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.