Google’s robotics drive

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This morning’s Observer column.

You may not have noticed it, but over the past year Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It’s called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It’s the size of a large dog or small mule – about 3ft long, 2ft 6in tall, weighs 240lbs, has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, runs at 4mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs muddy hiking trails, walks in snow and water, carries a 340lb load, can toss breeze blocks and can recover its balance when walking on ice after absorbing a hefty sideways kick.

You don’t believe me? Well, just head over to YouTube and search for “Boston Dynamics”. There, you will find not only a fascinating video of Big Dog in action, but also confirmation that its maker has a menagerie of mechanical beasts, some of them humanoid in form, others resembling predatory animals. And you will not be surprised to learn that most have been developed on military contracts, including some issued by Darpa, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the outfit that originally funded the development of the internet.

Should we be concerned about this? Yes, but not in the way you might first think…

Read on…

The importance of being Edward

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Opener of my long piece in today’s Observer on the implications of the Snowden revelations.

Whatever else 2013 will be remembered for, it will be known as the year in which a courageous whistleblower brought home to us the extent to which the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured.

Although Edward Snowden’s revelations initially seemed only to document the extent to which the state had exploited internet technology to create a surveillance system of unimaginable comprehensiveness, as the leaks flowed it gradually dawned on us that our naive lust for “free” stuff online had also enabled commercial interests effectively to capture the internet for their own purposes.

And, as if that realisation wasn’t traumatic enough, Snowden’s revelations demonstrated the extent to which the corporate sector – the Googles, Facebooks, Yahoos and Microsofts of this world – have been, knowingly or unknowingly, complicit in spying on us.

What it boils down to is this: we now know for sure that nothing that you do online is immune to surveillance, and the only people who retain any hope of secure communications are geeks who understand cryptography and use open-source software.

This is a big deal by any standards and we are all in Snowden’s debt, for he has sacrificed his prospects of freedom and a normal life so that the rest of us would know what has happened to the technologies on we now depend. We can no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for alarm or inaction.

Read on…

Peering into the future

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I was very struck by this piece by Zachary M. Seward in my Quartz Weekend Briefing.

(En passant, Quartz has been one of the great discoveries of 2013.)

Half a century ago, author Isaac Asimov peered into the future: “What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” he wrote in the New York Times. “I don’t know, but I can guess.”

With the exception of assuming the World’s Fair would still be around, Asimov was remarkably prescient. His essay forecast everything from self-driving cars (“Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘Robot-brains’”) to Keurig machines (“Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee”) to photochromic lenses (“The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it”).

But Asimov’s most impressive prophecy had less to do with gadgets than perceiving what that progress would mean for society. ”The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being,” he wrote. Later, he added, ”The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”

Heading into 2014, the so-called disruptive technologies we write about frequently at Quartz—from robotics to 3D printing to drones—are magical, yes, and inevitable, too. They also carry with them a specter of loss. Lost jobs, mostly, but also a sense of being lost. Where do we go from here? What is society’s replacement for factory work, clerical work, retail work? The honest answer is that we have none, at least for now.

The US may never return to full employment. Ravaged economies in Europe are putting an entire generation of youth at risk. China can’t put its college graduates to work. Jobs simply aren’t materializing.

Predictions are a fool’s errand. (Asimov assumed we would have moon colonies.) But if we had to make just one forecast, it would be that, in 2014, the reality of this loss of work will hit the world hard. The bright side is that we may finally start to confront the issue and start working on a new economy with jobs to spare.

Homeward bound

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Lovely tweet by Nóirín Plunkett.

“And in those days Caesar Augustus decreed that all must return to the town of their birth, that they might sort out their parents’ computers.”

Happy Christmas, one and all.

Brancaster Staithe at dusk

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Brancaster Staithe at dusk, originally uploaded by jjn1.

We’re in Norfolk, where we go every year in order to write our Christmas cards. (We discovered years ago that they never get done in the chaos of normal home life.) This afternoon we took a break and went to the Staithe, which we had to ourselves. The tide was out and the whole place was beautifully quiet and deserted, so the only thing to do before the light went completely was to see if an HDR shot was possible. This is it.

Larger size here.

Even our grunts could be monetised by Facebook

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This morning’s Observer column.

As Mark Twain observed: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And that was a long time before the web. Which brings us to a meme that was propagating last week though social media. Its essence was an assertion that Facebook monitored – and stored – not only the stuff that its subscribers post on their Facebook pages, but even stuff that they started to type and then deleted! Shock, horror!

Read on…

Robot or not?

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This (from a link sent by Andrew Ingram, for which many thanks) is fascinating.

Recently, Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer received a phone call from an apparently bright and engaging woman asking him if he wanted a deal on his health insurance. But he soon got the feeling something wasn’t quite right.

After asking the telemarketer point blank if she was a real person or a computer-operated robot, she chuckled charmingly and insisted she was real. Looking to press the issue, Scherer asked her a series of questions, which she promptly failed. Such as, “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” To which she responded by saying she didn’t understand the question. When asked what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained of a bad connection (ah, the oldest trick in the book).

Here’s the recording: