Thursday, July 30, 2015

Robopocalypse Report #8: This one Came so Quick!

This is my summation of the news about the robopocalypse: the machines coming to change our lives and radically alter our societies in the same way manufacturing did over the last century and a half in the West.  Except, much faster.  

I had settled on waiting until I had sufficient bits of news to share rather than waiting to write one up every week or banging it out every day.  This time, holy cow, the news poured in and I am going to put out a new report today rather than waiting for next week or at least the weekend!

As always, we start with the drones.



Facebook has unveiled its giant internet drone.  This is a replacement, in a sense, for comsats.  However, it will probably end up being more sensitive to weather than comsats are though.

Elsewhere in California, a General Atomics Reaper drone was used in a search and rescue effort at the request of the El Dorado County Sheriffs office to find a missing motorcyclist.



John Hopkins University decided to take the drone delivery to the next level and tested to see whether or not blood, lab specimens and other medical related examples could be delivered by drone.

Additionally, scientists used drones to monitor orcas, allowing precise measurements which they would not have been able to get otherwise.

In Hillview, Kentucky, William Merideth was arrested for shooting down a drone.  The drone kept hovering over his property and supposedly right over his family.  The drone's owner disputes that story.

Its not secret that the US military is into drones.  They have been for decades now and are an almost unique capability.  The US Navy has made history with its X-47B, to be sure, but it has a lot of programs in the works.  So much so, there have been articles about where they are going to put all those drones (UAVs, USVs and UUVs) on their ships, especially the ships which were not designed with being drone carriers in mind.  Furthermore, the US Navy is testing 3d printing custom drones on ships for specific needs as they arise.


Turning to the other poster child of the robopocalypse, the self driving vehicle, CNET profiles MCity again: the test ground for self driving and communicating cars.  

In something which ought to make you twitch, GM's cars can be hacked and semis can have their location-tracking devices turned off or even tracked remotely and hijacked due to a satellite security flaw.  Along with the Fiat Chrysler flaw, this should give everyone the chills when it comes to self driving cars.

Related, there is speculation if cyberwarfare hasn't broken out all over the world and taken over as the primary form of conflict. (snort)



Shifting to general robotics, the Koreans & Harvard have successfully built a very simple robot which can jump on water and act like a water skeeter, taking advantage of the surface tension.

In Dongguan City, China has started embracing the robopocalypse in its factories.  A factory which 6 months ago employed 650 workers building cell phones is now down to 60 (probably going to drop to 20!) and they mainly watch for problems while the bots produce better products (5% defet rate down from 25%) while making 21,00 pieces vs 8,000 before.

In the more mundane bot world, a robot box palletizer was unveiled by Ira Robotics. 

Stanford showed off their space robotics facility with some demos.

Obama directed the DOE, DOD, etc. to form the National Strategic Computer Initiative to produce the first exaflop supercomputer by 2025.  Those of you who have read this blog for a while remember when I put up the slides by Horst Simon explaining why we will not get an exaflop machine by 2020.  With Intel's admission they are going to be at least 8 months late with their next generation of chips, the NSCI is an attempt to force the issue and keep a roughly Moore's Law growth in supercomputer capability despite the fact Moore's Law is toast.  its going to require some fundamental rearchitecting which consumer products probably won't be able to use.

IBM has teamed up with CVS to bring Watson to CVS for chronic patients.  The service bots may be here and coming for the general practitioner.  

The robopocalypse did its first demo for coming to take down the Umpire in baseball.  Maybe we could get them to ref soccer, ahem, football games and killing the diving with its omniscience. 

The CEO of SoftBank thinks robots ought to be required to be programmed to develop emotional and empathetic bonds with humans.  Perhaps Huggable the Caring Bear is the step to that:




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