AI prof: The robot terrorists are coming! Aiee!

Autonomous Death Bots

Autonomous Chain Saws...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/

@ Hmm Coincidence

Last week actually. It's alright, nothing special. Friday night TV, don't need to think too much....

Paris, cos you know, "she'll be back...."

Pandora

As the myth goes once the box has been opened you cannot close it.

You cannot stop innovation because some Islamic nutcase, or Redneck wacko could then use the technology for a means to reach a darker end.

Technology like guns have never killed, it is the person behind it that is responsible.

Main reason for his statement is maybe he is looking for a new grant.

The problem is pure robots

Robot/human mixes are fine though cf. Robocop. He wouldn't zap a kiddie. I suggest we start by getting a metal dustbin, cutting holes for the legs and arms then plopping the good prof inside. I chose a picture of a six legged spider as a robot has pulled off two of it's legs. Robocop would not do that.

Does anyone remember the bit in Robocop where they boot him up for the first time and you see though his screen? The first line of text was 'command.com'. Pure genius.

To answer the question: - it's a loopy prof/lazy hack feedback loop.

cool...

but wasn't that pretty much the plot to Runaway with Tom Selleck?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/

heat seeking bullets here we come!

Space Cadet

As Lee Felsenstein once said :

"Anyone who's been around artificial intelligence is likely to be a hopeless case, they're so far removed from reality that they cannot deal with the real world."

Perhaps more apposite to our old chum Captain Cyborg, but still.

And is it just me, or is the fact that all these warnings seem to come from people actively involved in AI or robotics research just a little bit fucked up ?

I mean jeez guys, if you're so worried that robots with AI will rise up against us, maybe you should stop, y'know, BUILDING THE FECKING THINGS!

@ Paul Williams

"Millions if not billions" Nope, £250 according to the prof. And not every terrorist organisation has the manpower- or inclination- to stage endless suicide bombings

And a "wheel about, avoid walls, shoot anything that moves relative to you" system can probably be built for less than that if you're not buying everything brand new. The problem then becomes: if you're friendly, how do you defend yourself against it to give it more ammo?

Something like the T-1 from Terminator 3 is entirely possibly at the moment. Especially with the traffic cops' "Fleshie meat-sack Detection" system. And we can't be that far off an Arnie-spec T-800 model. Mechanically we could probably build one now; we just lack the software (or power supply) to make it all work okay.

Squeezing it all down to the size of Summer Glau might be a problem though!

@Whoever's in charge

Why's this not in ROTM?

Suppose we'd all better get building our own robot armies...

What do you mean if????

The Internet is just one big artificial intelligence, annoying us into submission by adding bugs to perfectly good software until we have had so many error messages that we just accept that we can't control the computers and do what we are told!!!! It's all part of the master plan, we are evolving into robots. The word Robot was actually coined as a term for mindless human slaves... yes, like Paris Hilton!

butlerian jihad

sounds like the guys been getting into the back story of dune a bit much, or prehaps hes gone senial and has mistaken Sarah Connor chronicles to be a documentary?

then again the dude was a judge on robot "well really radio controlled cars with a few more servos" wars, i mean if it was a war, then i would have been allowed to have as a weapon a capacitor from a tv attached to an electrode (axe) to discharge into the carcass of what i just smashed....

...hello mr CMOS, meet high voltage ;-)

And who's best at building robots?

"Invading a country could be turned into the international league of Robot Wars. Definitely has the potential to make some cracking TV."

Super, but I for one have no inclination to learn Japanese :/

He best be careful...

or our soon to be robot overlord masters will notice he's trying to warn folk and send a deadly dyson of doom after him.

Celebrity Death-Match Special

..Tonight featuring Noel Sharkey versus the the unstoppable cyborg killing machine, Kevin Warwick.

I'd pay good money to see that!

Redundant

Psycho+weapon = autonomous killing machine

Can't this guy keep up?

I for one welcome the arrival of our silicon & steel overlords

Yes but arms length confilct by robot can between two nation states can never by a reality (on this planet)

If you felt deeply enough about the reasons for the war to actually go to war, if your robots lost, would you be prepared to stop there ?

No of course not, once you ran out of robots, youd send the elite troops, then the regulars and at the last the conscripts... just like every other industrial war.

Paris, because apparently she never resorts to machines...

"Robot" doesn't have to mean SW droids, you know

So far I see that the most ridicule comes from the corner of people assuming that "robot" means some Terminator, or SW-style war-droid, or at least some sophisticated robo-tank.

Counter-point: the Roomba is a robot. The V1 was, more or less, a robot, and it didn't even have a computer. A mechanical arm with a drill is an "industrial robot". Anything that can perform a task autonomously without human intervention is a "robot".

Basically methinks the whole problem is one of communication. The good professor uses one (perfectly good) definition of "robot", while the leering public has images of HK-47 floating through their head.

The fact is, it _is_ easy to make an autonomous bomb. It won't be like the droids in SW Episode 1, but it will get the job done.

E.g., a pulsejet engine can be made in your garage from little more than a piece of pipe, and that's the engine that powered the V1. It's so robust that it can still generate some thrust after it's been riddled with holes by a machinegun. If you want to make a "robot" bomb, the fancy way is to strap a PDA with GPS to a model plane with that pulse jet and a bomb. With a bit of software hacking, you've just made your own GPS-guided cruise missile, basically.

The even less glamorous version is to just do what the Nazis did, and use a mini-propeller to measure the distance, then shut down the engine after that's done a number of turns. Not entirely accurate, but it can do the job of lobbing a bomb over a few kilometres. It already did that in WW2, after all.

An even simpler version can be the same on a model boat, or on a motor boat for bigger loads. Again, you only need a GPS-capable PDA and a couple of motors, to make a boat follow any course you want to, completely without human intervention.

With a bit more fanciful thinking and design, you can make it a (partially) submerged torpedo instead.

Etc.

Now I'm not saying that the terrorists will actually do any of those. Probably not worth the effort.

But I am saying that an autonomous bomb _can_ be done with off-the shelf components, if anyone actually wanted to. Heck, you can get half the job done with Lego mindstorm components.

But more importantly I'm saying that "robot" doesn't have to mean androids. A roomba with a bomb on it would qualify as a "terrorist" robot perfectly well.

Juicy Lucy Nippon Style?

"As Lee Felsenstein once said :

"Anyone who's been around artificial intelligence is likely to be a hopeless case, they're so far removed from reality that they cannot deal with the real world." .... By The Other Steve Posted Wednesday 27th February 2008 13:05 GMT

Which only goes to show, the Other Steve, how little Lee Felsenstein knew of Advanced Artificial Intelligence and CyberIntelAIgents then. I wonder what he would say Today?

"I mean jeez guys, if you're so worried that robots with AI will rise up against us, maybe you should stop, y'know, BUILDING THE FECKING THINGS!" ...... Far too Late for that whenever they can Spontaneously Communicate 42 Replicate and Mutate. And the SMARTer Ones Choose to Play in Stealthy Quantum Lingua Franca Fields of Fertile Endeavours.

Virgin Fields of Fertile AI Endeavour Gifted with Funds from the New European Microsoft Pot ...... for AI Tied Investment in Joint Add venturing in Magical Mystery Turing.

And amfM HyperRadioproActivity would be So Bold 42 Go down that Shining Path.

Knock, Knock, The Other Steve/Microsoft/EU.

I Trust that is not too Obscure and/or Obtuse, IT is Pretty Plain Text.

And given the Supposed Digital Control which we may now have, that should be the Simplest of Tasks to OverFill so as 42 Generate ITs Immediate Return. :-) ...... in States of Perpetual Immaculate Grace.

Some would Wish and Recognise that 42 Be the Most Wholly of Holiest Grails. You are more than welcome to dispute IT ....... although IT will Defy you not to Enjoy IT by You Tempting Yourself with ITs XSSXXXXual Pleasures, instead.

If you were a Global Operating Division/Device into Network InterNetworking RobotICQs with NIRobotIQs, then First Contact would be Created and Enhanced with PleasureRobotIQs ........ Leading NEURObotICQs.

And that make AI Perfect Sense, does IT not?

RSVP ...... Alsjeblieft.

I will wait

I will wait for the 'silicone' fem-bots but this is old I remember talking about beam riding a RC plane with porno tapes onboard from europe to the UK when Customs built a Betamax machine to take VHS cartridges.

FPS!!!

What a Kill-Joy!

These are the perfect way to play First Person Shooters in the future! Latency and Lag may pose a problem, but I'm sure that the boys at id will find a way to make it work.

Respawn to the next available robot, until the Capture the Flag (War) session is over. The terrorists may hijack the servers and force everyone to play in Free-For-All mode, but that is another matter.

generic title

sat nav and a rc plane for £250 ermm yeah right...

as for filling a rucksack with some Miracle-Gro....

I thought the used Miracle-Blo..

yes that coats mine.

@Adam Foxton

Doesn't have to be suicide bombings. The IRA were quite keen for their members to survive, and they did rather well out of ANFO. Put your bomb inside a blanket and black binbag, of the sort used by the homeless, leave it in a doorway or phonebox and it'll never get spotted or moved. Mass civilian carnage. Or if you want to take out buildings and don't mind civilians getting away, make up a tanker-full (with suitable anti-tamper devices), park the tanker outside the building, and have your mates in a stolen car immediately in front of you to take you to safety. Cops will figure it out immediately, but are unlikely to have time to disarm it.

As for ease of building - wheeling around at random is easy, and stopping bumping into walls is also fairly easy. Locating and aiming at a moving object is significantly harder though, to the extent that if you're interested in doing it, you're probably already doing it professionally. Of course you could just drop something programmed to spin round in a circle in "spray-and-pray" mode, but folks will get away from it pretty quickly, and you might as well just do a drive-by anyway if that's all it is.

The thing is, unless we modify our society to be fully geared-up for war at any moment, with a machine-gun on every lamp-post instead of a CCTV camera, we can't really do much except use intelligence to intercept terrorists, and try to stop the causes of terrorism. Of those two, only the latter works long-term. And the causes of terrorism are usually stupidity from the terrorised country.

high explosive

The main difficulty for would be attackers is making the bomb, not attaching it to the RC vehicle. At the point they can manufacturer high explosive to fit in the low weight small volume needed, the delivery mechanism will not matter, they could place it in a coffee cup or start taking down bridges with ease.

@Adam Foxton

"Squeezing it all down to the size of Summer Glau might be a problem though!"

well i am more than happy to squeeze Summer Glau in order to get the proportions

@Graham Bartlett

"Locating and aiming at a moving object is significantly harder though, to the extent that if you're interested in doing it, you're probably already doing it professionally."

Perhaps not as hard as you think. In the case of a stationary camera, image subtraction, a noise filter (don't forget the noise filter!), some re purposed flood fill algos and a bit of "blob counting" will do the trick, it's genuinely not difficult, to the extent that I knocked up a webcam motion tracker over a couple of rainy afternoons in the winter. There are plenty of similar (and better) projects of this nature floating about on the interweb.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=motion+tracking+&btnG=Search&meta=

This technique won't work unaltered for a moving camera, because the background isn't static relative to the objects you're trying to track, but I can think of a couple of nasty brute force ways to extend it just off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's already plenty of crumbs in the web.

I don't say this to be boastful, merely to illustrate that it's one of those techniques that you would think is really, really hard, but which turns out to be much less hard than you might at first think.(Quite a lot of undergrads manage it, for instance) While I'm sure doing it to "military precision"* or "safety critical" standards requires some degree of boffinry, a 'knocked up in my shed' version of the same technology, good enough for a kamikaze robot, is quite easy to do.

* Some militaries may be more precise than others, see press for details.

Zoomorphic?

Perhaps he means homomorphic? Most of the caretakerbots are homo, most of the milbots seem to be QUR (of course, maybe all the milbots are really really good simulacra of the fleshies and the fleshies just don't realize it yet!), and many of the petbots are zoo.

Anyway, his ideas are old and creaky, he needs to catch up to the present day. Next thing you know he'll be spouting off on the decade old terror of the "'gray goo' that ate the Earth" after reading about Bill Joy's hallucinogenic nightmares induced by Rifkin. Oops, being close to the EU, maybe his next worry will be frankengoo....

But really, how do these bumpkins get a soapbox anyway?

Anthrax Roomba

Fill a Roomba up with Anthrax and set it loose with instructions to blow instead of suck. I rest my case yer honour.

RE: $250 is a bit low, but....

Why bother to build a large expensive RC plane that can carry explosives when it would be much easier to use a smaller one with ... a web enabled camera, a wireless internet connection, GPS etc. etc. ... and a spraying device to deliver ... anthrax spores or one of dozens of other disease carying organisms.... to a large metropolitan area?

Never mind chain saw and machine gun carrying Terminators, simple RC planes and bioweapons could kill 10's of thousands of innocent people in a coordinated attack.

On another note, I DO think we still need to fear a.i. . Whenever I hear engineers laugh at that idea, I always think of the first terminator movie where Sarah Connor says to Kyle Reese, the soldier form the future, "You can't fool me Reese, they can't make things like that." And he says "No, not yet. Not for about another 40 years". ....... Even the possibility of it happening should give those who toy with autonomous robots pause. Maybe we DO need a Butlerian Jihad ......

(For those who don't know, in the DUNE books by Frank Herbert, an ancient war which was fought to eradicate intelligent machines is alluded to.)

{also, i don't have an English pounds sign on my 'puter, hence the title}

It doesn't have to aim at moving targets

"As for ease of building - wheeling around at random is easy, and stopping bumping into walls is also fairly easy. Locating and aiming at a moving object is significantly harder though, to the extent that if you're interested in doing it, you're probably already doing it professionally. Of course you could just drop something programmed to spin round in a circle in "spray-and-pray" mode, but folks will get away from it pretty quickly, and you might as well just do a drive-by anyway if that's all it is."

All pretty insightful and all, but, really, it doesn't have to aim at anything moving to cause a media ruckus and a bunch of doomsday prophets.

At the most basic level, what you need is something that goes BANG. Loudly. If it produces shrapnel, even better. Pretty much even gunpowder in a steel tube. If you mill it a bit to get, basically, a frag grenade, even better.

And you need a sort of vehicle that will carry it to either a public place, or near enough to someone.

The latter is actually easier than it sounds. Think a roomba with an explosive in it, and program it to detonate when it hits anything that wasn't there less than X seconds before. Meaning either it's someone's leg, or someone just pulled a chair. As a backup, make it blow up if someone tries to turn it off. Let one of them loose in a pub, and you have a guaranteed media hysteria.

Or think the poor-sod's-cruise-missile I've described before: a wooden airplane model with a pulsejet. If it can bring a grenade to anywhere near a demonstration or political rally, you have pretty much guaranteed hysteria. No image recognition required, just a PDA with GPS.

Just to make things clear: I'm _not_ advocating terrorism, the above is just an idle "ad absurdum" exercise. I'm not even saying that any terrorists would actually do that, since "forgetting" a backpack in the subway does the same job cheaper. Just saying that you wouldn't really need advanced image recognition, or indeed even a camera at all, if you really wanted to make a terrorist robot.

£250 keep dreaming

Even a pretty standard remote control CAR costs more then £250, a plane large enough to carry any load your looking at would cost a lot more than that. Then you've got the explosives themselves (plus all the literature and training to learn how to make the explosives and the isolated patch of farm land/forest to test such explosives), the electronic equipment required to turn the remote control aircraft into a self piloted aircraft (because remote controls in cities have an effective range of bugger all minus a bit), plus the training to use said equipment to turn the remote control into a self piloted aircraft, then there's the costs of a second and third remote control plane (because i guarantee your going to cock up and crash beyond repair at least the first 2 planes you try this on).

Once you've got the hang of it, maybe you could bring it in at under £1000 per aircraft but by that stage the cops will be looking around pretty sharpishly to all the remote control supply stores and your likely to get knicked before you get much in the way of mass destruction happening.

Oh and for the people who suggested anthrax and bio-weapons - do you really think that if terrorists had bio-weapons they would wait until they've developed a complex and expensive robot delivery mechanism rather then some more standard simpler method of say an aerosol can or a bomb?

An Embedded Question for the Chuckle Brothers....Ian and Martin

"And the causes of terrorism are usually stupidity from the terrorised country."...... By Graham Bartlett Posted Wednesday 27th February 2008 15:56 GMT

I would suggest that the causes of terrorism are usually stupidity in terrorised countries, Graham. Do you think tha IRA campaign was Uncle Sam funded/led with its civilians just expendable pawns used and abused by their leaders/commanders? Could it have been done without their help and support?

@Jon Tocker

The problem is that what you make there, and indeed what Lewis Page does, is build a ridiculous straw-man out of wildly unrelated bits and pieces. You take several unrelated scenarios that the professor thought up, and making up your own HK-47 out of them.

The linked press release makes _no_ mention of zoomorphic or anthropomorphic robots at all. In fact it only mentions one thing: the cruise missile I've already detailed twice. Nothing more. That's it.

But nah, that wouldn't let Lewis stroke his ego and go "omg, some scientist is stupid." So he has to scavenge a piece of a _different_ scenario, and make a strawman out of those bits and pieces. They're not even related in any form or shape, other than being by the same author.

Which is as bloody stupid as making up your own mixture of bits and parts of "Hansel and Grettel", "Cinderella", "The Valliant Little Tailor" and "Snow White", just because they're all by the Grimm brothers. And then going, basically, "omg, what a stupid story about dwarves in glass slippers, battling flies and feeding bits of a house to kids. The Grimm brothers must be soo stupid." Well, no, the only ridiculous thing is building that kind of a Frankenstein's strawman out of disjointed unrelated parts.

If you guys want to shoot down his ideas -- and God knows each of them has its own faults and weak points -- at least have the decency to take them as they are. Not editing together unrelated stories into something you feel safe enough to attack.

@Autonomous Death Bots

Ah ... somebody beat me to reference the "Autonomous Mobile Sword" from Screamers. Which is based on a Phillip K. Dick novel, by the way ...

Remember to implement IFF on your killbots instead of programming "kill all humans with a pulse" into them. They'll eventually out-smart your tags and overrun humanity ;)

nuts

I have Met Prof Sharkey, and I have to say I was not best impressed. Years ago I, like others, was on Robot Wars. Unlike others, I was actually doing a robotics degree (Liverpool uni) and even more unlike others, I won (team was middleweight champ, with Hard Cheese, from 98-2001)

The few interactions I had with Sharkey seemed to be of a guy who knew the theory, but had little experiance of the practical side. Even the safety guy at Robot Wars (Derek Foxwell) knew more about the mechanics of robotics than him, and I can think of no worse slight.

Sharkey shuld be lumped in with other 'experts' like Warwick (the main reason I went to Liverpool, instead of Reading), but those who can talk the talk often trump over those that can walk the walk, especially in academics. S;why I have mostly given up Robotics.

Robot sex will protect us

When the T-101 finds Cherry 2000 and falls in love, she will short cicuit and kill him mid-coitus.

Problem solved. :-P

does he know Negroponte ?

perhaps he is a colleague of the (in)famous Dr. Negroponte, he of the G1G1 / OLPC scam! sounds like they could work together to devise even more bizarre schemes to fleece people of their funds - not just promise things they can't delivery, but send a robot around to convince you it's not their fault they ripped you off. has anyone seen any proof, other than what OLPC offers, that they have delivered anything?

full disclosure, i ordered via the G1G1 plan on the opening day, 12Nov07, at 0601 - to date, i've received nothing but excuses - make no mistake, i'm not alone here...

Paris: now that's a real laptop!