Where is my robot?

About two weeks ago, my younger brother dragged me to an international conference on robotics in Skolkovo. I did not fail to write a report then, so nuzgul with my post brought me into such indignation that I finally found the strength to put all the information on the lists. He has groundlessly argued that "Apparently, the naive dreams of science fiction are gradually becoming a thing of the past, and it turns out that android robots are not the best workers and specialized devices will rule the ball." Like the most naive science fiction, I will allow myself some reflections. Perhaps they are angry at many, so look under your cat at your own peril and risk, I warned.



My brother (the last from the right) studies at the faculty of CM11 Bauman (underwater robots) and is now writing a curriculum on the infantry silhouettes recognition system for tank machine guns.
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He is a classic techie and our discussion of robots with him led to two opposite points of view on robotics, so let's start with them.

The essence of the dispute is as follows: I believe in anthropomorphic (human-like) robots that have two legs, two hands, and think with their heads. Nowadays, both a vacuum cleaner and an air conditioner are called robots, but a real robot is one. His knee may be inside or a chainsaw instead of one hand and a machine gun instead of the other, but in general it is an anthropomorphic creature capable of replacing a person in everything. And for Anton, the robot is a control module plus a bunch of plug-in gadgets for various tasks. Well, why is the anthropomorphic device for studying the bottom, it can be more convenient for him, and even most likely.


Video communication with the ISS shows that the status of the conference is the highest. Astronauts are asked to send them more robots.

Predicting the future is a thankless task, but real, feasible for everyone. How does the gypsy at the station and Professor Hawking? They use the method of historical analogy. We take in the past a phenomenon close to ours and, using his example, we extrapolate tendencies to the future:

• The roots of robotics are growing from microelectronics - then we take the history of microprocessors.
• Robots are the technology of the future, so take an atomic bomb.
• Robots are fantastic, so we’ll add a pinch of space technology to the boiler.
• And finally, Robots - for the mass market, let's compare them with our personal computers.

That's what robots are made of!

Personal computers

In the 60s and even 80s (!) Personal computers were presented to everyone as an uninteresting hybrid of a calculator and a typewriter. Even in science fiction, they did not receive any attention. It was believed that the PC will be used only by writers and lab technicians, as a home calculator. But in fact, it immediately became clear that the home computer is an add-on to the human brain, which allows a significant increase in intelligence — access to any information, or lightly designed complex systems. Any things can now be done “in mind” - any schoolchild in Photoshop can draw like Da Vinci, and the student can make calculations like a whole scientific research institute.


The conference was successfully led by robot Sepulka (right), brought from the department of robots at the polytechnic (I didn’t know what it was).

Without any doubt, the same situation is now with robots, the naive middle managers of Mail.ru (this is about Grishin :) they think that robots are vacuum cleaners and calculators. The same managers talked about thirty years ago about personal computers, as a result, personal computers were born in garages of enthusiasts , while managers sucked their paws with their mainframes.

What is the trump card personalki? In versatility. My laptop can perform any task - it takes part in everything I do. This became possible thanks to the previously created universal processor.

Microprocessors

In 1970, the Pentagon’s computer department revolutionized the onboard computer for the F-14 carrier-based fighter - it was the first fighter ever to be piloted mainly by a computer. The variable wing sweep and extremely sophisticated weapons did not allow a person to cope with all systems in real time. However, putting on dozens of electronic cleaners was impossible just in size and the engineers had the idea to make one universal processor - a small, fast, capable of solving any tasks.

In 1968, two American engineers Ray Holt and Steve Geller created a 20-bit SLF (Special Logic Function) chip that contained an ALU arithmetic computing device, an instruction decoder, and supported control logic. Intel was registered a year later, and began to design a 4-bit microprocessor only in 1970.

The SLF chip, which served as the basis for the CADC (Central Air Data Computer) onboard computer, was created at the Pentagon, and work on it was carried out in strict secrecy. It was intended for use in a fundamentally new for that time F-14 fighter with variable geometry of the wing. This technology could not be realized with the help of mechanical calculators installed on airplanes of obsolete F-111 type classes. CADC monitored the position of the F-14 controls and performed the necessary actions on the pilot's commands. In this case, the mechanical connection between the pilot and the moving parts of the machine was completely replaced by an electronic one: the control tasks were taken over by a computer, which in addition markedly increased the flight characteristics of the aircraft.

The team under the leadership of Ray Holt brilliantly coped with his task. Miniature multipurpose CADC supported 20-bit words, was able to solve problems in real time and, in addition, was optimized for simultaneous execution of several intensive computational processes. Engineers also invented and created memory chips and, in fact, were the first to introduce and implement the concept of a mathematical coprocessor that accelerated multiplication and division operations. It can be said that CADC is a solution that is ingenious for its time and the principles embodied in it have not become outdated to this day. So, in the F-14, due to the large amount of computations, three (!!) synchronous microprocessor SLFs were used simultaneously. And only today, thirty years later, the first publicly available versions of four-processor PCs appear on the world market.

As a result, the on-board computer turned out to be so efficient that the F-14 was able to control even a woman (!!!) - though not for a long time, just three months after qualifying, Kara Spears Haltgreen made a mistake in managing and crashed during landing. This girl even CADC was too tough.


The F-14 was so good that it honored the main propaganda film of the decade in the states.

But we are talking about processors - the creation of the first universal chip by the Pentagon launched a tsunami wave. A year later, Intel was created, which created the well-known 4004, whose descendants now stand in all of our computers. Before him, all the chips were specialized and could perform only their task, the idea of ​​combining them into a universal training center turned out to be brilliant (albeit borrowed from the military). As a whole is greater than the sum of things, so the universal processor was able to perform any tasks. From this began the famous "computer revolution".

I suppose the analogy with robots is transparent - specialized robots, helicopter vacuum cleaners are not robots, but useless toys. As a “useless” non-universal processor. And since we agreed with this, we will have to take one more step - the robots will be completely anthropomorphic. They will be a copy of man - because only man can be universal in the human world. To use human tools, cars, buildings and the people themselves - you need a human body. After all, all these things are sharpened just for him. As they said in antiquity, man is the measure of all things.


We must sell the prototype Grishin.

Anthropomorphic

From a technical point of view, a robot, which is a complete analog of a human being, is still an unattainable and unimportant task. Everything is difficult, from nutrition to artificial muscles. The main problem is artificial intelligence, which requires computing power, which we will achieve in God in twenty years. What to do with the resulting robot is not particularly clear - it can replace low-skilled labor, but serve in the army. Human likelihood will only limit it. Accordingly, developments in this area are conducted by all countries, but carelessly. About how space exploration is now. But this is in the opinion of techies and my brother.

From a humanitarian point of view, nothing prevents now to create such a robot. He does not even need a special intellect. Moreover, robots in one generation will radically change the political, economic and social situation in society. Robots will be humanoid, and therefore ideally suited to the human world. Robots will take over all the work, besides they will produce themselves - there will be millions of them in a year. Very soon, each person will have a couple of servant robots, and his lifestyle will resemble an 18th century aristocrat. Simply put, robots are more abruptly than the atomic bomb, so all the forces of American science are now thrown at their development - the rest simply cannot afford. Therefore, all studies on robotics are classified since the 1980s, there is no news on the topic in the media in principle. The Japanese show talking toys, Americans stubbornly call unmanned military vehicles robots - that's all. "The atomic bomb is not interesting to anyone." That in itself speaks of special interest and for a person experienced, sounds like a diagnosis.


Robots in disguise.

By the way, a curious fact - it was the disappearance of materials on the "uranium problem" from the press that launched the Soviet atomic project.

In May 1942, together with a letter from Flerov, an intelligence report was passed through the secretariat of Stalin that work was underway on the "uranium problem" in the West . At the same time, the fact of the sharp disappearance of publications on nuclear physics from the open press was verified. There is a reference from physicist Vitaly Khlopin, dated June 1942, who headed the Committee on the Uranium Problem. In it, he points out: “This circumstance is unique, as it seems to me, gives reason to think that the relevant works are given importance and are being conducted in secret.” Theses Flerov were confirmed one by one. All this came together in one point - the decision point. “We have to do it,” Stalin succinctly quit in the summer of 1942, after hearing the summary report on the topic.

Which version is closer to the truth? With a robo-man (anthropomorphic), or just automatic machines (technocratic)? In a strange way, in the course of the Skolkovo conference, with each speech the technocratic theory was confirmed - the professors talked about the complexities of concrete tasks, and the students showed prototypes that they had before the robots, like the moon. Harry Bradsky from Berkeley agreed to talk only about computer vision problems and insisted that until we solve this problem, it’s not worth talking about robots at all. But when it came to the theory, all the scientists in chorus said something quite different. After the lecture, I approached Stephen Dubowski and asked what he thought about our argument with my brother (a box of beer from him if robots appear until 2023).


Showing the language of the honored professor is not very decent!

Dubowski said that our argument is not scientific, we are both profane and they would have been robbed us at MIT - we need to argue based on the deadline when robots can not fail to appear. In his opinion, this is the year 2030. The absence of robots in 2031 will be as strange as the absence of the Internet in 2013.

According to Igor Agamirzyan of RVC, today it may seem that humankind is stuck in its development, and we already don’t remember anything grandiose - neither social revolutions, nor space missions, nor atomic stations, nor the landing on the moon. Technical progress seems to have rested against the wall - if you look at the 1970s New York, then there is no difference, the same houses, the same cars, the same bright advertising. Technically, we have reached the limit. But if you look at information technology, it’s just a stone age. And after all, work with information is the main vector of progress - people of the 18th century on the streets of today's Moscow would be stunned by an infinite number of beautiful and incredibly high-quality images, texts at every corner.


The prototype of the supercube is a box that controls all your electronics and home in the manner of Siri.

That is, in the past 30 years we have advanced more than in the previous three thousand - today every child has access to information in his pocket — more than the president of some 1970s Germany. Progress in the informational area has finally “pulled away from the substrate” and is on its own. The first punched cards (and programming itself) appeared as a smart addition to weaving looms. The Internet has appeared as an addition to the organization of databases in CERN. But the robots themselves will appear - as a logical development of the computer revolution.

Thirty years have passed from its moment - computers have penetrated into all areas of life, but radically changed nothing. Now is the time for information technology to invade the material world. Why not the notorious singularity to occur in the form of a mass release of robots? Why are there no robots on the streets yet?

According to Dmitry Grishin himself, there is nothing impossible in robots - it's just the same crucial stage in the technical development of civilization as the production of bicycles or video recorders - for the former, standardization of parts was required, for the latter, high production standards. Of the first, a car turned out as a result, of the second, personal computers (they were produced at the same factories). Robots are the same stage, their production is already asking for reality - computer technologies have advanced incredibly. 10 years ago, you could not do without a design bureau, a factory and a couple of years to collect the robot; now all this is done by one person with a fast computer and a 3d printer in just a couple of months. But the results of this work can only be very limited mechanical toys like the one shown at the iCube exhibition.


104 cm, 22 kg, 53 degrees of freedom.

Like any technological breakthrough, robots require a radical complication of technology. Approximately as with the atomic bomb - the idea is trivial, but its implementation requires hard work. My favorite analogy here is the Eiffel Tower, the highest achievement of French engineering, built to wipe the nose of the Washington Monument. Now all the engineering complexity of the tower is equal to one blade of an aircraft turbine.

And from this point of view, we really have another 20 years to a mechanical person. Only now progress is a loose concept - when you need it and you can speed it up, it is not by chance that military equipment is ahead of civilian by a generation or two. I did not just remember the F-14 at the beginning of the article - all futuristic things first appear in the military.

Atomic bomb and space


The slogan of the Manhattan project.

Atomic weapons are the technology of the 1960s, but America has strained and got a bomb from literally the future (hence the whole hype around this topic). Only $ 26 trillion, 30 closed cities with scientists and 4 years of work. At the same time, only 10% of the effort fell on the development, everything else was spent on the creation of huge uranium enrichment plants.

The same with the space race - as you remember at the height of the Cold War, Kennedy declared that America would be on the Moon by the end of the decade. And again, 24 trillion, 400,000 engineers and voila - the American flag has been developing 40 years on the moon 40 years ahead of the moment when it had at least some practical sense. Subsequently, the director of NASA recognized the landing on the moon as the main mistake of the twentieth century and said that if it were not for her, then we would already have a habitable base on the moon.


Werner von Braun and President Kennedy are confident about the future.

And this concentration of efforts would have been due to the necessity of wartime, but any state has a particular craving for over-projects — the Panama Canal, landing on the moon, computers, a whole fleet of aircraft carriers costing a European country each, decolonization of Africa, industrialization of the USSR and China, atomic bomb — the United States they are always busy with such things, because this is the essence of the state - to do what even large corporations are not capable of separately. So Medvedev, with his national projects and Skolkovo, is the mainstream and refers to his encroachments, well ... with an understanding of something.

In addition, it is vital for the state to somehow keep these corporations under control and show them who is in charge here - the atomic bomb was also directed at the internal enemy. Hence the question arises - is the cold war over, but what is the budget for the development of super-weapons available to any decent state?

I'll give you a fact to think about - google made a promise (on the sly) before the end of the decade (somewhere we have already heard) to digitize all 130 million books existing on our planet. There is no benefit in this, quite the contrary - two years ago, Google lost $ 125 million to copywriter in court, paid them, and continued to violate every imaginable copyright as if nothing had happened. They say that this is for their artificial intelligence system. Willingly believe.

So where is my robot?


More robots, good and different

Why do I still have to turn on the dishwasher myself and go to work? Well, here you can not roll out the lip - if the state is capable of releasing robots, then it will not share technologies. (It’s funny that in science fiction of the 60s the theme was always pedaling that robots would be sold by evil corporations - such fears of a state official). So it will do everything to warn itself against copying - for example, robots will be released only at the stage of some tenth generation, when they no longer understand. What would not be like with personalkami that collect even Filipinos. Therefore, all developments are kept secret. And this is precisely why such confusion has been created with the very word “robot” - everyone understands that a robot is a robot, but the media is persistently called microwave robots and vacuum cleaners. But no one is being led to this.


In this pipe crawls "also a robot."

Alexey Kornilov (he is the scientific director of the Robotics program, and the chief expert of Robofest) said that the word “robot” leaves the language as soon as it is a mass industrial release of devices. So this is always-from-the-future, and never the word-about-the present. A massive robot vacuum cleaner Rumba has come out, a couple of years have passed, and now it's just a Rumba vacuum cleaner. A massive robot air conditioner came out that cleans itself, and now it's just an air conditioner that cleans itself, and no one calls it “robotics”. The robot-car, when it starts to be produced en masse, will also have a “car”, and no “robot”. It is somehow impossible to call a microwave or a toaster a robot, even as a joke.

Moreover, the robots themselves will not be considered things, they will gradually be given human rights and will be made a military obligation (like jeeps or shepherd dogs now - owners must voluntarily surrender their armies in the event of war). All this will cause social unrest even greater than the abolition of segregation with blacks. And of course they will be sold only in America (from the states now even powerful computers cannot be taken out).


Is there a trifle? Azimov know?

What will the robot we dream of look like?

They will start being produced no later than 2030, will cost $ 3000, are completely anthropomorphic in body structure, but do not look like a person (to avoid problems with an ominous valley ), have intelligence comparable to that of humans and free will. Therefore, no laws of robotics to you. And from this the first constructive feature follows inexorably - robots must be completely isolated. No external connections and wires. The security threat must be completely excluded - so the robot will be “completely anthropomorphic,” and if he needs to find out something on the Internet, he will sit at the computer and look. So all the books of mankind in memory, he will be useful.


Violation of naive laws by life itself.

It sounds scary, but think a little more - this is a fundamental problem with the power of the robot. Due to the actions of Greenpeace and political reasons, the development of energy has been stopped - the third millennium is in the yard, and we still burn oil and coal. At the same time, it is somehow forgotten that nuclear power plants are safe and have no emissions, and all the coal is radioactive and burning it leads to contamination of the entire nearby territory. Despite this, the necessary systems are used in the military and space industries. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator in Voyager continues to work fine thirty years after its launch, already outside our solar system. 30 years is enough for a robot, I think they will be quickly updated, like laptops.

The first generation will not have enough smooth movements due to imperfections of the muscles. Already, in the US Army, wounded soldiers are given prosthetic arms and legs, indistinguishable from real ones, but not yet so smooth and precise. Obviously this is a matter of time.

Another problem is sensitivity. The robot will need sensitivity over the entire surface of the skin. In Skolkovo, artificial leather collected by enthusiasts from “sensitive triangles” was shown - I think if this can be assembled in a garage, then there will be no problems at the industrial level.


Show the judge where the uncle touched you.

Well, let's touch the main problem in the end. Philosophical.If we make a robot, it basically does not need a special intellect. But he definitely needs free will - otherwise he will not be able to make decisions. Free will distinguishes man from animals. Simply put, if a goose hears a hunting decoy - he will definitely come in for a landing, the geese cannot say "no." Robots need such an option “say no”, and this entails grave consequences - we will have to recognize them as a series of rights that apply to humans. You remember the tension in the society caused by the transfer of “human rights” to women and blacks, or the topic of same-sex marriage.

In 2007, a futurological study in the field of social robotics was commissioned by the British Science Administration and the Center for the Study of Innovation. Specialists from Ipsos-MORI and the Outsights consulting agency took part in it, with the involvement of the American Institute of the Future.

From the document follows:

1. Mass production of anthropoid robots will begin in about 20 years. The robots will have artificial intelligence comparable to human intelligence and will be capable of self-programming and self-reproduction.
2. Robots will turn into “digital citizens”, unlike things that have legal rights and obligations. Robots will participate in elections, pay taxes and necessarily serve in the army.
3. Obtaining civil rights by robots will take place in several stages and is likely to be accompanied by great social tension.

Support the rights of the robots, while you have a choice!

The study, or at least in its published part, says nothing about the main problem of a robotic society: anthropoid robots make the existence of the overwhelming majority of humanity socially unnecessary. In addition, the economic gap between a robotic and an ordinary state is so deep that it turns the most modern, non-robotic state into a reservation of outdated equipment, outdated culture and outdated social relations. At worst, the whole world, except for the United States, threatens to become “reservaty”, to all but the United States, England, the EU, and (unlikely), Japan.

It's funny that the future of Russia here depends entirely on Skolkovo. The fact that thanks to Skolkovo in Moscow the first-class conferences on robotics are taking place gives us hope that with some sideways Russia will find a place in the world of the future. We have no other hopes.

PS
I read the text, and somehow it turned out to be sad. This is forever the case with science fiction - how not to draw bright prospects, in the end, it still turns out to be a grim dystopia. I am sure that if Americans release robots, there will be no problems with advertising. Robots will be launched with orchestra and fireworks, and all the darkness will be left in the past - robots are fun.


And the girls like it.

And now, attention, poll!