October 23, 2016
Your Score Is Your Life
July 12, 2014
Robots Reach The Clouds
Bloomberg Businessweek reports how robotic activities are being stored in the cloud and are then accessible to other robots to learn from and repeat as necessary.
The "cloud servers essentially [are] a shared brain" where memories and experiences are uploaded and accessed by other robots with a need to know the same thing.
The cloud is the means of transfer learning from one robot to the other.
It serves like a master neural network where the Internet provides the how-to for everything from serving juice to patients in a hospital to functioning as autonomous warbots in battle.
Like the Borg on Star Trek with a collective brain, the cloud may become the mastermind for everything from day-to-day functioning to taking over the species of the universe.
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Robots Reach The Clouds
April 24, 2011
Brain Sharing is Eye Opening
Brain Sharing is Eye Opening
March 1, 2009
Cybots to the Rescue
In the Star Trek series Voyager, the (cyb)Borg wants to assimilate everyone (literally every species and they are given numbers to keep track of them) throughout the galaxies into their collective. They are an existential threat to humankind. And it makes for some great science fiction entertainment.
In real life though, the cybots are coming not to harm, but to help people.
Government Computer News, 23 February 2009, reports that Oak Ridge National Lab is working on developing cybots (software robots) to defend us in cyberspace.
Cybots are “intelligent enough to cooperate with one another to monitor and defend the largest networks.”
What makes cybots more effective than the software and hardware security we have today?
“Instead of independent devices doing a single task and reporting to a central console, the cybots would collaborate to accomplish their missions.”
The end state is a virtual cybot army deployed so those seeking to do us harm in cyber-warfare will themselves be the ones for whom “resistance is futile”.
Could cybots end up like the the Cylones in Battlestar Galactica or the machines in Terminator that turn on humans?
The Cybots have a programmed mission such as “network monitoring and discovery, intrusion detection, and data management.” So the hope is that they stay true to those things.
However, to me it seems completely plausible that just as cybots can be developed for defensive capabilities, they can also be programmed for offensive cyber warfare. And if they can be used offensively, then we can end up on the wrong side of the cybots someday.
Where does this leave us?
It seems like cyberspace is about to get a whole lot more complicated and dangerous—with not only human cyber-criminals and –warriors, but also cyber robots that can potentially wreak Internet havoc.
In terms of planning for future IT security, we need to stay technologically on the cutting edge so that we stay ahead of our adversaries as well as in constant control of the new defensive and offensive cyber-weapons that we are developing.
Cybots to the Rescue