robots | M Thomas Apple Author Page

“The fungus among us”: biohybrid machines and mushrooms

September 3, 2024
MThomas

Researchers at Cornell have come up with a novel way to control a walking robot: with a mushroom.

Cornell explained in a press release that these four-legged “biohybrid” robots were built by researchers who literally grew mycelia, the belowground connective threads that allow fungal communities to communicate, into the robot itself.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/mushroom-robot-brain

This is a little freaky…

This robot is alive. Incorporated into its electronics are living fungal tissues that change the robot's behavior when exposed to intense light. That and more of the best from @ScienceMagazine and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: https://t.co/dpFdWgt11M pic.twitter.com/0uC1oy0TCH
— Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie) August 30, 2024

Believe it or not, there actually is some science behind Star Trek: Discovery’s “spore drive.” This robot is just one small step…

Psyche! There are no “mycelial network” in space, and the drive would only work if we could somehow find a fifth spatial dimension (this was discussed a few years ago).

Too bad the spore drive is “laughably ridiculous,” said one scientist, and if all Star Trek ships had one, over half its episodes wouldn’t have happened.

Oh well. At least a “sporebot” is possible.

Hmm.

Wow, so realistic! Uh, waitaminute here…

September 2, 2024
MThomas

Footage making the rounds on social media shows what appear to be astonishingly lifelike humanoid robots posing at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.

But instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the “robots” turned out to be human women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-company-humanoid-robots-humans

During the World Robot Conference 2024 in Beijing from Aug 21 – Aug 25, 🇨🇳 animatronics company EX-Robot (or EX Robots as reported by some news media) hired 2 women cosplayed as robots to spice up the exhibition.

Hmmm… two human beings mimicked the movements of robots that… pic.twitter.com/hRGxgfe4mD
— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) August 26, 2024

Apparently some people were convinced these women were actually robots.

For real? This just seems like another crass, sexist attempt at titillating fanboys.

Railway Robot in Japan

July 5, 2024
MThomas

West Japan Railways (West JR), one of six companies that make up Japan Railways Group, has unveiled a giant “humanoid robot” to work on heavy machinery on its lines…

https://www.railway-technology.com/news/japanese-railway-introduces-infrastructure-robot/?cf-view

Interesting that in English the official name is West Japan Railways Company, while in Japanese it’s JR Nishi-Nihon Guruupu (JR西日本グループ), which means Japan Railways West Japan Group. It’s one of six “companies” that comprise what used to be “National Railroad” (Kokutetsu), owned by the government.

JR West is renowned to be badly run and somewhat corrupt. I wonder about this “robot” project. With the increase in “human accidents” (ie people hit by a train), I think it’d be better to hire more workers than to reduce staff and have the top level desk jockeys pocket the…

Oh. 🤖 💴 🏦

Easy question. Easy answer.

February 7, 2024
MThomas

Daily writing prompt

Do you need a break? From what?

View all responses

LIfe.

I need a break from life.

Just let me hide in a cabin in the mountains with coffee and WIFI and a laptop for writing.

That’s it.

SLIM pickings! Back to work…

January 31, 2024
MThomas

The craft is at a very awkward angle. A picture, captured by the small baseball-sized robot called Sora-Q – which was ejected from Slim moments before touchdown – showed the lander face-down on the lunar surface.

That left its solar panels facing away from the sunlight and unable to generate power. The decision was taken to put the lander into sleep mode – and conserve what power remained – less than three hours after it landed.

That tactic appears to have worked. A change in the direction of the sunlight has now “awoken” the craft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68131105

As previously reported, JAXA did achieve its goal of a “precision landing” — as some put it, a “pinpoint” touchdown within 100 meters of the intended target — within 55 meters, although if all had gone as planned, it would have been within 10 meters.

That’s far, far closer than previous Moon landings.

Too bad SLIM is essentially standing on its nose. But at least this is a beginning. Japan has now become the fifth country (US, USSR, China, India) to successfully “soft land” an object on the Moon.

And the robots it brought with it are pretty amazing. And tiny.

Japan lands on the Moon — for just a few hours

January 20, 2024
MThomas

A Japanese robot has successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the lunar surface near an equatorial crater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68035314

Or SLIM, if you want to actually write acronyms properly (snark).

Also, it’s JAXA, not Jaxa. And NASA and ESA, not Nasa and Esa. But I digress.

Anyways, kudos but too bad yet another space mission failed. At this point I’m wondering how on Earth NASA managed to land people on the Moon so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without killing half of them in the process. We can barely manage to get a tiny robot rover the size of a marble to land (see the link above for the picture of the “hopper” and “shape shifting” ball…curious about the “shape shifting” bit…)

AI and the future of warfare (as predicted)

September 23, 2023
MThomas

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces are integrating traditional weapons with AI, satellite imaging and communications, as well as smart and loitering munitions, according to a May report from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-partisan U.S. panel of experts. The battlefield is now a patchwork of deep trenches and bunkers where troops have been “forced to go underground or huddle in cellars to survive,” the report said.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/human-machine-teams-driven-by-ai-are-about-reshape-warfare-2023-09-08/

I found it interesting that many people online were commenting about Iain M Bank’s take on AI (for an in-depth analysis of his Culture series check this out on Blood Knife) and how he “predicted” all this.

Uh. You know, I’m not sure whether Banks wrote much about integrating traditional weapons with AI (since I haven’t read his series). But I do know that PK Dick wrote a short story called “Second Variety” about trench warfare and AI robots making more versions of themselves and taking over the world.

He wrote it in 1953.

(You can read it at Project Gutenberg.)

That is waaay before the Culture series.

Sigh. Read the classics, guys.

Bringer of Light first draft completed (finally!)

September 10, 2023
MThomas

Way back in 2015, my good friend Rami Z Cohen came to me with an idea for a story. He had written two or three scenes about a group of asteroid hunters who stumbled upon something bizarre. The idea of mining asteroids was news at the time (and still is, although probably too expensive right now and not a worthwhile investment until we actually get some people in space who need metals without relying on NASA/ESA/JAXA/ISRO/etc).

I was more interested in philosophical aspects of finding that we are all (as the late great Carl Sagan loved to put it) “star stuff” (he meant carbon being created by supernovas, but we also know that asteroids are the way we got amino acids to rain down on ancient Earth).

So Rami and I began to email ideas back and forth for a few weeks, then we started to flesh out his characters and plot. I wrote a synopsis and outline and we hashed out the background.

“Female” robots and other bias

September 6, 2023
MThomas

When we give AI a humanoid form, we typically choose the robot to have feminine characteristics. Are we playing on stereotypes?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230804-is-there-a-sinister-side-to-the-rise-of-female-robots

Isn’t it blindingly obvious?

All artificial intelligence, all robots and Chatbots and everything else electronically-programmed by a human being, will inevitably have human bias.

Even women prefer women’s voices to men’s when it comes to customer service.

On the other hand, women are also historically relegated to work with lower pay, lower status, kept out of positions of power — subject to the “male gaze.”

Now, we have AI that can be treated as sex objects. Even “married.”

So it is all “sinister,” as BBC asks?

Creepy, maybe. Sad, perhaps. Entirely predictable, definitely.

As we continue to lead more and more isolated individual lives, cut off from human contact and left unable to socialize, the rise of the “AI companion” seems inevitable…

10 things I know to be absolutely certain

July 17, 2023
MThomas

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

1. I know it to be certain that the wording of this prompt is a bit odd. Is this meant to mean “know to be true”?

2. I know it to be absolutely certain that there are many things about which I am far from certain.

3. I also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things I know to be certain will annoy at least one person who reads this.

4. I also also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things to know to be certain will amuse at least one person.

5. One of these things I know to be absolutely certain may even irritate and amuse the same person (👈 maybe even this one right here).

6. I even know it to be absolutely certain that writing a list of ten things that are absolutely certain takes a considerably longer time than I had initially anticipated.

7. Just to be sure I irritate someone, it is absolutely certain that the world is a warmer place than it was when I was a kid 40 years ago.

8. The fact that June 2023 was the hottest month on record is absolutely certain.

9. I know it to be absolutely certain, however, that we have only been keeping records on temperatures worldwide since the late 1880s, and records were measured using different instruments

10. But the most important thing to be absolutely certain that I know is that Sony says they have the technology to make humanoid robots but can’t figure out what to use them for. I have an idea or two about that…

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