6 ms·

Meat-Eating Furniture

93 points by iamwil 16y ago

kemiller 16y ago
Robots that get their energy from flesh. What could possibly go wrong? Can we teach them to regard eating humans as cannibalism?
ajmurmann 16y ago
I am sure the clock would get all the energy it needs if it were to use Soilent Green instead of flies.
jerf 16y ago
While this may superficially sound like a problem if they get too involved in an evolutionary arms race, I actually don't think this will be a problem. It is extremely unlikely that a robot that is powered on flesh will be able to outcompete robots that get their power much more efficiently and rapidly. No, the real danger is them deciding they don't need us, or worse, that we are actively in their way, (or worse that our neurons can more productively be used to do something else other than "be a human") not that they are going to digest us.
- roc 16y ago
  Humans have stuck with flesh long after it was strictly necessary in an evolutionary sense. So I wouldn't be at all comfortable assuming we needn't ever worry about robot taste over-riding necessity. Personally, I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why machine intelligence would naturally act in a way consistent with its underlying machinery in the first place. But even if we were to assume it would naturally act in such a way, I've also heard no convincing argument for why it wouldn't choose to act in ways counter to that nature, for entertainment, sport, variety or any reason of personal 'taste'. Further, I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why a group of such intelligences would all come to the same conclusions about such topics, even those as seemingly open-and-shut as "whether we should eat other thinking beings, despite a surfeit of better alternatives". Even if almost all robots decided against eating humans, humans would still have plenty to be concerned about, with regards to those who dissent. Even the dissenters have merely taken a dispassionate stance toward humans accidentally gathered in their metaphorical nets, in a "humans are to robots as dolphins are to humans" analogy.
  - Jach 16y ago
    Don't develop human-like minds, or prove the stability of a goal system under recursive self-improvement. (If you offer Gandhi a pill that he knows will make him want to kill people, he won't take it, because he doesn't want to want to kill people.) If you throw a bunch of crap together and somehow get a mind from it, it's most likely not going to be anything resembling human (and so you'd be right that not all AIs would reach the same conclusions). I'm not an AI researcher so I'll stop here, but you're assuming that many AGIs are going to even have a concept of "taste" or "dissent" let alone a preference for it.
    - jerf 16y ago
      Actually, that's why I carefully stuck to phrasing it in evolutionary terms. I have no idea what AIs may or may not arise, but if the situation has spun this far out of human control regardless of how there may very well be a "species" of robot that desires to eat humans, it won't last long against its robotic competition. Plus the other robotic competition probably eliminated the humans, anyhow.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Humans have stuck with flesh long after it was strictly necessary in an evolutionary sense. Sure, it's not a strictly necessity, but have you payed attention to how hard it is to be strictly vegan? Evolution isn't going to pick what's morally right, it's going to pick what works best.
    - hni 16y ago
      Not really hard imho. At least as long as you are living in a major European city, but I would assume North America/some other places should be similar. Have you actually tried?
    - Samuel_Michon 16y ago
      I think you're confusing veganism with vegetarianism. Vegetarians don't eat meat, which is doable. Vegans try not to consume or use any animal products at all, which is near impossible. For example: dairy, honey and chewing gum are out of the question, as well as the use of beeswax, leather and products tested on animals. Veganism is a recent, Western, movement. Vegetarianism has been around for millennia and is practiced by hundreds of millions around the world. In India alone, 40% of the population is vegetarian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_in_specific_countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_in_specific_count...
- gbelote 16y ago
  Your last point is very creepy, and something I've never considered before. I hope I never become a computer's computer.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
burgerbrain 16y ago
Those pieces of furniture are glorified fly and mousetraps (really really cool ones...), why is the author of this article so disturbed by them? Personally I would find the idea that my house has enough mice to keep my coffee-table well-fed far more disturbing than my coffee-table eating mice.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  I find it more disturbing that your coffee table needs energy at all.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Well, if you could somehow get more energy out of it then maybe you'd be able to get it to preform some other tasks. Of course there aren't many tasks a coffee-table might preform, and there certainly aren't (enough? D:) mice in my house to keep it fed, but the idea is sound enough. Perhaps some sort of fancy bird-feeder that eats squirrels...
    - krakensden 16y ago
      Now, that bird-feeder idea has a market. I know some people with bird feeders and a deep, uncompromising hatred of squirrels.
  - cgs1019 16y ago
    What if it were charging your laptop/phone a la power mat?
- Kadin 16y ago
  The coffeetable doesn't strike me as practical but I could see an insect-eating lamp being useful outside. You'd probably have the same issue as most "bug zappers" do, namely that they kill more beneficial insects than harmful/annoying ones, but perhaps it could be tuned to kill mosquitoes? A mosquito-killer that powered itself (and didn't require propane or CO2 or electricity, as most current ones do) would be pretty cool.
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Matrix!
sudhirc 16y ago
Killer tech for tropical countries where lamps are needed and flies are hated :)
julian37 16y ago
Reminiscent of the 2001 SlugBot: "A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity" http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/slugbot.htm http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/slugbot.htm http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156 http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/4715...
moomba 16y ago
I'm hoping they make one that eats humans. That would be a fine piece of furniture to put on my mantle. I wonder if you were to breed organisms, would they be able to produce a plentiful amount of energy for our electrical grids. I'm not necessarily talking about humans. It may make sense to breed dogs or rats, whatever gives the best bang for the buck.
- reeses 16y ago
  PG&E is...PEOPLE!
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  The best bang for buck is always plants. Trophic levels are typically ~10% efficient, meaning an herbivore that consumes 1 BTU per hour needs to eat 10 solar BTU per hour's worth of plants. The same generally holds as you go up trophic levels- which means 1,000 BTU of sunlight provides a 3rd trophic level predator with 1 BTU. Though, this is an ultimate efficiency answer. For short-term small-scale, herbivores/predators could be a better answer, because they gather energy from all over the place, so harvesting them is sort of like harvesting plant life from your entire block.
syaz1 16y ago
Self-sustaining pest control robots. No need to bother about their maintenance. Just let it loose and have a lot less pests.
markneub 16y ago
It's all fun and games until your armchair decides it wants a more realistic set of arms for itself.
wybo 16y ago
Reminds me of Blood Car, a film about oil running out, and somebody retrofitting his car to run on blood :) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780485/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780485/
deepGem 16y ago
I would love to have a cockroach eating table or a rat eating bed that can just search and gobble up these creatures and churn out some energy to light a few lamps. Or if we place such a device in the food storage warehouses, the rats there can provide energy to power an entire street :).
guynamedloren 16y ago
Maybe I'm a bit out of the loop here, but from a purely technological standpoint, was anybody else's world just flipped upside down? Prior to this article/video, I had absolutely no idea that biomass could be converted into useful and readily available energy, nor has the thought ever crossed my mind in even the faintest of ways. A life-like humanoid robot comes to mind, that flawlessly mimics human traits including breathing, speaking, and moving, and to top it all off, they don't have to roll back to their charging station at the end of the day, because they got all of the energy they needed for the next day while sitting next to you at the dinner table munching on some beef. Suddenly this all seems so very attainable.
- sesqu 16y ago
  Biomass is old hat. Wood, peat, ethanol, methane - plenty of energy comes from that stuff. However, I had never heard of non-plant biomass use before, so this is interesting indeed. The trouble with biomass is that we're not great at extracting the energy yet, so it's not good for energy transport. For the same reason, I don't think we'll be seeing taco-powered robots anytime soon - although vegetable oil and ethanol do show promise as a swap-in for petrol, and cars have been adapted for straight-up biomass in times of crisis. Here, you might be interested in this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/juan_enriquez_wants_to_grow_energy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/juan_enriquez_wants_to_gro...
radu_floricica 16y ago
I wonder if the "microbial fuel cell" they mention is actually any better then a normal battery pack of the same size. If it does't do any kind of waste disposal, I imagine it has a limited lifespan - so we have to ask if it is longer or shorter then the non-flesh-eating kind.

93 points by iamwil 16y ago

Robots that get their energy from flesh. What could possibly go wrong? Can we teach them to regard eating humans as cannibalism?

ajmurmann 16y ago

I am sure the clock would get all the energy it needs if it were to use Soilent Green instead of flies.

jerf 16y ago

While this may superficially sound like a problem if they get too involved in an evolutionary arms race, I actually don't think this will be a problem. It is extremely unlikely that a robot that is powered on flesh will be able to outcompete robots that get their power much more efficiently and rapidly. No, the real danger is them deciding they don't need us, or worse, that we are actively in their way, (or worse that our neurons can more productively be used to do something else other than "be a human") not that they are going to digest us.

roc 16y ago
Humans have stuck with flesh long after it was strictly necessary in an evolutionary sense. So I wouldn't be at all comfortable assuming we needn't ever worry about robot taste over-riding necessity. Personally, I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why machine intelligence would naturally act in a way consistent with its underlying machinery in the first place. But even if we were to assume it would naturally act in such a way, I've also heard no convincing argument for why it wouldn't choose to act in ways counter to that nature, for entertainment, sport, variety or any reason of personal 'taste'. Further, I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why a group of such intelligences would all come to the same conclusions about such topics, even those as seemingly open-and-shut as "whether we should eat other thinking beings, despite a surfeit of better alternatives". Even if almost all robots decided against eating humans, humans would still have plenty to be concerned about, with regards to those who dissent. Even the dissenters have merely taken a dispassionate stance toward humans accidentally gathered in their metaphorical nets, in a "humans are to robots as dolphins are to humans" analogy.
- Jach 16y ago
  Don't develop human-like minds, or prove the stability of a goal system under recursive self-improvement. (If you offer Gandhi a pill that he knows will make him want to kill people, he won't take it, because he doesn't want to want to kill people.) If you throw a bunch of crap together and somehow get a mind from it, it's most likely not going to be anything resembling human (and so you'd be right that not all AIs would reach the same conclusions). I'm not an AI researcher so I'll stop here, but you're assuming that many AGIs are going to even have a concept of "taste" or "dissent" let alone a preference for it.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Actually, that's why I carefully stuck to phrasing it in evolutionary terms. I have no idea what AIs may or may not arise, but if the situation has spun this far out of human control regardless of how there may very well be a "species" of robot that desires to eat humans, it won't last long against its robotic competition. Plus the other robotic competition probably eliminated the humans, anyhow.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Humans have stuck with flesh long after it was strictly necessary in an evolutionary sense. Sure, it's not a strictly necessity, but have you payed attention to how hard it is to be strictly vegan? Evolution isn't going to pick what's morally right, it's going to pick what works best.
  - hni 16y ago
    Not really hard imho. At least as long as you are living in a major European city, but I would assume North America/some other places should be similar. Have you actually tried?
  - Samuel_Michon 16y ago
    I think you're confusing veganism with vegetarianism. Vegetarians don't eat meat, which is doable. Vegans try not to consume or use any animal products at all, which is near impossible. For example: dairy, honey and chewing gum are out of the question, as well as the use of beeswax, leather and products tested on animals. Veganism is a recent, Western, movement. Vegetarianism has been around for millennia and is practiced by hundreds of millions around the world. In India alone, 40% of the population is vegetarian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_in_specific_countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_in_specific_count...
gbelote 16y ago
Your last point is very creepy, and something I've never considered before. I hope I never become a computer's computer.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

burgerbrain 16y ago

Those pieces of furniture are glorified fly and mousetraps (really really cool ones...), why is the author of this article so disturbed by them? Personally I would find the idea that my house has enough mice to keep my coffee-table well-fed far more disturbing than my coffee-table eating mice.

tomjen3 16y ago
I find it more disturbing that your coffee table needs energy at all.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Well, if you could somehow get more energy out of it then maybe you'd be able to get it to preform some other tasks. Of course there aren't many tasks a coffee-table might preform, and there certainly aren't (enough? D:) mice in my house to keep it fed, but the idea is sound enough. Perhaps some sort of fancy bird-feeder that eats squirrels...
  - krakensden 16y ago
    Now, that bird-feeder idea has a market. I know some people with bird feeders and a deep, uncompromising hatred of squirrels.
- cgs1019 16y ago
  What if it were charging your laptop/phone a la power mat?
Kadin 16y ago
The coffeetable doesn't strike me as practical but I could see an insect-eating lamp being useful outside. You'd probably have the same issue as most "bug zappers" do, namely that they kill more beneficial insects than harmful/annoying ones, but perhaps it could be tuned to kill mosquitoes? A mosquito-killer that powered itself (and didn't require propane or CO2 or electricity, as most current ones do) would be pretty cool.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago

Matrix!

sudhirc 16y ago

Killer tech for tropical countries where lamps are needed and flies are hated :)

julian37 16y ago

Reminiscent of the 2001 SlugBot: "A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity" http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/slugbot.htm http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/slugbot.htm http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47156 http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/4715...

moomba 16y ago

I'm hoping they make one that eats humans. That would be a fine piece of furniture to put on my mantle. I wonder if you were to breed organisms, would they be able to produce a plentiful amount of energy for our electrical grids. I'm not necessarily talking about humans. It may make sense to breed dogs or rats, whatever gives the best bang for the buck.

reeses 16y ago
PG&E is...PEOPLE!
sliverstorm 16y ago
The best bang for buck is always plants. Trophic levels are typically ~10% efficient, meaning an herbivore that consumes 1 BTU per hour needs to eat 10 solar BTU per hour's worth of plants. The same generally holds as you go up trophic levels- which means 1,000 BTU of sunlight provides a 3rd trophic level predator with 1 BTU. Though, this is an ultimate efficiency answer. For short-term small-scale, herbivores/predators could be a better answer, because they gather energy from all over the place, so harvesting them is sort of like harvesting plant life from your entire block.

syaz1 16y ago

Self-sustaining pest control robots. No need to bother about their maintenance. Just let it loose and have a lot less pests.

markneub 16y ago

It's all fun and games until your armchair decides it wants a more realistic set of arms for itself.

wybo 16y ago

Reminds me of Blood Car, a film about oil running out, and somebody retrofitting his car to run on blood :) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780485/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780485/

deepGem 16y ago

I would love to have a cockroach eating table or a rat eating bed that can just search and gobble up these creatures and churn out some energy to light a few lamps. Or if we place such a device in the food storage warehouses, the rats there can provide energy to power an entire street :).

guynamedloren 16y ago

Maybe I'm a bit out of the loop here, but from a purely technological standpoint, was anybody else's world just flipped upside down? Prior to this article/video, I had absolutely no idea that biomass could be converted into useful and readily available energy, nor has the thought ever crossed my mind in even the faintest of ways. A life-like humanoid robot comes to mind, that flawlessly mimics human traits including breathing, speaking, and moving, and to top it all off, they don't have to roll back to their charging station at the end of the day, because they got all of the energy they needed for the next day while sitting next to you at the dinner table munching on some beef. Suddenly this all seems so very attainable.

sesqu 16y ago
Biomass is old hat. Wood, peat, ethanol, methane - plenty of energy comes from that stuff. However, I had never heard of non-plant biomass use before, so this is interesting indeed. The trouble with biomass is that we're not great at extracting the energy yet, so it's not good for energy transport. For the same reason, I don't think we'll be seeing taco-powered robots anytime soon - although vegetable oil and ethanol do show promise as a swap-in for petrol, and cars have been adapted for straight-up biomass in times of crisis. Here, you might be interested in this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/juan_enriquez_wants_to_grow_energy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/juan_enriquez_wants_to_gro...

radu_floricica 16y ago

I wonder if the "microbial fuel cell" they mention is actually any better then a normal battery pack of the same size. If it does't do any kind of waste disposal, I imagine it has a limited lifespan - so we have to ask if it is longer or shorter then the non-flesh-eating kind.