GlenTheMachine

It isn’t that we have no lights. We do. They’re on most of the time. The walls are painted black and there are no windows, because occasionally we want the lab to be dark so we can simulate the lighting conditions of space. We have a spotlight that approximates the brightness of the sun for when we do those tests.

The end result of this is that, especially in the winter, it’s really easy for me to drive to work in daylight, and then that’s literally the only time I see the sun. I leave work after dark. Totally screws with my circadian rhythm.

To simulate the lighting conditions of space

Space robotics

I've been on fairly low dose Klonopin for about fifteen years due to persistent insomnia (I work in a black room with no windows, and hence no circadian rhythm).

The good news is that the Klonopin let me sleep -- the first regular sleep I'd had in three years, when I first started using it.

However, I'm on a journey to get completely off of it. I managed to do that for several weeks, but when I then tried to ween myself off the other drug I'm on for insomnia, mirtazipine, it came back. So I started taking Klonopin again, temporarily. I'm now in the process of getting off of it for a second time.

Personally, I didn't find this that hard. The key, for me, was just to take it very slowly. Reduce 10%-25% at a time, and stay at that dose for 4-8 weeks. Repeat. Be patient with yourself. It took around six months the first time. I did have one crazy symptom: in the middle of the night, if I woke up, I could close my eyes and watch my visual cortex go haywire. It was like a fireworks show. That eventually went way, but man, it took months.

It absolutely is.

But if you're a rational actor, and you need humans to e.g. release your bioweapon, then clearly humans are capable of a bunch of stuff you still can't do. So you can't kill all the humans.

OTOH if you're a religious fundamentalist who thinks the End Times are near and just need a little shove, you can certainly use AI to design your weapon and recruit people to go release it. The difference being that religious fundamentalists aren't rational actors and aren't interested in self preservation.

Omniverse (new Isaacson) is good, but no existing dynamics engine does an actually good job at contact dynamics.

"I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions."

That system is "the economy". Which, clearly, doesn't have humanity's best interests in mind.

By definition, if you're taking over the world by bribing humans to be your hands, you aren't killing all the humans.

I"m not saying it's obviously going to be great. I'm saying that "extinction event" has a very specific definition, and this isn't it.

"If you're in the field, then you know: modern robotics is an AI problem more than anything else."

It is not. Certainly AI is a big part of why robotics is hard, but it is by no means the biggest.

You can fall into one of two camps: you either think that robots will need to work in human-engineered spaces, doing jobs by replacing humans; or you think that we need to change our infrastructure in order to be robotically compatible. Of course, there are intermediate states, but those are the two cleanest ones.

In the first case, robots are hard because robotic manipulation is hard. Building robotic hands that are economically viable in human jobs is, currently, FAR from a solved problem. The human hand has 24 degrees of freedom and very capable touch sensing. Current touch sensors have a MTBF of tens of hours. And not only can we not build such hands, but we also do not have and are not likely to get the massive datasets a transformer model would need. Also, robots are not self-repairing, which makes them far less economically viable right now. We do not have the right datasets to even understand most step-by-step manual work, and no, VLAs are not the answer, because VLAs stop with vision, not with touch. They don't have the granularity required to make a robot actually reach out, pick up a tool, and use that tool to replace an oil filter.

So it's not just an AI problem. It's a data problem, a simulation problem, and a bunch of hardware problems.

In the second case, a tremendous amount of work needs to be done before we have anything resembling a fully automated supply chain. We would need self-driving cars and self-driving mining equipment. We would need self-driving trains and aircraft and ships. And not only that, but we would also need robotically repairable cars and trains and ships and factories, which would mean we need robotically repairable machine shops and robotically repairable buildings in which to house them. And so on and so on. Once you recurse down that tree a couple of steps you get to things like robotically compatible oil wells (for asphalt), robotically layable undersea cables, robotically wireable solar farms, robotically manufacturable and repairable pipelines and undersea wells, automated road and rail repair, etc.

I'm not saying these things will never happen. I'm saying that they're a huge lift, not primarily driven by AI, and way less than 10% likely over the next decade.

Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors.

"AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots are hard. So even a malign rational actor would still need human labor.

On the other hand, even the HuggingFace hack wasn't actually propagated by AI. it was initially started when humans directed the AI to achieve impossible results on a series of tests, and the AIs figured out that cheating was the only way to do that. That was then not caught by humans due to what seems to be a shockingly slack safety culture even for a company not known for its safety standards.

The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here. An AI isn't going to (for instance) engineer a bioweapon by itself. It's going to do so at someone's direction, and then significant parts of that thing are going to be assembled with human labor inputs.

I'm not sure what to do about the humans. Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades, and we're either muddled through, been lucky, or both. The problem with AI is that it pushes power down to the individual, not the nation-state or large corporation.

But it's nearly impossible to put odds on how likely that is to result in an extinction-level terrorist attack (which is what this would be). So I sympathize with the various researchers, but I have no idea how they came up with their figures, and I don't think they know either.

I mean, deer (and cows and goats and sheep, but not horses) are ruminants. They can eat all sorts of things humans can’t digest: grass, tree leaves, most weeds, etc).

The evolution of the rumen was one of nature’s best tricks.

I suspect that if/when we get to a world where it makes economic sense to manufacture billions of robots, it’ll be easier and cheaper to modify the infrastructure.

Roboticist here. All of this, and he didn’t mention compliance or online adaptation to otherwise un-sensable dynamics. Or massively complex miniature mechanisms.

Current generation tactile sensors cost a couple thousand $ PER FINGER, and have a real world MTBF of hours. The cost can be solved with economy of scale. The fragility is harder.

I vote for Zotero integration!

The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.

Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.

The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.

The RPO and docking are autonomous specifically because it's hard to deal with the latency.

Note that the algorithm stack for almost any spacecraft cannot rely on modern compute. Single-core sub-1 GHz processors are the standard. Very few GPUs have ever been in space, in any capacity, and none that I know of in a mission-critical role.

It's very likely that a spacecraft similar to MRV/RSGS could do a life extension mission on Hubble. But, unfortunately, Hubble is in a very different orbit than MRV/RSGS is, so we wouldn't be able to reach it.

"Does the satellite servicer need its targets to be constructed to some common standards, or is the new capability now leading to common standards?"

We can do life extension missions on client spacecraft that were not designed to be robotically compatible. That's actually SpaceLogistic's primary business case.

The question of standards in the spacecraft industry is a huge question. It's being worked... by a lot of people, cue the obligatory XKCD reference.

"Was it built with a method for itself accepting refueling?"

We are, in fact, refuelable.

"It seems to me this device would lead to a revision in satellite reliability design and life calculations."

We hope so! Spacecraft are expensive in large part because they have to be designed to be incredibly reliable. The example I use is cars. If you had to design a car that could go for half a million miles without ever having a part replaced, you could. It would just cost a billion dollars. But that's how we design spacecraft today. IF we can create a "mechanic safety net", we might be able to bring the cost down significantly.

It's almost impossibly hard to return things to earth from GEO. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that "a circular orbit is halfway to anywhere", which means that the most energetically difficult part of a mission to the Andromeda Galaxy is getting out of earth's gravity well.

To get back into earth's gravity well from a circular orbit requires similar amounts of fuel. Getting things back to earth from low earth orbit is doable, if you have a heat shield, because you only have to dump enough velocity to start hitting the atmosphere, and atmospheric drag does the rest of the work.

But that doesn't work at GEO, because you're so high (22,000 miles as opposed to ~1,000 miles for LEO). It's very hard to get enough delta-V (read as "change in velocity", which is basically the amount of fuel you need per unit mass) -- you'd need something with as much fuel as the upper stage of the rocket you were launched on, plus you'd need a heat shield. Alternatively you could use electric propulsion, which takes a lot less fuel, but would also take, literally, a couple of years, during which time you're a hazard to navigation to anything in a lower orbit. Plus, electric thrusters of the size you'd need to do this aren't cheap either.

So we basically never do that. If you need to dispose of a derelict satellite at that altitude, it turns out to be much easier to raise its orbit by a few thousand kilometers.

So, nobody will be recycling space debris that lives at GEO any time soon, unless someone figures out how to do it in situ.

I can only provide answers to technical or programmatic questions that have already been "approved for public release" by DARPA and NRL. We've done a number of publicly released presentations over the years, so there is a fair amount of that information in the public domain, but things like the exact algorithms we use for IK or controls, or whatever, hasn't been released yet. I also can't speak about anything that is Northup-Grumman's or SpaceLogistics' intellectual property or is business sensitive, so I can't say which client satellites we'll be servicing.

I'm very hopeful that I'll get a strong technical paper through public release by the end of the year, ant at that point I could provide more detailed technical answers to things a HN audience would be interested in.

It’s all custom flight code. The only software packages we use are basic matrix-vector libraries. Hopefully there will be a paper describing the dynamics/kinematics/controls algorithms soon.

Oh gosh.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, was introduced to the idea that people would actually pay you money to program computers, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.

When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.

I managed to not fail out, but it was close.

I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.

Thanks! There isn't a paper yet, but I'm working on one; I hope it will be presented at the upcoming iSAIRAS/iSpaRo conference in Cologne.

We use pretty standard BLDCs.

You wouldn't. Ionizing radiation at GEO altitude quickly exceeds your lifetime exposure dose.

The Apollo (and Artemis II) astronauts went through GEO inside a metal capsule going as fast as they could.

Sort of mini-fridge sized. They take over attitude control and propulsion for satellites that are low on fuel.

"Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to another satellite that needs servicing?"

Yes.

I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.