Offbeat Geek

Honda has created a series of short documentary films called “Dream The Impossible“.  The series aims to celebrate “those who have the courage to turn failure into success, and to forge dreams into a better future.”

In one such short, Living with robots, we get a brief glimpse at the current development of robots and how it can help us in the future. It also brought up something of note.

Throughout the short they try to dispel the fact that modern real life robots are not like their movie counterparts.  A certain Schwarzenegger movie series is referenced multiple times.  They discuss the effects of the Uncanny Valley hypothesis (Masahiro Mori: when robots look and act almost like actual people it causes a very negative response any observing).

I posit that it is not just the physical but also the hypothesis of Technological Singularity ( Raymond Kurzweil: The exponential improvement described by Moore’s Law will lead to a time when progress in technology occurs almost instantly) which creates the greatest fear of robots.  Technological Singularity states it my soon be possible to build a machine that is fundamentally more intelligent than a human.   If/When this happens the machine itself could build an even more intelligent machine which would go on to do the same. This is referred to as Recursive Self Improvement.

It is this idea which ultimately leads us to: What happens to the human race at that point?

In essence, it will be down to how we handle the evolution (pardon the pun) of  Artificial Intelligence which will determine the future of robotics and how close or far it stays from the movies.   I do see Isaac Asimov’s laws making an appearance when we get to that stage.

Server rack would probably be useful

After taking inventory of the external hard drives connected to computers in the office I calculated that they total over five terabytes of disk space.  More shocking was the realization that there was hardly any free space between the lot!  Traversing the labyrinth of files and folders has become a chore so I decided once and for all to restructure everything.  Shuffling over 5Tb of data has proven to be a tiresome task.  Four days of transferring files, almost 3Tb of data sorted and I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  With the aim of having all data shared across the internal network I want the files to be as accessible as possible. It is amazing how much redundant data you can accumulate on eight separate drives. Once I get all the data sorted I’ll be looking into more suitable method of data storage along with backup system.