Alex Hern

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“He’s Nervous”

March 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I recently came across the photo of Tinius the Turtle robot being “walked” at Rice University in 1950, and how cute! So far most psychological tests indicate humans are averse to harming robots, but I’m not buying it. Considering the things we do to one another and the atrocities we reign down on chickens and pigs and cows, it’s only a matter of time before restraint is relaxed and hands ungloved. There’ll be AI petting zoos, but there also be an industry of lifelike machines built to take a punch, or a bullet. There’s just something about us. We compartmentalize. From Alex Hern’s Guardian article about robopets and torture, which centers around DAR-1. An excerpt:

DAR–1 is the creation of roboticist Ray Renteria, who introduces himself to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, as an amateur magician. And just as the work of a magician is focused around misdirection, and a control of the context in which magic is performed, so too is DAR–1 an exercise in how simple, mechanistic effects can be imbued with life with just the right presentation.

The work starts in Renteria’s blurb for DAR–1, a part of the festival’s “Robot Petting Zoo”. The Raspberry Pi and laser-cut legs (both, incidentally, produced in England, leading Renteria to describe the machine as a “British invader”) aren’t mentioned. Instead, visitors are primed to treat the robot as a fellow living being from the off.

“Curious about people, he’ll study your eyes and your smile with the intensity of a focused child,” it reads. “He’s shy, though. If you get a little too close to him, he’ll get nervous and try to back away. See how long you get him to keep following your eyes by looking deep into his.” Similarly, if you ask Renteria why the robot has a permanent shiver to its movements, there’s a technical answer – a particular variable hovering between fully-on and fully-off leads to motors being rapidly engaged then disengaged – but also an anthropomorphised one: “he’s nervous”.

At the same time, says Renteria, “he’s a robot, he’s proud of being a robot, so you’re not going to talk to him, you’re not going to call to him to try to get his attention.”•

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“Online Rudeness Probably Won’t Last Forever”

October 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two passages, one from five years ago and one from today, about how the anarchy of the Internet has released the devil inside us all.

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In 2009, Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair wrote a good article about Internet trolls even before the term existed, but even though biting blogs have been supplanted by social media, his prediction about the decline of anonymous online hating did not come true–at least not yet–in fact it’s taken on new and even more hurtful forms. An excerpt from his piece:

“Online rudeness probably won’t last forever. I think it’s just a fashion. Things change. Stuff that seems cool gets stale. It feels like it won’t, but it does. So it seems reasonable to guess that online nastiness will fade—not through any enforcement, but just because it will go out of style. There will always be flame wars. There will always be online lunkheads and goons. But in a few years maybe you won’t really want to be the one calling someone else a douche-tard in a comments section.”

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From Alex Hern’s Guardian article, Tim Berners-Lee on what he hath wrought, complete unintentionally:

“Tim Berners-Lee has expressed sadness that the web has mirrored the dark side of humanity, as well as enabling its ‘wonderful side’ to flourish.

The developer, who created the web in 1990 while working for the particle collider project Cern in Switzerland, said that the web is a reflection of human nature elsewhere, but that he had hoped ‘that the web would provide tools and fora and new ways of communicating that would break down national barriers and allow us to just get to a better global understanding.

‘Well, maybe it’ll happen in the future … Maybe we will be able to build web-based tools that help us keep people on the path of collaborating rather than fighting.’

Speaking to BBC News, Berners-Lee said that it was ‘staggering’ that people ‘who clearly must have been brought up like anybody else will suddenly become very polarised in their opinions, will suddenly become very hateful rather than very loving.'”

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“As Well As The Internet Of Things, Autonomous Vehicles, Consumer 3D Printing And Wearable Computing Are All Innovations That Are Over-Hyped”

August 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Atop the list of overhyped technologies from a new Gartner report: the Internet of Things. Defining common standards is the main problem. Speech recognition, however, is now ready for the masses, the research argues. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:

“Initially, a new technology enters the public’s awareness with low expectations, which slowly rise as the potential becomes clear. Quantum computing, holographic displays and human augmentation are all at that period of the cycle, although the firm puts all three of them at well over 10 years from general use.

Eventually, expectations hit a peak, where the technology is predicted to solve almost every problem known to humanity. As well as the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, consumer 3D printing and wearable computing are all innovations that Gartner thinks are over-hyped at the moment.

Then comes what Gartner calls the ‘trough of disillusionment’: the period when the realisation hits on that the technology is never going to perform as well as its proponents hoped. Examples include gamification, augmented reality, and near-field communication.

Importantly, however, the tech doesn’t disappear from use, and continues to be refined throughout the trough of disillusionment. As the innovation finds its niche, it enters the ‘slope of enlightenment,’ where the public realises the actual potential of the product, as with enterprise 3D printing and gesture control.

Finally, the new technology hits the ‘plateau of productivity.’ It has become good enough to carry out its functions, and the period of hype is far enough in the past that people are willing to give it a second chance. For Gartner, speech recognition has hit that plateau, and is now ready for real world use.”

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“Self-Drive Cars Will Probably Work Through Internet Connectivity”

June 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When the computer is in everything, everything can be hacked. No doubt Google and others are building serious safety features into their driverless-car software because the new vandalism, not to mention terrorism, could be turning an autonomous car the wrong way down a one-way street. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:

“Wil Rockall, a director at KPMG, warns that ‘the industry will need to be very alert to the risk of cyber manipulation and attack.’

‘Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create ‘spam jams’ or disruption is a very real prospect.’

Rockall suggests that manufacturers could build safety features in to lessen the risk of this happening. ‘The industry takes safety and security incredibly seriously. Doubtless, overrides could be built in so that drivers could shut down many of the car’s capabilities if hacked. That way, humans will still be able to ensure their cars don’t route them on the road to nowhere.’

But Google’s prototype self-driving car, revealed on Tuesday, is largely controlled using an app, and has just two physical buttons: stop, and go. The company has taken a very different approach to firms like Audi and Volvo, who market the driverless features as an addition to, rather than replacement for, a traditional driver.”

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“Cars without steering wheels,” 1950s:

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