Hasta La Gadget!

Imagine a world in which all candy is free and you can eat as much as you want. Now stop imagining, because that place is the All Candy Expo. And I visited earlier this week.

What’s candy have to do with gadgets? From food science to Pez dispensers to the internet bacon phenomenon, mass produced candy and snacks are pretty much all about technology. And…I really, really wanted to go eat candy all day.

The press room is fully stocked with Skittles and ice cream bars. And every breath you take is infused with at least a few calories of sugar. Sure, the show floor is set up with mass produced booths like CES or any other trade show. But each exhibitor has delectable treats for you to grab, at will, repeatedly.

One of my earliest stops was to check out a new product called Wine Sticks—made of real wine. The liquid (in this case, a Cabernet) is reduced to a jelly-like consistency, pectin is mixed in and then a layer of chocolate wraps around the sadly non-alcoholic concoction. How’d it taste? Like 2 buck chuck, mixed with a few tablespoons of sugar, topped off with a Hershey bar chaser.

The Jarm is “brain power potion” that you can wear. Essentially a Pixie stick that wraps around your wrist as a bracelet, I can only presume its proprietary mixture of dextrose, cirtic acid, malic acid, and artificial flavors/colors have produced cognitive improvement in reproducible, double blind lab testing.

The Super Straw is a nifty little invention. It’s a straw that adds chocolate, strawberry, etc, to your milk as you suck it up. The idea, which I’m pretty sure exists under other branding elsewhere, almost works. While my first sip was a bit weak, my second sip greeted my tongue with the strong taste of strawberry milk…along with a bit of grit like you find at the bottom of any powder-flavored milk.

No matter how many trade shows I attend, I always end up in an international area, with a Korean woman yelling “no pictures!” This little novelty was captured after our impromptu international concord. Essentially, it’s a large, awkward chunk of plastic that, with a single pump, makes a piece of gum appear. It’s a pretty horrible slap in the face to both the environment and gum.

Another company named Das Foods has invented the (world’s first?) bacon lollipop. And they’ve reasonably named it “Man Bait.” As gross as it sounds, a lollipop filled with real chunks of bacon, it was the single greatest thing I tasted at the show. Just enough bacon mixes with just enough maple to create a salty/sweet treat that lasted about 20x longer than any strip of bacon you’ve ever consumed.

Fruit Chu TXT MSGs are a snack that have been on the market just a few months. I was lucky enough to infiltrate their booth to snag a shot of the company’s upcoming product, TXT LUV MSGs, intended for Valentine’s Day. A mean blonde lady tried to stop me, but I tried to explain to her, news waits for no one on Gizmodo. Maybe she has no love in her life. I hope she finds someone nice.

Intoxi-tators are a chip infused with boozy drinks like Margaritas and Bloody Maries. Unfortunately, and this wasn’t in the pitch, the chips don’t contain any alcohol. I tried them anyway. The Margarita lacked any hint of tequila, but had a pleasant oil and vinegar flavor. The Bloody Mary had a similar enjoyable sourness with a touch of spice.

And then there was the Necco booth, makers of Sweethearts, the pre-Twitter of chalk-flavored romantic professions. Keep doing what you’re doing, Necco!

For more on the All Candy Expo, read our other articles on inhalable chocolate and the beef jerky crane game.

Humans are fragile. Our bodies are easily mutilated by our own creations: Crushed, mulched, zipped. But physical force is weak and inefficient compared to good old electrocution, which, according to MythBusters’ Adam Savage, doesn’t kill you the way you think it does.

If you learned about how electrocution kills you from cartoons or Ernest P. Worrell—you get fried as your body flashes like fireworks and everybody can see your bones—well, you got learned wrong. Electricity doesn’t actually fry you—that actually requires way more juice than it takes to kill you, which is a frighteningly minuscule amount.

But before we get to the scary part, let’s get through the technical part, so we’re on all the same page of scariness. You’ve got a few major units when it comes to electricity: Volts relate voltage, amperes (amps) describe the current, watts measure power and ohms refer to resistance. A pretty good analogy from HowStuffWorks relates the basic differences between them, plumbing style: Voltage is like water pressure, current (amps) is like the flow rate, and resistance (ohms) is like the size of the pipe. Increasing the voltage results in a greater current (more amps)—assuming a constant resistance-since increasing the pressure logically increases flow [Update: Clarified this sentence]. Power (wattage) is simply the voltage multiplied by the current (amps). One amp is equal to about 6.242 × 10^18 electrons per second moving through a point. And a single watt is equivalent to one joule of energy per second, but that doesn’t matter so much for our purposes.

Alright, now let’s get real. And who’s more real and had more opportunity to get electrocuted than Adam Savage from MythBusters? So we called and asked him just how much electricity you need to kill a human. His reply? “I’m about to freak you out.”

Seven milliamps. For three seconds. That’s all it takes. Electricity kills you by interrupting your heart rhythm. If 7 milliamps reaches your heart continuously for three seconds, “your heart goes arrhythmic,” he explained. Then everything else starts shutting down. “You could quite easily kill someone with a 9-volt or AAA battery directly to the heart.”

The reason electricity isn’t able to murder millions of people a day with ultra-tiny shocks is that our bodies have built-in resistance against electricity, so it doesn’t shoot straight to our heart. The skin’s resistance is about 5,000 to 15,000 ohms. Adam said that “it’s super difficult to quantify” precisely how much juice you need to break through, since there’s all kinds of variables in play, like the clothes you’re wearing. Not to mention, “how do you quantify that someone’s actually died?”

But if it’s any consolation, Adam says that the kind of static shock that actually stings your skin is about 20,000 volts—high voltage, just a really tiny amperage.

So the trick is getting the proper amount of power to cut through our skin and clothes and rubber-soled shoes to zap our heart. There’s a reliable way to do that: Lightning. With lightning, Adam said, “all bets are off.” A lightning bolt can hit over a billion volts. Air’s resistance, he explained, is about 10,000 volts per centimeter—so for electricity to move just 10cm through air requires 100,000 volts.

Machines could generate lightning artificially—this dude Charles Steinmetz built a lightning machine back in 1916 that generated over 10,000 amps and 100,000 volts. The reason some people survive is that they luck out with the path it takes through their body—so they might get scorched if it travels along the outside of their body, like if you’re wet, but if their heart goes untouched, they could come out alive.

That’s obviously wildly impractical—the sophistication and energy required for lightning-shooting machines would be more easily put toward acquiring nukes, a la every apocalyptic movie ever. Besides, there are far simpler machines that do a similar job when it comes to electrocuting people. Simple skin-penetrating Tasers already kill people occasionally. However, according to Adam, Tasers are designed with the 3-second-kill problem in mind—most pulse at much shorter intervals to avoid being fatal.

Still, we likely have little to fear from extinction by electrocution. With the exception of the admittedly clumsy electric chair, no one’s ever systematically killed people with electricity. Machines, if they were to develop a murderous intent, would most likely use all of the other ways humans have designed to kill each other.

Huge thanks to Adam Savage from MythBusters for helping us—or the machines?—out!

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about why I’ll never recover from Terminator: Salvation, electrifying puns or the pancake apocalypse to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to design some super-deadly robots for our Machines Behaving Deadly week. Here’s hoping none of these terrorbots ever get made.

First Place — Adam Page
Second Place — Mark Fletcher
Third Place — Joey Del Real

When people talk about robots and ethics, they always seem to bring up Isaac Asimov‘s “Three Laws of Robotics.” But there are three major problems with these laws and their use in our real world.

The Laws
Asimov’s laws initially entailed three guidelines for machines:
• Law One – “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
• Law Two – “A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
• Law Three – “A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
• Asimov later added the “Zeroth Law,” above all the others – “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

The Debunk
The first problem is that the laws are fiction! They are a plot device that Asimov made up to help drive his stories. Even more, his tales almost always revolved around how robots might follow these great sounding, logical ethical codes, but still go astray and the unintended consequences that result. An advertisement for the 2004 movie adaptation of Asimov’s famous book I, Robot (starring the Fresh Prince and Tom Brady’s baby mama) put it best, “Rules were made to be broken.”

For example, in one of Asimov’s stories, robots are made to follow the laws, but they are given a certain meaning of “human.” Prefiguring what now goes on in real-world ethnic cleansing campaigns, the robots only recognize people of a certain group as “human.” They follow the laws, but still carry out genocide.

The second problem is that no technology can yet replicate Asimov’s laws inside a machine. As Rodney Brooks of the company iRobot—named after the Asimov book, they are the people who brought you the Packbot military robot and the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner—puts it, “People ask me about whether our robots follow Asimov’s laws. There is a simple reason [they don’t]: I can’t build Asimov’s laws in them.”

Roboticist Daniel Wilson [and “Machines Behaving Deadly” contributor here at Gizmodo] was a bit more florid. “Asimov’s rules are neat, but they are also bullshit. For example, they are in English. How the heck do you program that?”

The most important reason for Asimov’s Laws not being applied yet is how robots are being used in our real world. You don’t arm a Reaper drone with a Hellfire missile or put a machine gun on a MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) not to cause humans to come to harm. That is the very point!

The same goes to building a robot that takes order from any human. Do I really want Osama Bin Laden to be able to order about my robot? And finally, the fact that robots can be sent out on dangerous missions to be “killed” is often the very rationale to using them. To give them a sense of “existence” and survival instinct would go against that rationale, as well as opens up potential scenarios from another science fiction series, the Terminator movies. The point here is that much of the funding for robotic research comes from the military, which is paying for robots that follow the very opposite of Asimov’s laws. It explicitly wants robots that can kill, won’t take orders from just any human, and don’t care about their own existences.

A Question of Ethics
The bigger issue, though, when it comes to robots and ethics is not whether we can use something like Asimov’s laws to make machines that are moral (which may be an inherent contradiction, given that morality wraps together both intent and action, not mere programming).

Rather, we need to start wrestling with the ethics of the people behind the machines. Where is the code of ethics in the robotics field for what gets built and what doesn’t? To what would a young roboticists turn to? Who gets to use these sophisticated systems and who doesn’t? Is a Predator drone a technology that should just be limited to the military? Well, too late, the Department of Homeland Security is already flying six Predator drones doing border security. Likewise, many local police departments are exploring the purchase of their own drones to park over him crime neighborhoods. I may think that makes sense, until the drone is watching my neighborhood. But what about me? Is it within my 2nd Amendment right to have a robot that bears arms?

These all sound a bit like the sort of questions that would only be posed at science fiction conventions. But that is my point. When we talk about robots now, we are no longer talking about “mere science fiction” as one Pentagon analyst described of these technologies. They are very much a part of our real world.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology. Guest writer PW Singer is the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

Driving through the New Mexico desert during summer’s peak, my mouth as parched as the baked terrain, I wonder to myself, what would Dr. Frankenstein do if he lived today?

Would he dig through morgues to find the proper arms, legs and noses he needed to create his infamous monster? Or would he give up on biological life and simply build a robot?
The T-600 is the closest thing modern fiction has to Frankenstein’s famous beast. He stands 7 feet tall and shares the monster’s trademark stiff, slow movements. If pushed to the ground, he might not be able to get up, trapped like an overweight baby on his back. But then again, it would take a lot to knock him down. A truck, at least. Plus, you’d need to get past the minigun that’s permanently welded to his arm first.

And then there’s his skin. Like Frankenstein, the T-600 is in a constant state of rot. Sent out to patrol without maintenance, the T-600 is Skynet’s more sinister rendition of the taxicab, a tool driven day and night until its rubber skin melts to slime and crackles away in patches to dry, desert heat.

In Terminator Salvation, SkyNet has not created the cold, technologically precise world of The Matrix. It’s simply not that smart yet. And the thing about machines is that they’re not usually as self-conscious about their looks as Hollywood designers would argue.

During my visit to the movie’s set during filming last summer, I got a firsthand look at all of this techno-ugly, the world in which, if the machines do take over, we’d see in our lifetime.

Everything in the future is pieced together from scraps and bits. I realize that as my bus pulls up to the nondescript studio in the middle of the New Mexico desert. I glance over at a cacophony of metal in the sand and wonder, is it a junkyard or a battlefield that I’m looking at?

Buses and cars are piled not with armor plating but a few extra layers of rust and grime. Most look like they couldn’t run. Some look like they may have never run.

I walk up to a helicopter that’s in relatively good condition, yet my untrained eyes can tell it’s not one chopper but two or three stitched together with a welding torch and a lot of swearing. It barely looks like it can fly (and ironically, I find out later that it can’t—it’s suspended from a wire during shooting).

Everything is perforated with bullet holes.

Then I see the source of the carnage, shining with enough sheen to justify that whole overused diamond in the rough metaphor.

With two sets of mini-tank treads, a vague hint of a torso and head and twin miniguns, it looks sort of like Johnny 5…if Johnny 5 ripped out his eyes and flooded his chassis with robotic performance enhancers until his metal skin buckled under the pressure.

Those guns are more than a prop, I hear. And during filming, they’ve decided to fire live ammunition in lieu of CGI. Each shell costs $3 and the guns fire somewhere around 100 rounds per second. Sure, the effect would be cheaper to create on computers, but there’s no way it would be so much fun.

I’ve pretty much just walked up to the T4 set—one of many, in fact—and I realize that the amount of real, massively-scaled props I’ve seen is astounding. A week earlier when I booked the ticket to New Mexico to visit the set, I wondered just how much stuff I’d actually see versus how much of the set tour would consist of dry wall and green paint.

There’s really not much green paint going on at all.

As I work my way inside and weave through a small army of builders constructing plywood masterpieces that rise stories into the air, I smell wood, not paint. I’m told that green screen is saved for the edges or corners of a set—things like the blown-out roof of a real 3-story air intake silo.
Meanwhile, as we wet our shoes in a darkened sewer complex (filled with about an inch of real water and mud), I’m amazed at how the plywood walls have been transformed from generic yellow wood into metal and rust and brick—set decorators have airbrushed almost every square inch to create the illusion of infinite tetanus.

And the tech. Oh man.

Lining the walls of this resistance bunker, the stomping grounds of John Connor, there must have been at least 50 PCs in various states of disrepair. They were stacked like concrete blocks, a rummage sale obsession gone way, way wrong. And there was other stuff, too. Super geeky stuff. Spectrum analyzers, CB radios and coils of aging solder.
As the bunker continues, the floor dries out as it leads to a small operating room. Here, you could see all types of medical equipment easily dating back to the 60s. Combine every season of MASH with every season of ER, cover it in dirt and add a solitary intimidation light hanging from the ceiling. That’s what it looked like.

The Resistance was fighting Frankenstein with Frankenstein—piecing together every type of tech possible to battle SkyNet’s evolving monster.

I knew the sets were fake, but when you’re surrounded by so much existing technology, so much detail, being pieced together as part of a dark thesis, it unsettles your stomach to say the least.

Hopping back on the bus, I sat for about an hour riding deeper into the desert as the air conditioning submitted to New Mexico’s summer heat.

I pass by a gas station. Is this just a gas station in the middle of nowhere? Nope, it’s a movie set – the famous Sara Connor station she visits at the end of T1. (It wasn’t exploding at the time.)

I pass by a pile of old corroding cars. Is this another futuristic battlefield? Nope, it’s just a junk car lot.

The bus jostles me through a seemingly endless, operational train yard before reaching its abandoned station that must be a century old, an eerie conglomeration of beauty and horror. The sun diffuses through skylights in the expansive space and time seems to slow as dandelion pollen floats through the air. Yet, when shot at night, the cattle cars around back—retrofitted by “machines”—had brought people here to be skinned for hair and epidermis (to develop the Arnold Schwarzenegger terminators, the “skin jobs”).
Standing inside one of these steaming cars, sharp edges exposed at every corner, I couldn’t imagine what the extras had gone through during shooting…let alone those persecuted in the real world events that this scene was meant to so closely (maybe even heavy-handedly) parallel.

And in this sense, the movie was reaching another level of Frankensteinian philosophy—patching the most horrifying moments of our past with the potentially hopeless bleakness of the future. Who knew, if the actors, director, cinematographer, special effects coordinator and editor could pull it off, maybe the movie—a sequel of a sequel of a sequel—might actually be good…poignant, even.

As the sun finally set and I arrived at my final destination, a night shoot right outside of SkyNet itself (depicted as an aging factory expelling absurd but periodic balls of flame) my skepticism had been laid to rest.

Terminator 4 might or might not be a good movie, but I’d gotten the vibe from McG, the director, and a number of the actors that, yes, they knew, Terminator 3 was horrible. And previewing about 6 minutes of footage of the film in McG’s trailer depicted the Mad Max world in a cohesive, and new voice.

(Since then, the trailers have painted the picture of a bigger action movie with more CGI and more polish. It’ll be interesting to see how the stylistic themes collide in the final product.)

Everyone was clearly working hard to make this movie not suck. A month earlier, one member of the construction crew had been stung by a scorpion. This tale of a real life emergency made McG’s informal poll amongst journalists as to whether or not a James Cameron cameo would be too cheesy for the content seem a little less impressive, but earnest all the same.

That night, as I watched the first and last actual filming of my visit, the crew of 150 or so people had one goal—put a giant bulldozer through a wall. The scene could only be done once (lest they rebuild the brick wall) so it was rehearsed endlessly. A jib arm would track an actor’s movements as he infiltrated SkyNet, then, BOOM. Wall comes down.
Well, that’s not including the military-grade explosions from SkyNet’s rhythmic death flames (that ushered a periodic deathly wall of heat onto onlookers), but you get the point.

And after several hours of rehearsal and constant mini meetings between directing, cinematography and visual effects departments (tediously boring in spite of the endless pyrotechnics), I can spoil that the brick wall does come down and our protagonist lives to tell the tale.

But whether or not the Frankensteinian T-600 lurking in the background noticed, I do not know.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.