SynapticNulship

Science comedian Brian Malow has made a video containing neither comedy nor science:

When Robots Attack! Should We Fear a Singularity?

And yes, I realize I shouldn’t have even bothered to watch it once I realized it was for a mainstream news outlet, but several people in my Twitter lists were tweeting it.

Unfortunately, this video turned out not to be for nerds or anyone who has ever thought about future robots or the Singularity.  This video is for mainstream sheep.  The only glimmer of hope was when he started pursuing the thread of asking why humans have this tendency to punish themselves in robot stories with a father figure or in the manner of Frankenstein.  After a couple seconds of that we’re dropped back into cliché city with “robot uprisings.”

The Roomba is mentioned—and then—holy shit, iRobot makes military robots too!  OMG!  Wait…everybody knows that already.  Big deal.  I guess Time readers/watchers are really behind the…times.  And sure, I’m not being fair—Time readers may not have heard of every robot company, after all.  Thank goodness this video shows Big Dog and Robonaut, two unrelated robots made by other companies, wedged in between the iRobot clips while Malow lobs the old joke at us that the cleaning robots will decide to kill humans.

Sure, it’s supposed to be funny.  But it’s not, because it’s unoriginal and out of date and/or not real enough (some humor is effective because it’s so close to the truth).  As William Zinsser said of humor writers:

They’re not just fooling around.  They are as serious in purpose as Hemingway or Faulkner—in fact, a national asset in forcing the country to see itself clearly.

Occasionally I do see a humor piece on the web that achieves this, sometimes even from big places like Cracked.com or The Onion.

Partly, it’s just a matter of taste.  Surely some people found Malow’s robot/singularity video funny; after all, millions of people out there paid money to see Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers.  Millions of people…laughing when they’re told to at tired jokes and clichés.

Of course, maybe it’s too difficult to be funny with robots—you have to be creative and you’re not sure what your target audience will grok.  But, please, if you’re going to make yet another joke about the “robot uprising,” at least make it a new joke.

If you think I’m biased against people making fun of robots or my company, think again: The Daily Show beat Malow to the punch and made fun of iRobot in 2009 (“Roombas of Doom“), and it was much funnier than Malow’s attempt, although still very far removed from reality:

So why do I even bother ranting about mainstream tropes and lack of creativity?  Well, the problem is it’s infecting even those not in the mainstream.  Almost every person, even if they are scientists or engineers, seems to be obligated to mention AI overlords and robot uprisings as if there are no possible other hooks available.  Every single military robot related article I have seen on the Internet mentions Terminator.  It’s as if the bulk of our culture has been reduced to a mere handful of common concepts, and more and more people are being sucked into this pit of mental inbreeding.

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

One of reasons I like Tron:Legacy is the existence of ISOs.  ISOs are “isomorphic algorithms”, which are lifeforms that emerged–unplanned–from the artificial environment of the grid.  Besides being a cool movie manifestation of ALife and emergent phenomena, there is also an association with certain philosophical and AI ideas via the word “isomorphic.”  The introduction to ISOs may have sounded like a brief moment of technobabble to some, whereas to me it was a brilliant reference to Gödel, Escher, Bach.

In this famous (in some circles) 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter , the author suggests that since isomorphisms produce meaning in simple formal systems (they act as the link between symbols and real world objects) they might be behind all meaning in humans.

Hofstadter says (p. 82):

In my opinion, in fact, the key element in answering the question “What is consciousness?” will be the unraveling of the nature of the “isomorphism” which underlies meaning.

The other awesome element of Tron:Legacy is the digital DNA.  This can be repaired by manipulating the holographic interface of an entity’s identity disk.  In the movie this was demonstrated when Flynn fixed the digital DNA which then somehow resulted in the regeneration of Quorra’s missing arm.  Although this is Hollywood’s presentation of hacking incredibly complex system of codes (note that unlike most movies, Tron:Legacy shows actual UNIX commands being entered in the real world 2010 scenes, saving the fake interfaces for the Grid), it makes one wonder–what if repairing DNA and/or physical body parts really was that easy?

The concept of the ISO’s digital DNA is also a provocative idea aside from the ID disk interface.  Is this DNA better than biological DNA?  Are ISOs truly better than humans?  Or are they simply the Grid isomorphism of “real” world humans?  Flynn talks about all the improvements he can make in the world from Grid projects.  However, Flynn tells his program CLU (which is a partial copy of himself) that there’s no such thing as perfection.  So we are left in the middle ground, and anybody who thought this movie was a simple black and white good vs. evil epic Hollywood effects regurgitation has missed the important grey areas.

Quorra, an ISO

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

Kevin Kelly concluded a chapter in his new book What Technology Wants with the declaration that if you hate technology, you basically hate yourself.

The rationale is twofold:

1. As many have observed before, technology–and Kelly’s superset “technium”–is in many ways the natural successor to biological evolution.  In other words, human change is primarily through various symbiotic and feedback-looped systems that comprise human culture.

2. It all started with biology, but humans throughout their entire history have defined and been defined by their tools and information technologies.  I wrote an essay a few months ago called “What Bruce Campbell Taught Me About Robotics” concerning human co-evolution with tools and the mind’s plastic self-models.  And of course there’s the whole co-evolution with or transition to language-based societies.

So if the premise that human culture is a result of taking the path of technologies is true, then to reject technology as a whole would be reject human culture as it has always been.  If the premise that our biological framework is a result of a back-and-forth relationship with tools and/or information, then you have another reason to say that hating technology is hating yourself (assuming you are human).

In his book, Kelly argues against the noble savage concept.  Even though there are many useless implementations of technology, the tech that is good is extremely good and all humans adopt them when they can.  Some examples Kelly provides are telephones, antibiotics and other medicines, and…chainsaws.  Low-tech villagers continue to swarm to slums of higher-tech cities, not because they are forced, but because they want their children to have better opportunities.

So is it a straw man that actually hates technology?  Certainly people hate certain implementations of technology.  Certainly it is ok, and perhaps needed more than ever, to reject useless technology artifacts.  I think one place where you can definitely find some technology haters are the ones afraid of obviously transformative technologies, in other words the ones that purposely and radically alter humans.  And they are only “transformative” in an anachronistic sense–e.g., if you compare two different time periods in history, you can see drastic differences.

Also, although perhaps not outright hate in most cases, there are many who have been infected by the meme that artificial creatures such as robots and/or super-smart computers (and/or super-smart networks of computers) present a competition to humans as they exist now.  This meme is perhaps more dangerous than any computer could be because it tries to divorce humans from the technium.

Image credit: whokilledbambi

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

This weekend I attended the H+ (transhumanist) Summit at Harvard University (live streamed videos here).

We were invited to blog about it on Scientific Blogging which added a special tab for H+ and a category for the theme of the conference, which was Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

So I made a new blog there, In the Eye of the Brainstorm, so far with two three posts related to transhumanism and/or the conference itself:

Kurzweil’s Phenomenological Consciousness

Cat Usability Testing (Wolfram’s Predictions)

Pirate Evolution

Note that SynapticNulship (this site) is still my main blog for artificial intelligence and interaction design writings.

Note for those interested in presentation skills: The most lively talk was by Seth Lloyd.  Interestingly, he did not use a computer.