Androids and Cyborgs just got a step closer

One of the main limitations to developing androids, is the power supply problem. The immense computing power needed, using current technology, means battery power isn't really a viable option. Humanoid robots still need power cables, or can only run for a few minutes with current battery technology. The ever-growing complexity of their circuitry and memory requirements is not at present keeping pace with the required energy efficiency needed for autonomous functioning.

The same goes for implantable circuits - they will still need, using current technologies, an external power supply. An autonomous cyborg with integrated circuitry really should not be in a position where he or she needs to plug in.

Some recent research has opened a door to a new computing paradigm - one that if successful, could cut carbon emissions, and , more to the point, make androids and cyborgs more of a possibility. At present, it is still very much on the drawing board.

Here is the article:

 By combining two frontier technologies, spintronics and straintronics, a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University has devised perhaps the world's most miserly integrated circuit. Their proposed design runs on so little energy that batteries are not even necessary; it could run merely by tapping the ambient energy from the environment. Rather than the traditional charge-based electronic switches that encode the basic 0s and 1s , spintronics harnesses the natural spin -- either up or down -- of electrons to store bits of data.

Spin one way and you get a 0; switch the spin the other way -- typically by applying a magnetic field or by a spin-polarized current pulse -- and you get a 1. During switching, spintronics uses considerably less energy than charge-based electronics. However, when ramped up to usable processing speeds, much of that energy savings is lost in the mechanism through which the energy from the outside world is transferred to the magnet.
The solution, as proposed in the AIP's journal Applied Physics Letters, is to use a special class of composite structure called multiferroics. These composite structures consist of a layer of piezoelectric material with intimate contact to a magnetostrictive nanomagnet (one that changes shape in response to strain). When a tiny voltage is applied across the structure, it generates strain in the piezoelectric layer, which is then transferred to the magnetostrictive layer. This strain rotates the direction of magnetism, achieving the flip. With the proper choice of materials, the energy dissipated can be as low as 0.4 attojoules, or about a billionth of a billionth of a joule. This proposed design would create an extremely low-power, yet high-density, non-volatile magnetic logic and memory system.

The Dark side of Empathy

Since London went into spasm this week, I have been thinking long and hard about what has been going on. The press is throwing out the usual answers - these kids are reacting to spending cuts, to a political platform. Others are just condemning a wave of criminality. Tens of thousands, bizzarely, have signed a petition, saying that rioters should lose all State benefits. Westminster council is threatening to evict rioters (Although they have no powers to do this, but it makes good copy).

Exquisitely timed, a piece of sociological - psychological research was published this week, that sheds a lot of light on the various phenomena that we are seeing.

The article I want to discuss was published this week in "Current Directions in Psychological Science", a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The article is entitled, "Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm."
Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley.

The essence of the article is this - working class people are far more empathetic. Their lives are more emotion driven. Their very poverty throws them into each other's laps for mutual assistance. They are much better at reading emotions than people from higher socio-economic backgrounds. They suffer the down side of living on the emotional edge, with higher rates of mental disturbance, than those who are emotionally insulated. They respond to their environment primarily on an emotional level. In normal everyday life, they are more likely to act altruistically and to give freely from the little that they have. When things go wrong, on the other hand, the other side of this coin can manifest itself.

On the other hand, people from higher socio-economic levels are poor at reading emotions on other's faces. They hoard wealth and do not re-dstribute it. Their primary focus is on the self, and not on others. They are far less reliant on their peers to get through life.

Interestingly, as people rise in social class, they shift, and start to become less empathetic, and less caring of others.

Now, what has this to do with the riots in London, and the response to them?

Let us look at the responses, first: most social commentators are, of course, from the higher socio-economic echelons. They will look at these rioters, and think, "These are people who are just like me, but poorer." They respond accordingly, and the responses show an alarming lack of empathy.
Westminster Council has threatened to evict council tenants who have had their children involved in the riots. Their children!!! Even if the parents knew nothing about it. I read this, and felt deeply uncomfortable.
Tens of thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition, asking that all people involved in rioting, be stripped of all their benefits. Here too, a lack of empathy and understanding.

Let us look at the rioters themselves. Many, when asked to explain what they were doing, responded in simple emotional terms, the most common expression being "It is fun". The rioters, young boys and youths, who are particularly emotionally unstable as a normal state of affairs, rioted. London used to have regular riots, in the Middle Ages. The apprentices of the City of London regularly went off on a wild rampage.


Essentially, this is what we are seeing. One half of society, the half that responds emotionally, the half that freely gives and that cares deeply for its own community structures, is reacting.

The question is, reacting to what? I believe the answer lies in emotional interaction between the classes. Something unpleasant has been building for a long time, a growing tension.

Since the current government was elected, (And I largely support their economic platform) there has been a burst of non-empathetic language from those in power. Those on the dole, or on sickness benefits and the unemployed have been emotionally attacked by the government, and by the media, repeatedly, day in and day out, for month after month. Feckless! Workshy! Parasites! There have been attacks on the entire concept of Social Housing. Those who receive it, are being made to feel like their Victorian predecessors were made to feel about the workhouse. The language is, quite frankly, Dickensian. And so , as we have seen, has been the response.

Within the communities, a feeling began to build up - until the point of explosion was reached.
These riots are not just about criminality. They are not about people being individualistic. Yes goods and chattels were stolen, but just as frequently, they were simply destroyed by the mob. These riots were not rational, if they were, the targets would have been different. The emotional outpouring that these riots represent was directed seemingly randomly. an animal in pain, was lashing out wildly. I believe the riots are the result of a fundamental disconnect between two very different sections of society.

These disconnects are expressed in a variety of ways, the most visible of which is through language - the previous Labour government, despite its faults, was always careful, always emotionally in tune to some extent with the lower socio-economic group. ( Whom one cannot even call the 'working classes', as so many are unemployed, and in the current jobs market, unemployable, because the jobs they once would have done, simply no longer exist). The current Tory-Liberal government is not. Liberalism, in its English manifestation, is a profoundly middle class movement. So is Toryism. They are both populated by people drawn from the higher socio-economic groups, people who think and talk in a totally different way to those who have been roaming the streets of England.

The Labour opposition has not been vocal in voicing the concerns of the poor - and if it has, it has had its voice has been drowned out. The Press is largely right wing, and the discourse there is also one of attack.

If this rioting were political, the commentators reason, then the targets should have been political. However, these riots, which I do believe are deeply political, in the true meaning of the word political, were driven by the heart, not by the head. They were an attack on the very fabric of society itself. There is a dark rationality to this.

The lower socio-economic classes have seen their jobs melt away to the Far East. What jobs remain for the less academically able, or the less well educated, or for those who speak a different dialect of English, with a different accent from the Middle - Upper Class RP norms, are almost all at the bottom of the ladder. The early morning buses coming in to the City of London are not full of City Workers in suits, but of cleaners and janitors and back office staff. The men in suits start to turn up, pouring out of the mainline stations at London Bridge and Liverpool Street a few hours later. The two populations of staff seldom even cross paths in the street, their mutual co-existence concealed, hidden away.

The end result: an explosion. The response is not likely to solve the problem, unless the underlying emotional wound that lead to the explosion in the first place, is addressed.

Youth Centres must stop closing. Programs that primarily assist the poor must not be cut back. Teenage pregnancy care provision needs to be provided. Day centres that protect the vulnerable need to be ring fenced. The Sure Start programme needs to be expanded, not reduced. The NHS needs to be seen to be protected. The wealthy - and those in government - probably all have private insurance. The poor do not. Above all, the tone of the public discourse vis a vis the poor and disenfranchised needs to change. If it does not, more riots are on the way, and next time, they will be far, far worse, more damaging to life and property, and much better planned than these small fits and spasms that we have been witness to, spasms that rioled across the surface of our body politic.

The rise and rise of AI

The thing that is driving technological development forward, in ways that are going to be increasingly hard for us to imagine, is the rise of artificially intelligent systems.

There are already systems in some fields that are so good at their specialised tasks, that the researchers are playing catch up with the output of the systems.

This article published today, is of a type we will be seeing increasingly frequently, in an ever widening range of endeavour: For those  in analytical knowledge-based professions - such as lawyers, lab technicians, and data analysts, beware. Even most architects may soon be out of a job, with the brunt of the  work being produced by automated systems, with perhaps guidance from a creative mind.
 Musicians, poets and authors - for the moment, you might be able to relax.


ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2011) — Robot trading agents, which already dominate the foreign exchange markets, have now been definitively shown to beat human traders at the same game.



The new results were obtained after a re-run of the well-known


 IBM experiment (2001) where human traders competed against
 state-of-the-art computerised trading agents -- and lost.

Results presented at a conference July 22 showed beyond doubt that computerized trading agents, using the Adaptive Aggressiveness (AA) strategy developed at the University of Southampton in 2008, can beat both human traders and robot traders using any other strategy.

Ten years on, experiments carried out by Marco De Lucas and Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol have shown that AA is now the leading strategy, able to beat both robot traders and humans.

The academics presented their findings at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011), held in Barcelona.

Dr Krishnan Vytelingum, who designed the AA strategy along with Professor Dave Cliff and Professor Nick Jennings at the University of Southampton in 2008, commented: "Robot traders can analyse far larger datasets than human traders. They crunch the data faster and more efficiently and act on it faster. Robot trading is becoming more and more prominent in financial markets and currently dominates the foreign exchange market with 70 per cent of trade going through robot traders."

Lifespan and Public Policy

I have noticed an increase in drip-feeding the population with little "awareness" articles issues from Central Government, relating to the problems of increased lifespan. This short one, quoted below, is from the Guardian, and published today:

Lifespan leap raises care problems

By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor

Thursday, 4 August 2011

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Today's 20-year-olds are twice as likely as their parents to reach the age of 100, a new analysis of Britain's rapidly ageing population reveals today.

My note: This assumes current projections hold, however, the exponential growth in computing power, affecting the fields of chemistry and biochemistry, and ageing research, means that this estimate is likely to be very conservative. There are some people who think someone is alive now, who might well have an indefinite lifespan. The longer people live for, the more medicine has time to advance,and the more likely it is that interventions will be found for specific problems of ageing. So, the guesses below are incredibly conservative, my estimate is that these numbers will be far higher, and not only that, the survival rate past 100 will be greater.

A girl born this year has a one-in-three chance of becoming a centenarian, and a boy a one-in-four chance, the research by the Department for Work and Pensions discloses.

A girl born in 1931 had only a 5 per cent chance of reaching her century, with the figure dropping to jut 2.5 per cent for boys.

On current trends there will be half a million people aged 100 or over by the year 2066.

And here lies the rub. We cannot make policy based on current trends, not when information technology and Artificial Intelligence, used increasingly in basic computational molecular research, is advancing in sophistication with exponential rapidity.

Steve Webb, the Pensions minister, warned that the huge advances in average lifespans meant people would need to save more for a retirement that could stretch into an 11th decade.

Here, finally, we have someone who is aware of the problems, but seems to scared to voice them explicitly. The government knows that it will not be able to keep the current pension model in operation - the entire notion of retirement will have to be re-evaluated. the current problems we are seeing, with the government attempting to reduce pension liabilities, and talking about building a retirement age escalator, meaning retirement age will rise automatically as average lifespan increases, without the need for policy decisions, just as the fuel escalator functions with fuel duty.

He said: "The dramatic speed at which life expectancy is changing means that we need to radically rethink our perceptions about our later lives. We simply can't look to our grandparents' experience of retirement as a model for our own.

It is very rare to find overt discussion of this problem. About 5 years ago, the newspapers were focusing on pension provision, and the lack of it. However, should there suddenly be a paradigm shift in ageing research, many pension programs will simply go into default - a programme that is set up to pay pensions for 10 years on average, will  not cope if its members suddenly require 30 or 50 years of additional pension payments.

The question is, what models will be proposed? Not everyone can manage to save enough to invest in a second property, and rent it out and live off the proceeds - which is probably the most secure option currently available.