Do you wish you had a Robot? [DataDownload]

8 min readFeb 13, 2021

Do you wish you had a Robot? [DataDownload] A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Some days I wish I had a robot. Then, I ask Alexa if she will help me buy a Robot, and she suggests a $12 Design and Drill Robot (delivery by tomorrow). But I’m thinking more like the robot from Lost In Space.

Meanwhile — this week’s newsletter has lots of robots. And they’re building themselves! Meanwhile, facial recognition has us losing control of our faces. That can’t be good. And machines are inventing new math conjectures. If you want to see some great robots, check out the Boston Dynamics video we’ve included.

In our year-long Work From Home world, is WFH eroding trust? Harvard Business Review suggests trust is in crisis. A bunch of startups are using Adobe’s strengths against itself. A great read from a Greylock investor.

Which brings me back to how we began. I want a home robot that will get me a cup of coffee and fold laundry. How long do you think I’ll have to wait?

Meanwhile, ping me with your ideas, feedback, or thoughts for the year ahead for The Media Lab. Steve@NYCMediaLab.org

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read We’re Teaching Robots to Evolve Autonomously — So They Can Adapt to Life Alone on Distant Planets

Emma Hart, Chair in Natural Computation at Edinburgh Napier University, builds robots that assemble themselves, then continue to evolve based on the conditions in their environment. These early autonomous robots are precursors to robot ecosystems that will one day occupy remote planets, developing conditions favorable for human explorers.

Figuring out how to make robots that can adapt to such hostile environments without human supervision is “an impossible brainteaser,” says Hart. We can virtually model evolution’s process in as little as minutes on powerful systems, but dynamically moving physical objects still remains a challenge even for advanced robots.

Hart is part of the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project, which aims to create an environment where “robots will be ‘born’ through the use of 3D manufacturing… [and use a] new kind of hybrid hardware-software evolutionary architecture for design. That means that every physical robot has a digital clone. Physical robots are performance-tested in real-world environments, while their digital clones enter a software programme, where they undergo rapid simulated evolution.”

The Conversation / 5 min read Read More This Is How We Lost Control of Our Faces

As facial recognition datasets grew in size over the years, they grew messier. Researchers scraping millions of images off the web “gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent,” while datasets amassed photos with racist and sexist labels. Mozilla fellow Deborah Raji says researchers used to be “extremely cautious about collecting, documenting, and verifying face data” in the early days. “Now…. all of that has been abandoned.”

Raji and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of the US Congress on algorithmic accountability, studied 130 facial recognition datasets over 43 years, such as the DoD’s $6.5M project to compile a 14k-image dataset by 1996, and the 2007 Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset, where researchers began downloading images directly from search engines without consent.

Raji: “The data requirement forces you to collect incredibly sensitive information about, at minimum, tens of thousands of people. It forces you to violate their privacy. That in itself is a basis of harm. And then we’re hoarding all this information that you can’t control to build something that likely will function in ways you can’t even predict.”

MIT Technology Review / 5 min read

A group of researchers from the Technion in Israel and Google in Tel Aviv have created the Ramanujan Machine, named after mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Machine can generate original mathematical conjectures — an ode to the real-life Ramanujan’s prolific work. The researchers see the Machine as a way to generate food for thought: “the entire discipline of mathematics can be broken down into two processes, crudely speaking: conjecturing things and proving things. Given more conjectures, there is more grist for the mill of the mathematical mind, more for mathematicians to prove and explain.”

“The researchers’ system is not, however, a universal mathematics machine. Rather, it conjectures formulas for how to compute the value of specific numbers called universal constants. The most famous of such constants, pi, gives the ratio between a circle’s circumference and diameter. Pi can be called universal because it shows up all across mathematics, and constant because it maintains the same value for every circle, no matter the size.”

VICE / 4 min read Read More WFH Is Corroding Our Trust in Each Other

According to the Harvard Business Review, there is a crisis of trust. While early on in the pandemic heroic stories of seemingly overnight WFH transformations abounded, reports of electronic monitoring and questioning employee work habits only rose. Sneek, whose platform takes employee webcam pics at regular intervals, reported a five-fold increase in customers during the pandemic. Misunderstanding and miscommunication seem to be more prevalent over screens.

Authors Mark Mortensen and Heidi Gardner suggest that monitoring is not the answer: “First, it never works. Any manager who thinks they can know everything their remote employees are doing is fooling themselves…. The better approach is to leave the space alone, but reduce the likelihood that someone will take advantage of it (and you). This doesn’t mean trusting blindly, but rather relying on the science of trust to build it in the least risky way possible.”

HBR / 10 min read Read More How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time

How are Figma, Sketch, and Canva thriving against a behemoth like Adobe? In his deep dive, former Greylock Partners investor Kevin Kwok says these companies have “distinct atomic concepts’’ that turn Adobe’s advantages — like a large existing userbase and ingrained products — into weaknesses by capturing new types of users and use cases during market transitions.

Photoshop, for example, was built for editing images. But users designing digital products — digital ads, social media content, entire websites — needed tools that were more in tune with the end result: vectors rather than raster graphics, and team-level collaboration on products that eventually morphed into complex web products.

While Adobe has captured many of these use cases, it hasn’t captured them all. “Sketch, like Illustrator, is vector based. But is designed for building digital products which means things like operating at a project level.” Meanwhile, Figma “builds on Sketch’s approach, but also includes a greater focus on… the entire collaborative process as the relevant scope…. [and] Canva is similar to Photoshop and Illustrator, but its users aren’t designers who care about low level tools.”

kwokchain / 28 min read

“Boston Dynamics are leading the development of a new generation of robots and how their 2021 unfolds may well have a big influence on the future of robotics. As we transition from narrowly capable industrial robots, to generally capable and agile robots, a new platform that could shape the future of mobility emerges.”

Exa Cognition (YouTube) / 13 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Building A Quantum Computer with Ligh‪t‬

For all the explainers out there on how quantum systems work, it’s still a byzantine subject, especially with competing architectures like trapped-ion qubit and superconducting qubit systems gaining momentum. In a recent Exponential View podcast, Azeem Azhar interviewed Jeremy O’Brien, CEO at PsiQuantum, which has received over $500M in funding to date and relies on a different approach than trapped ions or superconducting circuits — photons on a chip.

O’Brien covers topics like the distinction between quantum and classical computers, particle entanglement, and the various approaches to creating a quantum computer.

‎Apple Podcasts / 50 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders — David Rogier, Founder at MasterClass
Date: February 17, 7:30PM-8:20PM EST
Growing up, Rogier loved learning but struggled in school. Determined to reinvent the traditional learning model, he created MasterClass in 2015. Register Here.

Free Event: A New Quest — The Future of Gaming
Date: February 18, 2PM EST
Join the Verizon 5G Lab as they explore how cloud streaming, remote play, and multiplayer game formats are revolutionizing the gaming experience, and the role that 5G will play in the future of immersive gaming. Register Here. A Deeper Look ‘A Managerial Mephistopheles’: Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos

Amazon doesn’t just occupy our shopping carts — it’s the backbone of the internet. PBS, which put out the highly critical Amazon Empire: the Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos, runs on AWS. So do the systems of various intelligence agencies, and of enormous corporations like GE and Unilever. Its acquisitions and announcements move billions on exchanges. What are we to make of this total occupation? In a lengthy essay, author Mark O’Connell attempts to answer the question, in part by reading through Bezos’ collected writings (which actually exist in book form).

The grand end-goal for the former Amazon CEO is to save Earth by getting humans to colonize the solar system. This will be accomplished, of course, with the help of his rocket company Blue Origin, which he injects $1B into annually. As Fortune journalist Brian Dumaine wrote in Bezonomics, “he wants to make Earth a residential and light industrial zone and move all the mining and heavy industry to space.”

But O’Connell doesn’t see what Bezos and Amazon have done as radically new — in fact, he sees many of the company’s products and innovations as somewhat banal. “It’s not that Bezos is doing any one thing that no one had thought to do before: it’s that he’s doing it faster, more efficiently, and at unprecedented scale. His achievement, in this sense, can be seen as one not one of quality but of quantity.”

The Guardian / 31 min read