A bit long at 47:04 but worth watching.

Seemingly straight out of Asimov’s novels and short stories Japanese engineers are heavily focused on developing artificial humanoid forms. They have an aging population and are seeking to address workforce replacement needs, as well as servant / caretaker roles. Ex. Papero - Partner personal robot.

Key Challenges:

• Coordination and Balance - (human brain sends thousands of commands, robots not capable of this at this point)
• Learn From Experience - Robots lack common sense. Can not distinguish that water is wet, or difference between push and pull. To program in enough knowledge regarding al environment and task variables would be nearly impossible. Focus now is on learn from observation like a young child does.
• Emotions / Feelings - In addition to the need for verbal communications, robotics engineers want machine to be able to show personality through facial expressions (excitement, anxiety, suprise etc.) Ex. Kismet at MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs.

Other points:

• Swarm - Like ants and bees who rely upon stigmergy (modification of local environment), teams of inexpensive robots are being devloped to be able to build upon each others success by being able to pass messages through each other. Ex. Military is building robot mines that can move and adjust position.
• Nueruoengineer - Developing artificial limbs and other devices that connect directly to brain. Robots and muscles communicate through same methods, electronic signals.
• Bioengineer - Connect robotic device to rats brain and control movement. Proposed us is S&R type work (ethical concerns?) Rat could operate for 12 hours while a battery powered robot would have to be recharged every few hours.

Source: Robot Dreams

Opus responds to the needs of a young man whose technical gadgets have failed, leaving him without amusement….

“The president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be.  It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society. Military force is best used to support clear political goals, whether limited, such as expelling Saddam from Kuwait, or comprehensive, such as demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan and Germany during World War II. It is one thing to have a limited political goal and to fight decisively for it; it is quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to find a political solution somewhere along the way. A president entering these situations must ask whether decisive force is possible and is likely to be effective and must know how and when to get out. These are difficult criteria to meet, so U.S. intervention in these ‘humanitarian’ crises should be, at best, exceedingly rare.”

Source: Andrew Sullivan offers quote from Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2000, Vol. 79, #1, p. 53

Higher Ed: “I am a pro-choice libertarian Democrat whose platform remains the same, above all regarding educational reform. I denounce the outrageous expense, ideological indoctrination and spiritual hollowness of American higher education, with its crazed admissions rat race and juvenile brand-name snobbery. And I call for a valorization of the trades and for national investment in vocational schools to help salvage the disaster zone of urban public education. ”

Iraq: ” Support of the troops means not subjecting them to an unsustainable and ultimately unwinnable mission, cooked up by armchair cowboys who see the world in simplistic cartoon terms (”good guys” vs. “bad guys”). The provincial philistines of the Bush administration blundered into the Mideast with little more than superficial knowledge of its tangled history and ancient culture. And they have colossally wasted American blood and treasure on a project that had only a tangential relation to the atrocity of 9/11. ”

Source: Salon.com

Andrew Sullivan points to a Hew Hewitt interview of Colonel Stuart Herrington (”military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 — long before Abu Ghraib” Washington Post):

HH: From the time you began in this human and counterintelligence business to today, how much of the techniques changed as to effective interrogation?

SH: Well, we thought we had it pretty well on track, and that there was a consensus in the discipline that interrogation is a very professionally demanding discipline that requires an understanding of human nature, and essentially how to outsmart and outfox a source who has information that he really doesn’t want to tell you, but it’s your job to get it. And I’d thought for some time that we had a good consensus on that until the Iraq thing came along, and something happened, and people took a wrong turn at the intersection, if you will.

HH: And how did they do that?

SH: Well, there became a notion of what, and I think part of it was because of official policy emanating from the Department of Defense, and then part of it was just that plus osmosis plus the influence of television and the overall pop culture, that interrogators are inquisitors, and that the best way to get information out of people is to “take off the gloves.” And that’s the wrong turn that we took, and it’s a very serious wrong turn, because for a whole variety of reasons, torture and brutality in interrogations is counterproductive.

HH: Does the United States military torture people?

SH: Well, I think if you ask the question has it happened, or have things taken place that are wrong, and that went well over the line, I think the answer is yes, regrettably. Was it a controlled policy, i.e. that what they were doing was something that was sanctioned from on high, my own personal opinion is that some of it was, especially the things that the task force was doing in Iraq with respect to the top fifty of Saddam’s henchmen that they caught, and al Qaeda types. And in some cases, it was just stupid young people with bad leadership and bad skills essentially behaving in an extremely counterproductive and undisciplined fashion, and that’s more what applies to Abu Ghraib.

Source: Andrewsullivan.com