The Tools of Telepresence in Your Phone

Dr Robert Ballard speaking at the TED conference May 29, 2008

We're entering a new golden age of exploration Dr Robert Ballard told the audience at the TED conference in May. He's commandeered a US Navy Boat, the Okeanus Explorer. "It's mission is as good as you can get. Its mission is to go where no-one has gone before on Planet Earth." He has no idea what he'll discover. It might be the wreck of an ancient trading ship, an unknown sea-life form, or an anomalous geological feature. But whatever his remotely operated robots come across deep in the ocean will instantly be seen in a command centre connected to universities and schools on internet 2.


The tools he's laboured to develop will allow many humans to feel the electrifying thrill of discovery as if they were actually there, not thousands of miles away plugged into a computer. He wrote about the experience of telepresence in his book Adventures in Ocean Exploration. "Now I looked back at the shimmering image, suddenly no longer in the van but virtually hovering a few metres above the wreck, my eyes absorbing what the video camera saw. This was the precious sense of 'telepresence' that I had struggled with my colleagues from Woods Hole's Deep Submergence Laboratory to achieve over the previous two decades."


Marvin Minsky coined the term in 1980 to explain the engaging of the senses with something that's happening at a remote location. This can happen through time as well as space. When Robert Ballard found life-forms that thrive without light or oxygen in the hydrothermal vents of the Galapagos Rift, and wondered how they might have contributed to the evolution of life on earth, he reflected upon Charles Darwin's observations of variations and similarities between animals in the Galapagos region that were the foundation for the theory of evolution.

Minsky made a distinction between virtual reality - which engages people with a simulated environment - and telepresence. Ken Goldberg's Telegarden project demonstrates how people, from a distance, can affect an environment. Over the internet people could direct a robot arm to plant and water seeds and weed a garden plot. Considering Ken Goldberg's telerobotic art and science projects in tandem with Robert Ballard's illustrates what Ballard means when he talks about the most important part of the exploration being bringing home insights gained on the mission and applying them to everyday life.

CONE Sutro project in San Francisco
Ken's created a set of smart robotic cameras that can be controlled remotely, collaboratively by scientists. The CONE project is currently operating in Texas, tracking changing migrational patterns of birds but it was first installed on the deck of the home of Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, on the outskirts of San Francisco and operated by amateur birdwatchers.


The tools of telepresence are now in mobile phones. In his keynote address for this year's Apple Conference Steve Jobs stressed the GPS location tools in the new, cheaper 3G i-phone and that its operating system has been opened up to third party developers. I imagine that it will be possible to access Outside.in's Radar on an i-phone. In 2006 Steven Johnson and John Geraci started Outside.in, a service that aggregates hyperlocal news by geotagging posts from blogs, newspapers, twitter posts and discussion threads to places displayed on Google Earth maps.

"Radar organises the news in dynamic, concentric circles around you. First it looks for news and conversation immediately around you, within 1,000 feet. Then it searches for stories in your neighbourhood, then in your city. You can set up your radar to track specific places you care about, anywhere in the US."


Travelling to a place, metaphorically, through telepresence is only one part of the equation. Radar gives us a way to bring mentally organise information that's far away with what's close, constantly telescoping between them. It's something Steven Johnson's termed "the long zoom" and that he started talking about in his 2001 book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.

"Imagine a kind of tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale - like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, which starts with a view of the Milky Way and steadily zooms all the way to a person lying in a park in Chicago, and then all the way to subatomic particles contained within that person's hand."




Partying Like It’s 1929

Tom Waits performs “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” with lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Photographs are scenes from the Depression of the 1930’s.

E.Y. (Yip) Harburg wrote the lyrics for “April in Paris” by taking an armload of travel brochures to a diner on 7^th Avenue. He’d never been to Paris. He wrote the lyrics for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the song, added to the soundtrack of “The Wizard of Oz” at the last minute, gives the movie its sense of magical hopefulness.

He hadn’t intended to become a songwriter. He’d made investments in the stock market that he expected to provide a healthy income for him, but when they were wiped out in the crash of 1929 he considered it a blessing in disguise.

“With the crash I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business,” he told Studs Terkel in 1968. “The only realistic way of making a living was versifying, living off your imagination. We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable.”

During the Depression, walking along the streets of New York City, he’d hear men asking “brother, can you spare a dime?” These were men who’d made a contribution to society, they’d built the skyscrapers, and railroads, and fought for their country. Now they were struggling.

“In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends?” said Harburg. “Is it a dividend to say ‘Can you spare a dime?’ ‘What the hell is wrong?’ Let’s examine this thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions – and a bit outraged too, as he should be.”

Yip Harburg told Studs Terkel that the song struck a nerve, and that coming into an election in America — which the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt would win — the Republicans tried to suppress, or ban, the song. But it had already taken hold.

In office President Roosevelt halted a run on the banks and if he couldn’t feed his citizens he at least tried to nourish their spirits, creating federal works programmes in theatre, art, literature, photography and music.

from “Sullivan’s Travels” by Preston Sturges

The film tells of the ‘mission’ of ‘Sully’ (Joel McCrea), a big-shot Hollywood director of lightweight comedies to experience suffering in the world before producing his next socially-conscious film of hard times – an epic titled ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ about the common man. [Film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen paid homage to Sturges and his admirable film by naming their own 21st century film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)?] After some failed attempts dressed as a hobo and companionship on the road with an aspiring blonde actress simply called The Girl (Veronica Lake in her second picture following her work in I Wanted Wings (1941)) and wearing boy’s clothes, he succeeds in losing his freedom, identity and name, health, pride and money. Incarcerated in a prison work camp as the end result of his misadventures, and as part of an audience of chain-gang convicts watching a screening in a Southern black church of a Walt Disney cartoon (starring Mickey Mouse and Pluto), he retains one final ability – - to laugh. He succeeds in understanding that his attitude toward the poor had bordered on patronization. He finally realizes the uplifting power of laughter, and decides to return to his true calling – the making of entertaining comedies to entertain rather than to edify.

from filmsite.org

“We’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write.” Kim Stanley Robinson

Fire by Alexis Rockman from a new show of his paintings.

He applies paint with abandon, using tools such as turkey basters, eye droppers, toothbrushes, and sponges. He depicts landslides, waterspouts, hurricanes, crumbling Arctic ice, and other weather-related phenomena. The paintings look like Abstract Expressionist works, save that along the edges he applies his talent for realist rendering, adding oil derricks, swimming pools, and mountain shacks, tiny in scale alongside the daunting forces of nature.

“This is the aftermath of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” Rockman says, looking around the gallery at the Rose. “It’s a response to the seven years I worked on that piece. I was so sick of painting a very specific building. . . . I wanted to get the same kind of content, but not as much information.”

That content has a pointed political agenda about global warming, a longtime subject for Rockman.

“I’m very worried,” he says. “My feelings have changed over the last 10 years. I’m cautiously hopeful about culture shifting to take it seriously. I’m skeptical that corporate America will do the right thing.”

Weather – visually operatic, so affected by climate change – was the perfect next step. “I want to paint about alchemy and intuition, which you can’t do when you’re painting architecture,” he says.

From The Boston Globe

Bestselling, award-winning, author Kim Stanley Robinson continues his groundbreaking trilogy of eco-thrillers-and propels us deeper into the awesome whirlwind of climatic change. Set in our nation’s capital, here is a chillingly realistic tale of people caught in the collision of science, technology, and the consequences of global warming-which could trigger another phenomenon: abrupt climate change, resulting in temperatures… When the storm got bad, scientist Frank Vanderwal was at work, formalizing his return to the National Science Foundation for another year. He’d left the building just in time to help sandbag at Arlington Cemetery. Now that the torrent was over, large chunks of San Diego had eroded into the sea, and D.C. was underwater. Shallow lakes occupied the most famous parts of the city. Reagan Airport was awash and the Potomac had spilled beyond its banks. Rescue boats dotted the saturated cityscape. Everything Frank and his colleagues in the halls of science and politics feared had culminated in this massive disaster. And now the world looked to them to fix it. Whatever Frank can do, now that he is homeless, he’ll have to do from his car. He’s not averse to sleeping outdoors. Years of research have made him hyperaware of his status as just another primate. That plus his encounter with a Tibetan Buddhist has left him resolved to live a more authentic life. Hopefully, this will prepare him for whatever is to come…. For even as D.C. bails out from the flood, a more extreme climate change looms. With the melting of the polar ice caps shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, another Ice Age could be imminent. The last time it happened, eleventhousand years ago, it took just three years to start. Once again Kim Stanley Robinson uses his remarkable vision, trademark wry wit, and extraordinary insight into the complexity between man and nature to take us to the brink of disaster-and slightly beyond.
Synopsis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, from Google Books

BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would be considered a work of science fiction, even surrealism, today; but that same book, in fifty years’ time, could very well be a work of climate realism, so to speak. So if climate change is making the world surreal, then what it means to write a “realistic” novel will have to change. As a science fiction novelist, does that affect how you approach your work?Kim Stanley

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.

I started writing about Earth’s climate change in the Mars books. I needed something to happen on Earth that was shocking enough to allow a kind of historical gap in which my Martians could realistically establish independence. I had already been working with Antarctic scientists who were talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and how unstable it might be – so I used that, and in Blue Mars I showed a flooded London. But after you get past the initial dislocations and disasters, what you’ve got is another landscape to be inhabited – another situation that would have its own architecture, its own problems, and its own solutions.

To a certain extent, later, in my climate change books, I was following in that mold with the flood of Washington DC. I wrote that scene before Katrina. After Katrina hit, my flood didn’t look the same. I think it has to be acknowledged that the use of catastrophe as a literary device is not actually adequate to talk about something which, in the real world, is often so much worse – and which comes down to a great deal of human suffering.

A Cone of Silence

City dwellers, rest easy. Engineers have designed a material that redirects sounds and could be used in buildings to shield them from noises. The sound-shielding material, which, if actually made, would be the first acoustic cloaking device, could also be useful in hiding military ships and other vessels from sonar.

Acoustic cloaking materials, which direct sound waves around an object so that they re-form on the other side with no distortion, do not exist in nature. But engineers led by José Sánchez-Dehesa at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, in Spain, have created a plan for making them, using alternating layers of two different materials. These materials would comprise arrays of sonic crystals–patterns of small rods made of aluminum or other materials that allow some sound waves to pass while blocking the passage of others.
MIT Technology Review

 

Sound shield: An acoustic cloak comprising alternating layers of sound-scattering materials should make objects invisible to sonar–and insulated from sound. In this computer-generated image, a cylinder (green circle) is coated with 200 layers of such a material, which was found to be the optimal design. Sound waves moving from left to right (their peaks and troughs are represented by red and blue lines) flow past the object and reform on the other side with no distortion.
Credit: New Journal of Physics

 

 

 

gathering dirt

 

NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Two trenches dug in Martian soil by the robotic arm of the Phoenix Mars Lander.

After days of struggling with sticky Martian dirt, the Phoenix Mars Lander has unexpectedly succeeded in getting its first soil sample into an onboard laboratory for analysis, jubilant NASA scientists said on Wednesday.The breakthrough came after the lander spent days vibrating a screen over its onboard Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) in hopes that the clumpy soil would break loose and fall into the onboard ovens. The scientists were caught by surprise when the trick worked on the seventh, and likely last, try.

Members of the normally staid Phoenix team, who have been forced to watch for much of the last week as their first Martian soil sample lingered maddeningly close to the ovens, celebrated by cheering and dancing around the room to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s 1970s disco hit “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.”
New York Times. June 12, 2008

Myths for Machines

Mars Rover Opportunity

When the Mars Rover Opportunity rolled onto the planet’s surface it started up its systems and played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”.

It’s a song drenched in nostalgia for a type of sleek, streamlined machine that represented escape and romance for young adults. It hadn’t been Bruce Springsteen’s era. He wasn’t sentimental about a vanishing age. He was just sharpening his wits, learning how to tell stories for his own time by first re-telling the stories that had filled him with wonder. I think that NASA, by giving Opportunity this song, has given the machines that inhabit Mars – Spirit, Opportunity and now Phoenix – myths of their own.

Phoenix landed on Mars recently with a library on a disc strapped to its hull, with visions, dreams and nightmares Earth-dwelling humans have had of Mars. It includes messages from writer/scientists Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, the telling of “War of the Worlds” by both H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, and excerpts of books by J G Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. And a video explaining Phoenix’s mission and giving its specifications and workings.

When I heard Bruce Springsteen perform “One Headlight” with the Wallflowers, it struck me that it could be added to Opportunity’s collection of myths.

Spirit and Opportunity continue to operate long after their termination time, heroically battling the malfunction of their own components and the tough Martian climate to send back footage from Mars. “One Headlight” is an ode to a stoic machine. A disillusioned Cinderella dies of a broken-heart and a grieving Prince Charming bravely faces the realisation that there’s no happily ever after. He didn’t need a magic coach, he decides he could have driven himself and Cinderella through life with a trusty old machine with one headlight.

 

 

Radio with Feathers

Taiknam Hat is a kinetic head-wear that reacts and animates in accordance with the changes in its surrounding medium wave radio signals.

I’ve just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke’s When The World Was One, his personal history of communications, with a long section on the invention and development of radio. As a child a transistor radio was practically the only toy that I had. I lived in a remote part of Australia that took a long time to be connected to television. I wanted everything to be able to receive and transmit radio waves. This hat is the most beautiful radio I’ve ever seen.  And the most thoughtful. Perhaps my childhood wish came true, with dastardly results, for everything IS a radio (or a television or a computer or a microwave or an LED) causing something the hat’s designers refer to as “electrosmog”, which causes stress and anxiety to animals. The feathers on the hat measure the amount of electrosmog and shudder and sway according to the levels of electrosmog it detects. To be beautiful now is to be benign to the environment. It may include characteristics beyond the visual. To be beautiful while wearing this hat is to be still.

The intention of the project is to materialize the invisible and to contribute to the awareness of the increasing electromagnetic radiation. The co-existence of all electromagnetic waves that radiate from physical devices (light, microwaves, x-rays, and TV and radio transmissions) creates an invisible landscape that interacts with physical space and its inhabitants. It has long been noted that the expansion of uses for electrical, electronic and radio devices is converting this landscape into a new form of pollution which is known as electrosmog.

Medium waves are generated by radio transmitters which are ranked among the most powerful sources that cause electrosmog. Although the electrosmog is not visible to us, it is claimed to cause in biological effects on humans and animals and the topic has also been a focus for various projects in the field of art and design.

This project is an alternative attempt to materialize the immaterial space of radio waves by emulating horripilation, an automatic instinctive reaction of living creatures to sources of irritation and stress. Horripilation, which can be defined as the erection of hairs or feathers in various species under certain emotional conditions (better known as goose bumps in human body), is a temporary and local change in the skin and claimed to be evolved as a part of the “fight-or-flight” reaction by some biologists. Numerous experiments on various animals report that animals respond to exterior threats with a reflex of their nervous system which results in either the animal fighting (anger emotion) or fleeing (fear emotion) and horripilation can be clearly observed in the moment of both reactions. Other than the primary emotions of anger and fear, in some animals, especially in birds, horripilation is also attached to another instinct, the instinct of “self-display/signaling”.

Taiknam Hat aims to utilize the biological facts regarding the causes and properties of horripilation in birds as a metaphor, in order to express our bodies’ irritation towards electromagnetic radiation as well as to create a visual and tactile signage of their existence for other people. The final idea of creating a kinetic headwear which provides a contemporary interpretation of the historical feather hats is moreover encouraged by the scientific findings that show that feathers themselves may act as microwave sensors. Therefore, the headwear employs a number of actual feathers. The feathers hat are mounted on the Taiknam Hat become activated and move according to the existence and amount of medium waves at a certain location while the person who wears the hat strolls through space.

The system is composed of movable feathers movements of which are operated by a motor that is activated by a medium wave detection system. The detection system constantly checks and verifies whether there are any medium waves in the environment. This live information is sent to a microcomputer. The microcomputer activates the motor and the mechanical structure that is holding the feathers and results in the kinetic behaviour of the feathers.

The hat.
2 batteries 1,5v (should be changed when over).

Ricardo Nascimento,
Master Student, Kunstuniversität Linz, Interface Culture.
ricardo [at] popkalab.com

Ebru Kurbak
PhD Candidate, Department of Space and Design Strategies, Kunstuniversität Linz
ebru.kurbak [at] ufg.ac.at

Fabiana Shizue
freelancer illustrator. www.fshizue.com
fshizue [at] gmail.com

 

 

 

Getting Smarter

 

It was purely by chance that I happened to read deep sea explorer Dr Robert Ballard's cold war thriller, Bright Shark, this week. I saw it in the library's catalogue while I was searching for one of his other books and requested it on a whim. The details are exceptionally vivid. He spent the early part of his career in the US Navy on missions using unmanned submersible craft to locate the wrecks of submarines that sank with their experimental nuclear weapons.

The novel is set (and was published) in 1992 but concerns an Israeli submarine that sank in the 1950's, so there are goofy old-school spies from Russia and America and Israel and Britain. If Buck Henry and Mel Brooks had gotten a hold of this and made a movie it could have been given the Get Smart! treatment. There's even a female commander as chic and sharp and sardonic as Agent 99.


Get Smart! television series 

When I checked my e-mail today there was a trailer for a Get Smart! movie, based on the tv series, on the Yahoo! home page.

  
Trailer from new Get Smart movie

I’m sure there can’t be too many 60’s t.v. shows left to re-stage as movies: Mr. Ed perhaps, or F. Troop, but — call me paranoid – I’ve started seeing references to the Cold War everywhere. The new Indiana Jones movie is set in the 1950’s, with nuclear testing and Roswell style aliens in the plot. And Alex Ross’s column in the New Yorker this week talks about psychological warfare waged through music.

The idea of using music in psychological warfare goes back to at least the Second World War, when Soviet forces under siege in Leningrad defiantly broadcast Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony into no man’s land and the Office of War Information relayed jazz and other democratic sounds into Nazi-occupied Europe. During the occupation of Germany, from 1945 to 1949, the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), took control of German musical culture, discouraging nationalism and encouraging progressive approaches among younger composers. In the course of writing a history of twentieth-century music, I examined the records of OMGUS at the National Archives, and, while I was there, the invasion of Iraq began. The U.S. Army’s conspicuous disregard for Iraqi cultural heritage made for a stark contrast with the meticulous planning documented in OMGUS’s records.

In Get Smart!, the t.v. series, the K.A.O.S. agents posing as a psychedelic band called The Sacred Cows used music as a mind control device.

Max and 99 and the Sacred Cows

The cool absurdity of the war movies of the cold war era was thrilling to me. The dark humour of M.A.S.H., Catch-22, and especially Doctor Strangelove.

 

I must have a high threshhold for irony because I accepted Doctor Strangelove as something plausible, but when I found the original review from the New York Times I was astonished to see Bosley Crowther worked-up and spluttering about it.

Stanley Kubrick's new film, called Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across. And I say that with full recollection of some of the grim ones I've heard from Mort Sahl, some of the cartoons I've seen by Charles Addams, and some of the stuff I've read in Mad magazine.
For this brazenly jesting speculation of what might happen within the Pentagon and within the most responsible council of the President of the United States if some maniac Air Force general should suddenly order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union is at the same time one of the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that has ever been on the screen. It opened yesterday at the Victoria and the Baronet.

My reaction to it is quite divided, because there is so much about it that is grand, so much that is brilliant and amusing, and much that is grave and dangerous.

New York Times review of Doctor Strangelove. By Bosley Crowther.  Published: January 31, 1964

Television came late to the rural outpost in Australia where I lived as a child. But I was immediately entranced by Get Smart! and Roadrunner cartoons. I was inspired by Max’s shoe-phone and other techno-communications devices and desperately wished for an Acme catalogue to have a look at the devices Wile E. Coyote was ordering. I learned, soon enough, that these were not auspicious sources of wisdom for a young would-be engineer.

My favourite cold-war music is the series of albums made by David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the Hansa studios in Berlin, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti is quoted in a Wikipedia entry saying that Red guards would shine their searchlights through the production studio window. For reasons that infuriate me and drive me to despair my communications devices work about as well as anything created in the C.O.N.T.R.O.L. workshops, or ordered from the Acme Catalogue, so in order to have music while I write I’ve been calling up videos on YouTube and listening to them, without watching them. A new favourite is a version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” from the Hansa sessions, a song about lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, by the Wallflowers. I heard the sound of helicopters and buildings being demolished while the Wallflowers played and figured it must be from a Cold War movie soundtrack, with a backdrop of the sound of the Berlin Wall falling. But it’s from Godzilla !!! Which side had the covert gargantuan lizard operative?

Wallflowers perform David Bowie’s Heroes from the movie Godzilla

 

 

The Romance of Robots

Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very.
Rachael: I’m Rachael.
Deckard: Deckard.
Rachael: It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.
Deckard: Replicants are like any other machine – they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.

Blade Runner

 If humans still exist two centuries from now and are able, and wish to, look back on the history of robotics, the period from 1984 to the discontinuing of Sony’s AIBO robot dog early in the new century, will seem like a high romantic period, a digital equivalent of the renaissance, swooningly beautiful and sensual. A lifelike owl swooped through the high-domed art deco hall in Tyrell’s penthouse like Merlin’s wise pet, at the beginning of the era and at its end Sheila Metzner photographed a melancholy, lonely paradise that looked like it was on Mars. A version of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house was inhabited by a languid beauty and her AIBO (“man’s next friend”) in Bergdorf Goodman ads published in the New York Times Magazine in 1999.

The dream imploded with the crash of the stock market: the business plans of the dot.com companies now seemed like nothing but hallucinations. In the twilight of the consumer robot industry Sony’s humanoid robot Qrio appeared in an episode of Astro Boy, the Japanese animated series about a robot boy with a human heart. When Star Trek: The Next Generation ended, the concept of a machine yearning to be truly human faded when the android crew member Data was no longer on our screens.

 

One of the proponets of intelligent machines, continuing to do research in this area, is Rodney Brooks. He was one of a number of academics asked by the Boston Globe  today to suggest what technologies will change our lives in the coming decade as much as the personal computer and mobile communiciations technologies have. He replied:

“As the baby boomers age, the demographics of Europe, North America, East Asia, and Australia will demand that the productivity of all aspects of manual work increase dramatically. Fortunately, robots are just now maturing to the point where they can help with real productivity at practical prices. From virtually no mobile robots deployed anywhere in the world six years ago we now have thousands on active duty in the US military and millions cleaning the floors of American homes. This is the lead-up to a classic hockey-stick growth curve. Just as computers we interact with personally (e.g., desktops, laptops, PDAs, cellphones) transformed our lives over the last 25 years, so, too, will robots transform our lives over the coming 25. And it just so happens that Massachusetts is the epicenter of this nascent industry.”

His predictions seem to be borne out by the manipulation, by thought, of a robot arm by a monkey.

Cortical Control of a Prosthetic Arm for Self-Feeding (Nature)

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. A grid in the monkey’s brain carried signals from 100 neurons for the mechanical arm to grab and carry snacks to the mouth.

“The reality of this is so remarkable. The potential impact, in terms of quality of life for amputees and patients with spinal cord damage, is awesome.” Ron, Chicago
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

The Mars Rover, Phoenix, has just landed on the planet’s surface and has left a footprint like mark.

Phoenix landing on Mars.

 It will be instructed, from earth, to use its robot arm to dig for ice and soil samples.

 

On Bldgblog, these two robotic experiments have Geoff Manaugh thinking about a new class of sentient robots.

Two unrelated bits of news this week strangely merged for me, to surreal effect.
First, we learned that two monkeys were able to move a robotic arm “merely by thinking.” The arm, which included “working shoulder and elbow joints and a clawlike ‘hand’,” was controllable after “[p]robes the width of a human hair were inserted into the neuronal pathways of the monkeys’ motor cortex.”
This field of research is referred to as “mind-controlled robotic prosthetics” – but the mind in control here is not human.
Second, the New York Times reported that “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has successfully lifted its robotic arm” up there on the surface of another planet.
“Testing the arm will take a few days,” we read, “and the first scoops of Martian soil are to be dug up next week.”
And while I know that these stories are not connected, putting them together is like something from a Thomas Pynchon novel: monkeys locked in a room somewhere, controlling the arms of machines on other planets. As if we might discover, at the end of the day, that NASA wasn’t a human organization at all – it was a bunch of rhesus monkeys locked in a lab somewhere, enthroned amidst wires and brain-caps, like some new sign of the Tarot, lost in private visions of machines on alien worlds. An experiment gone awry.
Their “dreams” at night are actually video feeds from probes moving through outer darkness.