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.