Technically I don’t think there’s all that much to the robot legs themselves. Don’t get me wrong, they’re a very well devised and beautifully implemented piece of engineering, it’s just that in the recent past we’ve seen things that show us how much more advanced we are in this field, from military full-exoskeletons for reducing the load on field-personnel, to things like Petman.

Much more relevant than the product itself, is the fact that all of the necessary bureaucratic hurdles have been successfully surpassed for a product like this to come to the market. This is possibly a giant leap in terms of trusting technology to help us in a very physical, personal way. It is an external device, yes, but the principle of body augmentation is already clearly perceptible in it and it gets us just that little bit more comfortable with this kind of non-biological systems, so that when brain augmentation (as of yet in the far distant horizon) gets here we won’t have such a strong and immediate sense of rejection about it.

The plan is that companies wishing to test-drive their autonomous cars will have to file a detailed plan about what exactly they are testing, but once accepted, they may openly and lawfully set their machines lose on the streets of Nevada.

We all knew this was coming, but this was a surprisingly fast turn of events.

Have I said how I, for one, welcome our future robotic overlords?

The degree of control each quadrotor has over it’s position and trajectory is nothing short of amazing, as can be witnessed by the several demonstrations of handling a single one at the beginning of the video.

But it is the tight formation they keep and the way the change formations and even how they are perfectly able to maintain the figure-eight moving formation in the end of the video that allow us to appreciate just how developed these things are.

The future looks bright. And fun!

It is so cool to see the little robot wagging it’s tail to stabilize itself mid-air. And also, can you imagine how fast these things can go over rough terrain once they gain the possibility of jumping over ramp-like obstacles?

Nature has done it’s homework. It’s been doing it for millennia, actually, so are we (humans) bad students for copying from it?

It is not a commonly accepted fact that there is a real need for serious thought and debate over the subject of “synthetic” moral agents. Many people and institutions still regard this issue as something of an esoteric topic that the techies have dreamed up in their wildest dreams and not something that will ever impact society at large, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Still, there are a number of people who take this issue very seriously indeed and today we point you to an article about it: The Future of Moral Machines. In it the author, a self professed Singularity-sceptic (and co-author of a book on this very subject), makes the point that regardless of the Singularity issue, the fact remains that robots moving around in the physical space and interacting with humans are something that will inevitably become more and more common and that many of these machines will necessarily be making operational decisions that will impact humans in very serious (and potentially very dangerous) ways. It will, therefore, be necessary for us to provide these machines with ways to evaluate their actions in light of doing “good” or “bad” by us humans.

The machines, the article argues, will be autonomous, not in a human sense (they will not be self-aware or have freedom of will-in fact, they will have no will whatsoever), but they will be autonomous in the operational sense. This “engineers’ autonomy” will make for the absolute necessity of some kind of “functional morality” that tries to “make autonomous agents better at adjusting their actions to human norms“.

The article is somewhat long, but the viewpoints and arguments are very compelling and I urge you to read it in full. I just can’t resist quoting one final passage that I found particularly inspiring:

The different kinds of rigor provided by philosophers and engineers are both needed to inform the construction of machines that, when embedded in well-designed systems of human-machine interaction, produce morally reasonable decisions even in situations where Asimov’s laws would produce deadlock.

While I do not share the author’s skepticism towards the Singularity, I find the notion of a “functional morality” to be a very interesting and, really, very important one. Here is a topic into which we can (and I think we should) make headway today, regardless of what the future brings, because Singularity or no Singularity, one thing is certain (as the author posits): short of a cataclysmic event at a global scale, robots will be all around, and so we’d better make sure they understand our ways, our needs and our frailties so that they are able to deal with us without causing us harm. Wether they end up being conscious entities, or mere mindless tools, it behoves us, as their creators, to provide them with that knowledge.

Read the original article and the /. discussion.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know we’re more advanced now than we’ve ever been before and this is an exciting field which is seeing real progress on a daily basis, but we’re still so far…