Weekly Journal : Getting Started

Don’t stare at a blank page for too long, be bold, and make the first incisive stroke. The rest will come naturally.  —  James Kingman

Submission

Submit a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week05_starting.md, to the individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

Starting a Big Project

You have likely heard the basic advice for working on big projects: break the work into smaller, more manageable chunks; focus on the next small step that will move you forward; set intermediate deadlines, etc.. However, this can be complicated when you are not sure how to do the project or you are working with other people that have different ideas about chunks or deadlines. Take some time to reflect on how the project started, what you decided to work on initially, how your initial team meetings went, and use that to help yourself imagine a manageable process for getting the project done.

Discuss the following questions to help your thinking:

• What is the first design challenge you (or your team) chose to work on and why?
• What is the first piece of code you chose to work on and why?
• What is the hardest part of this project (or the biggest obstacle) from your perspective (be it technical, design, team related or something else)?
• How long did you write code for this project the first time (in one sitting) and did you accomplish what you wanted to? What helped or got in your way?
• What would the most successful outcome of this project look like for you?
• What would the worst possible outcome of this project look like for you?

Ethics Essay

Logo is a dialect of Lisp, a powerful language that quickly became a favored language for AI research. However, even from the beginning, most people focused on its ability to control a physical robot, which was called a turtle because that was what it looked like. The name and image of the turtle has stuck: from Turtle Graphics to modern robot research platforms like TurtleBot.

TurtleBot is one of many companies and universities that hold competitions encouraging anyone to work on solving interesting problems in robotics. Increasingly, these competitions also include a simulator so entrants do not need to own an expensive, physical, robot to compete (the simulator also helps researchers that can afford a physical robot because it reduces the cost of mistakes that would require fixing physical damage). Kevin Knoedler recently won a NASA competition to design a robot that could fix things while on Mars using a TurtleBot as the base. Currently, these competitions are for very altruistic causes and judged by humans but, as a side effect, they are helping to make it easier for anyone to program robots and, as society has seen with social media, simply giving everyone access may lead to negative outcomes (plus scientists and Science Fiction authors clearly sees AI/robots as humanity's doom :).

Based on your interest or knowledge about the topic, choose one of the following ethical questions regarding AI/Robots to discuss:

• What happens when AI/robots replace humans doing a specific job (such as factory workers, truck drivers, or radiologists)?
• How will AI/robots affect human interactions?
• How will AI/robots be programmed effectively, especially when currently ML algorithms are built for optimization which produces many unintended consequences?
• Should gender be used when referring to AI/robots or that they should be made with an explicit gender?
• Will it ever be possible to remove bias or errors in the decisions AI/robots make?
• Will it ever be possible to make AI/robots that are smarter than humans (in a general way rather than in narrow, specific, tasks)?