Which Colossal Death Robot are you?

[David Jamieson]

I think I have time for a little giant robot battle watching... hmmn

[GeneChing]

I think I have time for a little giant robot battle watching... hmmn

You got like half an hour to watch?

[GeneChing]

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

View image on Twitter

Follow
Ben Goertzel @bengoertzel
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
1 1 Reply 23 23 Retweets 29 29 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy

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.

[GeneChing]

...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.”

[GeneChing]

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

[GeneChing]

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.

[GeneChing]

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.