VIDEO OF THE YEAR - "Do You Love Me?"

 

THE FUTURE OF WORK - Robots

"The robots are coming.  Will they work with us?" PBS NewsHour 12/5/2018

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In the latest installment of our Future of Work series, Miles O’Brien visits MIT’s Interactive Robotics Laboratory to understand the “new species” of robots scientists are designing to work alongside humans safely.  Though the devices often excel at repetitive tasks, will they be able to function just as well in dynamic environments, such as the faced-paced world of health care?

REF:  Boston Dynamics - YouTube

LEADING EDGE SCIENCE - Marine Robots

"These robots are helping answer a huge unknown about young marine life" PBS NewsHour 11/2/2016

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SUMMARY:  Many mysteries remain about life under the sea, like what happens to marine creatures between life stages of larvae and adulthood.  These tiny creatures are extremely hard to track in the open ocean, so one marine ecologist is using robots to mimic the larvae's motions in order to determine what control they have over their own fate.  Special correspondent Cat Wise reports.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Now a new effort to shed light on a mystery that has long baffled scientists who study the world's oceans and waterways.

Researchers are using some very sophisticated robots to understand what's happening with microscopic marine life.

Special correspondent Cat Wise has the story, part of our weekly series covering the Leading Edge of science and technology.

CAT WISE, Special correspondent:  At the Crab Cove Visitors Center in Alameda, California, the main attraction is, no surprise, crabs.

WOMAN:  It's pointed, right?  So that means it's a…

CHILD:  Male.

CAT WISE:  On a recent afternoon, a group of children on a field trip at the center headed outside to the nearby beach with naturalist Morgan Dill for a talk on the creatures of the cove.

MORGAN DILL, Naturalist, East Bay Regional Park District:  We have got clams.  We have got oysters.  Would you like to see a crab's baby picture?  This is the cute little baby crab.  So, this is their larval stage, and they go through this stage and they're out there, but we don't actually know too much about them, but this is their baby picture.

CAT WISE:  Dill's lesson highlighted a gap in her and other scientists' otherwise detailed knowledge of the crab's life cycle.

MORGAN DILL:  Sometimes, when you flip them over, they have actually got eggs on their abdomen.  And they're holding them there, and there's hundreds of eggs.  And, so, often, the kids will say, OK, so where do they go from there?

We tell them they go back out into the bay, but we don't really know how long they're out there, when they're coming back, and are they at the whim of the current or not?

CAT WISE:  The answers to those questions have long been a mystery to those who study the oceans.  But it's not just the whereabouts of baby crabs that's perplexing.  More than 70 percent of all marine organisms start out life as tiny microscopic larvae, creatures like sea urchins, anemones, lobsters, shrimp, and a wide variety of fish.  Many look like little aliens.

STEVEN MORGAN, University of California, Davis:  We know so little about this life stage because it's so incredibly difficult to study.

CAT WISE:  Steven Morgan is a professor marine ecology at the University of California at Davis.  Morgan has spent most of his career trying to figure out what happens to marine larvae before they become adults and are easier to track.

STEVEN MORGAN:  On land, we can radio track mountain lions by putting collars on them and their offspring, and so we know exactly what's happening to populations.  But in the sea, imagine trying to follow this microscopic larval stage for weeks and months in the plankton while it's developing.  We can't do that.

BOMB SQUAD - The Newest Member

"How robots are joining the police force" PBS NewsHour 9/21/2016

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SUMMARY:  In light of the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey, science correspondent Miles O'Brien takes a look at a new technology that is increasingly being used by law enforcement, bomb-disarming robots.  Operated from a safe distance, these robots can blast through car windows and even kill, raising ethical issues about how they should be used.

MAN:  Everybody, get off the street!

MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour):  As the pipe and pressure cooker bomb plot unfolded and unraveled in New York and New Jersey, police deployed some remotely operated tools aimed at saving the lives of civilians and bomb squad technicians alike.

In New Jersey, a reminder of the hair-trigger risk they face in harm's way.

At NYPD bomb squad headquarters on City Island a few years ago, Lieutenant Mark Torre gave me a demo using the same robot, the Remotec ANDROS F6A, built by Northrop Grumman.

LT.  MARK TORRE, NYPD Bomb Squad:  Its primary mission is to put distance between our technicians and something of a hazardous nature, because distance in this business is always your friend.

MILES O'BRIEN:  In this scenario, it is believed there may be an explosive in this car.  And it is much more than a hypothetical.  It's what happened in Times Square on May 1 of 2010.

A street vendor discovered a smoldering, abandoned car filled with propane tanks, fertilizer, gasoline and firecrackers.  It was a Saturday evening, the busiest time of the week, in one of the busiest, and most iconic, intersections in the world.

MITCH SILBER, Terrorism Analyst:  Between the scenery, the symbolism, the congestion and it being be just media central for New York City, you can't get much better of a background for terrorists.

MILES O'BRIEN:  Mitch Silber was NYPD's director of intelligence analysis at the time.  He shudders to think what would have happened if the car bomb, built by Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad, had not been a dud.

MITCH SILBER:  It would ripped the car in half, and this is a very busy intersection.  Depending on the congestion of people right around the car, it would certainly kill people, injured and maimed many others.  And it would have been the first big terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11, since 2001, nine years earlier.

WESTWORLD - Gets an Upgrade

1973 starring Yul Brynner



HBO's 2016 Westworld series by Michael Crichton
Starring Anthony Hopkins

AMERICAN JOBS - Humans Need Not Apply

"Do labor-saving robots spell doom for American workers?" PBS NewsHour 7/30/2015

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SUMMARY:  The onslaught of automation that's replacing human workers -- from golf caddies to bank tellers -- may be putting us on a path to humanitarian crisis, says Jerry Kaplan, author of "Humans Need Not Apply."  As technology grows and jobs become obsolete, income inequality and poverty could follow for millions of Americans. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  We have shown you before the rising role that automation and robots play in some parts of the work force.

Tonight, we have a more sobering and perhaps somewhat eerier picture of how those trends are gathering force more quickly than anticipated.

Economics correspondent Paul Solman looks at the promise and perils of the rise of the robot, part of our weekly series Making Sen$e, which airs every Thursday on the NewsHour.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  The 11th hole at Stanford University.  Chad Gray’s an OK golfer, but his caddy is really hard to beat.

CHAD GRAY, CaddyTrek:  It’s going to go wherever you want it go.  Follows you like a puppy dog.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Meet the robot CaddyTrek (video).

CHAD GRAY:  It has two ultrasound bars that send a signal back to the remote that’s on my back pocket here.

JERRY KAPLAN, Author, “Humans Need Not Apply”:  It’s an incredibly simple piece of technology.

PAUL SOLMAN:  But the implications for America’s caddies, and millions of other workers, are ominous, says computer scientist and serial entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan.  Kaplan has his own labor-saving schlepper, an R2-D2 designed to make local deliveries.

JOBS - Replaced by Robots?

"Will your job get outsourced to a robot?" PBS NewsHour 5/19/2015

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SUMMARY:  It's not just basic tasks anymore:  Computers can now do work once deemed possible only by humans.  And in some cases, the computers are doing it better.  In an economy driven increasingly by intelligent automation, which jobs will survive?  Hari Sreenivasan reports.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Have you ever worried you might lose your job to a robot?  I have.

Hari Sreenivasan finds it could well happen with advances in artificial intelligence, or A.I., transforming the work force.

That’s the latest report in our series on invention and innovation, Breakthroughs.

MAN:  Oh, all in?

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  In a closely watched brains vs. artificial intelligence poker match held in Pittsburgh earlier this month, humans pulled off a slim win over a computer program called Claudico.

MAN:  All right.  Good job.

MAN:  Good game, guys.  Good game.

MAN:  Good game.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, created the algorithms that run Claudico’s A.I.

TUOMAS SANDHOLM, Carnegie Mellon University:  Those algorithms figure out how you should act strategically, how do you avoid or deal with humans trying to deceive you, and how do you deceive humans?

TECHNOLOGY - A Fully Functional Robotic Arm?

"Will a robotic arm ever have the full functionality of a human limb?" PBS NewsHour 2/12/2015

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SUMMARY:  Improvements in body armor have kept more soldiers alive, but many veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have come back with debilitating injuries.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien, whose left arm was amputated last year, tests out some of the future limbs now in development.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  A report on the possibilities and limits of robotic arms and prosthetic technology.

It’s also a story with a real and personal connection for us through the experiences of our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien.  One year ago, he was involved in an unlikely accident that led to the amputation of much of his left arm.  Since then, he’s been reporting and exploring what might be available to help him and others.

Here’s the first of two reports.

Lots of people wonder why I don’t wear a high-tech bionic arm.  It’s a fair question for an arm amputee who happens to be a reporter with more than 20 years on the science and technology beat.  People expect a professional nerd like me would have an arm that approaches what Luke Skywalker or Colonel Steve Austin wore.

ACTOR:  We can rebuild him.  We have the technology.  We can make him better than he was.

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  Not yet, but maybe soon, as I discovered not far from my home in Washington at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Here, they’re using knowledge gained, building compact, complex systems like spacecraft and missile warheads to push the envelope in upper limb prosthetics.

MICHAEL MCLOUGHLIN, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory:  This is the modular prosthetic limb.  This has been designed to have most of the functionality of the human limb.

MILES O’BRIEN:  Chief engineer Mike McLoughlin introduced me to the Modular Prosthetic Limb, the MPL.  It’s the most sophisticated artificial limb in the world.

TECHNOLOGY - Run Robot, Run

MIT's Robotic Cheetah
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

TECHNOLOGY - 'The Second Machine Age' of Robots

"In ‘second machine age’ of robots, it’s time for humans to get creative" PBS Newshour 2/13/2014

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GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  All week this week, we have been stepping into the future with stories about robots in the opera and the coming revolution in 3-D printing.

Now Paul Solman gets in on the act with a look at the economics of this latest machine age.  It’s part of his ongoing coverage Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Sorry to see you do that.

A robot that plays Connect Four.  First one to get four in a row wins.  My grandkids thrash me at 10 times this speed, but after decades, as promised, robots like Baxter here are finally replacing humans at a breakneck pace.

Really?

Or so say MIT Professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee.

ANDREW MCAFEE, Co-author, “The Second Machine Age”:  Where we have always needed human beings, suddenly, we have digital alternatives to all of them that are already pretty good and getting better very, very quickly.

ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON, Co-author, “The Second Machine Age”:  Andy and I have been astonished at how rapidly things are happening, whether it’s self-driving cars, computers that can place “Jeopardy” and beat the best champion.  We are seeing a wave of technologies that can automate all sorts of cognitive tasks.

PAUL SOLMAN:  In their new book, “The Second Machine Age,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that industry is facing a revolution as radical as the one powered by the steam engine.

ANDREW MCAFEE:  The Industrial Revolution was about overcoming the limitations of our individual muscles.  What is going on right now in the second machine age is overcoming the limitations of our individual minds.

THE ARTS - Technology Meets Opera

"Singing robots show humanity of technology in opera of the future" PBS Newshour 2/10/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Finally tonight: A classical art form meets cutting-edge technology, an opera that will be simulcast, where viewers around the globe can interact with the performance this Sunday.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

MAN:  Wow.  They remember their parts.

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  In the future there will be robots.  But there will also be opera, the power of technology joined to the human imagination.

(SINGING)

JEFFREY BROWN:  That, at least, is one message from the opera “Death and the Power” by composer, computer scientist, and futurist Tod Machover.

TOD MACHOVER, “Death and the Power”:  A lot of my work has been about humanizing technology and making technology, especially in music, be an extension of human gesture.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Machover’s opera tells the story of Simon Powers, a successful businessman seeking immortality through technology by downloading his mind and spirit into a computer program called the System.

Now, stay with us here, because his essence becomes incorporated into physical objects.  Robots line up on stage, representing each of the main characters of the show.  During the prologue and epilogue, they also serve as a kind of Greek chorus.  They’re all that is left on planet Earth.  Once every year, they gather to remember and tell the story of Simon Powers, even though they have no real knowledge of human emotion.

They are moved about by iPads and remote controls using cutting-edge software such as a position tracking system and 3-D visualization.

With a libretto by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, it’s a new twist on old-age life-and-death questions, and newer ones about the role of technology.

TECHNOLOGY - Our Robotic World

"Tech industry looks to robots to tackle problems but finds hurdles on the way" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 1/2/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  The latest gadgets and electronics are perennially best-selling holiday gifts.

Our science correspondent, Miles O'Brien, had a more ambitious wish list, but he didn't yet get what he wanted for Christmas.

ACTOR:  Danger, danger.  Force level building to fatal intensity.

MILES O'BRIEN (Newshour):   I have always wanted what Will Robinson, George Jetson, and Luke Skywalker have.

ANTHONY DANIELS:  That's how he came to be in your service, if you take my meaning, sir.

MILES O'BRIEN:  You know, a robot servant to do my bidding, my dirty work.

Seems like that idea is languishing in around-the-corner purgatory, with the flying car, fusion power and the jetpack.  A lot has changed over the years.  Robotic devices are everywhere, assembly lines, disarming bombs, helping the disabled, even sucking up dust bunnies.  They are smarter than ever.

But, unlike Hollywood's robots, they only excel when the task is very narrow and clearly defined.

"What role does the human touch play in the digital age?" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 1/2/2014

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SUMMARY:  In a digital age that creates more automated services at ever lower prices, how can we retain the value of human work and relationships?  Hari Sreenivasan ponders this with computer scientist Jaron Lanier, author of "Who Owns the Future?," and Andrew McAfee from MIT's Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management.

PS:  As Google Inc. gobbles-up the tech world....

TECHNOLOGY - Robotics Challenge, 8 Countries Compete

"The ultimate video game: teams compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge" by Elizabeth Barber, Christian Science Monitor 6/28/2013

Teams from eight countries competed in the first round of the challenge to develop a disaster response robot

Except in this game, turning on a garden hose is an enormously difficult task, requiring huge teams of scientists and decades of acquired technology.

About twenty-six teams from eight countries competed on June 17-21 in The Virtual Robotics Challenge, the first round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, using complex software to direct virtual robots in a cloud-based simulator that looks like a 3-D video game.

The overall challenge for the teams is to develop software that can operate a DARPA-supplied humanoid robot across a low-bandwidth network, which is expected to be the only type of network available to first responders in a disaster scenario.

This first round was a software competition in which teams used software of their own design to have a simulated ATLAS robot navigate a simulated disaster zone that looked something like suburbia gone wrong.  For three days, competitors stared into computer screens in their respective far-flung labs and offices, instructing their virtual robots to complete a series of challenges, including driving a vehicle and walking over uneven ground.  Robots also had to pick up a hose, connect it to a spigot and turn it on.

“The disaster response scenario is technically very challenging,” said Russ Tedrake, a professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  “It requires the robot and human operator to simultaneously perceive and gain an understanding for a complex, new environment, and then use that information to perform difficult manipulation tasks and traverse complex terrains.”

That means that the virtual robot must feed its raw sensor data back to its operating team, which then, with the help of the robot, must interpret its surroundings and enter instructions about where to move or how to manipulate objects.  The team then continuously asks the robot to share its plan, adjusting their requests and their suggestions until the robot provides a correct answer, at which point the robot is allowed to go on autonomously.

The top nine teams received funding and an ATLAS robot to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in December 2013.  The trials are the second of three DARPA challenge events and will be the first time that the physical robots will compete.

The overall winner of the first round was The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a team of some 22 researchers.

“Getting in the car and driving was our biggest challenge,” said research scientist Jerry Pratt, the Florida Institute’s team leader.  “Walking — we had that nailed.”

Other winners included Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MIT, and TRACLabs.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was also among the winning teams, donated its awarded funds to three runner-up teams that DARPA had not originally selected – it had chosen six teams – putting the total to nine teams that will compete in the second round.

HEALTH - Robot Therapists

"Talking Robots Play Part in Therapeutic Treatment for People With Special Needs" PBS Newshour 1/9/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Researchers at University of Notre Dame and University of Southern California have found that robots can be less intimidating than humans to some patients. Ray Suarez reports on how researchers are using machines as nontraditional therapists to treat conditions such as autism in children and strokes for seniors.

LIAM MCGUIRE, autistic child: What's your favorite game?

COMPUTER VOICE: "Mario Cart," the original.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): In a carefully monitored session that seems more like playtime than therapy, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have enlisted an unusual therapist to assist their studies of children with autism, a two-foot robot named Kelly.

SCIENCE - Relistic Walking Robot Legs

"US Researchers Believe They’ve Developed ”Most Realistic’ Robot Legs Ever" Daily Disruption 7/6/2012

A group of US researchers has produced a robotic set of legs which they believe is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.

The neural architecture, musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans have been simplified and built into the robot, giving it a remarkably human-like walking gait that can be viewed in this video (below).

The biological accuracy of this robot, which has been presented July 6, in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Neural Engineering, has allowed the researchers to investigate the processes underlying walking in humans and may bolster theories of how babies learn to walk, as well as helping to understand how spinal-cord-injury patients can recover the ability to walk.

A key component of the human walking system is the central pattern generator (CPG). The CPG is a neural network in the lumbar region of the spinal cord that generates rhythmic muscle signals. The CPG produces, and then controls, these signals by gathering information from different parts of the body that are responding to the environment. This is what allows people to walk without needing to think about it.

The simplest form of a CPG is a half-center, which consists of just two neurons that fire signals alternatively, producing a rhythm. The robot contains an artificial half-center as well as sensors that deliver information back to the half-center, including load sensors that sense force in the limb when the leg is pressed against a stepping surface.

Co-author of the study, Dr Theresa Klein, said: “Interestingly, we were able to produce a walking gait, without balance, which mimicked human walking with only a simple half-center controlling the hips and a set of reflex responses controlling the lower limb.”

The researchers, from the University of Arizona, hypothesize that babies start off with a simple half-center, similar to the one developed in this robot, and over time they ‘learn’ a network for a more complex walking pattern. This could explain why babies have been seen to exhibit a simple walking pattern when placed on a treadmill even before they have learned to walk — a simple half-center is already in place.

“This underlying network may also form the core of the CPG and may explain how people with spinal cord injuries can regain walking ability if properly stimulated in the months after the injury,” Dr Klein continued.