Arjen | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exciting and interesting to think about – many Science Fiction writers have explored the subject, and lots of movies exist.

Author Ian M. Banks came up with The Culture, a symbiotic society of artificial intelligences (Minds and drones), humanoids and other alien species who all share equal status. Overall that works out well. If you’re looking for something new to read, check out those books! There are a lot of fantastic ideas in there.

But there are also many other stories about how AI can look good initially and then go terribly wrong. Worth a thought as well… to phrase it in my own words (and I see this in my work): people in tech can sometimes go a tad arrogant about the abilities of technology, and the risks (from little bugs to huge disasters).

See also the blog at the Washington Post, Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’

Tesla Motors / SpaceX chief Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

When asked whether his words meant we shouldn’t expect to see Hal 9000 installed on a rocket to Mars, Musk warned that the most dangerous iterations of man-made AI would make the 2001 computer look like “a puppy dog.”

To explain to the youngsters… HAL 9000 is a computer in “2001, A Space Odyssee“, a famous movie by Stanley Kubrick. It was made in the late 1960s. You can find it in good video stores, and it’s definitely worth watching. It’s perhaps a bit slow-going compared to recent movies, but deal with it. Remember that when this was made, humanity hadn’t set foot on the moon yet, Unix and C hadn’t been invented yet, the Internet was a handful of university computers and no web, and there were no mobile phones or any computers in homes. Most households didn’t yet have colour television, many didn’t have television at all. Yet 2001 shows, for instance, tablet computers… pretty slick.

Superfluid Helium – Zero Viscocity

Science is often surprising. Basic stuff runs on fairly simple “rules”, but the simple rules don’t cover everything – so when you see stuff that doesn’t abide by the simple rules, you can’t just ignore or dismiss what you see. To me, this is awesome rather than scary. It makes science extra cool.

We generally regard substances as having three possible states: solid, liquid, gas. It’s a simple rule of thumb (rather than a rule) and works well for our everyday environment. At room temperature, many things are always solid to us, and many things are always gas. In the video below, helium shows us some extra quirks when it is made particularly cold.

So how about those simple rules or “rules of thumb”. Well, they are a simplified version of the full picture – and thus cover many cases, but not all. Newtonian physics work really well for the world around us, but not when looking at really big stuff (we need general and special relativity for that) or really small stuff (quantum physics).

In Australia, we are taught “look right” first when crossing the road. In The Netherlands, where I was born, I was taught “look left” first. This is pretty clear for an example: in the Netherlands cars drive on the right hand side of the road, while in Australia they drive on the left. But we don’t learn “look towards the side where the cars normally come from” as that’s way longer, and actually problematic: if you don’t remember, and there are no cars immediately visible, does that mean there can’t just be a car about to race around the corner towards you?
Of course, the full rule is (for Australia): “look right, left, right” and that actually covers various eventualities.
Nevertheless, I was once at a training course in London (UK) and had to save fellow students from Brazil from oncoming traffic several times (by giving them a shove backwards as they started to cross), as they were not used to cars coming from the right. Blind habits can be dangerous…..

LibreOffice Code Quality

Simon Phipps has written an article for InfoWorld about the latest code defect review of LibreOffice by Coverity.

Coverity has tools to check computer program code for many faults. These tools are offered commercially (and thus used by vendors of proprietary software) but they are also specifically made available for Open Source projects. Every once in a while a report is published on this effort, and that is most useful.

As it turns out, LibreOffice has vastly improved the code quality since it started its path about 4 years ago, now featuring one of the lowest fault rates of any large program/suite. OpenOffice, the codebase from which it started, had many features but also plenty of bugs. The LibreOffice project has clearly taken that lesson and done its homework. Naturally, being an open source project, it’s not just one small group of people at one organisation working on this, but many people globally.

As Simon writes:

While an open source license on code is no automatic guarantee of quality, by its nature it allows evaluation of quality and encourages collaborative efforts toward improvement.

LibreOffice is not Microsoft Office. It uses a different approach in many aspects of its user interface. But, by and large, provides very similar functionality. It’s probably safe to say that the user interface differences between LbreOffice and MSOffice are smaller than the differences between two MSOffice versions. Each takes some getting used to, but it’s often not a drama.

And LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents. I prefer LibreOffice, because using it does not require either me or anyone else to buy licenses for a particular version of a particular product – because we do know that nasty things often happen when opening a document, spreadsheet or presentation on a different version.

For education, it is very important to have open formats and free tools available – it enables everybody to access the technology. Not just at schools, but also in the home and beyond. Documents get shared, so it’s all tied together.

LibreOffice is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux – you can download it from http://www.libreoffice.org/ although if you run Linux it’s probably already installed and you may just have been using it as your regular office suite already!

Power of Optics

Let students set up something like this in a classroom, just with the gear that’s around. You’ll be amazed, and what an awesome learning experience. Let us be amazed too: send us a link to your video!

STEM in USA

See what our friends at STEM Center USA are up to! The gang there have developed awesome programs for schools using Robotics, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, as well as Lego.

Great stuff.

3D printed custom vertebra

Of course 3D printing is cool and funky. But that’s actually just a bonus that helps it get more attention and makes it easier to talk about.

One other great thing is that with 3D printing now, one-offs – aka printing just one copy of a particular design – has become affordable. Previously, only a few research and commercial facilities here and there had a 3D printer, and using it was both restricted and expensive.

Example: Surgeons have implanted an artificial, 3D-printed vertebra into a 12 year-old patient to replace the bone he lost to cancer (article @ sciencealert.com.au)

“Minghao had been lying in the orthopaedics ward of the hospital for more than two months. He could barely stand up for more than a few minutes at a time due to the damage caused by a tumour growing in his neck. In the past, patients with this condition would have received a piece of standardised, hollow titanium tube as an implant, but the new technique involving 3D-printing technology offers them a much greater customisation and a speedier, more comfortable recovery.”

Science and smart (cheaper but good quality!) innovation can do a lot of good. We can imagine how this operation will make a world of difference to that 12 year-old. We wish him all the best and a speedy recovery with his new 3D printed vertebra!