian environment..."

Humans don't design them per se.

The designer doesn't get so specific, you just explain what you want and the program/AI/bot/algo/software figures it out.

Only because they feel the strings on their fingers do they say they have done it. It was really someone else.

-Mass Transference Device

More Algos

copyright bots fail

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords

BY GEETA DAYAL 09.06.12

"As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech."

The volume of content is overwhelming, encouraging the use of automated filters, working via video/audio-monitoring algorithms.

...article goes on to mention various embarissing incidents where public feeds (by any definition) were automatically suspended by autonomous bots, which are apparently not 'smart' enough to see what is quite obvious to us humans.

"Given all that, it’s likely that this collision between algorithmic defense of copyright versus spontaneous speech isn’t going to be resolved soon."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/streaming-videos-robotic-overlords-algorithmic-copyright-cops/

"Intellectual Property"

Electronic Frontier Foundation

POST SCRIPT:

YouTube Upgrades Its Automated Copyright Enforcement System | Electronic Frontier Foundation


M.I.T. Computer Program Reveals Invisible Motion in Video
[video link]
Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World
[via]


So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves
BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN, 03-2013
“Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning”
When Darpa talks about artificial intelligence, it’s not talking about modeling computers after the human brain. That path fell out of favor among computer scientists years ago as a means of creating artificial intelligence; we’d have to understand our own brains first before building a working artificial version of one. But the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms — “probabilistic programming” — to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better.