SynapticNulship

Right now I’m reading an architecture book from the 1970s called The Timeless Way of Building.  So far it has to do with theories of how towns and buildings and other things seem more “alive” than others, and how to achieve this quality—the “quality without a name”.

This of course goes far beyond merely architecture; indeed this book was brought to my attention not by an architect but by people in the UX (user experience) design community. Anyway, this blog post only covers a couple pages out of the book.

The author, Christopher Alexander, says that we have come to think of buildings, towns, and works of art as “creations.” And that “creation” is thought of as a monumental design task, “brought to birth, suddenly, in a single act, whose inner workings cannot be explained, whose substance relies ultimately on the ego of the creator.”

I would interject that the creator might understand the inner workings, but even then, for a complicated project attempted in a process with this mindset, the end result would probably not be completely understandable by the creator. More on that in a minute…

As Alexander writes:

The quality without a name cannot be made like this.

Imagine, by contrast, a system of simple rules, not complicated, patiently applied, until they gradually form a thing. The thing may be formed gradually and built all at once, or built gradually over time—but it is formed, essentially, by a process no more complicated than the process by which the Samoans shape their canoe.

And if you’re thinking that this sounds very much like how biology works, then you have predicted the next key statement on the same page:

The same thing, exactly, is true of a living organism.

An organism cannot be made. It cannot be conceived, by a willful act of creation, and then built, according to the blueprint of the creator. It is far too complex, far too subtle, to be born from a bolt of lightning in the creator’s mind. It has a thousand billion cells, each one adapted perfectly to its conditions—and this can only happen because the organism is not “made” but generated by a process which allows the gradual adaptation of these cells to happen hour by hour….

And Alexander claims that there is no other way. Of course, as a transhumanist and a roboticist and an occasional cognitive architect (oh, maybe there is architecture here after all!) I want to be able to create and modify life forms. I want to make artificial organisms, and interfaces between the organic and the non-organic.

However, I have enough experience with software development and project management to know that what Alexander says is true. I.e., I believe it based on my experience and observations.

So I have two immediate responses when I read this part of the book:

1. Examples of systems that look complex, but evolved and/or iterated via simple rules.

For instance, the cellular automata popularized by Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science create complexity and even randomness from ridiculously simple rules. Behavioral robotics, which started in the 1980s (although there were a few examples long before then), embraced the artifical organism in the environment concept. They had simple programs and no traditional internal models.

If you’ve ever made any kind of robot, or a software agent in some environment, you may have discovered how complicated and or unplanned the behavior becomes so easily.

The adaptability and flexibility of organisms has not yet been matched by artificial creatures. I’ve discussed some of this before in my article “Softer, Better, Faster, Stronger: The Coming of Soft Cybernetics“.

If you’ve ever made a mobile robot or any other electromechanical system, and expected it to work perfectly as designed, you have probably encountered a rude awakening. It never works “out of the box” (unless you went through many cycles before putting it in the box). In fact, engineering in general is more of a building out of existing working things. And then your specific project still has to have cycles of test and/or integration, etc. And that brings me to response two: the meta.

2. The Meta: Development Methodology

The meta aspect is management of projects and what process the “creator” and his/her team uses. I don’t particularly care how similar a process is to biology…although biological evo-devo is quite interesting. I’d love to find ways of doing things that are totally alien to biology.

It’s just that I’ve found that cycles of development (“iterations” or “sprints”) have to happen. And it’s much better if there are feedback loops between testing with contexts. And contexts are environments, other artificial equipment, users, and so on.

Iterative development processes almost always work better than sequential types like Waterfall. In fact, I’ve never seen a sequential development process work out well. Others have discovered this to. It’s probably part of the reason why Agile software development processes are becoming the most popular.

Anyway, comments about why generative and iterative processes work in our version of the universe are welcome.

Today I was at the 2011 Embedded Systems Conference / DesignCon exposition. I typically attend technology expos in Boston, keeping an eye out for devices and software that I might be able to use in my job. But of course, I’m also interested in what embedded systems technology will enable in the near future.
There wasn’t anything mind-blowingly cool, but I will mention a few things that may be of interest to my readers.

First, IBM had an instantiation of Watson there, which was housed in a large black monolith that would be menacing if not for the colorful touch screen. Yes, Watson can run on a computer that IBM actually sells, which is the IBM Power 750 server.

IBM Watson

I started playing Jeopardy against this Watson, but lost interest when I found that there wasn’t any voice recognition (to get a question right after winning the buzz, the software would tell you the answer, at which time you would honorably press a button to confirm or not).

I also experienced NLT’s new (samples became available in June 2011) 3D display. This is an LCD module which does not require glasses to see the 3D, and although I only stared at it for less than a minute, it did work and I did not have to be in a very specific location relative to the screen. I’d like to try an actual application that made use of mixed 3D/2D. That is part of what’s supposedly unique about this 3D LCD, is that it can mix 2D and 3D and it’s all at the same resolution. This is due to their HDDP (horizontally double-density pixel) tech. NLT also claims their LCD reduces cross talk (when your brain’s visual system mixes right and left eye information).

NLT 3D LCD Tech

Speaking of display tech, I also played with Uneo’s Force Imaging Array System and 3D-Touch Module. The force array was not combined with a screen, and I’m not sure exactly what the killer app(s) would be—they claim it could be used for some unspecified medical, automotive, industrial apps. But I tried it and it works, and they told me that they would have one with even higher resolution soon (the current one has 2500 elements).

The 3D-Touch module was embedded in a tablet, and that also worked pretty well. The example app was of course a paint program, where you can see how your finger’s pressure affects the brush width as you paint. This doesn’t use the array—instead it uses sensors at the corners of the screen. That means you should be able to add it to any existing screen—it doesn’t have to be layered into the display stack. I certainly could imagine this being useful, at least occasionally, in various apps on my phone. Uneo has demoed it with Android devices so far but plans on getting support from the other mobile OSes.

Uneo 3D Touch example (photo from Uneo)

Microsoft was there. Nothing amazingly new…they had the Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel, which ships in October as far as I know. It seems like such an obvious controller that I was surprised that it didn’t come out until 2011.

Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel (stock photo)

They had a Kinect there, of course, and that’s always fun to play with—I spent about 10 minutes chopping flying fruit with my sword-hands. For those that are excited by this prospect, Fruit Ninja is available as of last month. For those living under rocks, Kinect is a super massively best selling controller for the XBox 360 which tracks the movement of your body as input for games. When it came out, people immediately started hacking it and using the sensor for robot applications. Microsoft didn’t like that at first, but now they’ve given in and offer a legit SDK (Software Development Kit) for it.

Fruit Ninja Kinect (stock screenshot)

I was pleased to see that one attendee teleconned in with a VGo telepresence robot. Note this photo is of the back of robot.

VGo robot in use at ESC 2011

Apparently a concept I developed in my spare time in 2009, which I dubbed “posthuman factors,” is very similar to some guy’s PhD dissertation in 2010 in which he also used the term posthuman factors. (And I don’t mean everything in his dissertation, but there’s a lot of overlap.)

I recently learned of this through a Wikipedia article I discovered (created in April 2011 by user Nikiburri) called “Posthuman factors.” It has a good summary:

In general, posthuman factors addresses the intersection of design practices that includes (1) the design of posthumans, (2) designing for such posthumans, especially in safe and sustainable ways, and (3) designing the design methodologies that will supersede human-centered design (i.e., “posthuman-centered design”, or the processes of design that posthumans employ).

Interestingly, it cites my IEET article “Why You Should Care About (Post)Human Factors,” published Jan 8, 2010, yet claims that posthuman factors was first “articulated” by Dr. Haakon Faste in his Jan 2010 doctoral dissertation “Posthuman Factors: How Perceptual Robotic Art Will Save Humanity from Extinction.”

Most likely we were both thinking about it and writing about it at around the same time (one would assume that, as with my articles mentioned above, the writing actually started in 2009). And then there are whatever projects that lead to this particular synthesis of concepts; e.g. in my case it connects at least as far back to my attempt to describe an interface point of view for future human/robot/posthuman/etc. interactions (“Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Robot?“).

But the Wikipedia pages are a bit annoying. The Posthuman factors page has a link to a wikipedia page for Haakon Faste (created by the same user Nikiburri) which informs us that he is a leading figure in the field of posthuman factors and that he coined the term in 2010. Well, guess what—I posted my article “Do We Need a Posthuman Factors Discipline?” in December 2009 on my blog, so I guess that means I coined it first.

But it’s nice to know that I started a new field. And I’m pleased that at least one other person is thinking about these issues.

This is a belated post from April. I live near MIT, so when they held an open house on April 30 I felt it was my duty to attend.

However, the most surprising thing was not the technology on display so much as the vast swarms of yuppie larvae—aka virus vectors, aka children. After awhile (about 5 minutes) my perception of their presence incremented from “cute” to “horrific.” Even worse were the parents of said children, whose method for navigating crowds consisted of crashing into other people like a bunch of semi-autonomous pinballs. So I departed, but not without taking a few photos first.

El Cheapo Multi-Touch Table

Innards of the Student-Built Multi-Touch Table

Cars That Won't Crash

Supervisory Control of Cyberphysical Systems (poster)

A Wearable Vital Signs Monitor at the Ear (poster)

And now photos of human children engaged with robots:

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

Children with Robots

And just for shits and giggles, here are some ancient computing artifacts that were on display in the Stata Center.  The first is an Atari 2600 “video computer system” (nowadays, a “console”) with a Space Invaders cartridge, right underneath a sign about Moore’s Law.

Atari 2600 console (released in 1977)

And one of the first cell phones, being fondled by me:

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (circa 1983)

I conclude with a video I took of a good ol’ floating electromagnet: