Patrick Cox is the author of a very interesting article on Contrarianprofits.com. In the post, Cox makes the case that the time is ripe for large-scale adoption of robotics in both civilian and military applications.The latter is old news: in previous posts, we looked at the growing opportunities, and concerns, of robotic applications in dangerous (or dangerously boring) domains. Cox backs up his optimism with numbers: even in a bad economic climate, robotic companies have posted good profits, and the adoption trend or robots in certain industry seems unstoppable.
The second part of the article is about memristors, and HP. Cox does not provide a clear cause-effect link between the introduction of memristors and his forecasted "boom" in robotics, but Neurdon can fill in the blanks for you. Memristors, for the first time, provide the medium to allow modelers such as the ones that populate Neurdon to implement those large-scale circuits that can power the next generation robotic platform. And, thanks to the memristors, we will soon be able to do it at low cost and without the need to attach a power plant to the unfortunate robot.
Large-scale, more intelligent artificial neural systems and portability will be the two key innovations that will contribute to the advancement of robotics, as Cox (and Neurdon) hope...
What we’re talking about here is robots with the potential of personalities. How can we trust them? How can we ensure friendliness? I don’t want to hear about laws. Intelligent machines may develop friends and enemies. Neural networks evolve. How can any such emergent AI be trusted undoubting? Perhaps the personalities that we give them must be our own. How are we going to control these things for our purposes? Maybe there is a way to lock in the memristance for the whole network after configuring/training it. This would prevent further adaptation. Or, if adaptation were necessary to some specific non-threatening degree, perhaps it can be frozen to within looser parameters. But, after sufficient configuration/training, might it not be best to prevent significant deviation from this preset at (what amounts to) the personality level of organization? Such a machine might be more easily trusted not to evolve animosity.
Hi Nicholas,
thanks for your thoughts. I am not sure you can do what you propose on humans, who acutely display all the bad traits you describe below. Machines have the luxury of having an “off” button, and being programmable.
Max