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

 

 

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 .