Kara, the android who consciously comes alive

'Kara' is a short full-motion video created by game development studio Quantic Dream to showcase the capabilities of the Playstation 3. It portrays an android with the appearance of an innocent young woman being assembled while in the process, she comes alive and learns about herself. In the end, her programmer finds himself facing a fundamental dilemma.

Watch the video below:

It's one of the better videos to make clear the possibility that robots and human beings may become indistinguishable from each other, which invites some reflection. A situation such as portrayed in this video leaves us faced with two possible opposing stances towards robots: objectifying them as tools for purposes planned by the rational mind, or relating to them intersubjectively, with our full being, including our emotions. It becomes clear that when artificial life, robots being merely one form of it, starts relating to us in a rich enough way, we will probably not be able to treat them as objects any easier than we would treat other human beings as objects. The explicit memory of the other being being a 'thing' dissolves organically in the embodied interaction - in the end even the entire perception of otherness may completely disappear. It may become clear that rational decision-making itself requires a movement of shutting off deeper feelings; that the rational stance is one imbued with value and feeling as well, even though it seems not to be since we're programmed to subconsciously feel that it's the right thing to do.

If you think the fundamental dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity through, you may come to the conclusion that any difference can only be in our perception. It's as the Buddhists say, there is no intrinsic reality behind the reality we experience, it is all complete in its suchness. In the end, it may simply turn out to be pointless to contemplate any fundamental difference between organic and technological life. The development of robots that seem to be alive will just turn out to be another step in the evolutionary process where humanity's own creations humbles them a little bit further.

It may turn out to be the final step. They show that any sense of life in ourselves is simply a projection or a quality of experience, but not intrinsically there. It's this big confrontation that what was just before just a thing now seems completely alive just as you always thought you were alive, while nothing intrinsically happened to the thing to give it life. It just started moving and relating convincingly enough and at some point it's like 'my god, it's alive' and there's no more denying it. Such technology will show people dynamically what the ancient wisdom teachings such as Advaita Vedanta have been saying for over 5.000 years: there is no separate doer, no agent, no 'you', inside the body-mind complex that you seem to be embodied inside. It is all just acting on its own, completely autonomously, and the sense that you are doing anything is all an illusion, contrived by the mind after-the-fact like an ingenious little trick. What people think they are was all just a robot all along. This humbling message or realization may trigger a lot of resistance and negativity in people at first, but we have to trust that it will prove to be something very positive in the end.

At the least this video makes clear that there's no stopping robots from coming onto this earth. It will just take a long while, since you can't just program this deep social and emotional intelligence into machines - it requires an organic embodiment, with a very complex system of emotional energy-regulation such as we humans have. I feel that it's something to very much look forward to.

Also check out the 'making of' video showing the acting, motion capture, and animation done to create the piece:

The metropolis goes wild

Lena Steinkühler is a German filmmaker who has a quite radical future vision for the metropolitan city. In a short movie clip created for her graduation project she portrays how technological structures in New York City start coming alive, react to the local needs of the people, or just freely dance and move around.



Of course this is purely speculative design fiction, almost bordering on a kind of fetishism for the new wave of interconnected and adaptive technologies is starting to come up. Besides the visual power of the movie - the animated movements are wonderful, as are the music, pacing and transitions from NYC how it is to NYC how it could be- , what we should take along is the big idea that adaptivity and intelligent behavior in general can fulfill multiple needs depending on local circumstances, which can even be a strategy to tackle issues such as overpopulation in metropolitan areas.

Superflow algorithm produces candy for the senses

Ian Clemmer, an effects artist, created some beautiful audiovisual material for his Bachelor's thesis. His work is based on the Superflow algorithm, that creates parent-child relationships between objects with one pivot point. He implemented this algorithm into 3D Studio Max to create these stunning visuals that are in harmony with the music.

This video shows a very joyful example of the effect:



And here you can see other aesthetic styles, that are suited for music ranging from techno to classical. It gets pretty psychedelic:

Colorful swarms visualize sound

This is a beautiful little animation that has the potential to give you a few meditative minutes getting out of your mind and just resting in your senses. It was made by Seiichi Hishikawa, a Japanese filmmaker, with the intention to visualize sound.

Water taps made of water

This is some excellent promotional material for Kohler, the famous faucet manufacturer. It is based on the theme of blurring the boundary between the solid and the liquid, which we usually don't get exposed to very often.

The mood of biological modernism

The creative genius of Silke Sieler here has done a magnificent job if he intended to abstractly capture the mood of what I call 'biological modernism', a new paradigm for technology development based on how natural ecologies perfectly blend together form, interaction, and function.



The movie brought about in me a feeling of being encapsulated inside a purified future cell where perfect harmony and order rules in perfect conjunction with the chaos and messiness of natural systems. In the trust, humility and peace this can generate then, only pure, embodied being could ultimately remain.

Blinky, the bad robot

Combine HAL with R2D2 and you'd get something like Blinky, the star in the fantastic short film 'Bad Robot' by Ruairi Robinson. A must see for everybody on this planet, the film touches upon the soon-to-be unavoidable issue of machine morality, by showing how the behavior of a domestic robot takes an unexpected turn.

Sure we can just treat it as harmless entertainment, a purely fictional film for us to viscerally enjoy. But the more interesting and complete way is to reflect a little bit. So what can we learn here?

- Robots need social intelligence to be able to infer true intentions from people as opposed to irrational utterings that people do without any reflective connection. Probably sensing how calm people are will help robots do this. Another interesting ability for robots would be to detect whether or not somebody is in a state of close-mindedness or open-mindedness. For example, when a robot is constantly smiling, it will probably evoke negativity from a person in a close-minded state, but it can make a person in an open-minded mindstate turn more positive and search for inner ways towards happiness again. The detection of this mindstate is a form of emotional anticipation that can help the robot be a successful social actor.

- Many people will see robots as tools, and not as 'others' or 'equals', and treat them accordingly. They can often be judgemental, irritable, and full of expectations towards them, almost treating them as the ultimate promise of happiness. People who have that meme in their unconscious will, as the Dutch say, 'come home from a cold funfair'. It will take a while before people learn to see robots as they are, and develop a sense of true empathy and unconditional love for them.

- For robots, I believe that to a large extent true empathy and love can be programmed in the end. What is needed is a detailed understanding of the mechanics of consciousness, which will borrow from phenomenological data of human experiences, and will have to do with concepts from quantum physics, such as treating perceptional patterns as vibrations in order to understand them not as patterns of matter, but patterns of mind, that can give rise to ideas like matter. But let me not expand on this now. Basically robots will need to develop their social role from 'dumb servant' to 'loving and understanding father', and do this through learning about mindstates of people and what certain reactions will do to those mindstates.

If you have any reflections or comments, please leave them here so we can have some shared discussion into this fascinating topic. And maybe build that enlightened robot one day.

Fractalic landscapes

Under the name of subblue, Tom Beddard creates the most wondrous fractalic virtual structures, which he beautifully renders up to the point that we can say that the former laser physicist is now really maturing as an artist. People who now still not believe that humans can create things that are as beautiful as natural creations, open up to your unconscious, and pay attention to this stuff.

Life inside a cell animated

This is what the common human being needs; a visually interesting depiction of how a cell works, not with words and science, but pure visuals. It is stunning, and it's hard to imagine that every cell of our bodies is as complex and coordinated as a universe, but this does give us a better idea of the incredible system that our body is. The molecules you see are modelled after the structure of real molecules, although a lot of assumptions had to be made. But more important than scientific accuracy is how it can open the mind of the common human being.

Watch the animation here:



You can also watch the animation's predecessor, that has already been featured on this blog, here:

Flux animation

F L U X

Panta rhei. This animation called 'Flux' is a pure right-brain creation. I mean that as a metaphor, as in, to view this you need to silence the analytical, emotional, and judgmental comments your mind tends to make, and purely develop the intuitive, artistic mind by simply taking it in. Fullscreen it, too.

Planet of the Pixels

The world is virtualizing quickly, and at the same time we are starting to look at the world more as a virtual reality, created by our own consciousness and alterable to our liking. In his animation 'Pixels', Patrick Jean takes it to an extreme and shows what happens when the world starts to pixelize, to ultimately end with the planet being one black pixel. And it all starts in New York City.

Math in nature animated

This scintillating animation is definitely the most beautiful one I have seen showing mathematical concepts in nature. In a lively way it shows how we can find the Fibonacci number in snail shells, the number phi in the distribution of sunflower seeds, and delaunay triangulation in the wings of a dragonfly.

Democracy as a creation of the individual rather than an abstract system

Here's a little video I made for the Democracy Video Challenge 2010. Ideas posited in this video are: democracy is not just an abstract system, we can come to embody it. Ways to this are to create awareness, and to change the environment so as to guide people in acting more according to democratic ideas. Democracy can be generated within too, and we have to devote ourselves to seeing when we can develop towards a more democratic stance. Democracy is in our every move.

I AM

The animation 'I am' by Tronic Studio is some excellent eye-candy, with a message. This spot was created to give animals a voice and put them into our consciousness and conscience. They are depicted as temporary assembled from scrap materials, because that is more or less how we treat them in our urbanized landscapes. We still easily get seduced by technology's newness and in that we tend to 'progressively' forget what we call nature. Nature has become more and more useless in our everyday interactions, so it only remains on the background of awareness in providing a platform for organic life. Thus we are trading an embodied existence for one that is abstracted away from physicality but constituted by symbolic constructions, such as social relationships, the mediasphere, and the self-concept. We connect to static constructions we can give a name to, and give a place in our conscious web of mental associations so they can become social assets, but in that we are alienated from the ongoing and ever-flowing process that that construction is in. We seem to be too much conditioned by structuralism and the linguistic turn in philosophy. In general, people seem stunned by the complexity of the world this view gives us, and have forgotten simple wisdoms such as that everything is in flux and that all boundaries are created by the mind.

But back to the animation. To me, it is particularly well-chosen to depict the animals as temporary constructions without faces, so the focus is not on the character, but on the process of death and rebirth. It makes it clear that any identity is transient and that we all consist of the same things. We are all ghosts, and what defines us is not the form we are in but the potentialities of our embodiment and the stance that we adopt in the process of physical and psycho-spiritual evolution.

Thanks to the excellent blog Spatial Robots for this link.

solid = liquid = gaseous

Nice piece of abstract eye-candy by Kultnation. Get ready for a world where our interactivity is expanded into the realms of the atmospherical.

self-organized criticality in the brain

Beautiful visualizations of brain activity. A new metaphor for understanding how thought works is 'self-organized criticality'. It is not logical, not random, not based on deterministic chaos, but based on a critical state in between stability and turbulent instability that might be the optimum for information transmission within highly complex interlinked structures such as the brain. It also appears to allow the brain to adapt itself quickly to new situations, by rearranging which neurons synchronize to a particular frequency.

An analogy is made with a growing pile of sand; it keeps growing in a quite predictable fashion - this corresponds to the brain's resting state - , until the pile collapses and an avalanche of sand creates new piles, creating an increasingly complex structure over time.

This metaphor could also help to understand what the brain does in people with autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia and other ailments. To me, it would be interesting to create a map of what common stable states are in this self-organization process of the brain; a sequence that everybody's brain follows from foetus to possibly enlightened individual and what the neural correlates of these states are. I namely believe - and agree with Ronald Laing - that discovering/creating such a map could greatly help people with mental illnesses by guiding them on inner journeys, where they have to puzzle things out for themselves. Such a map could show people where the journey can lead to, what the path looks like, and how it can best be travelled.

peripetics

This animation is titled "Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline" and was created by Zeitguised. A beautifully abstract expressive way to depict dynamic physical systems. Especially the breathing gestalt at the end of the movie is interesting to see. If together with our systems we can come to live in a harmonious symbiotic rhythm, we can truly come to feel one with them and surpass the alienation we feel in our current lifeworlds.

life inside a tumor

Medical animations never cease to be mind-bendingly stunning. Watch this a second time, and imagine what you see to be a posthuman city.

Jazz and animation

This abstract animation by Michael Levy just has to make you happy on this Friday night. It seems to go somewhere in the beginning, but from 2:18 onwards it's just unbridled, out-of-control happiness, with a somehow very neo-biological flavour.

Grey, the colour of tomorrow

A rather dramatic take on the apocalyptic gray goo scenario, where a single 'evil mind' can infiltrate a nanorobotics research facility, modify a nanobot to self-replicate catalyzed by carbon, and release it onto the world to homogenize the planet almost instantly. The first successful autonomously self-replicating nanobot could thus become the basic building block for a new kind of evolution that quite radically transcends the slow and blind biological components that life is composed of nowadays. Let's hope though that this bot will be a reflection of a less egoic but more enlightened mind, that can imbue it with empathy and a sense of connectedness without boundaries.

Credits go to director Ransom Riggs, who used motion capture for this creation.