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.

 

Foamy music by Warren Ellis

Exquisite music by Warren Ellis for a Sony ad which filled the streets of Miami with foam.

Created by the ad agency Fallon London, which also made the three previous iconic Sony advertisements – all for the Bravia flat-screen television – the ninety-second “Foam City” commercial required 16 hours of filming.

The  team flooded the centre of the Florida, south east United States, city with over 460 million litres of foam, using the world’s largest foam-producing machine, which could fill an Olympic swimming pool in 24 seconds.

The commercial is being shown for the first time on European televisions today. However, it will not appear in the UK until May 1.

Directed by Simon Ratigan, it features music by Warren Ellis, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It is advertising the new Handycam and Cybershot handheld digital video cameras.

Over 200 Miami residents were asked to frolic in the foam while capturing events on the cameras.

Tom Chivers. Telegraph. April 16, 2008

I used to romanticize Sony. I did well investing in the stock market at the end of the dot.com boom but Sony was a lead weight, I made the mistake of emotionally investing in my investments. The Walkman was a truly magical object to me: As it was to William Gibson, it was part of his inspiration for cyberspace and what became the digital age in Neuromancer.

”I had gone into a small neighborhood electronics store, never even having heard of the Walkman,” he said in an interview from Vancouver. ”They had one on display and the guy told me, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

”I haven’t had that immediate a reaction to a piece of technology before or since. I didn’t analyze it at the time, but in retrospect, I recognized the revolutionary intimacy of the interface. For the first time I was able to move my nervous system through a landscape with my choice of soundtrack.

William Gibson, interviewed. New York Times. July 29, 1999.

Then I got caught up in the Sony creation myth, Ibuka and Morita cooking up audio tape with tarry substances on kraft paper in the rubble of bombed out buildings in post-WW2 Tokyo.

Sony disappointed me with the “walkman of words”, a hideous geiger-counter like object with ugly radioactive-green words on a tiny screen, in 1991. I held fast to the dream of a perfectly simple multi-screened device through watching e-ink’s developments in clear text on opaque flexible screens that could be read even in daylight. But then the Libri-e, only released in Japan around the turn of the millennium and later the electronic book reader, for the Western world, just seemed futile. One day I woke up and the the fairy tale was over: the nerd equivalent of no longer believing in Santa Claus. The discontinuation of the robot dog, AIBO was the final nail in the coffin. An electronic book was no longer a holy grail. I figured that if I wait a few months I’ll have an Apple phone/ Blackberryish communicator / Music player / World radio with a reasonable screen and do basic reading-for-information, or when I’m travelling, on that device and print out anything I want to savour and flip through. So I’m researching flexible ceramic spines and pages that fold in and hold, without glue, to build a bibliostructure to hold the print-outs.

When I read that Warren Ellis had been hired to do the music for an ad, then heard the music, my heart warmed a little again towards Sony. He’s an exquisitely thoughtful and intelligent composer. I don’t know much about how compositions evoke a feeling, time or place rather than illustrate it, I just respond. As a child my favourite composer was Duke Ellington, and Warren’s music seems to me to have that kind of scope, something unbounded in its curiosity and genuinely soulful. I first saw Warren perform when he played with the Bad Seeds in Los Angeles and there’s something tender, though wild, about his contributions to the band that make me think of a description I once read about early country music, that the violin was the symbol for tugging the strings of the heart.

The first piece of his own music I owned (before circling back to the Dirty Three’s albums) was a solo violin piece he wrote for my dancer friend Dana Gingras’s company, the Holy Body Tattoo. Dana spent her childhood in Buenos Aires and has a great love of Paris, where Tango music found a home when it was exiled from Argentina. The name of the dance company refers to the indelible marks that life experiences leave on the soul. (The show Circa also includes music by the Tiger Lillies.) Warren has commented on his music for Circa.

I had been approached sometime before to contribute some solo music to the project,and this recording is the result. The theme of the dance was the tango and I was asked to write music in an appropriate style. Tango is a style of music I have never attempted to play or write, and for that reason decided any attempt to try and write something in that vein would be at once dishonest and most probably insulting to a fine form of music.

So I decided to deconstruct, if you like, the elements I heard in Tango music,its percussive nature, sliding melodies, glissandos, the emotional intensity, and try to create it in a figurative way, using only the violin. I worked with the two dancers in a small studio in Paris, listening to the way their shoes slid, and improvising to the movement that they were creating for the piece.

Warren Ellis.

Warren’s foamy music for Sony has the crystalline loveliness of a snowflake, with just a sharp metallic edge of something manufactured, not organic. And the wrenching melancholy of snowflakes, the fleeting beauty that dissolves in your hand the moment you touch it.

Geoff Manaugh has a post on Bldgblog about the meteorological foam we call clouds being used as an advertising medium. A recalibrated version of skywriting.

Over on LiveScience we learn that a new company has started using “a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium” to create “floating ads and messages” in the sky.
Unfortunately dubbed Flogos, these floating logos can be made – or printed, really – every 15 seconds by “re-purposed snow machines,” thus “flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.”
I should start blogging with it.
The sky texts aren’t particularly large, however. They’re only “about two feet long and nearly a foot wide” – but they “generally last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere.”
“They will fly for miles,” their inventor adds – because they are “durable,” capable of flying as high as 20,000 feet without breaking up. Gaseous typography.
It won’t just be meteorologists watching the skies, in other words, but graphic designers. Adjusting leading, kerning the clouds, ragging atmospheres.

Geoff Manaugh. Bldgblog