by Antonio Damasio
Pantheon Books

News media are gripped by AI panic, the fear that AI agents will go rogue and inflict indescribable horrors upon mankind. As AI policy becomes increasingly politicized, the punditocracy seems to be in no mood to air issues calmly and deliberately. Voices of reason can be found, but most are relegated to the realm of books… which means their thinking is inaccessible to the vast majority of Americans who imbibe their information from the likes of TikTok and CNN. Let’s face it, fear sells.

One voice of non-politicized sanity is Antonio Damasio, a professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His long-abiding interest has been the phenomenon of consciousness — more specifically, consciousness as it exists in the “natural” world of biological creatures, not in the realm of artificial intelligence. In his most recent book, “Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness,” he adds critical context to the AI debate by arguing that consciousness — or sentience, or self-aware intelligence — is not a purely cognitive phenomenon, as many treat it, but is an intrinsically biological phenomenon.

The implication of Damasio’s work, as I interpret it, is that Artificial Intelligence, even human-like General Intelligence, will never reach self-aware consciousness. AI eventually will become supremely adept at mimicking consciousness but will not — cannot — achieve it. AI agents may “go rogue” because of the failure of human designers to build appropriate safeguards, but they will not be acting out of a conscious volition of their own.

Damasio never says this explicitly (and he may or may not agree with my extrapolation of his arguments), but he comes close. Consciousness, he argues, arises from feelings. Robots and AI agents don’t have feelings.

Frenchie, writing on X, identifies three key bottlenecks for the development of humanoid robots:

• Actuators and precision mechanics to enable “bots to achieve strength and precision in compact, lightweight and reliable joints.” The challenge is producing joints that hold up over time at reasonable cost.
• Hands and sensing. Seeing an object isn’t sufficient to manipulate it. “You also need to gauge the force, detect when it slips, and correct the movement before dropping it. … The issue isn’t just dexterity — it’s dexterity that withstands repeated use.”
• Vision and perception sensors. Recognizing a cup in an image is one thing, knowing where it is in a kitchen is another. “The robot must estimate distances, spot obstacles and tack its own movements to maintain balance.” Required: image sensors, depth sensors, and inertial measurement.

Dozens of companies are working within the humanoid robot value chain. Frenchie predicts phases of hype, followed by pullbacks, followed by real progress. Humanoid robots are coming.

An important character in my “Trogs” novel (to be published Sept. 8) works for the FBI Fugitive Detection and Recovery Directorate. He uses the tools of 2075-era forensics backed by a dedicated Quantum computer to chase “ghosts,” or individuals evading arrest who are sophisticated enough to cover their digital trails. As happens all too often, the seeds of what I can conceive in my imagination for the 50-year future are being planted now.

According to QuantumAnalysis’ X post today, that the FBI has created a Quantum Information Science and Technology Counterintelligence Protection Team. This unit isn’t out chasing crooks and political enemies, like the ghost hunters in “Trogs” do. Their aims seem laudable. As QuantumAnalysis explains:

American universities and companies are where most of the world’s quantum breakthroughs happen, in open labs, published papers, and grad programs full of international students. That openness is why the US leads. It’s also the softest target in national security.

And the value of what’s in those labs keeps rising, error correction methods, qubit designs, control software, the exact IP that the government just paid $2 billion in equity stakes to accelerate. Washington is now funding the research and guarding it. …

It’s not the scenario I describe in “Trogs,” but it is a first step in that direction.

Foreseeable needs for space exploration exceed projected payroll-launch capacity, so NASA envisions the need for robotic manufacturing on the Moon. A newly funded project called The Assemblers envisions a swarm of robots fabricating solar arrays and undertaking other assembly tasks on the surface of the Moon or Mars.

A new video published on Space.com shows how the assembly would look from a robot’s point of view as it examines a structure and targets certain areas for more work. On Earth, they are functioning under the watchful eye of engineers, but in time they will work autonomously.

“The project goal is to increase the technology readiness level for the modular robot, autonomous in-space assembly, and develop a robotic prototype for ground testing,” principal investigator James Neilan, a computer engineer at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, said in a statement.

The deliverable for the $2.5 million project will be a prototype that can manipulate items and assemble components in a space environment. The assemblers will use task-management software to keep tabs on errors and address issues as they arise. Writes Space.com:

The Assembler robots are a series of stacked platforms with actuators in between the platforms, as well as sensors that help each robot figure out where its components are located. “The team is working on algorithms for software so that the robots could choose how many platforms to stack and the right tool for the task at hand,” NASA officials said in the statement.

NASA has announced its intention to send a mobile robot, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s southern pole to identify the location and concentration of water ice in the region.

“The key to living on the Moon is water — the same as here on Earth,” said Daniel Andrews, project manager of the VIPER mission, reports Forbes. “Since the confirmation of lunar water-ice ten years ago, the question now is if the Moon could really contain the amount of resources we need to live off-world.”

Moon water also would make Mars missions more affordable, Mars enthusiasts contend.“Creating space fuel depots would allow spacecraft to travel much farther and allow missions and satellites to sustain operations,” says Karen Panetta, IEEE Fellow, Dean for Graduate Education, Tufts University. “Rather than transporting water into space in heavy loads on rockets, the goal is to extract it (mine it) from the moon and asteroids.” more “VIPER Robot to Locate Water Resources on Moon”