I, For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords

From Terrifying Robot Update comes this terrifying robot update:



Obviously there are endless civilian uses, replacing workers, getting rid of non-robotic citizens, and related etc, but the fact that this is a DARPA project suggests that they are working toward taking the human element out of war, which can only be a good thing.

Human Resources Is a Misnomer

I recently applied for a some kind of a job. I got an email the other day explaining that all the applications had been feed into a computer which then didn't select me. The email, which is about was bog standard as it could be, came from a real person and asked me to log into the company's webpage to acknowledge having received the email. What is the point of a HR department that uses machines to make the important decisions and people to fulfill the routinized functions, you ask. It seems to me that by automating the process of selecting winners and losers the system forces us to think like machines. No longer will the cover letter matter but rather it matters that a machine reading your resume finds the various words,whatever they may be, that tell a machine that you can handle the job. It is, in other words, another step in dehumanizing humanity in the service of greater efficiency. Indeed, were I the HR human who wrote the bog standard letter, I would be busy changing careers as all HR humans are now redundant.

Castro Blogs

A recent email obliquely informed me that Fidel Castro blogs. In a recent post, Castor ponders the speed of information and asks us to

[i]magine. . . for one minute, this powerful quantum computer cable of processing an infinite number of times the data processed by modern computers.

Is it not, perhaps, obvious that worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war which would put an end to human life?

I am sure that 90% of U.S. citizens registered, especially Latinos, Blacks and a growing number of those in the middle class, the impoverished, would vote for the robot.

Jesus, now the commies want to outsource the real work to robots.

Warring Robots

I read somewhere that in WWII the percentage of combat to logistics was 30/70 and, it seems fair to argue, that the logistics played a role in winning that if not every war. Recently, the US has privatized logistics out of concern for the neoliberal ideal of making a buck off of everything especially those things that increase human misery and particularly if someone's crony or another makes that buck.

Today, however, I read an interesting article about how

[t]he Navy, on behalf of the Marines, launched the so-called Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System program late last year. According to program documents, the goal of the six-year-program is to produce an “unmanned and potentially optionally-manned” robot to “provide affordable and reliable rapid response cargo delivery to distributed small units in demanding, austere locations and environments.”

At first I thought this would be opposed by Halliburton et alia on the grounds that they need the dough. But then it occurred to me that this is a win win win for the forces of private wars and police. Once the US taxpayers spends trillions to perfect robot pilots and drivers, the Pentagon can sell the methods to make the machines for a buck two eighty and then Halliburton et alia can fire all their employes boost while keeping their contracts at the same level and reap not, as one might hope, the whirlwind but rather the windfall.

With crap brilliant examples of human ingenuity like this, is it any wonder that we hare fighting five or six wars? The business of America is business and war is where the money is.

Sort of Like Robots

So this video suggests that some kind of a replicator is in the works.



 Unfortunately, or so it seems to me, this will not led to a more egalitarian society but rather, given the 21st century's political dynamic, more stuff for the one percent and decreased life expectancy for the rest of us.

I think the time has come to refocus on political and social arrangements before creating the next shiny  bit of technology.

Biking Bots

Recently I drew attention to robotic snakes and spiders, which -- should science fiction movies predict the future -- will lead to all manner of mayhem. Today, I want to mention that robot makers want robots to enjoy the rude good health of your average cyclist:



 So now solar  powered robots will be able to survive the loss of man made power and ride their cycles from city to city while enslaving the remaining humans who will be forced to construct nuclear power plants because robots are immune to the environmental damage those mechanical monstrosities cause. Hurray scienctist types.

Oh Dear

It like today's robot engineers never ever watch movies:

I'm Sure Nothing Bad Will Come of This

Thinking robots:


It's not like they just got closer.

How The World Ends

I am sure, of course, that there is nothing to this:

The Lingodroid research project lets robots generate random sounds for the places they visit in both simulations and a real office.
The "words" are shared and the robots play games to establish which sound represents which location.
The lexicon has proved so sophisticated that it can be used to help robots find places other robots direct them to.

When machines finally do gain the upperish hand will it be our friends and collaborators in the creation of a new Eden or our overlords. I'm voting overlords.

Robots

The guys that developed this



are almost assuredly not actively plotting humanity's demise, but still.

via

Skynet Lives

Ahem:

European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.
Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.

Robots and Education

From here, I went here and learned that

one school, Carnegie Mellon, has come very close to a self-contained course with no instructor at all, but still toes the party line on the notion that human capital is crucial to the educational experience.

But what’s keeping a less-scrupulous school from making professors disappear entirely? The cost of the technology, explains Stross:

Developing that best-in-the-world online course — in which students would learn as much, or more, than in an ordinary classroom or a hybrid online class — requires significant investment. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed about 15 sophisticated online courses, mostly in the sciences, spent $500,000 to $1 million to write software for each.

Proponents of distance education might tell you something about how wonderful it is that students can learn all the way from India or in their pajamas, but anybody who knows anything about labor history knows that this kind of large-scale technological investment is really all about costs. Professors demand salaries. Cut out the professors and save the cost of their salaries.

But that’s where the labor history analogy breaks down. The Bonsack cigarette rolling machine not only destroyed the jobs of untold thousands of workers, it led to really, really cheap cigarettes. Online education, an education so bad that some employers won’t even consider someone with a degree earned from a for-profit college administered this way, is actually seven times more expensive than a real education at a typical community college. Professors haven’t disappeared entirely yet, but obviously none of the cost-savings from online education have been passed on to students. Since even online courses with poorly-paid adjuncts save schools so much money in costs compared to real classes, shouldn’t they cost less rather than seven times more?

And this weird robot could never carry and deliver the mail



Certainly the last thing we would want to do is have a discussion about creative destruction and technological innovation because that might mitigate against the market's genius

Creative Destruction

Over to "The London Review of Books'" blog, we read about the Neoliberalization in the name of "modernisation" of the Royal Mail from someone with the improbable name of Roy Mayall. In the course of the discussion he mentions something called the Pegasus Geo-Route, which is some sort of GPS dealio, that

measures the precise distance of every walk, up and down every garden path, to every door. It tells the postal worker exactly how fast he is supposed to be walking and therefore how long each round is supposed to take.

And a

new walk-sequencing machines are made by Solystic, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, which describes itself as ‘a leading global security company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, shipbuilding and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide.’

To say nothing of the replacement of bicycles with trucks.

Recently, I mentioned that robots have taken over the diaper.com warehouse. These robots work off of some kind of a grid thingy that allows them to pick up and drop off items inside the warehouse. They are the first step in the mechanization of the pick up and drop off industry. How long until someone puts together picking up and dropping off in a discrete space with the ability of GPS dealios to aid the picking up and dropping off in a larger and unenclosed space with robots and, consequently, using robots in mail delivery? Or garbage pickup? Or UPS or FedEx?

No doubt, those whose jobs are creatively destroyed by the robots will find work busing tables, waiting tables, cooking food, and paring the bunions of the every fewer and older rich folks, whose job markets will not, thankfully, suffer from the interference of union rules and licensing.