Cooking with Johnny 5

There is quite a bit of strange and goofy stuff on YouTube. People diving off of roofs, Scarlet taking a tumble.. news goof clips from 2014 and the best of the ice bucket challenge gone wrong. A decade of YouTube has clearly showcased some of the most creative of human beings, and the flipside of humanity: The embarrassments, the shameful, and the inhumane.

So enter this into the equation of our collective transhuman future: Robots can now learn by watching human beings on YouTube!  And specifically, they learn how to cook by watching videos of people doing just that..

Jordon Novet writes this in Venture Beat:

The researchers, from the University of Maryland and the Australian research center NICTA, have just published a paper on their achievements, which they will present this month at the 29th annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

The demonstration is the latest impressive use of a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. A hot area for acquisitions as of late, deep learning entails training systems called artificial neural networks on lots of information derived from audio, images, and other inputs, and then presenting the systems with new information and receiving inferences about it in response.

The researchers employed convolutional neural networks, which are now in use at Facebook, among other companies, to identify the way a hand is grasping an item, and to recognize specific objects. The system also predicts the action involving the object and the hand.

To train their model, researchers selected data from 88 YouTube videos of people cooking. From there, the researchers generated commands that a robot could then execute.

That’s just the beginning ..

I took some time to actually read the paper written by the researchers at the University of Maryland and the Australian research center NICTA..  I got the deep sense that we are on the cusp of something that we cannot truly grasp the morality or importance of until it passes and comes into being.

Robots, learning to cook? That means they can run a restaurant to perfection! Each ingredient perfectly within, meat seasoned to the the exact.. And then the world!

There is a very unique opportunity, if we allow it, for robots to take on the jobs that people do. You can even envision a future of robot clerks in an office, perhaps robot judges who memorize volumes of law.. Driverless cars, with robots never wrecking. A perfect future–or near perfect as far as machines go.. of course there are dangers.. a lack of human emotion and morals.. a complete change in all culture and a massive transhuman landscape..

But what will humans do then?
What are the jobs of the future?
Perhaps fixing the machines that take ours..

So many possibilities. So many miracles .. so many dangers and landmines on the highway to the danger zone..