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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues October 2024 WHO’S
DOING THAT? For
many years the Correspo has offered links to
videos showing especially
interesting robots in action. Many of the most interesting clearly weren’t products
performing practical tasks, and we wondered vaguely why anybody would put
the energy and money into developing robot birds, ants, kangaroos and other
fascinating critters…one after another, year after year. The videos of
these thing in action…not
just one, but a flock of birds, for example, are
professionally made, and often shot in what seems to be a great big lobby of
a building at least four stories high (easy to mount cameras at different
levels) and the robots themselves are artistically crafted, often
beautiful. Only recently did it occur to us to look into the company, called Festo. They’re family-owned,
headquartered in Esslingen, Germany…the Stuttgart metro area…and they’re a
large company, with more than 20,000 employees and revenue around
four billion dollars a year. They sell automation products to 300.000
customers in several different industries worldwide, they are big in
education as Festo Didactic, offering training programs in automation…and
they invest 7% of their gross income in research and development. We’ve never
seen their name in connection with anything, but their wonderful
biologically inspired robots are marvelous advertising, as well as being
great experimental exercises. Notice on the company’s website that their
robots aren’t all that’s imaginatively designed. Their architecture is
interesting. ARF! Dogs
interact with machines in different ways One
of ours would hide in corners when we were using the vacuum cleaner,
rushing out to bite the bag on the machine whenever it sensed an
opportunity, then rushing back to hide before the thing could bite her
back. Neither of them was injured in this activity, and it added
entertaining challenge to cleaning the carpet. In 2020, a
team at Yale published a report on their study to explore how dogs
interact with robots; do they perceive them as companion critters? will
they respond to commands from them (necessarily via speakers) in the
voices of their human folks? Not surprisingly, the results were mixed,
but fascinating. The pups weren’t very responsive to commands simply
played through speakers. They weren’t much
interested in video displays. They were a bit more responsive to
static robots, and more responsive to social robots that moved and
pointed…especially when their human folks were seen to interact socially
with the robots. This wasn’t a huge study, and the results (which I
may have misunderstood) provide just an interesting start. Because 2020 was a
few years ago, we looked online for followup,
and there hasn’t been much. That was early in the covid outbreak, and
people were staying home a lot with their dogs. They worried that the pups
would feel lonely and abandoned when work and other group activity resumed
and their folks left them for extended periods, so there was talk…not a whole
lot …of giving them robot companions to make them feel better. (A work
associate in the 1970s knew that her dog became much
excited, and would race wildly through the house whenever the phone was
ringing, so she’d call home a couple of times a day when she was away to
give her pup some exercise.) There’s commercial activity along these lines
four years later, all companies offering devices that produce signals
that cue a dog who has learned what they mean to interact with the machine.
When the dog responds, the machine tosses out one or more treats as a reward.
The prominent guy in the field is John Honchariw,
who set up a company called Companion
as long ago as 2020 offering machines that interact with dogs, ostensibly
(maybe really) training them. A second company, PupPod, offers a “toy” that
does the same thing. A third, Ogmen, offers a more complex and presumably more
expensive system. Perhaps there are others. These things all use cameras,
sound, wi-fi, and software to allow dog owners to be part of the activity
from near or far (my associate could have seen her dog running) and with
the advent of powerful AI, all sorts of automatic activities are possible.
Still, we’ve never actually seen any of these thing, so they’re not yet
reaching the mass market. Mr. Honchariw’s company, Companion, is still online with a dog in
its logo but they’re selling business consulting, with no mention of
dog-training-robots, whatever that indicates. It may seem a trifle
cynical to recall that decades ago when an observer commented to a trainer
of animals for the movies, “It must be really tough to train the turtles,”
the guy replied grimly, “If it eats, we can train it.” ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item: A couple of years ago the Correspo commented
on closely related jackfruit, breadfruit, and durian as a significant source
of human nutrition over the centuries. Noting my comment that I’d never eaten
breadfruit, Steven Sester sent me three packages of breadfruit snack chips
that were slightly more edible and tasty than cardboard, but did not suggest
the rich gastronomic
potential of breadfruit. This
article from Wired brings the subject pretty
well up to date. It’s intriguing to read here about the growth of
other food-producing plants protected from the sun by the broad-leafed
breadfruit trees. Apparently, breadfruit trees flourish in the warm and
warmer weather we’ve been noticing in recent times. Item: When
Medellin Drug Cartel Leader Pablo Escobar was
killed in 1993 (gosh, that’s 30+ years, now…feels like yesterday) and his
lavish estates were let go to ruin, a small handful of hippos escaped from a
zoo in one of them. They flourished in the tropical wilds of Colombia, and
have become a serious hazard to people and other wildlife. Authorities set
out capture or kill them, but their
half-hearted efforts have not been effective, and the population is
reportedly still growing. This is rather like the
Burmese Python infestation of the southern swamps in the US. which has
reportedly reduced the populations of other critters like deer sharply. The
snakes are apparently fighting things out with alligators in some areas. It
will be interesting to see what the next ten years bring. Item: This report
of extraordinarily high tailwinds moving passenger airliners at well over the
speed of sound relative to the ground does not mention the reverse effect
of headwinds. One recalls being hastened along in one of the DC-3s we
operated up and down the West Coast. The ‘3s typically cruised at ~150 mph,
and it was unnerving to see landmarks appearing startlingly soon as we
approached them at 220+mph. Conversely, one of our flights, fighting a 100
mph headwind wasn’t reaching its usual radio checkpoints one night, and the
crew kept checking with the tower at their next stop. “Do you have us on
radar yet?” “No, we don’t see you. Where are you?” “We’re here!”
“Nope, don’t see you.” The plane was practically standing still with respect
to the ground. When they turned to head back to their last stop before
running low on fuel, they got there in record time. Airliners tend to be a
little faster these days. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1996 was recalled when Ondine hauled a big, heavy old Underwood office typewriter upstairs recently from the recesses of some downstairs closet. I dug out an old portable typewriter the other day, so I
can type envelopes and such without having to outwit the computer and the
printer. Even found a fresh ribbon for it. Ondine, almost nine, and Skylar,
five, were fascinated by this mechanical device. They ordinarily rise early
and play games, check their e-mail, etc...on their
dad’s computer. They had never seen a mechanical typewriter, and were
astonished to discover the reversed letters on the print levers, to use the
manual carriage return, and see the metal parts bunch up when multiple keys
are struck at once. Who would have thought...? Computers and the internet are wonderful. (One editor, may his canals be filled with sand, rejected an article, sending it back in my stamped-self-addressed-envelope [SASE] with comments on it in ink, so I had to retype it for submission elsewhere.) Hooray for word processors. …but I do sort of miss the ding of the bell at the end of a line and the physical activity of using the lever to swing the carriage back to the right after each line. It was reassuring to sit in my office and bang away on a great big old Olivetti office typewriter. We were sort of a team. No, no…that’s just a fit of nostalgia talking…I wouldn’t go back to it, thank you. A
few companies are still manufacturing mechanical
typewriters, mostly for specific applications…and it’s strange hear
people discussing IBM Selectrics
with no carriage- return levers and their golf-ball print heads as old-fashioned systems. What? some of us still think of Selectrics as dazzling
new technology. In the late ‘70s we found what looked like a good deal, and bought portable typewriters for each of our four kids…but it wasn’t a good deal. I hammered
out maybe three million words on my good old 1957 Smith-Corona portable (which must still be hidden somewhere around the house), but I couldn’t do that on those machines, and I don’t think the kids ever used them. Quality counts in the typewriter biz. Wikipedia has a great
article on typewriters, and by all means listen to Leroy Anderson’s wonderful
music The Typewriter. The HP OfficeJet Pro behind me
as I type this seems unlikely to suggest such fun. And see the Wikipedia piece about The Typewriter. The Underwood pictured there looks just like the one
now across the room. September 2024 SMART
AND ENGAGING The hooraw over AI/LLM systems includes a lot of loud,
uneasy-sounding complaint that they aren’t “really” intelligent…although some of us are reasonably
satisfied that they can meet our minimum definition of intelligence as “The
ability to do something appropriate under unforeseen circumstances.” That
doesn’t seem like enough. Maybe, to be accepted as “intelligent” the
systems must demonstrate that they really care how things come out.
They are reportedly writing humorous stories, skits, etc…at
least as funny as those written by human beings, certainly funnier than
what I write. How do they know? To be taken seriously, it seems clear
robots will need a sense of humor. One recalls a story that pretty well established the notion that whales have a
sense of humor. The friend of a friend was a trainer at one of the marine
zoos in which Orcas were maintained, and taught to do interesting things
for audiences. This trainer routinely did an act in which he stuck his
head inside the cooperative whales’s mouth…inside
all those teeth. The trainer had a trick to keep him safe, of course. He
kept a hand on the muscle just below the whale’s jaw that was used to
snap the jaw shut. If he felt that muscle tense up even a little, he
yanked his head out. There was a hitch in this; the whale knew
perfectly well what the trainer was doing, and would occasionally, not at
every performance, not necessarily every week, but once
in a while, tense that muscle deliberately. The trainer
would almost jump out of the arena at this warning, while the whale
splashed happily around the pool, obviously laughing and laughing. When
the machines start to play jokes and laugh at us, we’ll know we’re dealing
with a new class of smarts. We don’t imprison Orcas in those marine zoos
anymore. Would it be practical to build robot porpoises with LLM AI that
would perform similarly? Would it even be very interesting? …and how long
would it be before we’d feel guilty about imprisoning those smart machines
that care about, um, something, and ban the practice? NOT KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES The Correspo spoke in the last issue about
using new technology and techniques to make old (old, old) still and
moving photographic images more “realistic,” increasing resolution,
adding color, and making movement more smooth. A
couple of people responded interestingly. Bill Turner commented, “I
have travelled the globe widely over many years. There are places I
have been where the men have a life span of about 36 years if they are
healthy, and the people have never heard of Coca Cola let alone seen a bottle
of it because they are still living in biblical times. It’s easy to
step back thousands of years. On Google Maps look up Toungad, Mauritania. [and
see pix here and here] It
is not necessary to try to imagine how people two thousand years ago
lived. The mayor’s tent is at 20 d 03 m 14.11
Lat and 13d 08m 10.54 Long. The outdoor
sanitary facilities are at 20 d 03m 13.83s
and 13d 08m 9.47s. The Mayor’s slaves
keep it clean as a whistle. Heat stroke was treated with a block
of rock salt from the shelf in the tent around the interior sides of the
tent and which was bought from a Camel Caravan 1,000 camels strong, a
moving business across the Sahara replete with scriveners, linguists, cooks,
camel handlers, camel milkers, butchers, and harems, a biblical sight to
behold. Travelling from the Niger River to the Mediterranean following
storm clouds with the seasons. Weddings at midnight to avoid the heat
of the day and guests dancing the pre-Spanish Matachine
ceremonies. Toungad hasn’t changed since the
dawn of mankind.” Jake Mendelssohn said depressingly, “I can look at a
stone carving image from 2,000 BC, a mosaic image from 500 AD and an oil
painting from 1800. But I cannot view the pictures I took with my digital
camcorder from 1980.” One
would like to know more about how things were around Gobekli
Tepe, for example, about 14 thousand years ago…and what came before that?
Does the way of life in modern Toungad represent everything
that came before? All intriguing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item: This is really an item from the
past (2000), but it’s not very big, just worth a mention in MUSES. It comes
to mind because of lots of reports in the media about coyotes in large
numbers. (Seems to be a big surge of wildlife lately, roadrunners, rabbits,
raccoons, and packs of coyotes all over the neighborhood, with daily reports
of pet dogs and cats being lured out, killed, and eaten by the coyotes,) WOOF, WOOF! Gas pipeline leaks and
explosions were more common forty years ago, before we learned how to build
pipelines as well as we do now. Investigators
finding the bodies of coyotes at the explosion sites wondered why so many of
these crafty dogs chanced to be caught in the blasts. It wasn't chance. The leaking methane evidently attracted the
coyotes, who would dig to find its source, hoping for a luscious dead thing
of some kind. They sometimes struck sparks as they dug, triggering
explosions. "This was not a problem
they prepared me for in engineering school,"
says a veteran of those times. Item: It did not, and would not have occurred to me that one way to improve concrete is to add
coffee to the mix, but it has occurred to somebody
else. Item: The Correspo commented recently about Paul Honoré’s regret that computers were entirely too good at creating music that sounds like the work of Stephen Foster. Here’s a bit of explanation; back in the 1940’s, the musician’s union under the leadership of James Petrillo was in a dispute with the broadcasting companies that led Petrillo to forbid the use of any music on the radio, live or recorded, by union members. (Television? What’s television?). Recall that this was before we had tape recorders or even wire recorders, and not many had the equipment to record good sound on wax disks. The effect was that just about the only music available to broadcasters was on very old recordings, and much of that was the music of Stephen Foster, So, we heard I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, The Camptown Races, Old Black Joe, etc day and night, ad infinitum. There was practically nothing but Stephen Foster on the air, and some grew more tired of it than others. Petrillo became a well-known figure, much talked about in the media, His power was quite remarkable. Paul was among those who wound up with lingering distaste for Stephen Foster’s music…much of which is appealing and nostalgic to me. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1987 is brought
to mind by the current to-do over neural-net-powered AI/LLM
activity. NEURAL NET FEST That Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE) first meeting on neural nets (brain circuitry) went off with
a bang in San Diego in June. Sixteen
hundred people turned up with things they've been concealing for decades,
because the Artificial Intelligence gurus scorned them. Reports are that
much of the work has already been beautifully fitted
with theory and math that make it easy to use. Working,
practical systems were on display. Gossip says this show was organized and
financed by the San Diego IEEE people because the national guys wouldn't do
it. Some are grousing that National showed up to take undue credit. Pick pick pick. David Bunnell
reports that the meeting felt like early personal computing shows, full of
potential. "But these people
haven't yet shown the commercial sense that the early personal computerists had," says Bunnell. "They didn't
even sell Neural Net Conference T-shirts, leaving several thousand dollars on
the table." They'll learn...or their machines will. The
message here is that this stuff didn’t spring up
in just the last half-dozen years. People here and
there were chipping away at it, and learning that
technology wasn’t the hard part, gaining social acceptability was harder. There was still a way
to go after this meeting…which was 37 years ago
now. David
Bunnell knew what he was talking about. He’d
staged shows like World Altair Computer Conference
in Albuquerque in what must have been
1976, probably the first personal computer conference…sponsored
by MITS , but with booths and products
from a bunch of different companies …and
a year or so later a non-company-sponsored show
in that hotel at the corner of Century and Sepulveda
near LAX, which he successfully, though rashly,
pushed through, billing it as the “First Personal
Computing Conference. He was eager to beat
out somebody else, and did it, antagonizing some
folks…which seemed to appeal to him. One
of our current presidential candidates recently pointed
out that their rally venues have been filled to
overflowing, with huge crowds outside, unable to get
in. Someone* taught me back in the day that part of
the art of staging such events is to select venues that
are sure to be too small for the expected turnout. The
media will report truthfully that the place was jammed,
with throngs unable to fit in the hall This creates
a sense of excitement. We
can watch this art being practiced. *My teacher was
now-much-missed Peter Johnson, who was active in managing campaigns (choosing exits least likely to harbor
shooters, e.g.) and had a particular personal advantage. He was tall and
burly, with very red hair, and when he held up his hand, the people
guiding the candidate could spot him easily, and follow him. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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