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 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."




Donation Dashboard

   

         Craigslist is a meteor whose impact is sending the lumbering media giants into extinction by taking away their lifeblood, classified advertising. Craig Newmark had a newsletter about things going on in San Francisco that he distributed by e-mail. I imagine it was the sort of thing that once would have been photocopied and tacked-up on bulletin boards in coffee shops, the public library and the doctor’s waiting room, among notices for rooms-to-rent, bicycles-to-buy and plumbers spruiking their services. Then he took the whole bulletin board and put it online. But he put every town’s bulletin boards online and undermined the financial structures of newspapers from the small community paper all the way up to the New York Times.

            No matter how expansive and comprehensive Craigslist becomes it aims to retain the integrity of a community newsletter, doing business within what the FAQ on the website calls “a culture of trust.” There’s been no brand-creation, cross-marketing, and a significant corporate investor is E-Bay, which has also laboured to create a community culture of trust, trying to maintain its connection to being an online host for neighbourhood flea-markets and yard-sales, and relying on testimonials of trust to evaluate buyers and sellers.

            There’s no editorial content on Craiglist. Community news and features has been radically re-imagined by Steven Johnson and John Geraci with Outside.in, which geotags posts and groups them into locations. The ebb and flow of news and opinion can be seen on buzz maps which represent media organisations in grey and bloggers in orange. The Washington Post has teamed up with Outside.in to revamp its City Desk with Outside.in buzz maps.

            This local and simultaneously global phenomenon is the perspective of our age says Steven Johnson who calls it “the Long Zoom”. Joseph Campbell said that the image of the earth shown to us by the Apollo astronauts widened the horizon for mythology, that since that time we’d have to be aware that local and global were inextricably linked states of being. The satellite tracking and imaging technology that was created for the moon missions has now sunk into lowly domestic appliances and communications devices. Outside.in’s navigation system is linked to Google earth’s maps.

            I followed a couple of links from John Geraci’s blog through to assessments of the media. The gist of these reports was that newspapers have a different financial model online because their digital service is accessed in pieces. A reader may perform a search, follow a link, be responding to an e-mail alert and may never even visit the newspaper’s site to read the story. Offline the prestige of the newspaper is in its whole. Investigative journalism may occasionally be dull but it’s the kind of endeavour that brings prestige to a newspaper and is worth the investment in reporting costs. Online an investigative report may bring in few readers and be difficult to match with keyword advertising that readers will click through to. The ideal online story might be a sensational new study of depression, say, that can be surrounded by pharmaceutical advertising that worried readers would surely be likely to click on.

            One of the reports asked Craigslist founder Craig Newmark what he thought was important in newspapers and he replied “investigative journalism”. Well there’s no hope the blogger mused, now that Craigslist is inadvertently destroying the organizations that could deliver investigative journalism. But another blogger suggested that what was needed was not to look at ways of propping up the same kind of media we already have, but taking a fresh approach and experimenting, taking the values of journalism, and seeing how they might effectively work with these new tools, to assess social value not just financial returns. The issues of trust, accountability and responsibility underpin investigative journalism and the project that the Berkeley Center for New Media has undertaken since Craig Newmark made an endowment looks at how the accumulated wisdom of a community can make considered choices about charitable giving. The Berkeley Center for New Media has created a Donation Dashboard that ‘learns’ from the opinions of its users to make suggestions about matching potential donors with charitable organizations.

            Here’s how it works: you are presented with brief descriptions of non-profit institutions and asked to rate each in terms of how interested you are in donating to it. The system analyses ratings in light of others’ ratings and does its best to allocate your available funds in proportion to your interests. Your customized “donation portfolio” is presented in an easy-to-understand pie chart that you can save at the site for future reference. Donation Dashboard, which is being developed by the Berkeley Center for New Media, extends machine learning techniques used by commercial websites to recommend movies, music, and books. Donation Dashboard goes beyond existing charity ranking sites by statistically combining your ratings with the ratings entered by your fellow good Samaritans to compute a portfolio customized to your interests.

            A few years ago the New Yorker’s finance columnist James Surowiecki wrote a book called The Wisdom of Crowds that told of how individuals acting alone, when their actions are aggregated, very often make more considered and correct choices than those following an expert handing opinions and advice down. Donation Dashboard has a conceptual clarity that asks users to base their opinions on two measures, the operational effectiveness of the organization represented as a percentage. The higher the percentage the more your donation goes directly to the mission, the lower the percentage the more your donation is applied to the administrative and operating costs of the organization. And a sliding scale that asks you to rank your interest in the philosophy of the organization from “not very” to “very”. 

            The Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, Ken Goldberg, is also a scientist and an artist and in telerobotic art projects created through the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Berkeley has been working with intelligent databases and collaborative filtering programs since before we were used to encountering them on the likes of Amazon.com suggesting other purchases, or ranking the popularity of articles online. Amazon’s suggestions fall within narrow and doggedly obvious comparisons. When I purchase a Nick Cave album I’m given a range of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen albums to buy. But the ranking system has no way of measuring that I’m more likely to buy Miles Davis’s last album, Doo Bop, because my curiosity had been stirred by Nick talking about listening to a lot of late Miles Davis albums.

            In the material world we’re guided by the opinions and suggestions of others, and are taken into realms that are seemingly unpredictable. Ken Goldberg’s first collaborative filtering program Jester, told jokes that we rated, and then it tried to tell us more jokes we’d find funny. The parameters were complex and finely calibrated and I was often surprised that the program could follow my eccentric and illogical sense of humour, and just as often be surprised that I’d find something funny that I wouldn’t have imagined I’d find funny. Something similar has happened with my first few experiences with Donation Dashboard. I’m generally drawn to operations with lean operating expenses, but there are exceptions. I’m very interested in practical medical programs that provide ongoing services in remote, dangerous locations and I’d want them to have the necessary equipment and security and incur travel costs rotating staff. Donation Dashboard is programmed to pick up on these nuances, and in some cases I overturned previous prejudices, rethinking an organization I’d had a narrow perception of previously.

            The Berkeley Center for New Media has a broad definition of media, including theories and philosophies as media. Donation Dashboard might just stand as a metaphor that helps us think about what we deem valuable and are willing to pay for. Media organizations are increasingly in thrall to advertisers, telling us this is the bitter pill we have to swallow in order to pay for the investigative and community reporting that might not generate revenue. So instead of cultural reports we get lifestyle stories with marketing tie-ins.

            New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who has invested in Outside.in and de.licio.us (before it was sold to Yahoo!) has been writing recently on large organizations not understanding the value of the smaller companies and services they buy, gutting or diminishing them, without capitalising on what makes them valuable to the people who use them. I’ve been annoyed, lately, that the New York Times has removed the bookmarking site, de.licio.us from the “share” function in favour of Yahoo! Buzz, a popularity ranking service for articles. The New York Times has been the newspaper I’ve valued most, but it’s astonished me to realize that I value de.licio.us more, that I read the Guardian first now and often buy the Guardian Weekly from newsstands in Sydney, several blogs (particularly Bldgblog )next, and catch up with the New York Times often through Dayna Bateman’s blog, Detritus. She condenses articles in a way that makes them poetry.

              The Donation Dashboard pie-chart, cutting an individual’s donation into several parts, acknowledges that the world we live in is fragmented but that we can perceive it as a whole, symbolically. A community newspaper might not be a single entity any more, or part of a chain, but made up of Outside.in articles and Craigslist ads without the two organisations ever having to have anything directly to do with one another. What’s important is to be able to measure and aggregate trust, to learn from and benefit from the thoughts and insights of others.