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Money can buy privacy… and surveillance

CCTV camerasThe world may be becoming something of a panopticon, but you can always buy yourself a safe haven… provided you’ve got the necessary cash, of course. Russian billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich isn’t feeling the credit crunch, it seems, as one of the latest additions to his private “yacht” (which looks bigger than most commercial passenger ferries, to be honest) is a laser-screening system for preventing sneaky photography:

The 557-foot boat Eclipse, the price tag of which has almost doubled since original plans were drawn to almost $1.2 billion, set sail this week with a slew of show-off features, from two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, to a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows to combat piracy.

It might not seem like somebody with such ostentatious tastes would crave privacy, but along with these expensive toys, Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi “shield”. Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph. According to the Times, these don’t run all the time, so friends and guests should still be able to grab snaps. Instead, they will be activated when guards spot the scourge of professional photography, paparazzi, loitering nearby.

Now, you’ll not see me shedding any tears for the poor paparazzi, but that’s some potentially nasty technology right there. For example, the UK government has become obsessively paranoid about photography of late – where might they decide to install something similar? Y’know, to prevent terrorism?

Somewhat further down the financial scale (and hence more accessible to the anxious middle classes), technologies are now available to surveil your own children at all times – like a GPS-enabled wristwatch that will plot your youngster’s location on Google Maps [via SlashDot]:

The watch, which is designed in bright colours to appeal to children, can be tightly fastened to a child’s wrist and sends an alert if forcibly removed.

Parents can see the location of their child on Google maps by clicking ‘where r you’ on a secure website or texting ‘wru’ to a special number. Safe zones can also be programmed with parents being alerted if their child strays outside this zone.

The makers of the num8 watch claim it gives peace of mind to parents and makes children more independent but critics say tagging children like this is a step too far in paranoia about child safety.

File me under the latter bracket, please – although I suppose tracking your kids via GPS is slightly preferable to keeping them shut in the house all the time in response to tabloid-inflated fears about predators. Whichever smart and exploitative bugger manages to mash up this technology with an overlay map of suspected paedophiles will be raking in the money… probably enough to buy a photo-screened yacht. [image by killbox]

Which highlights the real problem, I think – the supposed security of real-time surveillance, and the immunity to it, are both functions of affluence.  Will the gap between rich and poor become increasingly defined by the degree to which one can chose one’s place in the panopticon?

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Karl Schroeder: one-way tickets to Mars are a cost issue, not a risk issue

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exploding rocketWe’ve mentioned the one-way option for Mars missions here a few times recently, the latest being in response to the Krauss op-ed in the New York Times. Earning himself his second Futurismic mention in as many days, Karl Schroeder tears down the “poisonous meme” that claims the journey to Mars is too dangerous – the reality is that it’s too expensive.

The objections all sound reasonable:  too much radiation!  Too far away!  Zero gravity is too debilitating!  Too expensive!

All of these objections are true, while at the same time they’re all wildly wrong, and largely for the same reasons.  In fact they’re all true only if getting from Earth to orbit remains as expensive as it is now.

Consider the seemingly insurmountable problem of radiation that Krauss complains of in his piece.  What’s the solution to radiation?  Shielding.  Is shielding a spacecraft impossible, or even difficult?  No, actually it’s easy.  Two meters of water around the crew cabin are enough to solve the problem of radiation in the inner solar system.  The problem is not the shielding; it’s the cost of shipping the water up to orbit that is the problem.

Ditto for, oh, let’s say zero gravity.  No astronaut should ever have to put up with zero gravity for more than a day or two at a time; the simple solution to the debilitating effects of freefall is to spin the spacecraft.  To do it in a manner comfortable to to the astronauts, you need a long boom arm, which might be heavy and awkward to lift from Earth.  The point is, the solution is easy.

Too far away?  If a space voyage is going to take months or years, there are two simple solutions:  send the ship faster, by using more propellant; or bring along more supplies.  Both of these solutions are primarily constrained by the cost of bringing stuff up from Earth.

That cost is, of course, the cost of old-school 1960s vintage chemical rocketry – $10,000 for every kilogram of stuff you want to get into orbit. Schroeder lists a number of alternatives, some of which you’ll have read about here or elsewhere: magnetic accelerators, laser propulsion launchers and so on… all with much lower to-orbit costs, all within the reach of NASA budgets – if they abandoned rocketry.

The question stands, though: given that NASA is well aware of its own budgetary problems, why is it clinging to such dated and inefficient methods? Is it for the prestige, the showiness, the rocket’s red glare? (You have to admit, a Space Shuttle launch is pretty impressive to watch… when it works.) [image by jurvetson]

But back to Schroeder:

Space is only a costly and dangerous destination if you insist on using 1960s technology to reach it.  Once NASA–or more likely the private sector–finally abandons that route, what was impossible will become easy.  —I only fear that the meme of space’s inaccessibility will prevent us from ever building the launch infrastructure that will prove it wrong; at this point, the meme looks like it’s turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That would be a sad thing – to turn our backs on space, not because it was genuinely impossible, but because we’d allowed ourselves to be convinced that it was.

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Computers can now lip-read…

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Ronald Reagan. Read his lips.… so watch what you say when the webcam’s plugged in, eh?

A research team from the School of Computing Sciences at UEA compared the performance of a machine-based lip-reading system with that of 19 human lip-readers. They found that the automated system significantly outperformed the human lip-readers – scoring a recognition rate of 80 per cent, compared with only 32 per cent for human viewers on the same task.

Furthermore, they found that machines are able to exploit very simplistic features that represent only the shape of the face, whereas human lip-readers require full video of people speaking.

The study also showed that rather than the traditional approach to lip-reading training, in which viewers are taught to spot key lip-shapes from static (often drawn) images, the dynamics and the full appearance of speech gestures are very important.

Using a new video-based training system, viewers with very limited training significantly improved their ability to lip-read monosyllabic words, which in itself is a very difficult task. It is hoped this research might lead to novel methods of lip-reading training for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Might this be a short-cut around the persistent problem of poor voice-recognition software? Why analyse the sound is you can do a better job by watching the face producing it? [via Technovelgy; image by i_forbes, chosen for an old yet oddly topical cultural reference that I suspect no one under 25 is likely to get]

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The sexbots are coming

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EveR-3 androidWould you have sex with a robot? My money would be on most of you answering with a firm and assertive “no”… but David Levy thinks otherwise.

Levy just won this year’s Loebner Prize – the Turing Test contest for chat-bots, which he last won back in 1997. But writing convincing chatbots isn’t Levy’s main fascination. For him, convincing artificial intelligences are just one of the planks that will build the platform for robot companions – robots that will act as friends or pets, as full-time carers, and – perhaps – as lovers. From an interview at The Guardian:

“I think the sex robot will happen fairly soon because the bottom is dropping out of the adult entertainment market, because there’s so much sex available for nothing on the internet,” says Levy. “I think the market was worth something like $12bn a year, and they aren’t going to want to lose all their income, and this seems to me an obvious direction to go. The market must be vast, if you think of the number of vibrators that sell to women. I’m sure a male sex doll with a vibrating penis will sell better than sex dolls today. I’ll be surprised if it’s more than another three years or so before we see more advanced sex dolls with more electronics and electromechanics.

“There will be a huge amount of publicity when products like this hit the market. As soon as the media starts writing about ‘My fantastic weekend with a sex doll’, it will be like the iPhone all over again, but the queues will be longer.

Last year I reviewed Levy’s book Love & Sex With Robots for Vector, the critical journal of the BSFA, and went on the record as being skeptical of his claims – though I had to justify my skepticism by recourse to my emotional responses as much as to my reason. As sensationalist as his claims may sound, Levy has done a lot of research into not only robots and artificial intelligence but also the aspects of human psychology and emotion that might govern our willingness to enter into complex relationships with machines; my doubts rest in the economic unlikelihood of ubiquitous robots of the type Levy describes, rather than human unwillingness to take them to the bedroom. [image by destione]

Some people, of course, find the notion of sex with robots to be ideologically repugnant – take, for example, this rather lumpy (and unintentionally hilarious) piece of speculative writing from a Christian technophobe/creationist website [via Pharyngula]:

Initially, all FACA had been designed as young adult versions of their human counterparts. However, emboldened by their sweeping victories in the courts, FACA were soon designed as young girls and boys, and even animals, to meet every possible sexual perversion of their intended markets. Even those men who bought the adult FACA versions found their attitudes changing, since there were no consequences to anything they did with their FACA. After all, it didn’t matter if you swore at your FACA or spoke harshly to it, since it always did exactly what you wanted. Over time, men who owned FACA became more and more rude to their human counterparts as the degradation of society accelerated. Men who owned a FACA disdained the company of real women, with all their incessant demands and mood swings. The sexual revolution was complete and we were all the victims.

Cringing techno-fear aside, some of the concerns there are legitimate – but Levy’s book has meticulously researched answers for them all, and while I wouldn’t call myself a convert I’d strongly recommend it as a worthwhile read for any serious science fiction reader (or writer).

Would you have sex with an android – even if only just once, to see what it was like? If not, why not?

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Ultracapacitors: the game-changer for renewable energy sources?

Sf author Karl Schroeder points us to a development that may redraw the map for renewable energy use. EEStor, long suspected by some to be the sort of vapourware company that spends a few years making big promises before dissolving in a puff of evaporating venture capital, are believed to have applied for certification of their ultracapacitor technology.

There’s a Wikipedia page on ultracapacitors, which have existed for some time in smaller form, but here’s Schroeder’s summary:

… the ultimate in electricity-storage technology:  a device capable of running your car for hundreds of miles on one charge, and of recharging in under five minutes.  A device that is not a battery, and hence never wears out.  A technology that would make intermittent power generation sources such as windmills directly competitive with baseload generation sources such as coal.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? As pointed out by Schroeder, there’s a great deal of justifiable skepticism around the technology in general and the EEStor news in particular – snake-oil is still a thriving business in the information age, after all. But signs suggest we’ll find out the truth behind the speculation pretty soon… and if we dare to hope that this is the real thing, perhaps we’re about to see what Schroeder calls “a truly disruptive change […] nothing less than the first nail in the coffin of the fossil fuel age.”

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