Making money online is certainly not just for people on Amazon or Ebay. More and more people are discovering the massive money to be made from virtual worlds such as Second Life. The ABC television network recently did a 45 minute Second Life video segment and now has it online.

The video does a great job of covering various aspects such as virtual land sales/rentals, the adult sex industry, content creation and sales, the posibility of new tax laws and regulation, casinos, currency exchange and stock trading, and on and on.

I have no doubt it will not be long before the (all countries) govenments want to get their tax paws in on the action, but until then, it’s like the WILD WEST !! YEEHAW ! …. Well, even after that it will be awesome. Some say bigger than Google, Amazon, Ebay, etc is today, and I must agree with them. Once technology advances a bit more, and we see more emmersive worlds / interfaces then the world we live in will change in ways only a few can imagine.

If you don’t have a Second Life account yet. Sign up now! Mention “Ashling Babka” (me) as your reference, and I will get notified when you log in, and can help get you started.

March 21st, 2007
Categories: Money, VirtualReality, Second Life . Author: rock808 . Comments: 1 Comment

We are getting closer and closer each year with putting together androids that look and move in human ways, but some people question if we should really be making these androids appear so human.

Just last year, Ishiguro’s android’s were still in the Uncanny Valley, but recent progress has changed that. “Now, with the correct number of actuators, the android has come out of the Uncanny Valley. The movements still need improvements, but the current generation is much improved,” Ishiguro says.

“The young infants are now not afraid. We are still very far from replicating the exact movement of humans, and there is no way to have a perfect copy of humans within 50 years. However, with very short interactions of a minute or two, most would not know they are interacting with an android.”

I, for one, don’t think this is something to even question. The fact is, that there is a demand for human looking androids, and as they settle in to our society more and more, then that demand will grow at an incredible rate!

But, I also keep in mind that over the next several years, our biotech will be advancing as well, and humans will start wearing and then implanting more and more electronic devices, and this will ultimately lead in to a merging of humans and machines where there will be a very grey line for some “beings” as to wether or not they should now be considered human… or they should CONTINUE to be considered human.

March 3rd, 2007
Categories: RobotsAndAI . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

I ran across a few videos I thought I’d share.

Here is one of a robotic, self-healing/repairing chair:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNIz1lg2_AQ

Maybe a little slow, but if you can look a little distance in the future, you might be able to see a time when self-assembling robots will be able to organize themselves in to any number of structures, even reusing various parts to configure themselves from a chair to a bed to a table… anything that you might need at that time. If a part breaks, then other (spare) robots could re-assign themselves to fill in for the needed part.

Here are a few short videos of robots which are learning to walk/move on their own…. even to the point of discovering how their own body is put together. The most interesting thing about these robots is the fact that they are not pre-programming with any notion on HOW to move, and it is left up to them to discover the BEST way to get from one place to another. The advantage of this method is that the robot can try hundreds or thousands of different motion combinations, test them all, and find the absolute best method to move the farthest, the fastest, and/or the most efficient, and that could very well be in such a way that a human never would have thought of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNdDsK_t1Vs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBwtaaESP4A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ont07BS3bBE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsCbvl5Bak8

February 20th, 2007
Categories: RobotsAndAI . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

How do I KNOW that virtual worlds will become as real to us as the one we are living in now?

Because the human brain can’t tell the difference!

For most of us now, that might sound silly. Most might say “Anyone can tell that what goes on in Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, etc is not real.. It’s not REALLY happening!”

Well, it IS true that when your avatar/character in the virtual world picks up an item in that world, then the human sitting behind the keyboard has not physically picked up the item. In fact, the item doesn’t physically exist at all, but neither does love, the sound waves of speech, the quality of honor… yet they are a very “real” part of our everyday lives.

In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram did an experiment dealing with Authority where people were told to give electric shocks to other people who could be heard over a speaker system. There were different shock levels up to a lethal dose… and the recipient on the other end could be heard crying out over the speaker, but kept saying to go up another level, and so some participants went up in shock levels even to the lethal dose, at which point the person on the other no longer cried out. BUT, little known to the person pressing the buttons… the people on the other end were not REALLY getting shocked, it was just an experiment to see if the person giving the shocks WOULD go that far… and many did.

Today, that kind of experiment is frowned upon due to ethical reasons, so Mel Slater along with a couple of university research groups has put together a similar experiment in a virtual world. Where half the humans being tested could see a virtual avatar of a woman who was to be “shocked” and the other half of the humans could not see her. Everyone knew there was no human being shocked, so you would think people would have no problems sending “pretend shocks” to a virtual woman, right?! WRONG ! In the group of people who could not see the virtual woman, they did send shocks up to a lethal dose, but those people who could see the virtual woman were more likely to stop… almost half said they considered withdrawing from the experiment before it was over and several actually did!

“Of course, consciously everybody knows nothing is happening,” says Slater. “But some parts of the person’s perceptual system just takes it as real. Some part of the brain doesn’t know about virtual reality.”

Measures of stress, such as heart rate and sweatiness of palms, increased. These measures are nearly impossible to fake, and confirmed for Slater that the volunteers were actually feeling uncomfortable, rather than performing as they thought the experimenter would expect.

There are many more examples and scientific finds which also show that the brain can’t tell the difference between something happening right now, or the memory of something that has happened in the past. The same neurons fire. And in this experiment we see that even when the human consciously KNOWS something is not happening in the physical world, the brain still interprets it as really happening, and the body reacts as if it was.

Where all this leads to is how our virtual worlds will become just as real to us as the physical world. Human brains will still have to deal with moral and ethical situations, and our bodies will still produce the same reactions to events we are experiencing.

It always amuses me when I hear someone dismiss virtual worlds as not being real….
What? When you have a conversation with someone in a virtual world is that not a real conversation? Is it any different than a conversation over the phone? When you form a bond with someone in a virtual world it can be just as strong as bonds formed with people in the physical world. When I go to work in the online world, I get paid just the same as the physical world… it all seems pretty REAL to me!

December 30th, 2006
Categories: Experiments, VirtualReality . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

The Shadow Robot Company says a robotic arm to aid disabled people around the house could be completed within a year, and said a complete robot assistant could be ready in as little as 2-3 years and would probably cost about the same as a car, but payment plans could be set up. The current arm has 24 movements (compared to NASA’s arm with only 12) is the most advanced in the world, capable of handling anything a human hand can… including eggs, fruit, etc.

“The aim of this is to make a robot that’s helpful to a person that needs assistance on a daily basis, things that they could feel were too trivial or embarrassing to ask a person to help with.”

Along the same vein is a story where researchers demonstrate direct brain control of a humanoid robot at the University of Washington. At the moment only a few basic commands are available to make the robot move to a certain location and pickup a specific object, but the robot takes action based on the brain signals picked up from the human in control and is 94% accurate. Eventually, they hope to add more complex movements and control where the robots would still take action based on human thoughts, but it would also have more of it’s own self-learning and navigation.

“We want to get to the point of using actual objects that people might want the robot to gather, as well as having the robot move through multiple rooms.”

My personal thought, is that it would probably be better to have closet full of robotic assistants rather than clone slaves… or, is that robotic slaves and clone assistants?

December 23rd, 2006
Categories: RobotsAndAI . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

A new silicon chip created by Kareem Zaghloul at the University of Pennsylvania, US will be an eye implant to let the blind see (no longer will external cameras be needed). It’s said that around 700,000 people are diagnosed with macular degeneration each year and 1.5 million suffer from retinitis pigmentosa. The new chip has light sensors which function in the same type of way as a normal human retina. It’s only 3.5 x 3.3 mm in size and contains 5,760 phototransistors which take the place of neurons in a biological eye. Clinical trials should start as soon as they can reduce the size and power consumption a bit more, but then will be used to reverse blindness from these and other retinal diseases.

In related cyborgish news, a team of researchers at the University of Portsmouth, UK, have created the first bio-nanotech switch that can act as in interface between a living organism and a computer. This ‘nanoactuator’ is much smaller than the width of a human hair, and can be used to control artificial limbs, detect and react to airborne pathogens in a bio-defense role, or any number of other bio/mechanical applications. To me, it just shows one more step toward a human-machine evolutionary joining.

A Chiang Mai University team has developed a motor so small it will power a microscopic robot on an expedition through human blood vessels. The purpose of the new motor will be to drive a blood cell sized medical robot through the bloodstream seeking out small tumors in internal organs. There have been related stories about how these nanobots will then be able to deliver medicine, or eradicate infected the specific infected cells. Once this has been proven effective, then it might not be too long before a specialized “army” of various nanobots could be delivered to patients (or everyone) in a pill form and these tiny medical agents would go to work cleaning out the body of toxins, helping to fight off disease and co-existing within all of us to keep us more healthy and fit as they continued to live out THEIR lives within us in some symbiotic fashion.

Or maybe you’d prefer to just have Oxycyte put in to your bloodstream, or maybe soon the newer versions of synthetic blood that even do more… and better?! Right now, Oxycyte (a synthetic substance made from perfluorocarbons - PFC’s) is being used in clinical tests and some emergency medical procedures for traumatic brain injury, where these PFC’s can carry 50% more oxygen than normal blood cells, and also they can squeeze through smaller places that blood cells can’t fit… such as when blood vessels are squeezed from abnormal pressure. Right now this synthetic blood is already saving lives and is planned for more uses in the near future. I wonder what will happen when we have created a new synthetic blood that is always better than natural blood on many different levels…. combat infections better, carry oxygen and other nutrients more efficiently and just to make people healthier in general.

Another story describes a new brain implant that intercepts brain activity and can reroute it to another part of the brain, to a computer, or to another body part. Right now tests are being done on a monkey, but when the tests are complete their first application will be to use the device to help stroke and spinal injury victims by rewiring the brain activity around damaged parts, or sending brain signals to muscle tissue in other parts of the body to get around spinal injury issues. Of course, this new technology can also be used to control the movement of prosthetics as well, possibly bringing back complete and natural motion to someone who has lost their arms and/or legs… again, all with the power of thought, as easily as they use to move their natural arms and legs. Is there a limit at which point someones body could contain so many non-biological pieces that they would no longer be considered “human” ? What if that person was in an accident so terrible, that only their brain was able to be saved, and it was then placed in an android-type body, controlling all movement, speech, sight…. Now, what if the brain tissue was also dying, but was copied in to a computer powerful enough to store and use the information just as we use our biological brains now?

Chip Walter has written an article on the next “evolution” of homo sapien to cyber sapien. A rather interesting read about how advances up an evolutionary scale do not “require” the next step to be biological. As humans have evolved (advanced) from first making use of fire, and using sharp rocks, to increasing life with medical treatments, roots, plants, and the like… to later synthesized drugs, prosthetics, organ transplants, and now nanotech, computer-brain interfaces, robotic limbs, and more…. the couple dozen years will bring about a closer merging of humans and our technology. Perhaps even to a point we might “evolve” our biological selves out of existence.

November 11th, 2006
Categories: Cyborg . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

NewScientistTech has an article about new artificial intelligence software called “News at Seven” which can dynamically create a video news presentation based on real news it finds on the internet. (Watch A Sample Video Here). It can read over news stories, collect video clips and still images related to the story or topics in general and can then use those while an animated news agent presents the news…. anything from celebrity gossip to current world news headlines. The user is allowed to punch in their keywords of interest, the AI looks over websites to gather news related text, edits for length and content to allow for better verbal presentation, search sites like YouTube, Google Video, etc for related video and photo sites for still images, then finally puts it all together, with animated character and text-to-speech synthesis displays as totally customized news video for each viewer. This could easily become a feature of the next generation of TV, and the personalization that is given to focus on news each viewer is most interested in will be the key.

It seems like only yesterday when I wrote a post about “George”, the artificial intelligence software which (who?) has won the Loebner Prize two years in a row now, for being able to hold he most human-like conversations. This new article reports that now George has been set up with voice recognition and speech synthesis so he can carry on a voice-to-voice conversation as well, and is currently chatting with over 200 people on the internet simultaneously. As posted earlier, there are projects in the works to use this technology in support call centers, toys, virtual pets, celebrity impersonations, historical characters used as tutors, and any number of other “interactive” applications. FINALLY, a pet who will not only be able to understand English much better, but also be able to reply back to me in English! Maybe my search for the perfect woman is coming to an end, as well??

Also, in the realm of virtual worlds is a recent story in the New York Times which talks about how just in the last year more than 30 big companies have started getting more involved in virtual worlds. Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas, Sony, Toyota, and MTV to name only a few have all started setting up “shop” in Second Life. A spokesperson at Nissan said, “We’re just trying to follow our consumer, that’s where they’re spending their time.” Second Life tracks the amount of currency changing hands (in US dollar amounts) and says “It recently reached as much as $500,000 a day and is growing as much as 15 percent a month.” Last year I made a prediction about the growing use of virtual worlds for both work and play and this is certainly an obvious step in that direction.

November 8th, 2006
Categories: RobotsAndAI, VirtualReality . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

By 2015, the U.S. plans on one third of its fighting strength will be robots. A project known as Future Combat Systems (FCS). The year 2015 sounds like a long way off, but actually it’s only 8 years down the road.

In 2001, armed Talon reconnaissance drones were sent in to caves in Afghanistan clearing out al-Qaida fighters. The U.S. army is already using 20 different robotic systems and 2,500 various units are deployed in current warfare operations. By 2035 they expect to have the first fully autonomous robots moving on the battle field on their own.

The Korea Times also has a story about their push toward robots in warfare, as the US Military is helping South Korea advance their technology and fighting force.

Currently South Korea has a military of about 680,000, while North Korea has 1.2 million. Even with that huge difference, South Korea plans to reduce there troop size down to 500,000 by the year 2020 while increasing the size of their robotic force. By 2012 they plan to start using various autonomous robots for reconnaissance and landmine removal. By 2013 they plan to have these fitted with various weapon systems, and multiple pairs of legs for ease of movement across rugged terrain, and used to patrol along the border fence line between North and South Korea. Recently, there has also been the development of an unmanned, fixed position border guard which can identify moving targets up to 4 kilometers in the day, and 2 kilometers at night. The plan is to have these deployed along the Demilitarized Zone by the end of this year.

Of course, many people will see this as a great new age where people… humans.. are taken out of harms way…. removed from the battlefield, but, does that mean nations might be quicker to go to war, if there is the thought that human lives are not at risk? Even those people are not looking far enough ahead. What happens when Good Robot Army defeats Bad Robot Army? Do the people on the side of Bad Robot Army give up, surrender, and do as Good Army says? Or do (again) we see humans start getting in to the fight to keep up their way of life or achieve their goals? This certainly won’t bring an end to war, but will bring a new age to warfare…. and it seems that a Sci-Fi kind of “drone war” might only be 8 years away.

November 4th, 2006
Categories: RobotsAndAI . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments

Using call center data to train “chat bots” might be just the thing we need to help push artificial intelligence to the point of passing the Turing Test.

For those not familiar with the Turing Test, a short description is that it is a test where a one human and one AI are set up to have an instant message (or IRC) chat with a human “judge” who tries to determine which participant is the human and which is the machine. If the AI can reliably fool the judge in to thinking it’s a human, than it’s passed the test. So far there is no system that’s been able to fully pass that test yet, but there is a $100,000 grand prize for the first success! The Loebner Prize is a version of the Turing Test and each year there is a prize to the AI that seems “most human-like” among it’s competitors. For 2005 and 2006 that has been Rollo Carpenter’s “Jabberwacky” system.

Rollo has a unique way to get his AI system to seem human, and that is to interact with humans in a conversational (chat) manner and store all reponses the humans give during the conversation. Then when the next person comes along, it can search it’s database for appropriate human-like responses given to it in the past. This method seems to be working!

But, now he’s saying he needs more data… MUCH more data ! And he’s decided to go to call centers where he can get at the vast amount of human interaction and responses to help fill his database at even faster speeds.

To pass the Turing Test, a system does not really need to be “intelligent” as we might think of it being able to come up with new solutions to problems or be able to use reason and logic…. it only needs to be able to reliably convince a judge that IT is the human, by upholding it’s end of chit-chat in a conversation.

Rollo’s main goal right now is for his systems to be able to converse on enough topics that it could be used in toys and other entertainment applications, such as talking pets and televirtual companions. He is already working with a call center in Japan, and hopes that one day the AI will be able to take over the role of the human operator.

I’ve chatted with various online bots before, and sometimes for up to 30 minutes. I can’t remember any conversation being overly rewarding, or interesting enough to come back for more, but I do know that it won’t be many more years before these systems will be able to keep some people entertained and interested enough that they might look forward to getting online for hours each day to chat with their new virtual friend. Perhaps even have some epiphany or mind expanding thought come about from such a conversation. When the technology is good enough to be able to talk with you about topics you are interested in, and has access to the wealth of knowledge on the internet you might find yourself enjoying the company of an artificial intelligence as even more than a few of your human friends!

October 28th, 2006
Categories: RobotsAndAI . Author: rock808 . Comments: 1 Comment

Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne to be starring in a new upcoming movie !
“Impossible!” you say… “They are dead!”
Well, that won’t stop them anymore….

Virtual Reality (VR) is not much about robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs or much else I’ve posted about so far, but it has been a fascinating interest of mine, and will play a huge part in the future of humankind and our way of life, and the recent article in the New York Times is a great place for this blog to jump right in. I’ve found the video link might link to an unrelated video, so here is another video link.

Basically, here’s the deal… Image Metrics is a company that specializes in animation and effects for digital media, and they have found a way to (in real-time), map a human “actor’s” face on to a virtual, computer generated character. This means that a computer watches the actor, and is able to see every raise of the eyebrow, crinkle of the nose, smirk on the lips, turn of the head, direction the eyes are looking, etc. Every facial expression and characteristic is then precisely imitated on the digitally created character on another computer screen.

Currently this can be done with the work of animators, and a lot of time, but now computers can do it without the need to apply green paint to the actor’s face, or anything else…. as WELL as be able to animate the character in real-time, saving countless hours of animation work. So, bring on the aliens, new animated movie characters with even more life-like expressions, ogres, talking lions, and such… now, at an even faster pace!

But wait!
There’s another side to this. Why stop at aliens and cartoon characters? Why not create a character that looks EXACTLY like Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Albert Einstein, Napoleon, or ANY other dead person. It could be done easily from old photos that have been taken in the past. Use them to create a 3-D model character, in just the same way they create a 3-D model of an alien, and then have a live human actor give their performance. In effect, Image Metrics is bringing back the dead!

We already have people who specialize in voice impersonations who could do the voice overs, or perhaps even digitize past recordings of audio samples from the real (dead) person, so that their own voice is used.

The end result is that the exact likeness of a person can now be reproduced, and in real-time.

There are some interesting thoughts from amosbray and his blog ‘destroyed’ concerning the use of dead people in new movies and ads.

I can only imagine what this might lead to, as the technology filters down to the common people, and consumer webcams, video cell phones, video editing software, and the like. You could potentially be having a live video phone conversation with someone who does not look like their image at all.

Putting potential ethic problems aside, movies and TV shows could continue to be made featuring people who have died, either recently, or long ago. It does not happen often, but how many times has a show had to cancel, or find and work in a replacement when a leading actor has suddenly died?

On a bit more twisted path, what if a wealthy business woman loses a child at young age, and then decides to have their child re-created as a 3D model character, and then pays an actor to fill the role. Where she could continue to meet and converse with “her child” through video on the internet? And, within 15 years or so the technology for artificial intelligence should be great enough, that perhaps no human actor would be required at all.

Of course, this will also has much more insidious uses. What if a Osama Bin Ladin continues to make new video tapes for 50 more years… whether or not he’s really alive or dead? Or a video tape is released where George Bush was “filmed” at a party and you actually see and hear him say “I really fucking hate those jewish niggers!”. Or a child predator learns little Johnny’s kid-phone number, and around lunch time gets a video phone call from “mom” saying “It’s okay to get a ride home from Uncle Fred today.”

As virtual reality and virtual worlds begin to play a larger role in more people’s lives, the ability to shape our image (or the image of others) in to anything or any one we want will indeed have a profound effect on how we live.

October 21st, 2006
Categories: VirtualReality . Author: rock808 . Comments: No Comments