IBM Celebrates 20 Years Since First Manipulating an Atom

In 1989 Don Eigler manipulated atoms to spell ‘IBM’.

One wonders what we will see in the next twenty years. An IBM logo in your DNA?

Singularity Hub | Sep 28, 2009

by Aaron Saenz

It was twenty years ago when Don Eigler, a fellow at IBM, made history by moving individual atoms for the first time. Like any good employee he used his new found ability to do something productive for the company: spell out ‘IBM’ using thirty five xenon atoms. With that microscopic marketing ploy began a new era of research into nanotechnology that continues today. Check out IBM’s anniversary video after the break.

IBM had long been at the forefront of atomic research, building the first Scanning Tunneling Microscope in 1981. Eigler was using a STM in 1989 when he made the discovery he could manipulate individual atoms with the instrument. Recently, IBM continued to astound the world by creating nanoscale MRI, and imaging a molecule for the first time. The ability to move atoms and molecules, and observe what you are doing, is a revolutionary technology that opens the door to molecular machines – devices built of just a handful of atoms.

Those familiar with biology know that our cells already possess several structures that could be called molecular machines. In that way, nanotechnology and biotechnology are working towards one another. The successes at IBM suggest that the future of atomic scale manipulation may involve building interesting new substances that might fit into our lives at the cellular level.

Even if they stay outside ourselves, materials built one atom at a time are going to be amazing. Programmable matter, a substance that can rearrange itself to become anything you need, will become a reality when computer chips and machines can be built on a nanoscale. Quantum computing, superconductive wire, and carbon fibers stronger than steel – the next generation of technology was started with Eigler’s experiments.

It has taken 20 years to go from moving individual atoms to building artificial organelles, using carbon nanotubes in biosensors, or any of the hundreds of other current applications of nanotechnology. One wonders what we will see in the next twenty years. An IBM logo in your DNA?

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Real Science Sets Up Surrogates‘ Futuristic Robot Action

In Surrogates, Bruce Willis plays a cop who loses control of his robotic counterpart. Photo courtesy Disney

Wired | Sep 25, 2009

By Hugh Hart

HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.

The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.

“In this movie, people stay at home in their underwear wired into this fantastic massagelike chair device for 16 hours at a stretch and operate this idealized version of themselves that they can control like a puppet,” said Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow as he previewed snippets of the film in his editing bay on the Disney lot last month.

During the Wired.com video interview above, Mostow expounds on surrogate technology and elaborates on the human/machine dynamic in the PG-13 film, which opens Friday. “If your brain waves say, ‘OK, raise your hand up like this,’ then that’s what the robot does,” he said.

Human-machine interfaces have been explored before in movies, from Sleep Dealer’s node workers, who jack in to a network to operate machines remotely, to The Matrix’s humans-as-batteries paradigm.

Pure sci-fi, right? Not entirely. Chad Cohen, science producer for Discovery Studio’s upcoming Discovery Channel series Curiosity, says Surrogates draws from real-world technology to sell its central concept.

“There is certainly a lot of research out there relating to neural interfaces that would help audiences make the leap and buy the premise,” he said. In fact, as the movie starts, it uses news clips citing real scientific experiments to set up its story line.

Case in point: Last May, University of Pittsburgh scientists implanted a monkey with electrodes that empowered the subject to move a mechanical arm and grab food using willpower alone.

“It’s almost like Luke Skywalker using the force to grab his lightsaber,” said Cohen. “From there, it’s not such a stretch to think that one day researchers might help paralyzed people control prosthetic arms.”

Another real-world example of brain-wave-activated robotics comes from Duke University Medical Center scientists, who wired a rhesus monkey with electrodes. When the monkey strode on a treadmill in North Carolina, its cortex prompted a 5-foot humanoid in Japan to start walking.

“We can read signals from the motor and sensory areas of the brain, decode them, and send them this bipedal robot that actually starts walking like a monkey,” Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis told Scientific American.

And not unlike Surrogates‘ humans who operate their robotic counterparts from the comfort of home, Hiroshi Ishiguro has built a neuromechanical replica of himself that lets him engage the real world by proxy. Ishiguro’s doppelgänger, dubbed Geminoid, gives lectures in venues thousands of miles from the scientist’s Osaka home office.

The type of advanced remote-control robots imagined in Surrogates likely won’t materialize in the real world for decades, if at all. Yet on a metaphorical level, Mostow, who earlier delved into big-screen robotics when he directed Terminator 3, believes people have already become overly attached to technologies that threaten to make in-person face time obsolete.

Pointing to the near-addictive quality of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Mostow says: “What this movie is really about is what it means to live in a digital age where we’re connected to all these machines, yet we’re also so isolated from each other.”

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Surrogates – Official Trailer

Surrogates – Official Science Fact Teaser

Test brings scifi depictions of laser weapons vaporizing targets into reality

Laser weapon goes through successful test

UPI | Sept. 3, 2009

ALBUQUERQUE, Sept. 3 (UPI) — A potential new laser weapon fired from the air to a ground target went through a successful test over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Boeing said.

A Boeing spokesman told United Press International the first flight of the Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft was designed primarily as a learning test bed and to demonstrate its feasibility.

The test brings closer to reality fictional movie depictions of laser weapons incinerating or vaporizing targets, but no specifications of the target vehicle or the final outcome of the test were immediately available.

Boeing organized the test jointly with the U.S. Air Force on Aug. 30, the company said.

During the test flight of the ATL aircraft, a C-130H, the ground target was attacked from the air over the missile range. It was the first time that an ATL aircraft demonstrated the high-power laser engagement of a tactically representative target, Boeing said.

The C-130H aircraft took off from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and fired the chemical laser through its beam control system while in flight.

The beam control system on board homed in on the unoccupied stationary vehicle and guided the laser beam onto it as directed by ATL’s battle management system. “The laser beam’s energy defeated the vehicle,” Boeing said. It offered no description of what happened to the vehicle.

The company called the test a “milestone,” adding deployment of a similar weapon could transform future battles and save lives.

Greg Hyslop, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said ATL would give fighters a “speed-of-light, ultra-precision engagement capability” that could dramatically reduce collateral damage.

The ATL flight follows a June 13 test in which a laser fired from the air for the first time hit a target board on the ground. Additional tests will now follow to further demonstrate the system’s military utility, but Boeing says the demonstrations have shown that “ATL works, and works very well.”

Research into laser applications in the defense industry has engaged major players and involved other key recent tests.

Northrop Grumman also announced it successfully completed testing of its global positioning system-guided weapons technology at the White Sands Missile Range.

The company’s Viper Strike system is equipped with GPS laser guidance accuracy capabilities and is designed to be integrated into Northrop Grumman’s Hunter unmanned aircraft system.

In August, Boeing and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency announced they moved closer to developing an airborne high-energy laser weapon that will shoot down an upcoming offensive missile. In the first test over the California High Desert, a high-energy laser was fired from a modified 747-400F into a calorimeter, also on board, to measure the power of the beam.

Once there and while still in flight the ABL Jumbo unleashed its laser striking the calorimeter, allowing experts to determine how much more power will be required to make the weapon effective in combat.

Unlike stealth technology, which began as a passive countermeasure against increasingly advanced detection technology, airborne laser offers both pre-emptive and offensive paths of development, analysts said.

Schoolgirl ‘wanted to lose virginity before Large Hadron Collider caused end of world’

The Large Hadron Collider has endured numerous technical problems  Photo: PA

A teenage girl agreed to have under-age sex because she wanted to lose her virginity before the Large Hadron Collider caused the end of the world, it has been reported.

Telegraph | Sep 6, 2009

The girl, who is aged between 13 and 15, had heard rumours that particle accelerator under the Franco-Swiss border would bring about Armageddon when it was switched on last September.

At the time leading scientists including Prof Stephen Hawking were forced to deny claims that the £4.4bn accelerator would generate a black hole capable of swallowing up the earth.

In the event the collider kicked into life peacefully, although it has since been beset by technological problems.

But police in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories.

Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones.

Police have launched an investigation under child pornography laws, although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

Constructed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the collider has been built at depths ranging from 170ft to 600ft near the institution’s headquarters in Geneva.

The aim of the experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the birth of the universe – and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life.

It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles.

In June, engineers announced that it would be run flat out throughout the year – rather than shutting down over winter – to make up for lost time caused by its lengthy switch-off.

Augmented Reality Soon to Change Our View of the World

digitaljournal.com | Sep 2, 2009

By Kevin Jess

Augmented reality is heading our way, and this new generation of software has the potential to change our lives and how we view the world around us.

Computer graphics have become much more sophisticated since Pong entered the arcades and our homes in the early 1970’s. Since then, computer graphics have steadily improved and have become very realistic and soon they will become very real.

Imagine computer generated graphics being integrated and applied to the real world as you are walking down the street.

For instance, you might be on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia and while on a walking tour you stop in front of Government House. You want to know more about it, such as what it is used for and it’s history.

Today we would use our guide book that we picked up at a local tourist information center. With augmented reality applications you wouldn’t need these soon to be relics.

Instead, you would use your cell phone. By focusing your camera phone on Government House you would see all of this information on screen, clicking on links for more information, or quickly accessing a map.

The idea isn’t new, but with the latest generation of mobile phones, many of which have a compass and GPS, 3G mobile internet access and a growing range of mobile applications, there is nothing to stop augmented reality from entering the mainstream.

Google’s Android phones can already use some of the best augmented reality applications. One of those now available is Wikitude, which overlays what you are looking at with information about points of interest based on where the user points the phone’s camera. Simply by activating the phone’s camera mode and then panning it across buildings and locations, Wikitude pulls in information based on where you are located.

The technology even works with people. A Swedish company is working on an application called Augmented ID, which puts facial recognition and photo tagging together to provide personal information. You could use your phone’s camera to frame someone’s face in order to bring up details of their social networking profiles, their business card, or even a criminal record such as a sex offender reports the Telegraph.

Augmented reality displays, one of which is a cell phone will eventually look like a normal pair of glasses,or even contact lenses, where informative graphics will appear in your field of view, and audio will coincide with whatever you see. Graphics, audio and other sense enhancements would, in fact be superimposed over what you are looking at in the real world, in real time reports HowStuffWorks.

Toymakers are also getting in on the action. Mattel is building the technology into a line of action figures to tie in with Avatar, the upcoming 3D film directed by James Cameron. Each toy will come with an iTag; a small plastic card that children can hold up to their web cam. When the computer recognizes the card, a three-dimensional image is superimposed over the card on the computer screen, giving the child information about their action figure’s character and even the ability to “manipulate” the character or vehicle on-screen by pushing virtual “buttons”.

Other applications now available are Twittaround, Traffic Views, Layar and Nearest Tube.

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Japan Wants to Power 300,000 Homes With Wireless Energy From Space

Japan’s Wireless, Power-Generating, Solar Satellite Inhabitat

PopSci | Sep 2, 2009

By Adrian Covert

Japan has serious plans to send a solar-panel-equipped satellite into space that could wirelessly beam a gigawatt-strong stream of power down to earth and power nearly 300,000 homes.

The satellite will have a surface area of four square kilometers, and transmit power via microwave to a base station on Earth. Putting solar panels in space bypasses many of the difficulties of installing them on Earth: in orbit, there are no cloudy days, very few zoning laws, and the cold ambient temperature is ideal.

A small test model is scheduled for launch in 2015. To iron out all the kinks and get a fully functional system set up is estimated to take three decades. A major kink, presumably, is coping with the possible dangers when a 1-gigawatt microwave beam aimed at a small spot on Earth misses its target.

The $21 billion project just received major backing from Mitsubishi and designer IHI (in addition to research teams from 14 other countries).

The next revolution in computers and manufacturing: programmable matter

Claytronics or Gershenfeld: Why You’ll Be Able to Make Almost Anything

Singularity Hub | Jul 23, 2009

by Aaron Saenz

We still tell our children “you can be anything when you grow up.” It’s time to start telling them “you’re going to be able to make anything…right now.” Similar work at MIT and Carnegie Mellon is pointing towards the next revolution in computers and manufacturing: programmable matter. In the future you won’t use computers to design a car, the car will form from billions of tiny computers that arrange themselves into anything you want. The physical and computational world will merge. Hope you’re ready.

How can a material be intelligent? By being made up of particle-sized machines. At Carnegie Mellon, with support from Intel, the project is called Claytronics. The idea is simple: make basic computers housed in tiny spheres that can connect to each other and rearrange themselves. It’s the same concept as we saw with Modular Robotics, only on a smaller scale. Each particle, called a Claytronics atom or Catom, is less than a millimeter in diameter. With billions you could make almost any object you wanted. See the concept video after the break.

Carnegie Mellon isn’t the only university pursuing intelligent materials. MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) is actively trying to merge physics and computer science. Neil Gershenfeld, CBA’s director and one of the leaders in computational physics, is seeking to design, build and program computers that are what they compute. He’s taking the “bit” and turning it into an “it,” instead of the other way around.

It All Looks Good on Paper

It would be amazing if these technologies were available today, but they are still a long way off. In fact, as far as accomplishments, modular robotics on the human sized scale have shown a lot more success. What makes CBA and Claytronics so interesting is that they are proceeding at a steady (albeit slow) pace and making clear progress in the underlying research of the concept.

In hardware, Claytronics has already made centimeter sized cylindrical catoms that have basic features. They can latch together and recognize when they are latched, and they can be moved using electrostatic forces. Carnegie Mellon is also researching how to power the catoms using magnetic resonance coupling (having each catom convert a magnetic field into electricity). Catoms will be so small that electric forces will be more important than gravity so they’re using helium filled cubes to test how catoms will work when gravity is no longer the dominate force.

Software research is just as rigorous. Programmers have to create a system where catoms can communicate wirelessly over relatively long ranges and with little power. In a single cubic meter, there could be a billion catoms. That means a billion computers trying to talk to each other and move themselves to form a shape. It’s a daunting task but it’s helped by a great concept known as “fungibility.”

When something is fungible, not only is twice as many twice as useful, half as many is half as useful. Bread is fungible, a human is not. Cut one in half and you still have food, cut the other in half and you go to jail. Right now, computers are not fungible. With programmable matter, they would be. That same cubic meter of a billion catoms is essentially a network of a billion computers. That’s a lot of computational power – more than enough to organize it into different shapes. And if the computer was separated into sections, the overall computing power would still be the same. Don’t try that with your laptop.

Fungbility is a concept that Gershenfeld at CBA can really get behind. At TED 2006, he discussed how programmable matter and fungible computers will allow you to “pour out” as much computer as you need to solve a problem. The amount of computational strength you need would be matched by a physical quantity in the real world. Watch his talk below, but be warned: it’s long, he talks fast, and some of the ideas are a little heady.

What will it mean for us to be Post-Scarcity?

For those of you who managed through all seventeen minutes of Gershenfeld’s talk, you’ll notice a lot of it didn’t have anything to do with programmable matter at all. He started discussing “fabrication labs” as well. The two concepts are related. When you have programmable matter, tiny computers will be able to form into any shape. You’ll be able to make almost anything. So what will we do with this technology?

Working with non-programmable matter, Gershenfeld organized a lab with some basic tools: a laser cutter, milling machines, a sign cutter, and programming instruments. Costing somewhere around $20,000 these basic labs can make almost any useful modern device. Computer boards, antennas, you name it. He shared these labs with educational groups all over the world. What did he find? Human ingenuity is more powerful than previously expected.

Children, and adults, were designing chips, tools, and many other inventions to solve local problems. By providing the means, local solutions arose from local inventors. This, my friends, is one of the most promising aspects of programmable matter: when we can build anything, we can solve any problem. The programmable matter will provide the computational power and the physical forms that we can organize into tools to fix…well…everything.

That’s the dream, and I believe in it, but I would be amiss if I didn’t point out the nightmare. Look at the weapons humanity has made from sticks and stones and you can begin to imagine the destruction that could be unleashed with programmable matter. Even if we learn to love and let live, the programmable matter will have a huge amount of computational power, enough to support artificial intelligence. Can we hope to control a material that can out-think and out-build us?

Fear doesn’t help us much, however. Intelligent material isn’t just a powerful and promising concept, it’s an inevitable invention. Computer chip manufacturers are creating smaller and smaller devices, modular robotics are becoming more sophisticated, and artificial intelligence is pre-natal but growing. These trends will converge and lead us to programmable matter eventually. Instead of fearing that development, we can work to understand it better and harness it for limitless possibilities.

Because that’s a real likelihood. The world could really use programmable matter to move beyond living for day to day necessities and start exploring humanity’s potential. When everyone has access to a fabrication lab that can make almost anything, the world will be populated by inventors. Not only will every cubic meter have billions of computers, the world will have 7 billion (or more) human minds guiding those computers to new discoveries. In our life times, or our children’s, we will come to realize an inevitable and quite literal truth: the world is what we make it.

Military killer robots could lead to major escalation in civilian deaths

Terminator style killer robots could lead to a major escalation in civilian deaths, warns Prof Noel Sharkey  Photo: WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Action on a global scale must be taken to curb the development of military killer robots that think for themselves, a leading British expert said.

Military killer robots ‘could endanger civilians’

Telegraph | Aug 3, 2009

“Terminator”-style machines that decide how, when and who to kill are just around the corner, warns Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield.

Far from helping to reduce casualties, their use is likely to make conflict and war more common and lead to a major escalation in numbers of civilian deaths, he believes.

“I do think there should be some international discussion and arms control on these weapons but there’s absolutely none,” said Prof Sharkey.

“The military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction. The nub of it is that robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability. They can’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. It’s hard enough for soldiers to do that.”

Iraq and Afghanistan have both provided ideal “showcases” for robot weapons, said Prof Sharkey.

The “War on Terror” declared by President George Bush spurred on the development of pilotless drone aircraft deployed against insurgents.

Initially used for surveillance, drones such as the Predator and larger Reaper were now armed with bombs and missiles.

The US currently has 200 Predators and 30 Reapers and next year alone will be spending 5.5 billion dollars (£3.29 billion) on unmanned combat vehicles.

Britain had two Predators until one crashed in Iraq last year.

At present these weapons are still operated remotely by humans sitting in front of computer screens. RAF pilots on secondment were among the more experienced controllers used by the US military, while others only had six weeks training, said Prof Sharkey. “If you’re good at computer games, you’re in,” he added.

But rapid progress was being made towards robots which took virtually all their own decisions and were merely “supervised” by humans.

These would be fully autonomous killing machines reminiscent of those depicted in the “Terminator” films.

“The next thing that’s coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots,” said Prof Sharkey speaking to journalists in London. “The robot will do the killing itself. This will make decision making faster and allow one person to control many robots. A single soldier could initiate a large scale attack from the air and the ground.

“It could happen now; the technology’s there.”

A step on the way had already been taken by Israel with “Harpy”, a pilotless aircraft that flies around searching for an enemy radar signal. When it thinks one has been located and identified as hostile, the drone turns into a homing missile and launches an attack – all without human intervention.

Last year the British aerospace company BAe Systems completed a flying trial with a group of drones that could communicate with each other and select their own targets, said Prof Starkey. The United States Air Force was looking at the concept of “swarm technology” which involved multiple drone aircraft operating together.

Flying drones were swiftly being joined by armed robot ground vehicles, such as the Talon Sword which bristles with machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles.

However it was likely to be decades before such robots possessed a human-like ability to tell friend from foe.

Even with human controllers, drones were already stacking up large numbers of civilian casualties.

As a result of 60 known drone attacks in Pakistan between January 2006 and April 2009, 14 al Qaida leaders had been killed but also 607 civilians, said Prof Sharkey.

The US was paying teenagers “thousands of dollars” to drop infrared tags at the homes of al Qaida suspects so that Predator drones could aim their weapons at them, he added. But often the tags were thrown down randomly, marking out completely innocent civilians for attack.

Prof Sharkey, who insists he is “not a pacifist” and has no anti-war agenda, said: “If we keep on using robot weapons we’re going to put civilians at grave risk and it’s going to be much easier to start wars. The main inhibitor of wars is body bags coming home.

“People talk about programming the ‘laws of war’ into a computer to give robots a conscience, so that if the target is a civilian you don’t shoot. But for a robot to recognise a civilian you need an exact specification, and one of the problems is there’s no specific definition of a civilian. Soldiers have to rely on common sense.

“I’m not saying it will never happen, but I know what’s out there and it’s not going to happen for a long time.”

Matthew Knowles, from the aerospace, defence and security trade association SBAC, said: “Scare stories such as this are not helpful contributions to what is an important debate. The convention is that any decision to take a life using unmanned vehicles, which is of course a very serious choice to make, is carried out by a properly trained military human operator.”

Scientists fear a revolt by killer robots

Advances in artificial intelligence are bringing the sci-fi fantasy dangerously closer to fact

London Times | Aug 2, 2009

by John Arlidge

A ROBOT that makes a morning cuppa, a fridge that orders the weekly shop, a car that parks itself.

Advances in artificial intelligence promise many benefits, but scientists are privately so worried they may be creating machines which end up outsmarting — and perhaps even endangering — humans that they held a secret meeting to discuss limiting their research.

At the conference, held behind closed doors in Monterey Bay, California, leading researchers warned that mankind might lose control over computer-based systems that carry out a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting on the phone, and have already reached a level of indestructibility comparable with a cockroach.

“These are powerful technologies that could be used in good ways or scary ways,” warned Eric Horvitz, principal researcher at Microsoft who organised the conference on behalf of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

According to Alan Winfield, a professor at the University of the West of England, scientists are spending too much time developing artificial intelligence and too little on robot safety.

“We’re rapidly approaching the time when new robots should undergo tests, similar to ethical and clinical trials for new drugs, before they can be introduced,” he said.

The scientists who presented their findings at the International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence in Pasadena, California, last month fear that nightmare scenarios, which have until now been limited to science fiction films, such as the Terminator series, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Minority Report, could come true.

Robotic unmanned predator drones, for example, which can seek out and kill human targets, have already moved out of the movie theatres and into the theatre of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. While at present controlled by human operators, they are moving towards more autonomous control.

They could also soon be found on the streets. Samsung, the South Korean electronics company, has developed autonomous sentry robots to serve as armed border guards. They have “shoot-to-kill” capability.

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at Sheffield University, warned that such robots could soon be used for policing, for example during riots such as those seen in London at the recent G20 summit. “Is this a good thing?” he asked.

Scientists are particularly worried about the way the latest, highly sophisticated artificially intelligent products perform human-like functions.

Japanese consumers can already buy robots that “learn” their owner’s behaviour, can open the front door and even find electrical outlets and recharge themselves so they never stop working.

One high-tech US firm is working on robotic nurses, dubbed “nursebots”, that interact with patients to simulate empathy. Critics told the conference that, at best, this could be dehumanising; at worst, something could go wrong with the programming.

The scientists dismissed as fanciful fears about “singularity” — the term used to describe the point where robots have become so intelligent they are able to build ever more capable versions of themselves without further input from mankind.

The conference was nevertheless told that new artificial intelligence viruses are helping criminals to steal people’s identities. Criminals are working on viruses that are planted in mobile phones and “copy” users’ voices. After stealing the voice, criminals can masquerade as a victim on the phone or circumvent speech recognition security systems.

Another kind of smartphone virus silently monitors text messages, e-mail, voice, diary and bank details. The virus then uses the information to impersonate people online, with little or no external guidance from the thieves. The researchers warned that many of the new viruses defy extermination, reaching what one speaker called “the cockroach stage”.

Some speakers called for researchers to adopt the “three laws” of robotics created by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction author, that are designed to protect humanity from machines with their own agenda. Each robot, Asimov said, must be programmed never to kill or injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to suffer. A robot must obey human orders, unless this contravenes the first law. A robot must protect itself, unless it contravenes either of the first two laws.

While many scientists fear artificial intelligence could run amok, some argue that ultrasmart machines will instead offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

Some pointed out that artificial intelligence was already helping us in complex, sometimes life-and-death situations. Poseidon Technologies, the French firm, sells artificial intelligence systems that help lifeguards identify when a person is drowning in a swimming pool. Microsoft’s Clearflow system helps drivers to pick the best route by analysing traffic behaviour; and artificial intelligence systems are making cars safer, reducing road accidents.

DARPA spying squirrels, dolphins helped inspire ‘G-Force’ guinea pig super hero movie

Darwin in a scene from the motion picture G-Force.  By Disney

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, provided plenty of ideas for G-Force

Real spying squirrels, dolphins helped inspire ‘G-Force’

USA TODAY | Jul 27, 2009

By Dan Vergano

Hollywood has a curious crush on science, seen this year in movies such as Star Trek (anti-matter engines), Angels & Demons (anti-matter bombs) and Transformers (a critical bomb).

The latest dose of oddball silver screen science comes this week with G-Force, a talking guinea pig spy movie from Walt Disney Pictures. The science in the movie — talking guinea pig ninjas save the world from evil — is nuts, as director Hoyt Yeatman freely acknowledges. But he points out a lot of military animal science is out there, and the movie reflects some real world science.

“I actually had the idea from my 5-year-old son dressing up a guinea pig in gear,” Yeatman says. But after a year and a half of researching a script, “I began to see there were a lot of crazy things really out there.”

The result is a Jerry Bruckheimer Films parody of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, sort of Mission Impossible meets Rin Tin Tin. The guinea pigs are squad boss Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), weapons nut Blaster (voiced by Tracy Morgan) and martial arts vixen Juarez (voiced by Penelope Cruz). Plus a star-nosed mole computer geek, Speckles (voiced by Nicolas Cage, of course.)

Squirrels, not guinea pigs, were arrested as spies in Iran two years ago, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, after border guards spotted their eavesdropping equipment. “Squirrel espionage would not be without precedent,” noted Wired’s Sharon Weinberger, at the time. “Other members of the animal kingdom have been tagged as possible spies, including pigeons and cats.”

Indeed, from carrier pigeons, to suicidal dogs equipped with anti-tank mines in World War II, to dolphins used to patrol waters in the Vietnam War, armies have recruited animals for all sorts of missions.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, provided plenty of ideas for G-Force, Yeatman says. The Defense Department research agency’s HI-MEMS program is “aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces” in moths, according to its website. The idea was the inspiration for G-Force’s fly spy “Mooch” (voiced by Edwin Louis), who provides surveillance for the guinea pig team. This should keep Iran’s border police on their toes.

DARPA and Los Alamos National Laboratory have also recruited bomb-sniffing bees to find land mines. “Honeybees are as good as dogs,” Los Alamos entomologist Timothy Haarmann told USA TODAY in 2006. Los Alamos researchers have also looked into training bees to sniff out cocaine and other drugs at border crossings.

“The chief conceit in G-Force that the guinea pigs have been trained to understand people,” Yeatman says. “They could talk amongst themselves all the time, it’s just that people haven’t been smart enough to understand them.”

And in fact, animal communication also is a hot topic among researchers. Parrots, most famously the gray parrot Alex trained by Harvard University’s Irene Pepperberg, can learn the basic elements of English, attaining roughly the intellectual development of a 5-year-old.

The honeybee “waggle dance” (decoded six decades ago by Karl von Frisch), which the insects use to recruit nest mates to find food, “is one of the most celebrated communication behaviors in the animal world,” wrote entomologists Christoph Grüter and Walter Farina in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution last year.

Of course, “guinea pigs aren’t known for their athletic abilities,” says Yeatman. Or vocabulary. “So, we had to take a few liberties in the film,” he says, to create a team of ninja rodents.

Still, he argues there’s enough real science alluded to in the film to touch on real world issues. “If we can back up the story with a little bit of real science, we really make the movie a better experience for the audience,” Yeatman says.