would a robotic jesus have to obey the three laws?

via BoingBoing.
a robot housekeeper.  an etiquette and protocol droid.  a portable extension of the ship's computer.  robotic arms that build cars.  we often think of robots in terms of utility - it's that slavic root again ('to do, to labor').

but long before do androids dream of electric sheep? and i, robot, people have been trying to build electromechanical creatures that have not only intelligence and agency, but something more, some higher purpose to be served.  spiritualists got into the robot game, and one notable among these was john murray spear.  a universalist minister, abolitionist, and activist for women's rights and against the death penalty, he was attacked, vilified and even beaten for his views and practices, stripped  of his pulpit and in essence, driven quite mad.

By 1852, partly under the influence of his daughter, Sophronia, Spear began heeding the direction of spirit messages to people and places where his freelance ministry—which now included "magnetic" healing through the laying on of hands—would be of most help. That year, in a state of trance, he conveyed twelve messages from the spirit of John Murray, which he had transcribed and published as Messages from the Superior State.

He soon declared himself the chosen medium, or "general agent on Earth," of the spirits of John Murray, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and other distinguished departed who had together formed a "Congress of Spirits." Spear let it be known that the "Congress" would deliver plans, through him, for the remaking of society. Through Spear the spirit of Jefferson discoursed against slavery. Universalist physician Benjamin Rush's spirit directed him to give lectures on health and medicine. Scientific spirits, like Franklin's, relayed information to assist with advances in technology, including a perpetual motion machine, an electric thinking machine, an electric ship, an intercontinental telepathic network, and an improved sewing machine. The "Congress" also urged the foundation of spiritualist utopian communities in Kiantone, New York and Patriot, Indiana.

no common heavenly host, these.  among the scientific and technological advances promoted by this "Band of Electricizers", was what became known as 'the God machine' - "a mechanical Messiah, that was supposed to raise up all of humanity" (via wikipedia.

they set to work building the thing out of copper and zinc, setting it on a dining room table. a full description via the Fortean Times (registration may be required) follows...

Spear’s total lack of scientific and technical knowledge was considered an advantage, as he would be less inclined to alter the Electricizers’ blueprints with personal interpretations or logic (what remote viewers might call “analytical overlay”). The parts were carefully machined from copper and zinc, with the total cost reaching $2,000. (A prosperous minister then earned around $60 a week.)

No images of the New Motive Power exist, but apparently it was impressive, sitting on a big dining room table. “From the center of the table rose two metallic uprights connected at the top by a revolving steel shaft. The shaft supported a transverse steel arm from whose extremities were suspended two large steel spheres enclosing magnets. Beneath the spheres there appeared [..] a very curiously constructed fixture, a sort of oval platform, formed of a peculiar combination of magnets and metals. Directly above this were suspended a number of zinc and copper plates, alternately arranged, and said to correspond with the brain as an electric reservoir. These were supplied with lofty metallic conductors, or attractors, reaching upward to an elevated stratum of atmosphere said to draw power directly from the atmosphere. In combination with these principal parts were adjusted various metallic bars, plates, wires, magnets, insulating substances, peculiar chemical compounds, etc… At certain points around the circumference of these structures, and connected with the center, small steel balls enclosing magnets were suspended. A metallic connection with the earth, both positive and negative, corresponding with the two lower limbs, right and left, of the body, was also provided.”

In addition to the “lower limbs”, the motor was equipped with an arrangement for “inhalation and respiration.” A large flywheel gave the motor a professional appearance. This, however, was only a working model; the final version would be much bigger and cost 10 times as much.

The metal body was then lightly charged with an electrical machine resulting in a “slight pulsatory and vibratory motion [..] observed in the pendants around the periphery of the table”.

perhaps it looked something like this (via the Fortean Times):


an unnamed woman called the New Mary was eventually brought before the machine to 'give birth' to this new Messiah. after two hours of 'labor', the machine was, Spears claimed, animate for a few minutes. despite a great deal of spiritualist hype, nothing much came of this "New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah." eventually it was dismantled and moved to Randolph, New York where Baptist ministers apparently riled up the town against the spiritualist talisman, now in pieces in a shed - the people stormed the shed and destroyed the machine.  how very frankenstein's monster.  (which, by the way, i have now downloaded onto iPhone via Stanza... i'll be sure to talk about it later, yo.)

bringing a machine to life - a machine to lift up all mankind, a machine to love you, a machine to make moral choices - is something spiritualists and scientists have struggled with since ... well, i'm not sure how long, but apparently quite some time. is it about giving birth to something greater? is it about making god real and manifest, if not quite corporeal? is it about gaining control or mastery? i don't know - i don't build robots, and i don't really believe in god.

there's a published book about spears, if you want to know more... but in some ways more interestingly, a band called Pinataland has written a song about it. you can hear it here - it's called "Dream of the New Mary". and if you live in brooklyn, they're performing today in front of the Old Stone House on 5th Avenue between 3rd & 4th. they have an eclectic sound, and some of these songs work a bit better than others, but i'll give it up for Dream of the New Mary. go hear it.

vaya con dios.

what is a robot, anyway?

so i'm sitting here talking to my friend about robots and she says, "what makes a robot a robot, and not just a computer?"

let's ask toothpastefordinner.


toothpastefordinner.com

well that's not quite right. so let's try wikipedia. it says:

While there is no single correct definition of robot,[2] a typical robot will have several, though not necessarily all of the following properties:

• is not 'natural', i.e. it is artificially created
  
• can sense its environment, and manipulate or interact with things in it
  
• has some ability to make choices based on the environment, often using automatic control or a preprogrammed sequence
  
• is programmable
  
• moves with one or more axes of rotation or translation
  
• makes dexterous coordinated movements
  
• moves without human intervention
  
• appears to have intent or agency (See anthropomorphism for examples of ascribing intent to inanimate objects.)[3]
  

The last property, the appearance of agency, is important when people are considering whether to call a machine a robot, or just a machine. In general, the more a machine has the appearance of agency, the more it is considered a robot.

this seemed reasonable. so then Laila asked, "what about those robots in car factories - do they have the appearance of agency?" a fine question. for a moment, i was stumped. and then i remembered.



the answer: yup.

a complicated relationship

one of the blogs i scan is PSFK - basically a blog for people who do what i do for a living, and are bored. and we're often bored, but unwilling to be boring ourselves. so PSFK expressed some disdain for this concern for the safety of a piece of electronic equipment:

Harmed - not damaged, knackered, smashed or mucked up? How emotional is our connection with electronics becoming?

i suppose my first reaction was to wonder, 'what's it to him?' and then i started thinking about the very post-modern take that PSFK has on the Idolatry of Things. they tend to be in the camp of coming to the blog not to condemn beautiful design or clever purpose or ingenious use but to praise it, and then want it both ways. "see this beautiful thing? it is beautiful, though there is a better version of it, but really, can't you think of something better to do?" for the perfect example, go here.

but i digress. over on WIRED is where all the action at. contrary to the apparently 'too far down the love of gadgets' spectrum headline, the piece is really a review of a music video.

As Chapman told Vice, "you can't deliver an idea like throwing cameras out of windows to Kylie Minogue, because they'd just think you were a fucking idiot." Whatever the cameras cost (not much, apparently), the price was worth it.

the true concern of the author then, was on the wasted cash spent on roof testing cameras. and since the effect was properly punk rock, the level of concern he had in the end was limited. one must weigh rocking with the awesome power of the devil against dropping some junk out of a building, after all. if it failed to in fact execute cool, then the unnecessary waste would have been derided as a lame, mere attempt at being cool. oh, we're all digressing now.

but i'll throw my hat into the ring as someone guilty of what PSFK was alluding to. i personify many of my gadgets - most especially my iPhone, of course. when it's acting up, i stroke it while resetting it. i apologize to it if i drop it (which i almost never do!). my old PowerBook had a name, Claudia Jean, after the press secretary on the West Wing. it possessed, i felt, her intelligence, her loyalty, and her elegance. i'm only half-kidding.

why do we do that? i suppose it's because we can't help it, because there has always been a little deus in the machina and therefore we suppose there might be some room for personality or temperament in there amongst the rapid fire 1s and 0s of processing. but i think it's also a function of language - the computer takes too long to do something and so we say to it, 'any time now!' as though it could hear us and get a move on. when there's a delay between what your fingers are doing on keyboard or mousepad and what's happening on screen and we experience the necessary foul-ups that go with that, we talk to the screen, 'no, that's not what i meant!' again as if the machine could be admonished in some way. we say these things because we experience similar things from living beings, because we must express our frustration or pleasure, because we like to fill the time with the sounds of our own voices.

it ain't rational, but it is charming. a little.

wholly to be a fool

i'm a bit jetlagged. i'm in mexico city today, and just arrived from shanghai last night. i'm doing a really mediocre job of listening to an english translation of a spanish conversation, with the spanish conversation at full volume in the background. i tripped on steps right in front of me. i struggled to order breakfast off the hang tag card. why?

well first, it's my job :)

second, i'm tired - and when you're tired your ability to see things properly, to process information, can be affected. you struggle to find the word to describe a thing; you speak more slowly and with greater hesitation; your depth perception might be affected and you reach for something far away that's actually close.

we have complex systems for categorizing and naming things - for recognizing stuff. we have multiple words for an object - i'm wearing a shirt, blouse, top with pants, slacks, trousers, chinos and a pair of shoes, flats. i'm adorning myself with jewelry, ring. this assumes i'm thinking in nouns - identifying an object by its essential thing-ness. what if i look down and see gold with white with gold and more gold? would that tell you what i'm wearing? think about something round: it could be a ball, it could be a globe, or an orb. it could be a balloon, a sculpture, a bubble, a sphere; it could contain something or be empty; it could be solid; it could be made of nearly anything; it could float in the air or on the water or it could sink; it might roll or sit still. something round could be an infinite number of things. how do we decide if it's a golf ball or a balance ball or a mylar balloon or a snow globe?

on the one hand, this confusion is terrific - it's how we can achieve lateral thinking. what is this thing like? what can we learn from those other, like things? what can be borrowed or stolen or given back? we reason by analogy, by the familiar, we distinguish based on particulars, we limit the scope of what we think about to the context unless we are given permission or instruction to do otherwise. my mother used to say that she could hand an infant a purple clock and tell her it's a green toaster and how would the infant know? part of our ability to identify something is in our acquisition of language, our social negotiations over the names and provinces of things.

robots, on the other hand, live in a constant state of abstract, lateral thinking, when it comes to identifying objects. looked at from multiple angles, one object could be another. a tray could be a table; a book could be a shield; a couch could be a cow. so what's a young robot about town to do? or worse, what's a young soldier robot to do? via Wired and the DoD:

Recognizing and identifying an object from a video input turns out to be a very difficult problem. The problem stems from the fact that a single object can be viewed from an infinite number of ways. By rotating, obscuring, or scaling a single object, one can create multiple representations of an object - which makes the problem of matching the object to a database of objects very difficult. The problem expands exponentially when objects that need to be identified have never been viewed before. Combine these limitations with the wide variety of objects which might be identified, and the problem becomes intractable.

what will the military do with these shoddy, lateral thinking 'bots? apparently they take forever to identify objects and don't even do so accurately most of the time. they want to detonate your cat and pet your C4. which in some circles is perfectly acceptable; but in the don't ask, don't tell American military - we don't want to see too much creativity, it's sloppy. precision, march! the objective of the DoD project is thus:

To create an object recognition system based on the newer psychological models of object recognition by using a series of different algorithms to identify a variety of objects in different orientations. Such a system would be extremely beneficial for robotic control/intelligence and would allow for an exponential expansion of robotic capabilities and intelligence

and the next thing you know, they become self-aware and stuff. the most critical identification of an object any being can make is when they see their reflection, point, and say, "me."