Posts Tagged ‘Robotics’
“Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect”*…
… and so, for a very long time, it has been. Consider the case of the inventive Ismail al-Jazarī, a predecessor of Da Vinci…
… Al-Jazarī, who passed away in 1206, served as the chief engineer for the court of the Artuqids in Diyarbakir. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices lives up to its name, detailing lock-like devices for raising water, sophisticated zodiac clocks, avian automata able to produce song, and a showering system for King Salih, who “disliked a servant or slave girl pouring water onto his hands for him”. He invented bloodletting technologies, mischievous fountains, segmental gears, and a chest (sundūq) that featured a security system with four combination dials — presumably a safe for storing valued possessions — and has been subsequently dubbed “the father of robotics”, due to his creation of a life-like butler who could offer guests a hand towel after their ablutions. Al-Jazarī’s contemporaries already recognized his eminence as an engineer, referring to him as unique and unrivaled, learned and worthy. He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.
The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices contains some fifty mechanical devices divided into six categories: clocks; vessels and figures for drinking sessions; pitchers, basins, and other washing devices; fountains and perpetual flutes; machines for raising water; and a miscellaneous category, where we find a self-closing door. The second category is perhaps the most intriguing, and grants some insight into the extravagant concerns of al-Jazarī’s courtly patrons. One machine — “a standing slave holding a fish and a goblet from which he serves wine to the king” — is programmed to dispense clarified wine every eighth of an hour for a certain period. Numerous similar devices follow: robots that drink from goblets, which are filled from the recycled contents of their stomachs; automaton shaykhs that serve each other wine that each consumes in turn; a boat full of mechanical slave girls that play instruments during drinking parties. Not unlike our “AI assistants”, al-Jazarī’s inventions are never allowed to transcend the category of indentured laborer, reproducing the inequalities of social relations across the human-machine divide.
The illustrations from the Berlin manuscript are notably different than some of its sister specimens, such as the ornate pair of manuscripts held in Leiden. Here the images are mainly in-line illustrations and seem more focused on technical details and inner workings than other versions, which tend to lean toward aesthetic exteriors. Red and yellow predominate, offset by the occasional body of water in indigo blue. Gears and levers are rich in tone, while humanoid figures get left as simple, colorless sketches. To the contemporary viewer, the illustrations invert the power dynamic that is so present in al-Jazarī’s text. Machines come to the foreground; humans are incidental figures, almost irrelevant…
Putting material to work. More– and many more illustrations: “Ismail al-Jazarī’s Ingenious Mechanical Devices,” from @PublicDomainRev.
More of (and on) al-Jazarī’s creations here.
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As we imagine machines, we might spare a thought for Henry Christopher Mance; he died on this date in 1926. An electrical engineer and inventor, he was instrumental in laying the earliest underwater telecom cables (under the Persian Gulf) and developed the Mance method of detecting and locating the positions of defects in submarine cables. But he is better remembered as the inventor of the Mance heliograph (a wireless solar telegraph that signals by flashes of sunlight using Morse code reflected by a mirror), which found wide military, survey, and forest protection application and for which he was knighted.
“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes”*…
For some, the prospect of further advances in AI and related tech (robotics, connectivity, et al.) conjures a future of existential risk, a Terminator-like dystopian future in which humans fight with “machines” for primacy. For others (among whom your correspondent numbers himself), AI (better understood as “augmented” than “artificial” intelligence) has real promise– but also dangers of a different (and very human) sort. Those technologies, dependent as they are on capital and specific/rare expertise, could fuel further concentration of wealth and power, could usher in an era of even greater inequality. Noah Smith is here to argue that my fears may be misplaced, that augmentation may narrow the skills gap and help reduce economic polarization…
On the app formerly known as Twitter, I’m known for occasionally going on rants about how it’s good to be normal and average and middle-class. To some degree this is because I believe that the only successful society is an egalitarian one where people don’t have to be exceptional in order to live good and comfortable and fulfilling lives. But some of it is also a reaction against the messages I was inundated with growing up. It seemed like every movie and book and TV show was telling me that nerds like me were special — that because we could do physics or program computers or even just play video games, we were destined to be exceptional. In the late 80s and 90s, it felt like we were on the cusp of a great shift, where the back-slapping jocks who had dominated American society in earlier times were on the verge of losing power and status to the bespectacled freaks and geeks. The Revenge of the Nerds was coming.
It wasn’t just fantasy, either. Over the next thirty years, the nerds really did win the economic competition. The U.S. shifted from manufacturing to knowledge industries like IT, finance, bio, and so on, effectively going from the world’s workshop to the world’s research park. This meant that simply being able to cut deals and manage large workforces were no longer the only important skills you needed to succeed at the highest levels of business. Bespectacled programmers and math nerds became our richest men. From the early 80s to the 2000s, the college earnings premium rose relentlessly, and a degree went from optional to almost mandatory for financial success.
The age of human capital was in full swing, and the general consensus was that “Average Is Over”. And with increased earnings came increased social status and personal confidence; by the time I moved out to San Francisco in 2016, tech people were clearly the masters of the Universe.
The widening gap in the performance of the nerds versus everyone else wasn’t the only cause of the rise in inequality in the U.S. — financialization, globalization, tax changes, the decline of unions, and other factors all probably played a role. But the increasing premium on human capital was impossible to ignore.
That trend lasted so long that most Americans can no longer remember anything else. We’ve become used to the idea that technology brings inequality, by delivering outsized benefits to the 20% of society who are smart and educated enough to take full advantage of it. It’s gotten to the point where we tacitly assume that this is just what technology does, period, so that when a new technology like generative AI comes along, people leap to predict that economic inequality will widen as a result of a new digital divide.
And it’s possible that will happen. I can’t rule it out. But I also have a more optimistic take here — I think it’s possible that the wave of new technologies now arriving in our economy will decrease much of the skills gap that opened up in the decades since 1980…
An optimistic take on technology and inequality: “Is it time for the Revenge of the Normies?” from @Noahpinion. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Aristotle
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As we contemplate consequences, we might spare a thought for Joseph Glidden; he died on this date in 1906. An Illinois farmer, he developed and patented the design of the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”*…
… or, as Confucius would have it, “real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Happily Wikenigma is here to help…
Wikenigma is a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge.
Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer. [949 so far]
That’s to say, a compendium of so-called ‘Known Unknowns’…
Consider, for example…
How do marine turtle accurately migrate thousands of kilometers for nesting?
Can Beal’s conjecture be proved?
Can one solve the “envelope paradox”?
Do “naked singularities” exist?
What is the etymology of the word “plot” (which appears only in English)?
What are the function, importance, and evolutionary history of human “inner speech”?
One could– and should– go on: Wikenigma, via @Recomendo6.
* Richard Feynman
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As we wonder, we might spare a thought for a man who embodied curiosity, Marvin Minsky; he died on this date in 2016. A biochemist and cognitive scientist by training, he was founding director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Project (the MIT AI Lab). Minsky authored several widely-used texts, and made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. He holds several patents, including those for the first neural-network simulator (SNARC, 1951), the first head-mounted graphical display, the first confocal scanning microscope, and the LOGO “turtle” device (with his friend and frequent collaborator Seymour Papert). His other inventions include mechanical hands and the “Muse” synthesizer.
“Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”*…
Marion Tinsley—math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world—sat across a game board from a computer, dying.
Tinsley had been the world’s best for 40 years, a time during which he’d lost a handful of games to humans, but never a match. It’s possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship.
His opponent was Chinook, a checkers-playing program programmed by Jonathan Schaeffer, a round, frizzy-haired professor from the University of Alberta, who operated the machine. Through obsessive work, Chinook had become very good. It hadn’t lost a game in its last 125—and since they’d come close to defeating Tinsley in 1992, Schaeffer’s team had spent thousands of hours perfecting his machine.
The night before the match, Tinsley dreamt that God spoke to him and said, “I like Jonathan, too,” which had led him to believe that he might have lost exclusive divine backing.
So, they sat in the now-defunct Computer Museum in Boston. The room was large, but the crowd numbered in the teens. The two men were slated to play 30 matches over the next two weeks. The year was 1994, before Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue or Lee Sedol and AlphaGo…
The story of a duel between two men, one who dies, and the nature of the quest to build artificial intelligence: “How Checkers Was Solved.”
* Heraclitus
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As we triangulate a triple jump, we might send precisely-programmed birthday greetings to Joseph F. Engelberger; he was born on this date in 1925. An engineer and entrepreneur who is widely considered “the father of robotics,” he worked from a patented technology created by George Devol to create the first industrial robot; then, with a partner, created Unimation, the first industrial robotics company. The Robotics Industries Association presents the Joseph F. Engelberger Awards annually to “persons who have contributed outstandingly to the furtherance of the science and practice of robotics.”
“Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, ‘There is Another who is over us all'”*…
Brian Wolslegel was fresh out of school and looking for work as a firefighter when he took a temporary job with a taxidermist. One day a game warden walked into the shop near Wausau, Wis., and asked if he could build a robotic deer to help catch an illegal hunter.
“I had putzed around with robotic cars just like any kid,” Wolslegel said, “and we started messing around with little motors to make things move. It was a lot of fun.”
More than 20 years later, he’s still at it. His business, Custom Robotic Wildlife, is now one of the oldest and best regarded of its kind in North America. Each year, Wolslegel builds a menagerie of about 150 lifelike remote-controlled animals, mostly for wildlife enforcement officers in states and American Indian reservations across the United States and Canada.
Compared to current motorized decoys, that first attempt was “prehistoric,” Wolslegel recalled, laughing. Today, his whitetail deer can be made to independently move their ears and tail, stomp their legs and slide on a track that makes them appear to walk.
He’s made robotic animals as big as a bear and as small as a squirrel. He’s sold pigs to game wardens in Texas, and elk to clients out West…
More at “Wisconsin taxidermist makes robotic decoys used to help nab poachers across the U.S.”
* Felix Salten, Bambi
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As we muse on mechanical ducks, we might send thoughtfully-titrated birthday greetings to Denis Papin; he was born on this date in 1647. A physicist, mathematician and inventor, he is best known for his pioneering creation of a “steam digester,” the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine.
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