John Nash Vindicated?

Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) reports some unsettling details on the MiniDuke malware:

(...) If the target system meets the pre-defined requirements, the malware will use Twitter (unbeknownst to the user) and start looking for specific tweets from pre-made accounts. These accounts were created by MiniDuke’s Command and Control (C2) operators and the tweets maintain specific tags labeling encrypted URLs for the backdoors.

Once the infected system locates the C2, it receives encrypted backdoors that are obfuscated within GIF files and disguised as pictures that appear on a victim’s machine.

Once they are downloaded to the machine, they can fetch a larger backdoor which carries out the cyberespionage activities, through functions such as copy file, move file, remove file, make directory, kill process and of course, download and execute new malware and lateral movement tools.

An espionage system that talks to his masters via hidden messages in public media? I guess we all owe Mr. Nash an apology then...

Straight out of a Jetsons episode, the future of robotic manufacture

With its vaguely humanoid frame and cartoonish screen-drawn eyes, Baxter looks like an early-20th century artist's impression of a robot. And indeed, in many ways it is closer from those old ideals of pervasive robotics than the practical restrictions we have come to expect from industrial robots. Will Knight writes:

Baxter is the first of a new generation of smarter, more adaptive industrial robots. Conventional industrial robots are expensive to program, incapable of handling even small deviations in their environment, and so dangerous that they have to be physically separated from human workers by cages. (...) Baxter, however, can be programmed more easily than a Tivo and can deftly respond to a toppled-over part or shifted table. And it is so safe that Baxter’s developer, Rethink Robotics, which loaned Baxter to Vanguard Plastics, believes it can work seamlessly alongside its human coworkers.

Law and Science at The Edge of Human

Brookings has a very nice article on the legal (but more inherently, cultural) challenges scientific progress is likely to bring in the coming years, as technologies such as Computational Intelligence and Genetic Engineering further blur the line between human and non-human.

Too often we focus entirely on the physical hazards poised by emerging technologies – particularly, what kind of beings it might spawn, and what their disposition towards mankind it would be. However, the social impact of their very existence may be just as disrupting as anything these theoretical new lifeforms might be able to do.

In the typical Hollywood scenario, artificial beings – say, genetically enhanced mice – escape laboratory confinement and turn against humanity. However, in the real world, were a lab rat to display anything remotely resembling human-level cognition, it wouldn't even need try to escape: animal rights activists would be at the gates faster than you can spell "Sea Shepherd".

Blood and Oil

Penny Arcade has got a new run on Automata, their alternate Asimovian New York setting, going from last Friday up to next Monday: Blood and Oil. It's a guest piece, written and drawn respectively by Gary Whitta and Ben Caldwell.

I'm personally very glad the guys chose to give Automata another shot, even if they're outsourcing the actual work to a guest duo. The idea of a Prohibition-era Noir set in a world where sentient robots were outlawed instead of alcohol is downright bizarre – and I mean this as sincere appraisal.

The original Automata run started as a one-page "concept comic", which was later given continuation into a more complete serial. Reading it isn't really necessary to understand Blood and Oil – but I certainly recommend you do.

A Dream of A Thousand Computers

A very provocative short story by George Dyson:

ENGINEERS' DREAMS
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08/dysong08_index.html

There exists an horror genre called lovecraftian, in honor of its precursor H.P. Lovecraft. Unlike the more widespread gore horror – of films such as Friday 13th, which try to scare people by splattering guts all over the screen – lovecraftian horror usually revolves around a "sleeping giant" (a being of immense power, either real or imaginary) and the precariousness of the situation that prevents it from awakening and wiping us out, or at least completely transform our lives.

That Google's computer grid can already be used as a "sleeping giant" in a lovecraftian horror tale is testimony to its success.

Often reality is a little stranger than fiction, and there are in fact those who expect a conscious intelligence to spontaneously emerge from Google's grid. But even without taking those people seriously, it is undeniable that Google has already contributed with at least one important advance: concrete evidence that, with enough input data and computing power, AI's brute-force algorithms can approximate, and even compete with, human-level intellectual skills. The required scale may be demotivating, at least for the time being – but our computers' performance continues to advance in a quadratic scale, and can even begin to increase in an exponential scale when quantum computers arrive (which may take less than expected).

At the same time, Artificial Intelligence is moving away from its early digital approach, focused on discrete Boolean logic circuits, and towards something closer to the analog world, dominated by continuous domains and probability distributions. Not that it's anything new (ADALINE's and Bayesian classifiers have been around for decades), but the recent advances in our understanding of the human brain's inner workings, combined with success stories such as the Urban Challenge, are breathing new life into those research lines.

Very interesting things will indeed happen in the time of our lives.

Androids - AI + Telepresence = Sleep Dealer

Blade Runner's vision – a world built upon the work of disposable humanoids, designed to serve "real" people for a few years and then die – may never come true, but the combination of technological progress and social inequality remains a fertile source of inspiration for distopic science fiction works. The most recent goes by the title of Sleep Dealer, and has earned an article on Wired.

The film explores some far away technologies (such as the "mental blog" where people post their memories, read directly from their brains), but the movie's main speculation – unqualified workers remote-controlling robots – may be closer to reality than we would like. After all, between the progress of mechatronics and AI's comparative stagnation, it is quite possible that we'll soon have a highly functional android body, but no mind to animate it. And even if Jeff Hawkins is on the right track, there may still be a gap of some years during which the richer nations, with their shrinking economically active populations and ever-growing surplus capital, adopt mass-scale telepresence as an alternative to immigration – at least until synthetic substitutes become available for minds as well as bodies.

If this scenario seems unlikely to you, know it is already real – even if, for the time being at least, only in the Internet. Services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk essentially allow on-demand creation of sweatshops, while in the virtual worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online RPG's (MMORPG's) "gold farms" contract players to gather valuable game items (money, weapons, items) and resell them to other (presumably wealthier and lazier) players.

Twenty years on, the story of Rick Deckard and his artificial antagonists remains more of a metaphor than scientific speculation. Node worker's Memo world, on the other hand, is much closer to our reach, both in technical and social terms – and is only slightly less gloomy. What does this say about our future, and our present?