A Love Story

Future Evolution. Painting by Alexis Rockman

I went to see WALL-E today. The branch of robotics I write about isn’t anthropomorphic. Machines that allow one to work with something from a distance began with the Manhattan project with the scientists being able to manipulate the radioactive materials from a safe distance, and it’s hard to romanticise that kind of creation myth. I write mostly about the projects and theories of Dr Robert Ballard, whose remotely operated robots found the wreck of the Titanic, and Ken Goldberg, an engineer and artist who is now head of the new media center at Berkeley. Their robotic mechanisms are tending towards the deep background of invisibility and while the interfaces are simple, they don’t simplify the mathematical language and concepts for anyone wanting a more direct connection with the robotic devices.

But I’m susceptible to the charm of anthropomorphic robots, and given my gypsy lifestyle might well have satisfied my longing for owning a fox terrier by acquiring Sony’s robotic terrier, AIBO (“man’s next friend”) if it hadn’t been discontinued. I’m fascinated by the mythological framework of WALL-E. We’re in an era where changes to the natural environment are caused by humankind, by domesticated flora and fauna and the machines we’ve created. Back in 2004 scientists were observing that the “Anthropocene age” has arrived: “Scientists are beginning to accept that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, so named because humans have come to rival nature in their impact on the global environment. The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who first proposed the term Anthropocene four years ago, said the concept was winning wide acceptance from colleagues in other fields.”

WALL-E is a tender, dear-hearted machine charged with the responsibility of cleaning up after the humans who have abandoned the planet. He creates skyscrapers of compacted consumer refuse that sit among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The landscape reminded me of Alexis Rockman’s musings about the environmental future of Manhattan, particularly the cover of the book he collaborated on with Peter Ward, who says, in his introduction: “I explained the thoughts that make up the subject of this book, starting out with the basic assumption that colours all that follows: for the biological life span of the planet, humanity is essentially extinction proof, and, if we manage to develop effective interstellar travel, completely extinction proof as long as the galaxy survives…It is far more likely that the future will be … a digital wilderness of humans co-evolving with machines, or a wilderness of genetically altered plants escaping from agricultural fields to change the world into a landscape of weeds, or a wilderness of cloned sheep walking amok among their even more staid and normally bred bretheren.”

Like a Victorian naturalist WALL-E saves paleontological wonders: a rubik’s cube, a light bulb, garden gnomes, strings of fairy lights. He wonders about love. His only frame of reference for love and connection with another creature is a video of the movie musical, “Hello Dolly” and a pet cockroach.

I’m reading everything the Australian explorer, environmentalist and paleontologist Tim Flannery has ever written and the book I’m reading right now is Country, where he talks about his yearning to be a paleontologist in order to understand the history and magnificence of the kangaroo. He observes that Australia’s environmental woes have been exacerbated by the ill-suited European agricultural systems and flora and fauna introduced by the British settlers. But to walk away from the land and leave it untended would be a worse fate. The land and its creatures can only regenerate with our help, he writes. He was mortified by a farmer killing a steer in front of him when his scientific colleagues made a request to buy some meat: “Would it not be morally preferable to avoid eating meat?” he wonders. “What, then, would become of the outback, which is unsuitable for agriculture? Without industry no-one would live there and manage the land, so central Australia would become a vast degraded reservoir of feral animals, in which native species and introduced ones alike would, in drought, suffer and die by the millions. Care for our ecology must underpin everything we do, for without a viable ecosystem humans and animals will not survive.”

WALL-E tends the destroyed environment and cares for the creature he lives with, his pet cockroach. And he’s rewarded with the regeneration of plant life. The story of a fearless, big-hearted robot saving the human race, which returns to earth to help him regenerate the planet, is highly entertaining and exquisitely rendered. There are sweetly ironic references: when WALL-E powers up he plays the Mac start up chord. And Eve, WALL-E’s love resembles the Roswell alien. The movie is seen from the robots’ point of view, the demons and heroes are their demons and heroes, the malevolent computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and R2D2 (there’s an homage to its trash compactor sequence from Star Wars.)

The credits roll over civilisation forming, again, with humans and machines intertwined, that might be a scenario from Will Wright’s game, Spore. Equivalents to the cave paintings at Lescaux, Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan mythologies, all the way up to the present. And then … ? I’m tempted to buy a version of Spore for the iphone, if there’s one in the app store. I want to know how this ends, again.

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.

 

A Requiem for Aibo

This Aibo listens to Nipper. Photograph by pt at Flickr.

The mystical theme of the space age is this: The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the centre of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: That is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. Our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious, that is what is coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth, that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbours, in our enemies, in all of us.

Joseph Campbell. New York Times Magazine. Circa 1977.

An entire cyle of myth played itself out, from beginning to end starting with the Apollo 8 crew’s photograph of earthrise, the view back to earth from the moon’s orbit that showed us that we are one group of humans living within one habitat, undivided, and ended with a series of exquisitely beautiful Bergdorf Goodman advertisements photographed by Sheila Metzner and published in the New York Times Magazine towards the end of 1999, which showed a woman on a barren planet — perhaps Mars – living in something like Richard Neutra’s Kaufman House with only Sony’s robot dog AIBO, “man’s next friend” as a companion. The computer age ended with symbols of glamorous desolation that aligned with the wasteland identified by T.S. Eliot in the 1920’s, and that Arthur Schlesinger recognised as still existing in the middle of the century. “Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift,” he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1948. “We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.”

Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988 his series of conversations with Bill Moyers, recorded at George Lucas’s Skywalker Studio, The Power of Myth, was shown on public television in America and was an enormous hit, they reignited a public thirst for mythology but in the series Joseph Campbell noted that an era was ending and he had no clear idea where the new context for mythological stories would be found. The idealism of the civil rights era and the ambition that sent humans to the moon had passed and the falling of the Berlin Wall was bringing the curtain down on the cold war. The dot.com boom that would become a frenzy in the decade after Campbell died would bring about some powerful social and cultural advancements: the internet would remain free and owned by no-one, but what would largely be remembered was a hunger for ridiculous amounts of money tied to goofily improbable schemes.

Movies were carrying forward some mythological messages, Campbell noted in The Power of Myth. George Lucas had drawn heavily from Campbell’s writings that connected up myths across cultures and through time for his Star Wars movies. Campbell’s response to the movies was that: “It’s what Goethe said in Faust but which Lucas has dressed in modern idiom — the message that technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.” Campbell died before the introduction of the internet, but he’d owned a computer. He likened it to an Old Testament God that was “all rules and no mercy.”

The myths for a new century, a new time, look beyond the computer to what remains human. In his 1999 novel All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson predicted that as the millennium turned the world would end and no-one would notice. What ended was any sense of the divine being something outside ourselves. We’d travelled outside of ourselves to look back with God’s eye at our world when we put humans into orbit. We’d cloned animals (and perhaps humans) and in our dominion over nature had all but destroyed our world. The invention of the atom bomb gave us the power to wipe out the world. The novel ends with time symbolically beginning again: the last few chapters are truly poetic and inexpressible in logical terms. But these things happen: the entirely synthetic creature, the idoru, Rei Toi becomes organically human, an Eve for a new age made entirely from shards of our knowledge. Humans find themselves again within authentic stories: symbolised by the struggle between Cody Harwood, the media baron who manufactures abstracted existences around celebrities and Rydell, whose exquisite sensitivity to patterns in data recognises the aimlessness and inhumanity of the data stream. And the innocent, damaged boy Silencio, with the idiot savant’s ability to recognise patterns watches time being remade. And the bridge burns. This made me think of the Buddhist parable that the raft is not the shore, when we arrive at the other side we don’t drag the boat along behind us, it was merely a vehicle to deliver us to a new shore. We’ve arrived somewhere beyond the computer: it’s useful, but not Godlike, it serves us not the other way round. The perspective for this new mythology was introduced in Nick Cave’s 2001 song As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, the co-ordinates given are universal and global. Two beings sit beside one another and describe what they see through the window and in their own hearts: it’s a dialogue between Nick and his wife, Nick and the listener, Nick and himself, Nick and God. It’s a new age: the song vaguely references the final book of the New Testament, Revelations, where Jesus is the bridegroom of humankind, wiping away our tears now that the former things have passed away. It’s a call to action and has the rhythm of an engaged heartbeat. It seems to be a conversation recalled while Nick is walking out into the world. A couple of years later William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition would outline the mythological system for this new age, finding connections, human connections, that are meaningful: the only technology in the book was what was already on the market, an Apple cube, a regular powerbook, a mobile phone.   

His novels have become the defining myths of the digital tele-communications section of the computer age. He’s truly a Joseph Campbell figure for this new age. The Sony Walkman had helped define William Gibson’s concept of virtual reality. He wrote of walking through the streets of Vancouver with the “bleak majesty” of a Joy Division album playing within his thoughts, adding to his experience of the city. It was a bridge between the analogue and digital worlds. Gibson was also inspired by adolescents being absorbed into the abstract visual worlds of early arcade video games, the musicians of Nick Cave’s generation constructing elaborate mental worlds within the broken parts of cities worldwide, Ridley Scott’s movie Bladerunner, and the first personal computer, all of which happened circa the significant science fiction date of 1984.

The Bladerunner legacy is the one that’s most obvious to identify. Humans destroyed the landscape and all living creatures and had to relocate to Mars. On earth they’d created robotic animals to replace the real wildlife that had become extinct. On Mars they created humanoid robots to be companions, but even the robots were lonely. The robots (replicants) turned to classical Jules Verne and H.G. Wells science fiction to make their existence bearable, stories that represented Mars as a verdant paradise. The rogue replicants escape to earth, determined to have an authentic, meaningful existence, whatever the hardships and however broken the landscape, since they’d be a part of a genuine community.

AIBO, a Japanese word meaning companion, and a clumsy acronym for an artificial intelligence robot seemed to be the beginning of a breed of smart creatures that might, one day, be capable of becoming genuinely independently intelligent, lifelike. It’s possible that, like the Walkman, the AIBO represented the culmination of a technological system, as it was dying out, not the start of something new. Sony unwittingly symbolised the fulfillment of the Bladerunner prophecy. A version of AIBO, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity were robot dogs traversing Mars. One of them landed, rolled into place on the surface of the planet and began playing (Sony recording artist) Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born To Run”. A melancholy book about Sony, by John Nathan, ended with a chapter entitled “Idei the Heretic” in which the then Chief Executive suspected Sony as we knew it then would have to die. He was right. He was removed from the job. AIBO was discontinued, and the Qualia range, something as bizarrely perfectly unreal, like a Victorian naturalist’s specimens remains only as high-priced range in America. Qualia suggested that electronics would create heady new sensations, comparable with the joy of savouring a $400 glass of wine, or a perfect leaf plucked from a rainforest. Qualia stores were exclusive tombs, with their own scent and concierges clad in Yohji Yamamoto costumes demonstrating electronics to potential customers. The Qualia operation reminded me of the Tyrell Corporation’s perfect Frank Lloyd Wright headquarters with its all but real owl, and the nearly human Rachel.

The part of us that hears

needs to be heard

The part of us that sees

Yearns to be observed

The part of us that touches

Wants to be engaged

The part of us that feels

Needs to be nurtured

It’s the part of us that gives shape and meaning to sensory experiences – to Qualia.

Sony brochure.

The last decade of the twentieth century was heady. It was as if perfectly sane businesses began reading William Gibson’s novels and considering them urban planning documents and manufacturing schematics for technological devices. Gibson’s symbolic inference that all life would pass through the computer screen and find a truer existence there was taken as a bald fact. There were business plans that chased this notion that were patently absurd and unworkable and fell apart almost immediately. There were those that were sinister, like Enron’s befuddling commodities trading leaving a wake of environmental and human suffering in India, a couple of dimly lit years in California, and denuded pension plans of its employees. But there were those that were market dreams as fine and valuable as myths, that allowed people to do things for themselves: to market their own products directly to one another (e-Bay) with an escrow payment system that kept their financial details secure (PayPal), a search engine that was (then) unmuddied by advertising (Google). Google maps allowed us to view our world any way we wanted. And alongside these commercial ventures, the internet remained free and a community: with its backbone universally available (the World Wide Web), a system for sharing and collaborating through several sets of copyright tiers (Creative Commons), an operating system that re-invents itself through collective labours (Linux), and now the hyperlocal phenomenon of Placeblogging through Outside.in .