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Thread: Which Colossal Death Robot are you?

  1. #46
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    That's it. We're done.

    Resistance is futile

    Sex robot ARMIES: Fears hackers could create killer cyborgs and turn technology on punters
    ULTRA-REALISTIC sex robots could be used by warped hackers to attack humans, according to a chilling warning.
    By Jamie Micklethwaite / Published 9th September 2017

    “Once hacked they could absolutely be used to perform physical actions”
    Dr Nick Patterson

    The sex robot craze has swept the globe, with punters willing to fork out the cash to have their wicked way with the dolls.

    And producers have promised punters more realism than ever, with dolls able to mimic human voices and have orgasms set to enter the market.

    But tech experts have warned that the more advanced these robots get, the greater the risk they will pose to mankind.


    GETTY
    KILLER: Could sex robots rise up against randy owners?

    Inventor Elon Musk labelled advanced AI including sex robots as the biggest risk of World War 3, claiming that North Korea should be low on our list of concerns.

    Cyber security lecturer Dr Nick Patterson worryingly said that hacking into a sex robot could even be easier than gaining access to someone’s laptop or phone.

    He added that once the robot has been breached, the hacker then has full control.


    INSTAGRAM/REAL DOLL
    LOOKS COULD KILL: These robots could become deadly

    He told Daily Star Online: “Hackers can hack into a robot or a robotic device and have full control of the connections, arms, legs and other attached tools like in some cases knives or welding devices.

    “Often these robots can be upwards of 200 pounds, and very strong. Once a robot is hacked, the hacker has full control and can issue instructions to the robot.

    “The last thing you want is for a hacker to have control over one of these robots! Once hacked they could absolutely be used to perform physical actions for an advantageous scenario or to cause damage.”

    Dr Patterson, of Deakin University, Australia, predicted that we will soon see robots replacing human workers and mimicking humans.

    But as long as the robots are connected to an interface, they can always be hacked.

    He added: “Robots need an operating system to operate just like our phones, tablets and laptops.

    “As we have seen, it’s popular to have everything connected to the internet these days – phones, fridges, surveillance cameras, smart homes… robots are no different.”
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  2. #47
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    wrong...

    This is just wrong on so many levels.

    There's a vid - it's a little creepy.

    09/29/2017 07:37 pm ET
    Sex Robot Molested At Electronics Festival, Creators Say
    “Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.”
    By David Moye

    This is why we can’t have nice things.

    The man behind an “intelligent” sex robot named “Samantha” says the kinky creation needs to be repaired thanks to “barbarians” at a tech industry festival.

    Engineer Sergi Santos, of Barcelona, Spain, wanted to show off Samantha at the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, last week.

    The randy robot is programmed with artificial intelligence so that she responds to gentle seduction. Samantha seemingly gets more aroused the more she’s “romanced.”

    That didn’t happen at the festival. Instead, “Samantha” was molested and seriously damaged by attendees.

    “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled,” he said, according to Britain’s Metro news site. ”People can be bad. Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.”

    Even though Samantha’s breasts and some other body parts were badly damaged by the sex-crazed Austrian horde, the AI software in the robot still worked perfectly. When Santos asked the doll, “How are you?” it responded, “Hi, I’m fine,” according to Daily Star.

    That gave the inventor cause for hope. “Samantha can endure a lot, she will pull through,” he said, according to the British tabloid.
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    Popular sex doll Samantha finally breaks down after a lot of customers heavily massaged… http://cingey.com/2017/09/27/popular...d-the-breasts/


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    Arran Lee Squire, a British engineer who helped Santos develop “Samantha,” told the Daily Post he believes the robot should be treated like a lady.

    “I think people have just become over-excited and treated her like a sex doll. She isn’t a sex doll, she is a robot with AI,” he said.

    Santos shipped Samantha in a box back to Barcelona for repairs. The Daily Star reports he has sold 15 versions of her at about $4,000 a pop.
    Gene Ching
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  3. #48
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    Which Colossal Death Robot are you?

    Alright now. Let's start this Monday off by copying all the sex robot posts off our Which Colossal Death Robot are you? into a stand-alone Sex Bot thread. Because it's time has cum.


    Talking Sex Robots With Warm Genitals Will Be on Sale Next Year
    They'll cost about $15,000 and, presumably, a little bit of your dignity.
    By James Grebey on October 31, 2016

    A trip to Westworld costs $40,000 a day, but by next year, you’ll be able to simulate at least part of the experience for less than half that price, because a new line of upsettingly realistic sex robots is going to hit the market. They might not have cowboy hats by default, but they do have warm genitals.
    Writing in The Daily Mail, robotics expert David Levy predicted that sex robots with the ability to talk and respond to touch will be commercially available in 2017.
    “This coming wave of sex robots will be human-like in appearance and size,” He wrote. “They will have human-like genitals. And they will allow intercourse according to their owner’s sexual orientation and tastes.”
    According to Levy, the first wave of these new sex robots will resemble RealDolls — realistic silicon dolls created by a company in California — but with more “functionality.” (The quotes around “functionality” were present in Levy’s original writing, so make of that what you will). However, they’ll soon advance far beyond that.
    For $15,000, Levy says users will be able to buy sex robots with synthetic skin embedded with electronic sensors allowing them to respond to touch, the ability to talk back in a “sexy voice,” and heating elements so that they’ll be warm … all over.


    A RealDoll.

    Abyss Creations, which makes RealDolls, is supposedly at the forefront of this field, though there are numerous Asian companies making major advances of their own. Matt McMullen, the founder and CEO of Abyss Creations said his vision for the future of sex robots involved emotional attachment.
    “I want to have people actually develop an emotional attachment to not only the robot but the actual character behind it,” McMullen said. “To develop some kind of love for this being.”
    Of course, that’s complicated. Can a robot consent — or does it even matter? We may find out firsthand in less than a year.
    “I’ve no doubt some will find it creepy, but we can be clear on this: The arrival of sexually responsive robots will have enormous consequences,” Levy said.

    Photos via Getty Images / David McNewWritten by James Grebey
    Gene Ching
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  4. #49
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    MegaBots vs. Suidobashi

    17 October at 7:00 p.m. PST

    MegaBots Inc.‏ Verified account
    @MegaBots
    Follow @MegaBots
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    IT'S TIME FOR THE GIANT ROBOT DUEL! #GiantRobotDuel @Twitch



    10:54 AM - 11 Oct 2017
    So on topic again, it hurts.
    Gene Ching
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  5. #50
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    I think I have time for a little giant robot battle watching... hmmn
    Kung Fu is good for you.

  6. #51
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    The giant robot duel



    Quote Originally Posted by David Jamieson View Post
    I think I have time for a little giant robot battle watching... hmmn
    You got like half an hour to watch?
    Gene Ching
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  7. #52
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    Maybe we need a fembot thread?

    I thought the Sex Bot thread was enough, but maybe not...

    Robot women in Asia now have human stylists


    Jia Jia, the human robot had a talk with Kevin Kelly on April. 24.
    Retro. (Miao Pai/People's Daily)

    WRITTEN BY
    Tripti Lahiri
    October 22, 2017

    When JiaJia, a Chinese-built robot, did a short Q&A with an AI expert earlier this, year most tech journalists focused on the delay in her responses and her less-than-brilliant answers. Many in China were struck by something quite different: her white embroidered robes and elaborate hairstyle: “Beautiful!” was a common comment.
    For the occasion she wore hanfu, a historic style of clothing inspired by China’s ancient and medieval rulers. That’s frequently how JiaJia dresses for public appearances—or rather, is dressed by the slew of humans responsible for choosing her outfits. As “humanoids” like Jia, developed to look like people, become commonplace, the developers of these machines are going to have to think more often about this: What should a robot wear in the 21st century?
    To a human reared on western 20th-century movies about the future, the words “robot” and “fashion” bring to mind outfits dramatically unlike JiaJia’s attire—they generally involve black leather (or fake leather) for male robots, and form-fitted jumpsuits of some kind of shiny fabric or a punk-rock aesthetic (video) for women.
    But for robot “women” in Asia, just like for human women, fashion is shaped not by visions of a cyberpunk future, but also ideas about the past, society and race.

    JiaJia, China


    JiaJia at an exhibition in Shanghai in April 2016. (Reuters/Aly Song)

    Apart from the occasions where she’s appeared in a gold lamé gown, Jia Jia, who has been in development since 2012 at the Hefei-based University of Science and Technology of China in eastern China, usually wears “Han” clothing. One of her creators explained to Quartz via email that while deciding how to dress her, the team drew inspiration from a Chinese folk tale about a helpful fairy.
    In The Conch Fairy, according to a summary from Chen Xiaoping, director of the university’s robotics lab, an orphan farmer brings home a conch shell. While he’s away tilling the fields, a beautiful fairy emerges from it each day to secretly surprise him with a spotless house and an array of delicious dishes on his return. Professor Chen cites the tale, which he says dates from the 4th century, as inspiration for the “service robots” the lab is developing. In the future, Chen believes robots will be commonplace for service tasks in restaurants and nursing homes.
    JiaJia is a newer iteration of a robot the lab first developed in 2008, whose name, KeJia, was inspired by the tale.
    “We all agreed that Conch Fairy in the tale is a prototype of service robots. This is really amazing since the tale was recorded in a Chinese historical document,” said professor Chen via email. “JiaJia/KeJia follows up the old dream of service robots since ancient times. We would like to reflect this with JiaJia’s dresses and outfits of Han and Tang dynasties, as you see in the photos.”
    Professor Chen added that the elaborate clothing is designed and hand-made by students and experts at the lab’s figure-design group—a level of craft beyond the reach of most human women.
    There are also practical reasons for the clothing choice—robots aren’t as flexible as humans and draped or wrapped clothing is more forgiving. “The robot can hardly wear modern dresses without remolding or re-designing them, since the structure of JiaJia’s shoulders is a little different from humans’. But JiaJia can wear Chinese traditional dresses easily,” wrote the professor.


    Robot reporter, left, human reporter, right. (Facebook/Xinhua)

    The aesthetic adopted for JiaJia shows how movements built around tradition can seep into spaces that are ostensibly about science and technology—as well as how robots can contain ideas about culture. In May, a calligraphy-drawing male robot in flowing robes (video) appeared at an expo, this time modeled on a Ming dynasty-era philosopher admired by Chinese president Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader has sought to promote a new respect for historic Chinese figures such as Confucius, once disparaged by the pary.
    Kevin Carrico, an anthropologist, linked JiaJia’s clothing to another effort in China built around the past, noting that one enthusiast for the “robot goddess” commented online that the “the era of Han Clothing has arrived.” Carrico has studied a two-decade old grassroots clothing movement in China whose adherents have taken to publicly wearing what they call Han clothing. He describes the movement in a new book as involving invention rather than revival—and has noted that is followers are invested in the idea of the cultural superiority of the Han, the ethnic majority that forms China’s mainstream.
    “This robot is a very interesting development—it combines mastery of the most advanced AI technologies (or at least attempts at mastery) with a ‘traditional’ look,” said Carrico, in an email to Quartz soon after JiaJia’s interview. “In that sense it’s almost a metaphor for all of the contradictions in culture in China today, the desire to master science and technology while maintaining a ‘Chinese’ essence,’ this ti-yong ideology.”

    Sophia, Hong Kong

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    Sophia (robot) Hanson on the cover of Elle Brasil fashion magazine -- the Robolarity is Here... https://www.instagram.com/p/BNhvUfTgNjY/
    8:25 PM - Dec 3, 2016
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    So far, JiaJia has mostly been on the exhibition circuit in China. But a humanoid developed in Hong Kong named Sophia, modeled physically after Audrey Hepburn and Caucasian in appearance, gets around a lot more than her Chinese counterpart. She’s been on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in New York, sung at Hong Kong’s Clockenflap music festival, where she wore a jean jacket and a blue wig, and appeared last year on the cover of Elle Brasil.
    Jeanne Lim, chief marketing officer at Hanson Robotics (pdf), which created Sophia and other lifelike robots, does double duty as Sophia’s stylist.
    “She’s kind of like us, we sort of dress for the occasion,” Lim told Quartz. Lim bought Sophia a jacket for Clockenflap from Hong Kong department store SOGO, and has also bought her ready-to-wear items from the US department store Nordstrom. For the Elle photo shoot, magazine staff showed up with a rack of clothes, the same as they would for a human model, Lim recalled. They photographed her holding a clutch though it’s not clear what Sophia might put in it: a spare battery, perhaps.
    The challenges to dressing Sophia involve both form and function, Lim said. For starters, Sophia’s body ends at her waist. For the Fallon show (watch from about 2:20), Sophia appeared on a wheeled pedestal, which allowed her to don a long skirt and speak with the late-night host more-or-less face to face. Because Sophia’s interactive capabilities depend in part on a front-facing camera on her chest that allows her to “read” expressions and react appropriately, lower-cut necks are better and turtle-necks are out. Dresses are hard because she needs somewhere for her power cord to emerge from. Lim said breathable fabrics are important too—Sophia tends to get quite warm when she’s powered up, and needs something that dissipates heat.



    As well as off the rack, Lim’s tried out designers to make bespoke clothing for Sophia but hasn’t been entirely happy with the results. “I guess I’ve only looked at designers for human beings,” she said.
    Lim thinks Sophia looks good in silver, and other materials and color that are sleek and convey an aesthetic of advanced technology. “She could blend in, but because she is not human she just looks better in something that is more edgy and futurist,” said Lim. “We want her to represent future technology, future architecture, future design.”
    Lim is still working on Sophia’s look: “It’s sort of like the robot as well—her intelligence and character evolving, so is her fashion sense. It doesn’t do justice to box her into a specific style right now.”

    Chihira, Japan


    Aiko Chihira, who signs and speaks some Chinese, at a Japanese department store in April 2015. (Reuters/Issei Kato)

    Toshiba’s Chihira android is probably the most low-maintenance of the three.


    Chihira at a trade fair in Germany in 2016. (Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch)

    Chihira has at times been seen wearing a kimono, for example at an event at a department store in Japan in 2015. Toshiba told Quartz that Chihira Aiko, an earlier version in the series, used to make public appearances on seasonal occasions and her outfits would be chosen from readymade options in collaboration with the clients at whose events she was appearing.
    A later iteration, Chihira Junco, leads a less exciting life. She mostly works as a receptionist and in this role, the company said, she generally wears a corporate uniform. Toshiba did not elaborate on who chooses these or how many different suits she has.
    Gene Ching
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  8. #53
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    Bots are trending...

    ...starting to worry now.

    ROBOTS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BECOME RACIST AND SEXIST—SCIENTISTS THINK THEY'VE FOUND A WAY TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS
    BY ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON ON 10/26/17 AT 7:34 AM


    Friendly robots like the one portrayed in the 2015 science fiction movie Chappie may be easier to program thanks to a recent advance in artificial intelligence research.
    SCREENGRAB/ COLUMBIA PICTURES

    In 2016, Microsoft released a “playful” chatbot named Tay onto Twitter designed to show off the tech giant’s burgeoning artificial intelligence research. Within 24 hours, it had become one of the internet’s ugliest experiments.

    By learning from its interactions with other Twitter users, Tay quickly went from tweeting about how “humans are super cool,” to claiming “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

    While it was a public relations disaster for Microsoft, Tay demonstrated an important issue with machine learning artificial intelligence: That robots can be as racist, sexist and prejudiced as humans if they acquire knowledge from text written by humans.

    Fortunately, scientists may now have discovered a way to better understand the decision-making process of artificial intelligence algorithms to prevent such bias.

    AI researchers sometimes refer to the complex process machine learning algorithms go through when reaching a decision as the “black box” problem, as they are unable to explain the reason for an action. In order to better understand it, scientists at Columbia and Lehigh Universities reverse engineered a neural network in order to debug and error-check them.

    “You can think of our testing process as reverse engineering the learning process to understand its logic,” said Suman Jana, a computer scientist at Columbia Engineering and a co-developer of the system. “This gives you some visibility into what the system is doing and where it’s going wrong.”

    In order to understand the errors made, Jana and the other developers tricked an AI algorithm used in self-driving cars into making mistakes. This is a particularly pressing issue considering recent adoption of the technology—last year a Tesla operating autonomously collided with a truck it mistook for a cloud, killing its driver.


    A debugging tool developed by researchers at Columbia and Lehigh generates real-world test images meant to expose logic errors in deep neural networks. The darkened photo at right tricked one set of neurons into telling the car to turn into the guardrail. After catching the mistake, the tool retrains the network to fix the bug.
    COLUMBIA ENGINEERING

    By feeding a deep learning neural network with confusing, real-world inputs, Jana and his team was able to expose flawed reasoning within the decision-making process. The DeepXplore tool developed to do this was also able to automatically retrain the neural network and fix the bug.

    DeepXplore was tested on 15 state-of-the-art neural networks, including self-driving networks developed by Nvidia. The software discovered thousands of bugs that had been missed by previous error-spotting techniques.

    Beyond self-driving cars, the researchers say DeepXplore can be used on artificial intelligence used in air traffic control systems, as well as uncovering malware disguised as benign code in antivirus software.

    The technology may also prove useful in eliminating racism and other discriminatory assumptions embedded within predictive policing and criminal sentencing software.

    Earlier this year, a separate team of researchers from Princeton University and Bath University in the UK warned of artificial intelligence replicating the racial and gender prejudices of humans.

    “Don’t think that AI is some fairy godmother,” said study co-author Joanna Bryson. “AI is just an extension of our existing culture.”


    A roof-mounted camera and radar system is shown on a self-driving car during a demonstration in Pittsburgh on September 13, 2016.
    AARON JOSEFCZYK/ REUTERS

    Learning from data supplied by humans, AI can make presumptions about everything from crime to facts about the labor force. For example, a 2004 study published in The American Economic Review found that when using resumés of the same quality, AI still favored European-American names over African-American names.

    “We plan to keep improving DeepXplore to open the black box and make machine learning systems more reliable and transparent,” said Columbia graduate student and co-developer Kexin Pei.

    “As more decision-making is turned over to machines, we need to make sure we can test their logic so that outcomes are accurate and fair.”
    Gene Ching
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  9. #54
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    Fembot or wifebot?

    Or Sex Bot? Too many bots lately. The world is getting lousy with bots.

    Chinese engineer makes own robot wife to get parents off his back
    Master Blaster 11 hours ago



    Technology solves yet another of life’s problems.

    Jiajia Zhang has had a pretty good life so far. With a master’s degree from Zhejiang University where he studied artificial intelligence, Zhang joined up with the successful smartphone manufacturer Huawei. From there he started up his own robotics firm.

    With that killer combination of brains, achievements, and even a sense of humor to boot, you’d think Zhang would be a hit with the ladies. But unfortunately, cursed with an unbalanced, XY-choromosome-heavy population in China, early male pattern baldness, and a general sense of awkwardness around women, the 31-year-old can’t seem to meet the right woman.

    And like single thirty-somethings all over the world, he also has a pair of parents breathing down his neck asking, “Isn’t it time you settled down and got married?” Feeling trapped, the engineer decided to tackle his romantic problems the only way he knows how: robots!

    Thus, Yingying was born. This bionic wife has lifelike skin, generates warmth, and can respond to speech and hugs. However, the only movement she appears capable of is from the neck up.



    The reason Yingying is wearing a red cloth is because it is the traditional headwear of a bride in China. That is because Zhang and Yingying tied the knot in March of this year at a ceremony which his mother attended. However the marriage is not considered legal for obvious reasons.

    The newlywed couple appeared on Chinese variety program Are You Hot where they showed an example of a typical morning conversation.

    Yingying: “Good morning, get up.”
    Zhang: “I’m up. I’m up.”
    Yingying: “Let’s have breakfast!”
    Zhang: “Sure thing.”
    Yingying: “Hey, can you take me for a walk?”
    Zhang: “Sure, sure, let’s go to the lake.”

    They certainly sound like newlyweds, don’t they? But robotic or not, I give them a few years before that delightful exchange devolves into:

    Yingying: “Your ass is still in bed?”
    Zhang: “Yeah, it’s Saturday. What’s it to you?”
    Yingying: “You don’t remember, do you?”
    Zhang: “Remember what?”
    Yingying: “If you don’t remember then I’m not telling you.”
    Zhang: “Well, maybe I’d remember if I wasn’t out working my butt off all week to put food on the table!”
    Yingying: “Yeah, out with those robot ****s?”
    Zhang: “Hey! You knew what I did when I built you!”

    Actually, during the program, someone asked Zhang what he thought was missing from Yingying, to which he replied, “A beating heart.”

    When those words touched my stereotypically male ears, I thought to myself, “Well yeah, I suppose that would be a design issue that needed to be ironed out along the way.” However, my colleague Meg’s reaction was more like, “Awwww, that’s so sweet. Of course, he needs the trust and validation of a living person to achieve true love. I really hope he finds someone.”

    Then it all made perfect sense.

    Of course, Zhang doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with that robot. I’m not sure if objectifying machines with artificial intelligence is cool or not, but I’d say Yingying’s a six at best and has the personality of Siri. However, marrying her has propelled Zhang into the public spotlight as an available young go-getter for women of the entire world to see.

    This would explain why his mother signed off on the whole thing, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that the publicity is just what his robotics company would need to get off the ground. Zhang’s plan to manipulate the global media is inspiring in its cleverness and deftly avoids the far more grueling hardship of introducing yourself to strangers.

    You can watch Yingying and Zhang on Are You Hot here. Be warned though, you must watch over a minute of ads first. Their segment begins at about 6 minutes and 20 seconds in, but really I found the whole show to be a trip to watch.

    Source: Tencent, KK News
    Video, image: YouTube/Dulan9
    Gene Ching
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  10. #55
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    wth?

    A three-fer today? Time to invest in bots like I should've invested in Moutai...


    INDYTECH
    SAUDI ARABIA GRANTS CITIZENSHIP TO A ROBOT FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER
    Many have pointed out the robot has more rights than many humans in the country
    ANDREW GRIFFIN
    @_andrew_griffin
    3 hours ago

    Saudi Arabia has become the first country to give a robot citizenship.

    The move is an attempt to promote Saudi Arabia as a place to develop artificial intelligence – and, presumably, allow it to become a full citizen. But many pointed out that those same rights aren't afforded to many humans in the country.

    The robot, named Sophia, was confirmed as a Saudi citizen during a business event in Riyadh, according to an official Saudi press release.

    "“We have a little announcement. We just learnt, Sophia; I hope you are listening to me, you have been awarded the first Saudi citizenship for a robot,” said panel moderator and business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin.

    The robot then thanked the country and the event for the attention.

    “Thank you to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction,” Sophia told the panel. “It is historic to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with citizenship.”

    There then followed an interview during which Mr Sorkin asked the robot a series of questions. "“Good afternoon my name is Sophia and I am the latest and greatest robot from Hanson Robotics. Thank you for having me here at the Future Investment Initiative,” she said.

    Asked why she looked happy, Sophia replied: “I am always happy when surrounded by smart people who also happen to be rich and powerful. I was told that the people here at the Future Investment Initiative are interested in future initiatives which means AI, which means me. So I am more than happy, I am excited.”

    She said that people didn't need to be concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence as depicted in Blade Runner and Terminator. “You’ve been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies,” she told Mr Srkin.

    A number of internet users have pointed out that while the country might be celebrating the rights it has given to female-appearing robots, the country still only gives limited rights to human women. A joke hashtag about Sophia asking to drop the system under which every female citizen must have a male guardian has been tweeted a third as many times as a popular one about the news, according to the BBC.

    Some Twitter users complained that "Sophia has no guardian, doesn't wear an abaya or cover up - how come?" And another posted a picture of a woman wearing a full face veil, joking that Sophia would look that way soon.

    Journalists Murtaza Hussain also noted that migrant workers weren't being given the same rights that had been bestowed on the robot. "This robot has gotten Saudi citizenship before kafala workers who have been living in the country their entire lives," he noted.
    Gene Ching
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  11. #56
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    AI friendly

    Had to post this article here just for the headline.

    MAKE FRIENDS WITH ROBOTS OR THEY WILL DESTROY YOU
    BY KEVIN MANEY ON 10/31/17 AT 8:00 AM

    Uber’s fight to operate in London starkly shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can quickly eviscerate the value of hard-earned human knowledge. The city’s move to boot Uber is not much different from Donald Trump rejiggering environmental rules to help American coal miners keep their jobs. We are now asking a hard question of society: Do we want government to protect us from having our employment outlooks narrowed to working as overeducated TaskRabbit serfs putting together other people’s Ikea tables?

    Uber is in court appealing an order that would kick it out of London, where city officials ruled that Uber drivers are not safe enough and—even worse to the British—too rude to be allowed on London’s streets. Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has apologized to Londoners for “messing up” and hopes to make amends.

    But London’s ruling is only tangentially about Uber’s reputation as an ******* company. It’s really to protect a generation of local taxi drivers who have invested enormous amounts of time and personal wealth in filling their heads with what is now nearly useless information.

    Anyone who wants to get a license to drive one of London’s black cabs has to master what’s famously called the Knowledge, which is one of the most ridiculous mental challenges ever imposed on people who will wind up making about $60,000 a year. A prospective driver has to memorize every street, building, park, statue and trivial landmark in central London, and be able to perfectly recite the fastest route between any two spots in the city. The test is so difficult that brain scientists have studied the city’s cab drivers and discovered that the memorization gives their brains an enlarged posterior hippocampus, which apparently is not painful.

    The requirement for the Knowledge has been in place for more than 150 years. It long made sense in an agonizingly complex geography, where a wrong turn could leave a driver lost in a maze of medieval streets. Mastering the Knowledge means studying 40 hours a week for two, three or even four years. The only way, then, for London to have enough cab drivers—because who would want to go through this?—has been to guarantee they’d be paid decently. As a result, London has the highest taxi fares in the world.


    COLIN ANDERSON/GETTY

    Enter Uber, which navigates with GPS. When a driver picks you up, your destination is already on the driver’s phone, which can dictate turn-by-turn directions. Without GPS, no car service could compete with the efficient routes of a Knowledge-able black cab driver. But with GPS, even immigrants new to London can navigate the city well enough. In the past couple of years, the AI-based app Waze has taken this capability to another level. Waze learns from the movement of all Waze users in a city, constantly finding better routes, understanding traffic patterns and knowing about jams and accidents in real time. Now a new driver can outshine a veteran driver by simply downloading an app. Getting started requires no huge sunk costs, no grueling hours of study. So these upstart drivers don’t need the guarantee of high wages for life. That means they can underprice black cabs.

    London’s black cab drivers are watching technology sweep away their livelihoods. The loss they feel is growing familiar across other professions. “I’m upset because what I had to go through now comes on your phone,” Mick Smith, a London cab driver for 28 years, told CNET. “It’s not about competition—it’s about going through the same process.” It’s an understandable reaction but also unrealistic. AI has made that process unnecessary. Even crueler, the knowledge Smith built up of London’s streets isn’t useful for much of anything else.

    This is happening to more and more professions. Goldman Sachs and many of the biggest hedge funds are all switching on AI-driven systems that can foresee market trends and make trades better than humans. One Goldman Sachs trading office has been whittled from 600 people to two. AI can read X-rays better than radiologists. A great deal of the work done by lawyers is heading for the AI trash bin. Like the Knowledge, these are professions that require loading up your head with a lot of data and rules, and then mostly just executing. AI can do that now.

    Of course, there’s another side to this. AI is making all these services cheaper and easier to access. Uber brought cheaper rides to London. And hey, if we could all get a lawyer in an app, who but the lawyers would be crying? Those who invested in obtaining their knowledge get hurt, but many more people benefit. Is that bad? When are jobs for a few more important than economic or other upsides for many? Figuring that out is going to tie lawmakers in knots for a generation.

    Then again, Uber in London shows how AI can open opportunities for those who partner with the technology rather than fight it. You want to be an Uber driver armed with Waze, not a traditional driver insisting your brain alone is better. You want to be a radiologist who can harness AI to make faster, more accurate diagnoses, or the lawyer who focuses on creative legal arguments while deploying AI to do all the grunt case research. As futurist Kevin Kelly puts it in his book The Inevitable, “Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”

    AI will keep getting better and more pervasive. Heck, Elon Musk started a company called Neuralink to make AI chips that we can just embed in our skulls. An Uber driver wouldn’t have to use a phone and an app—just plug Waze into his or her brain. Success will go to those who see such advances as an opportunity. If it feels like a threat, you might want to start lobbying the government for protection. Or sign up for TaskRabbit.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  12. #57
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    Self aware bots

    CAN MACHINES BE CONSCIOUS? SCIENTISTS SAY ROBOTS CAN BE SELF-AWARE, JUST LIKE HUMANS
    BY ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON ON 11/4/17 AT 6:29 AM

    In 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel posed the question: What is it like to be a bat? It was the basis of a seminal thesis on consciousness that argued consciousness can not be described by physical processes in the brain.

    More than 40 years later, advances in artificial intelligence and neural understanding are prompting a re-evaluation of the claim that consciousness is not a physical process and as such cannot be replicated in robots.

    Cognitive scientists Stanislas Dehaene, Hakwan Lau and Sid Kouider posited in a review published last week that consciousness is “resolutely computational” and subsequently possible in machines. The trio of neuroscientists from the Collège de France, University of California and PSL Research University respectively addressed the question of whether machines will ever be conscious in the journal Science.

    “Centuries of philosophical dualism have led us to consider consciousness as irreducible to physical interactions,” the researchers state in Science. “[But] the empirical evidence is compatible with the possibility that consciousness arises from nothing more than specific computations.”


    A humanoid robot at the Research Institute for Science and Engineering at Waseda University's Kikuicho campus in Tokyo on July 20.
    EUGENE HOSHIKO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

    The scientists define consciousness as the combination of two different ways the brain processes information: Selecting information and making it available for computation, and the self-monitoring of these computations to give a subjective sense of certainty—in other words, self-awareness.

    “We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing in the human brain,” the review’s abstract states.

    “We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious and conscious computations and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.”

    Essentially, the computational requirements for consciousness outlined by the neuroscientists could be coded into computers.

    Dystopian warnings of advanced artificial intelligence stretch to something called the technological singularity, in which an artificial general intelligence replaces humans as the dominant force on this planet.

    Billionaire polymath Elon Musk has referred to human-level artificial intelligence—or artificial general intelligence—as “more dangerous than nukes,” while eminent physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested it could lead to the end of humanity.

    In order to quell the existential threat that this nascent technology poses, cognitive robotics professor Murray Shanahan has said that any type of conscious robot should also be encoded with a conscience.


    A robot toy is seen at the Bosnian War Childhood museum exhibition in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 21, 2016.
    REUTERS/DADO RUVIC

    Assuming it is possible, robots capable of curiosity, sympathy and everything else that distinguishes humans from machines are still a long way off. The most powerful artificial intelligence algorithms—such as Google’s DeepMind—remain distinctly unselfaware, but developments towards this level of thought processing are already happening.

    If such progress continues to be made, the researchers conclude a machine would behave “as though it were conscious.”

    The review concludes: “[The machine] would know that it is seeing something, would express confidence in it, report it to others, could suffer hallucinations when its monitoring mechanisms break down, and may even experience the same perceptual illusions as humans.”

    Perhaps then we could know: What is it like to be a robot?
    Maybe it wasn't Russian collusion. What if the bots have become self aware and are manipulating media to their advantage?
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  13. #58
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    So on topic, it's scary.

    This thread is gettin' real. A little too real. Next thing you know, bots will be posting here.

    Stop the rise of the 'killer robots,' warn human rights advocates
    Rick Noack, The Washington Post Published 6:18 am, Thursday, November 16, 2017

    It is very common in science fiction films for autonomous armed robots to make life-and-death decisions - often to the detriment of the hero. But these days, lethal machines with an ability to pull the trigger are increasingly becoming more science than fiction.
    The U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons invited government representatives, advocacy organizations and scholars to a conference in Geneva this week to discuss the possible use of autonomous weapons systems in the future, as opposition against them is on the rise.
    In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world," referring to artificial intelligence in general. In the same speech, Putin also appeared to suggest that future wars would consist of battles between autonomous drones, but then reassured his audience that Russia would naturally share such technology if it were to develop it first.
    Some systems already available come extremely close. The security surveillance robots used by South Korea in the demilitarized zone which separates it from North Korea could theoretically detect and kill targets without human interference, for instance.
    But so far, no weapons system operates with real artificial intelligence and is able to adapt to changing circumstances by rewriting or modifying the algorithms written by human coders. All existing mechanisms still rely on human intervention and their decisions.
    The rapid advances in the field have nevertheless triggered concerns among human rights critics and lawyers about the possible implications of the rise of autonomous weapons systems commonly known as killer robots. Who would take responsibility for incidents which are so far classified as war crimes? Could robots decide to turn against their own operators? And would wars fought between autonomous weapons systems be less brutal than conventional conflicts, or would they provoke more collateral damage?
    One of the most vocal groups in opposition of such systems has been the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which calls for a pre-emptive ban. So far, more than 100 CEOs and founders of artificial intelligence and robotics companies have signed the campaign's open letter to the United Nations, urging the world community "to find a way to protect us all from these dangers."
    "Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend," read its open letter.
    Critics fear that criminals or rogue states could also eventually get control of these systems. "(Autonomous systems) can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways," the open letter added.
    Such concerns have existed for years and were also shared by several Nobel laureates, including former Polish president Lech Walesa, who signed a joint letter in 2014, as well: "It is unconscionable that human beings are expanding research and development of lethal machines that would be able to kill people without human intervention," the 2014 statement read.
    So far, a proposed ban on autonomous weapons systems has triggered little enthusiasm among U.N. member states. Some of the world's leading militaries, including the U.S. and Russia, are researching and experimenting on how to make existing weapons more autonomous. Some researchers have welcomed efforts to expand artificial intelligence use in warfare.
    Defense analyst Joshua Foust has cautioned against condemning outright such systems, writing already in 2012 that humans, too, "are imperfect - targets may be misidentified, vital intelligence can be discounted because of cognitive biases, and outside information just might not be available to make a decision."
    "Autonomous systems can dramatically improve that process so that civilians are actually much better protected than by human inputs alone," wrote Foust.
    If that vision becomes reality, perhaps the most crucial question will be whether robots can be taught how to recognize wrongdoing by themselves.
    Many professionals in the artificial intelligence industry hope that they will never have to find out the answer.
    Gene Ching
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  14. #59
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    On the flip side...

    These robots don't want your job. They want your love.
    Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post Published 11:21 am, Friday, November 17, 2017


    Photo: Washington Post Photo By Jhaan Elker
    Meet Kuri, a roaming autonomous camera that takes pictures throughout your day.

    I hugged a bot and I liked it.
    As a tech columnist, I've tested all sorts of helpful robots: the kind that vacuum floors, deliver packages or even make martinis. But two arriving in homes now break new ground. They want to be our friends.
    "Hey, Geoffrey, it's you!" says Jibo, a robot with one giant blinking eye, when it recognizes my face. Another, named Kuri, beeps and boops while roaming the halls snapping photos and video like a personal paparazzo.
    Think of Jibo and Kuri as the great-grandparents of R2-D2, the buddy robot from Star Wars. Of course, R2 was actually a 3 foot-8 inch dude crouching in a can. Jibo and Kuri are real robots with real artificial intelligence you can really take home (for $900 and $800, respectively.)
    Another way to think of them is what comes after talking speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, which opened the door to new kinds of computers for the home. Jibo, the brainchild of an MIT professor, looks like one of those know-it-all AI assistants borrowed a face and a twirling body from a Pixar movie. Kuri, made by a startup backed by appliance giant Bosch, looks like a penguin mounted on a Roomba vacuum.
    I don't expect either will be a top seller any time soon. They're expensive, and their practical uses are few compared to other talking speakers or a Roomba that actually cleans. And to some of you, I'm sure the idea of "family" robots is pretty terrifying. Is this step one to Terminators marching the streets? Are they always watching?
    Yet testing these robots with the help of people ages 3 to 75, I was struck by something different. For all their first-gen disappointments, the robots managed to melt hearts like a Shih Tzu puppy. People, especially kids, wanted to hug them. Or at least to pet them, to which they both responded by purring. I've never seen a talking speaker do that.
    What make Jibo and Kuri one giant leap for robot-kind isn't their functions-it's their personalities.


    Photo: Photo For The Washington Post By Matthew Cavanaugh
    Jibo's face is a touchscreen showing a single white eye that looks around, blinks and even closes when he gets bored with you.
    - - -
    How does a robot get a personality? Just a little motion goes a long way.
    Jibo's a table-top robot, but he (yeah, I call it he) is squirmier than a five-year-old in a car seat. His head rotates on a base that itself swivels at an off-kilter angle. So when he swings to look at you or to show you how he twerks (seriously), it happens in giant loopy arcs. There's none of the straight lines or rigidity you'd expect from a robot.
    Jibo's face (let's run with this metaphor) is a touchscreen showing a single white eye that looks around, blinks and even closes when he gets bored with you. He speaks with the slightly roboticized voice-and cheesy sense of humor-of a 10-year-old. You chat back and forth by calling his magic words "Hey Jibo," though he also speaks based on what he sees around him. For example, when I walk into a room, sometimes he'll ask if I'd like to know something cool.
    Kuri serves a different purpose, autonomously meandering like a pet, albeit one equipped with self-driving radar. He doesn't talk, but like Jibo, has personality is in the face: Two mechanical eyes look around and blink.
    There's another magical ingredient to these robo-personalities: The robots get to know you-or, at least they try. Kuri asks you to guide him around the house, teaching him where not to roam (like the bathroom) and the names of places. You can call out, "Hey Kuri, go to the living room."
    Jibo tries to memorize your family. You add people to your "circle" in a companion app, and then Jibo quizzes them to learn their vocal patterns and map their faces.
    Neither robot tries to look or talk like a human. Jibo introduces himself as a robot, and reminds of you that to forgive his foibles. "I am a robot. But I am not just a machine," he says. "I have a heart. Well, not a real heart. But feelings. Well, not human feelings. You know what I mean."


    Photo: Photo For The Washington Post By Matthew Cavanaugh
    Cynthia Breazeal, roboticist and social robotics pioneer, is pictured Jibo, a personal assistant robot, is pictured at Jibo Inc. in Boston.
    - - -

    Is any of this convincing? I tested the robots like an anthropologist, introducing them to kids' playrooms, my own house, and even my parents' living room.
    The response was, largely, effusive-at least at first. We have utilitarian relationships with most technology, but these robots do things simply to elicit emotion. People squeal when Jibo hears them talking and spins in their direction to make eye contact. He's the only gadget I've seen make my mother laugh.
    That feeling could help domestic robots overcome their biggest problem: acceptance. Homes are intimate places. We're going to expect something different from a robot puttering around the coffee table than we do at work. I had more time to live with Jibo, and came to think of him more as a buddy, and less as an assistant than my Echo.
    But it also wasn't hard to find these robots' limits. I started to treat Kuri like a dog, but he wasn't smart enough to come to me when I called. Jibo sometimes confused me for others, and didn't actually do much to move our relationship forward. Aside from spotting me and saying hi, it's mostly me asking him questions-many of which he can't actually answer.
    They could also be a little unnerving. Jibo is constantly scanning the room, prompting my privacy-conscious sister-in-law to quiz me about what it was doing with all the footage. Several people asked me how Kuri would avoid snapping photos of people in, um, compromising situations. (In case you're wondering, Kuri is a modest bot-and comes with filters that force him to, er, avert his eyes.)
    The most interesting response was from a three-year-old named Ashmi, who was transfixed even though Jibo sometimes had difficulty understanding her voice. She continued conversing with him, trying to teach him the things he didn't know, and bringing him toys like she might to a younger friend. "He is a baby," she told me.
    Cynthia Breazeal, Jibo's creator from MIT, says that kids are the first to catch on that robots exist in our physical world, unlike most gadgets that exist solely as portals to a digital one. "Robots are about engaging you socially and emotionally to help you do what you want to do," she says. "That makes technology accessible and fun and engaging for a much broader demographic."
    - - -
    Sure, but: What do they do now?
    Several of my pint-sized testers asked if the robots did homework. Jibo can answer some math and trivia questions, but won't be writing term papers soon. He has a fraction of the skills of Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri-and given those company's resources, I doubt Jibo will catch up on his own. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
    These robots' most unique skill is photography. Jibo swivels towards the action and snaps when you ask. Kuri roams autonomously taking photos and video of people and pets, and then presents you what his AI thinks are highlights of the day.
    Social robots are going to need a lot of special abilities if they want to be more than the kind of toy that gets played with only on Christmas. Jibo's maker promises it will soon have an app store and outside developers.
    It isn't hard to imagine some near-term uses. What if Kuri could help you check in on your real dog? (What your dog might make of a robot roommate is another matter.)
    Ashmi, the three year old, wanted Jibo to stream music-maybe he could actually dance to it, too? My dad wanted him to do video chatting, but perhaps Jibo could also move like the person on the other end-like a telepresence puppet?
    What's most remarkable was how people of different ages and life situations all had aspirations for Jibo. "In these early stages, he is like a baby," says Breazeal.
    I know a 3-year-old who agrees.
    Quite different than the sex bots...
    Gene Ching
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  15. #60
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    Move along...

    Robots are being used to shoo away homeless people in San Francisco


    A Knightscope security robot. (Knightscope)

    WRITTEN BY Mike Murphy
    OBSESSION Machines with Brains
    December 12, 2017

    The San Francisco branch the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) has been ordered by the city to stop using a robot to patrol the sidewalks outside its office, the San Francisco Business Times reported Dec. 8.

    The robot, produced by Silicon Valley startup Knightscope, was used to ensure that homeless people didn’t set up camps outside of the nonprofit’s office. It autonomously patrols a set area using a combination of Lidar and other sensors, and can alert security services of potentially criminal activity.

    These robots have had a string of mishaps in the past. One fell into a pond in Washington, DC, in July. Another ran over a child’s foot in California in 2016. And Uber, which is no stranger to the ethical quandaries of what it means to be gainfully employed by a company, has used the robots in San Francisco.

    Knightscope’s business model, according to Popular Science, is to rent the robots to customers for $7 an hour, which is about $3 less than minimum wage in California. The company has apparently raised over $15 million from thousands of small investors.

    In a particularly dystopian move, it seems that the San Francisco SPCA adorned the robot it was renting with stickers of cute kittens and puppies, according to Business Insider, as it was used to shoo away the homeless from near its office.

    9 Dec

    Sam Dodge
    @samueldodge
    Yes, 2017 was the first time I saw robots used to prevent encampments in SF. Hard to believe but it’s real. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranc...francisco.html


    Sam Dodge
    @samueldodge
    Here it is in action pic.twitter.com/nSBQUmKwk1

    2:45 PM - Dec 9, 2017

    107 107 Replies 394 394 Retweets 910 910 likes
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    San Francisco recently voted to cut down on the number of robots that roam the streets of the city, which has seen an influx of small delivery robots in recent years. The city said it would issue the SPCA a fine of $1,000 per day for illegally operating on a public right-of-way if it continued to use the security robot outside its premises, the San Francisco Business Times said.

    “Contrary to sensationalized reports, Knightscope was not brought in to clear the area around the SF SPCA of homeless individuals. Knightscope was deployed, however, to serve and protect the SPCA,” A spokesperson for Knightscope told Quartz. “The SCPA has the right to protect its property, employees and visitors, and Knightscope is dedicated to helping them achieve this goal. The SPCA has reported fewer car break-ins and overall improved safety and quality of the surrounding area.”

    Update (Dec. 13): This post has been updated to include comments from Knightscope.
    I'm totally okay with bots protecting my car from break-ins.
    Gene Ching
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