A Robotic Future

Hollywood has not had the best representation of what a robotic future would look like. There are countless examples of a violent robotic uprising, leaving the human race to in a dystopian society fighting for their lives against the menacing robots. Examples that come to mind are the ever prominent Terminator, where SkyNet makes robots sentient and begins a war against robots. Or even the matrix, where robots thirst for electricity is so large that they begin to farm humans for electricity. Then there’s examples like I-Robot, where at first the robots make quality of life much better and everyone is happy, however, queue eventual robotic uprising.

But these are tremendous works of fiction, and our technological prowess in the field of robotics is nowhere near the functionality of the robots depicted in these films. Or is it?

An “Emerging” Technology

What is it that makes robots possible? Artificial intelligence, through extensive computer programming and feats of engineering, as well as using various sensors so a robot knows how to react. You may not know it, but there have been robots in society for quite some time now; just not the kind from the movies. A company called I-Robot (not related to the film), has a robotic vacuum called the Roomba. It uses sensors to vacuum an entire floor, and not bump into anything enough to damage it. Additionally, electric car company Tesla Motors builds its unparalleled quality automobiles from scratch using over 36 robots. The robots in question are created by German robotics company KUKA. One of their most impressive robots is definitely the KR AGILUS, which is something that will likely be seen in the mass production of automobiles all across the board. This robot is extremely smart, and it can even play ping pong. Check this video out:

The editing of the video makes it hard to make out if the robot is actually as quick as it seems, but regardless, it’s capable of playing ping pong which is a feat in itself. However, the robots mentioned aren’t really impacting the day to day interactions of society; in fact it is unlikely to see the KR AGILUS outside of a factory. What I’m getting at is the average citizen will not have interactions with these, and communities will not be intertwined with robot interaction. Will that ever actually happen, and to what extent?

Unmanned Drones

Now, at first thought on hearing “Unmanned Drones”, what comes to mind is generally something that you’d hope is not seen on a day to day basis – or ever. What I’m referring to is the US (and other countries), use of unmanned drones in the military. According to this article from The Guardian, UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are pretty terrifying and have some ramifications when used irresponsibly as weapons. You don’t feel the same way when you’re sitting at a desk controlling a plane bombing a potential “threat” as opposed to actually being there. The source for the article expresses the guilt, and this is a dangerous area in the field of robotics.

However, these are not the unmanned drones that you would see whizzing overhead in a busy metropolis (ideally). What is much more likely is to see the future of mail and delivery: introducing Amazon Prime Air. The idea is that an unmanned aerial vehicle will grab its payload from an Amazon warehouse, and ship it to you by flying navigating itself through a city, delivering it to your front door in under 30 minutes or less. The video from Amazon does the service a little more justice:

Amazon boasts that if they can get through the legal trouble from the Federal Aviation Administration, that these could could be hitting the skies by as early as 2015. This actually changes the mail game on a social and economic level. For starters, how long will it take the average person to get used to little helicopter drones flying overhead delivering packages, without distracting or feeling a little bit of paranoia? When commercial airplanes first flew through the sky, there was general fright and concern. Additionally, the job of a postal worker will eventually become obsolete, which is a fair criticism of any technological automation. Only time will tell.

On the topic of Amazon, the tech giant has been dipping it’s feet into other areas of robotics as well. Specifically, the acquisition of Kiva Systems, a robotics company that specializes in warehouse management. Instead of having a worker walk to a storage area in the warehouse to retrieve a package, the robots know the map of where each product is (stored in a remote cloud database), and retrieve and bring it to the worker. This is a much more efficient method, and it makes perfect sense as to why Amazon bought it. The amount of paid workers needed within a massive Amazon warehouse will decrease sufficiently, thus boosting profits for the company. This is just another example of the feats these robots can do for our society, and additionally the potential negative impact on the job market through automation.

Google: The Tech Super-Giant

The question whenever a tech company is doing something new innovative: what is Google doing in response (or just doing period)? The answer wont surprise you; Google’s doing big things.
Their latest acquisition is the outstandingly innovative, and sometimes eerie robotics company, <a href="http://www.bostondynamics.com/"Boston Dynamics. The stuff that the company is doing is just flat out – for lack of a better term – awesome. Whether it’s the highly mobile, RC car sized Sand Flea, capable of jumping 30 feet into the air and stabilizing itself. Or if it’s the heavy duty LS3, capable of carrying 400 lbs and does not need to be controlled due to it’s “follow the leader” capabilities.

The eerie portion of Boston Dynamics revolves around 2 things. Firstly, their humanoid Atlas robot which, for some, looks strikingly similar to the Terminator robot seen above. This is literally the closest thing to having the physical capabilities of a human. There are other humanoid robots, like Asimo, the robot created by Honda. These 2 robots are strikingly different though, mainly in size and as mentioned before, physicality. Specifically, Atlas can navigate itself through difficult rocky terrain, leading into the next point.

Before Boston Dynamics was purchased by Google, where did it receive it’s funding? The capabilities of these robots are extremely useful in military endeavors, and it is thus no surprise that they are backed and funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). It is unknown whether these are being tested in the military yet or not, but on the Boston Dynamics webpage, it says they will supply the government with models of Atlas by “summer of 2013”. Which has already passed. This strikes a lot of humanitarian arguments, similar with to those associated with UAV’s. Is it civil to use robots in warfare? Sure, it’s safer for the people who have robots, but when it comes to morality, how will robots be able to draw the line? This is a realistic argument that will be made prevalent in the near future.

Back to Google. The underlying question remains as to what Google is going to do with robots? There is plenty speculation, but it seems apparent that Google will not be doing anything military related. In fact, according to this article, their robot venture will initially not be “consumer based”. Although, with the amount of robot technology Google will amass within the next 5 years, it is intriguing to see what they will come out with, if anything.

It makes you wonder if the robotic utopia seen in the movie I-Robot is actually possible. Having Atlas robot’s as servants that help with daily tasks, Amazon Prime Air delivering parcels across the skyline, even potentially little Honda Asimo’s babysitting and entertaining children. With all this research and development in the field of robotics, one thing is for certain: they will be integrated into our daily lives. Skeptics and paranoid people alike will be hesitant, but sooner than later, humanity and robots will co exist in the future.

Here’s a test of Atlas’s humanoid balance:

Deep Web – The Darkest Corners of the Internet

If you asked the average person “What is Silk Road?”, chances are they will have close to no idea what you’re talking about. If they’re a history buff, they might give you a detailed explanation of the Chinese silk market that spread east through Asia in the 1st century, BC. However, chances are low of them telling you it is an online, anonymous marketplace  that is hidden within the Deep Web, used for trafficking illegal narcotics and other contraband. What?

Backstory

The whole idea of the Deep Web is constructed on the premise of how a search engine works. Search engines index by “crawling” through web pages, indexing the page, and continually going through links on web pages until the entirety of the web is indexed and can be found. As many of you know, if you want to find a phrase on a web page you can simply use one of the most powerful tools of our generation: Google. However, web pages that have NOT been indexed, referred to as unlinked content, are portions of the internet that do not have links on any other websites – and thus cannot be crawled. Also, any way that a website limits access to their pages, whether through password protection, limiting IP addresses, or web pages that cannot be cached (and thus not crawled). In short, in order to access the Deep Web it is essential to have a direct query, that way you can access it’s database.

The known internet, is only a fraction of the whole internet, with the Deep Web comprising the majority. Mike Bergman .

Mike Bergman, CEO of Structured Dynamics as well as the man who coined the term ‘deep web’, provides an interesting analogy to the structure and depth of the internet. As you can see, the vast size of the Deep Web conpletely overshadows what we would call the Clearnet (known internet). According to BrightPlanet.com, the Deep Web is up to 5000 times larger, and growing at a rate so fast it is difficult to quantify. The real question is, however, what is it used for?

Tor Web Browser

The Tor web browser, originally the abbreviation of The Onion Router, is a free web browser that enables online privacy, and can be used to get around government imposed censorship. The technology behind it is quite complex, but it uses the analogy of the layers of an onion.

Tor encryption illustration

Like an onion, Tor ‘layers’ the encryption of the user’s IP address and web traffic, by relaying it to other random Tor relays, and upon reaching its destination (peeling the final layer), there is no trace of the source. Websites and servers that are addressed with a .onion can only be accesses through Tor. It was sponsored and funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory, as well as backed by the NSA – which is actually rather ironic. For starters, Edward Snowden used Tor to communicate with The Guardian newspaper regarding the PRISM project. Additionally, due to Tor’s nature of keeping user interactions anonymous, this has lead to the possibility of criminal activity, despite Tor’s initial purpose of being to keep US spies hidden. What kind of criminal activity, would you ask? Lets start with the story of the rise and fall of Silk Road.

Silk Road

In the unexplored depths of the Deep Web, sometime in February 2011, a marketplace unlike any other was born. Thanks to the raw power of Tor, Dread Pirate Roberts was able to organize and setup a bazaar that sells goods that you couldn’t simply buy at the local mall. Drugs, firearms, false identification, phished credit cards, and even assassins for hire.

Silk Road: anonymous marketplace

Vendors could post there product or services for sale, where buyers would communicate with them using software such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), Privnote, or even the ever popular SMS4Tor, a self destructing message – leaving no trace (note: that link cannot be accessed unless you are using Tor, due to its .onion domain). In these private messages, you must enclose two things: your mailing address, and finalize your payment via cryptocurrency. Yes, that means whatever you order would get delivered right to your door, which raises the question: how is that safe? Well, through the use of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, and performing an action called ‘tumbling’ your Bitcoins, it is possible to make it that your money can not be traced back to you. If for whatever reason the FBI or police had a warrant to seize your mail, unless they are papers with your name on it, you can feign disbelief and deny whatever accusations. This level of criminal activity cannot be traced, and thus shows the power of the Silk Road. Dread Pirate Roberts fortune was up to 174,000 bitcoins, which at the time of December 2013, was valued over 45.6 million US dollars.

Silk Road, shut down.

However, all good things come to an end. On October 1st (or 2nd), 2013, Ross William Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested and SilkRoad was taken down, due to allegations of Ross attempting to hire a hit-man in order to silence an old business partner (whether it went through or not, it is still ambiguous). Of course, people could not get enough after its take-down. In the wake of Silk Road, dozens of other marketplaces have opened up across the Deep Web, although none as successful as this initial venture.

In the early days of the internet, this was not even close to fathomable. No one could have predicted the raw power of anonymity, where sending contraband via the US Postal Service was unimaginable, and having your mailman be your drug dealer was a rare case. The Deep Web’s use is plagued by criminals, not only of the drug world, but also a hub for child pornography, terrorists, and hackers. The impact this has on society as a whole is intriguing, because although this criminal activity, is not necessarily a “good thing”, remaining anonymous over the internet has its benefits. As mentioned previously, Edward Snowden as well as other whistleblowers and journalists use this technology for personal safety, as well as doing good. Due to its free nature, it can fall into the hands of anyone, if they want it. Additionally, after the revelations of the NSA spying on even the most minute conversations you have over Facebook, maybe being invisible to them is a good thing. Not to hide illegal activity, but because it is a right in your nations constitution to be able to communicate on a private network. All in all, I personally beleive the Deep Web is still in it’s infantile stages, and it’s uses are still being tested out. However, I believe it has the power to do more good, then bad, for sometimes a secret means the safety of many people, and you would not want it to fall into the wrong hands.

For more on this topic, check out the video below (Warning: Explicit Content):

3D Printing: A future staple in the 20XX household, or for the tech-savvy?

Printers. The fussiest, most likely to malfunction, despised piece of technology that is necessary for the paper documentation of anything digital. You’d think that technology companies would have mastered the printer by now, but this is not the case. And not the focus of this article.

The printer has a sibling with the capabilities of making 3-dimensional objects. A machine with the capability of additive processing, via computer control, is what we would commonly call the 3D printer. Probably one of the most overused futuristic cliches in sci-fi movies is the creation of an object with the single press of a button, with examples like the replicator from Star Trek. Of course, the current models of 3D printers are nowhere near this capability, but in comparison to the first 3D printer from the 80’s, the technology has progressed immensely.

There are several different types of 3D printing technologies, with the most popular being a process called stereolithography. It was coined by Charles Hull, who was in fact the pioneer of this industry. The idea, in lay mans terms, is to “print” layers of an ultra violet material on top of liquid polymer, which eventually hardens and dries.

So, what are people making?

Well, it depends on the model as well as the materials used for printing. Some printers (like the CandyFab 6000) can print edible structures using granulated sugar as its medium, where as most can produce high quality hard plastic objects, as long as you have the blueprints. That’s right, you must have the 3D CAD drawings of the file type STL in order to tell the printer what to print and in what order. Luckily, the internet is your friend, and with wonderful websites like thingiverse.com, you can build virtually anything.

A plastic fish? Of course.

Maybe some polymer bikinis? Sure, why not.

A gun? What?

The completely open-sourced website defdist.org, is an organization that provides users with CAD files for firearms. This provides anyone with a 3D printer to manufacture a plastic firearm, with or without legal gun license. For obvious reasons, this caused the United States Department of Homeland Security some alarm, where they released the statement: “Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns”. In this article, Homeland Security additionally reports that it might be impossible to stop. The reasons for this are the exact same as being unable to prevent illegal downloads of songs and movies.

Now what kind of repercussions could this have on society? For starters, the gun is made of plastic, and therefore cannot be detected by metal detectors. This provides additional worry for customs offices around the world, and could result in tighter security. Additionally, where in certain countries the laws on gun control are much more strict, this could be a method of providing illegal weapons to people who should not have them. Only time will tell. I think that despite this frightening possibility of guns getting in the wrong hands, 3D printing has much more potential in the betterment of society.

The Positive Possibilities

According to this article, approximately 18 people die a day waiting for an organ transplant…but what if we could print an organ? As in what if the material being used by the printer is human tissue? Well there’s a company in San Diego called Organovo, and they’re doing just that. The company uses live cells, and through the additive processing method prints layers upon layers of cells until it is human tissue. Unfortunately, this process is still in it’s infantile stages, and has the major road block of keeping the tissue alive after getting off the printer table. This would require additional time and money in research and development, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for clinical testing. However, do not squander this feat in the field of bio-medical engineering. The very proof of concept of being able to print human tissue is a marvel in itself. This is, in my opinion, one of the major steps to an increase in human life expectancy as well as longevity.

Another example of the limitless power of 3D printing technology, is in prosthetic limbs.

John Sleezer | The Kansas City Star

A 16 year old boy from Kansas City, did something remarkable by 3D printing his family friend a prosthetic hand at the local library. The sheer power in being able to custom print hands in different sizes, at the extremely low cost of 60$, is astounding. An additional point to note on is the fact that it was printed at the local library. This is important, because something that has not been touched on is the price of the machine.

Dollar Signs

As you can see, these devices are not cheap, by any means. They are mainly split up into 3 classes (in order from most to least expensive): pre-assembled 3d printers, kit-based printers, and self-sourced printers. The pre-assembled printers, although easier to use (the average person can learn how to use it), are extremely pricey. The Makerbot Replicator 2 is just over US$2000. Unless your local library purchases it, this is an unlikely investment. However, for the more tech-savvy users, they can purchase a 3D printer for $500. In fact, a man from Saskatoon built one himself, called the Peachy Printer, and is selling the parts for it for $100.

Where does this leave us? The 3D printer strikes some controversy in it’s capabilities of producing contraband objects, but at the same time holds the key over coming many medical challenges. Overall, I think the technology will not be a “push one button” task for a very long time, but as it progresses will become more user friendly and of higher quality. Check out the Peachy Printer and how it works below.