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Archive for future

The Illusion of Life

February 12, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Illusion of Life

You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.

 

Carbon sequestration

February 9, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Carbon sequestration

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150205/ncomms7124/full/ncomms7124.html

This one kindof fascinates the hell outta me.  For a while there, the idea of carbon sequestration was a “brass ring” idea for the scientists I associate with.  Solve the problem, and your future (and the future of the planet, obviously) are secure.  But carbon is kindof a bitch.  It doesn’t like very many things, so finding effective and efficient ways to not only scrub carbon out of the atmosphere, but to store it so it doesn’t get BACK into the atmosphere, is not as easy a task as you might think.

The big magic trick for a while was iron-enrichment (many authors have worked with this idea in their fiction).  The theory (in very basic layman’s terms) was you seed patches of ocean with iron filings (which are freaking *everywhere* and the resultant algae/plankton bloom will consume carbon dioxide and make it into their tiny tiny skeletons.  Then, when they die off, their tiny bodies float to the seafloor, taking the carbon with them and storing it away.

It works, after a fashion (it’s hard to nail down just how well without more formalized testing) but there are not only potential risks, but there is accountability as well.  Dumping shiploads of iron filings out into international waters means, if something goes wrong (say the bloom runs out of control, washes up on an island and kills their economy by suffocating the ocean ecosystem offshore) then with whom does the responsibility lie.  And does it matter (because deep pockets cannot magically repair dead fisheries, that takes lots of time).

So this new solution works around that.  Rather than the uncertainty of tweaking with biological processes, we can go straight to the source.  These beads can be installed in the sources of man-made atmospheric carbon, meaning it can be tracked and accounted for, controlled and measured.

If this could be done for a reasonable (consumer-level) cost, it could simply be a game changer, not only for factory-level pollution, but in developing countries (or in some cases, developed countries) where coal stoves are used for warmth in households, or diesel engines drive land and sea transport (okay, yes, to use it on a train might require some extra engineering, this is true).

As always, the link on top will take you to the paper in question so you can see for yourself (rather than just relying on my commentary)

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