Light made tangible by Philip Ross

Design luminary Philip Ross has developed what could be the most beautiful lamp, or even the most beautiful product, in the history of mankind.

It is called Fonckel, meaning 'glisten', and you interact with it by touching it on its back. Your hand movements will then more or less literally be translated into the behavior of the light, which swoops across the entire front surface. The movie below shows it all:



Fonckel is the result of Philip's PhD project at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, which again proves itself to be the city of light. His initial research was into how interactive products can elicit in people an experience of human values, such as creativity, helpfulness, and social power. Iteratively, and with the help of students, of which I had the fortune to be one (check www.nothings.nl/luxalive.html), he developed prototypes of lamps with different forms and behaviors. His final design, which was used for his scientific experiments, then led to the development of Fonckel.

From an aesthetic point of view there is not much to criticize about this design. You could say it can be categorized under the upcoming design movement of what I have termed 'biological modernism', as it has the purity of a design a la Dieter Rams, but also the organic and 'intelligent' forms that you see in nature. It would not surprise me if Fonckel would get an order from a Hollywood movie director in the near future, to have the lamp play a role in one of the next major science fiction films.

From an interaction design point of view you could argue that this design lacks both augmented and functional feedforward. Somebody who has never seen the object may have a hard time figuring out how to use the object, or even figuring out that it is a lamp in the first place. But I think the aesthetics and overall experience of the product overrules the usability issues here. This lamp is not meant to be useful. This lamp is meant to be beautiful and elicit a 'higher', even mystical experience in our little everyday lives. It intrigues people through its noble silence, its lack of communication, and invites them to touch it by the subtlety of its surfaces alone (this could be enhanced through certain materials or patterns though). Adding practical features would make this object much too earthly.



A main point for future improvement might be to expand the product's range of behaviors, possibly also with color, and the ability to link the light to things like sensors in the environment, or signals it gets from social media. Instead of having the user control the device fully, it may also attain some autonomy so that it starts to feel more alive (maybe this lamp will someday walk or fly around the home as part of a domestic robot). The product just feels so high-tech and sophisticated that you would almost be disappointed that in the end, it's just a lamp.

As far as I heard, Fonckel is ready to be sold at the moment, however I don't know the price. This is clearly still a product for the 'elite' who can afford quite a sum of money just to buy a lamp. But we need to start somewhere in putting beautiful products and experiences out there, don't we.

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.

Social robot ethics

This movie may change your view of robots and how 'human' they can become:



Here it becomes clear what embodiment can do for a robot's behavior. What robots usually have in common is their too precise, mechanic motion. Even the more sophisticated ones still suffer from a popping and locking type of dynamics in their movement, which just prevents us from feeling direct empathy for the thing. It just makes robots look artificial, as if they are just acting out commands. Boston Dynamics is making big progress here, but the -of course- Japanese baby-robot 'CB2' shown above makes it all clear what can give robots human-like properties. Despite it being uncannier than ever, it just moves organically, just because it shows a lack of control.

The New York Times recently posted an excellent article about social robotics, basically notifying people that there might be a more important issue than the fear of robots turning bad: people becoming too attached to robots.

To recap:

* "I can see my grin scattered across computer monitors in the Media Lab. Nexi’s [a robot with facial expressions] forehead-mounted, depth-sensing infrared camera shows my face as a black and gray blur, and the camera in its right eye portrays me in color. I watch as I slip from the monitors, Nexi’s head and eyes smoothly tracking to the next face. I am not creeped out—I’m a little jealous. I want Nexi to look at me again."
*   “It turns out that we’re vulnerable to attaching, emotionally, to objects. We are extremely cheap dates. Do we really want to exploit that?” - Sherry Turkle
* "How will grandma feel [...] when her companion bot is packed off for an upgrade and comes back a complete stranger? When a machine can push our Darwinian buttons so easily, dismissing our deep-seated reservations with a well-timed flutter of its artificial eyelids, maybe fear isn’t such a stupid reaction after all. Maybe we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing."

* "For kids who grow up around robots, the uncanny valley could be irrelevant and The Terminator little more than a quaint story. Vulnerable or not, children interact with these machines differently."
* "We need ethical guidelines for robots, and we need them now. Not because robots lack a moral compass, but because their creators are operating in an ethical and legal vacuum."

Let's elaborate on the last point: robot ethics, since this is in my view one of the most pressing issues of today. As far as I see it, a big change has to be made in our perspective if we are to co-exist peacefully with robots. We can think of all kinds of smart tricks to patch up unsafeties, but in the end, I think robots are going to change us at our cores.

We're talking about something very fundamental here. We're about to consciously treat man-made entities as humans. This requires a very drastic change in mindset, roughly comparable to that of slavetraders who suddenly had to treat their commodities as equals. We already necessarily anthropomorphize technological devices while interacting with them (read for example 'The Media Equation' by Reeves and Nass), we expect them to gratify our needs, we see them as inferior, and we think we own them, so I think that the comparison with slavery is not farfetched at all.

Before continuing to intellectually treat this topic, it is important to pause for a moment and see what the perspective is that makes humans treat things as things instead of as equals. I am sure that you yourself employ this perspective too to some extent. I know I do. It's hardwired into us. It's important that when we're in a reflective mindset, we still can put ourselves in this hardwired perspective by embodied empathizing, through the power of imagination, so we see that when we are in it, we are not in control of stepping out of it until a thought pops into our head that makes us aware of our own perspective. Human minds are more or less blindly operated by this perspective, until they learn to step out of it. But before they do, any stating that this perspective is inferior, useless, silly or blind will only invoke resistance. Therefore, the blind perspective must be accepted first.

I am talking about the mind run by social instinct, with the accompanying perspective of trying to find others that seem equal, and that can give you a kind of emotional resonance that validates how you see yourself as a social actor. In groups, this perspective will make us find people that we can have interesting conversations with, that we can trust and feel safe with. The people that make us feel good. The conversational realm we enter as a social actor then provides us an escape from the physical world into a mental realm where through words, we associate towards good feelings. It's very hard to deny this; observe any social group for a while and you will unmistakably feel that whatever is going on, its goal is to move towards resonance in the form of everybody smiling and laughing. It's very cyclical and predictable if you look at it. And it's very safe and comfortable if you are within it.

If you observe it, you will also see that objects and devices are most often used to accompany this process of mental resonance; the thing then provides a semiotic function for associating towards the shared state of pleasure. Of course, objects still have a direct, embodied role, such as when one sits down on a chair or picks up a glass, but the mind is usually not consciously employed. The body mostly operates on its own, and if it draws attention to itself, such as when you drop something, or slip over something, this is treated as unexpected and often laughed at in response. In other words, the social perspective makes us expect the body to recede into the background, so we can pay full attention to the shared mindspace.

This may seem obvious when talking about it, but it is very fundamental as to why objects are treated as slaves. They simply do not react to the mental play, so they don't receive any attention. And when they do attract attention, we usually expect the device to recede into the background again as soon as possible, so we can pay attention to a shared social mindspace again. Think of a phone ringing; we expect to pay as little attention as possible to the phone itself so we can get back into the conversational flow. Consequently, in this mode of being, everything that is not included into this flow as a social actor does not receive empathy, until it speaks up. I am mentioning this because I think the largest part of the world's western population is continuously in this mode of being. As a child, you learn language, and subsequently you live a life in language. You gain pleasure through language, you gratify your senses through language. You see things as concepts, with accompanying labels. When you see something you think is beautiful, you don't really feel it, you merely associate it with the word. You never learn to step beyond language because modern culture does not stimulate that, unlike older cultures such as the Aboriginals. To relax, stop trying to be something, immerse yourself, and just enjoy being.

Thus, we do not intuitively include technological devices in our 'circle of empathy', just as we didn't with slaves. And likewise, if a device does not work according to our wishes, we get frustrated and demand that it works again as soon as possible. We pay no attention to the feelings, needs and wishes of the entity we see as inferior.

I could go on about this forever, but it is very probable that it doesn't get any attention. I know, the web invites a lot of clicking, and if we don't get gratified instantly, we often don't have the patience to listen. I've done this before, but here are some key ideas I have about robots. I would like to spread them, I am willing to explain to everyone and write a paper on request, I can give some scientific basis for my ideas (although the ideas are beyond science and ultimately unprovable through the scientific method - they must be felt first - , though neuroscience and quantum physics give very interesting models), and I would like even more to convert them into action.

So here are the ideas:

- We are social actors, but beyond that, we are also the observer of ourself. So it is silly to see yourself purely as a social actor, as a person. You could also see yourself as connected to a whole, as a thing that's part of a larger whole, like a thread in a fabric. But even that means that you look for a 'thing' to be; you look to label yourself. But what if you are your embodied consciousness? If you ask yourself 'who am I?', are you not the asker of this question in the first place?
- Think about the previous point a little while, and you will realize that you are your consciousness in the present moment. You have created this moment through a deliberate act of action/perception. This moment and everything in it is you. When you look at the sun, you can say: 'The sun is over there, far away' but we forget that we have chosen to look at it in the first place. That's why the sun is only part of our consciousness.
- What follows is that there is not necessarily an objective reality, this is merely a concept in our heads. It is a valid perspective, but not the only one. And not the one that makes us most happy either, by the way. We don't want to be reduced to objects in space.
- What follows too is that your own body is just a concept. You think other people are like you because they look like the image you get in the mirror. What you forget is that you chose to look in the mirror in the first place. And it gave you a physical explanation for who you are. You forget that you are the act of looking in the mirror in the first place.
- What follows from that is that you are not a human being. Yes, you are not a human being. You are not even a being. On the physical plane, you are a human being, sure. We need to label 'things' and it is in many if not most cases very useful to conceptualize ourselves as a thing in space. It is more useful to say that we are a human being than, say, a teapot. But ultimately, that concept does not make us very happy. It keeps us insecure. Because by only thinking in terms of things we can never understand what's going on in our lives. We keep looking for a form of happiness dependent on things.
- Along the same lines, things are not things. We can think a computer is a computer, because we design it that way and label it. But it's made from the same things that nature is made of, when you trace it back. Never forget that everything we make ultimately stems from the things we already had. Nothing is new. There is a way behind everything we make, beyond what we think the thing is. A computer computes for us, sure, because we condensed material in a controlled way so we can predict what it does in response to our actions. And then we call that computing. But we don't really control it, we just think we do because most of the time it will behave in predictable ways. It's more accurate to say that we guide it. We guide electrons by creating channels that they most likely will 'want' to travel along. But probably not all electrons will do as we think. According to our model, they should, but in reality, particles do a whole lot of different things. If you never challenged physicalist principles to explain the world for you, please read about things like quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg principle, and holonomic brain theory, if you haven't already. Please do, these things should become stuff of mainstream culture.
- Robots are not robots. That is just a label for describing a thing, just as we call our own body a thing. In the end, it all is part of one whole, and we can live in line with that whole by seeing everything in the first place as that whole, instead of a separate thing. If we see ourselves as that whole, as everything there is, the distinction human - machine dissolves. It is that very distinction that creates ego, fear, and a possible 'war with the machines'. It is created by the mind. It's all mind. Instead, we could learn to step out of our heads and just start to be. It's like kung fu, just learning to be and act without mental reaction. That's true acceptance and love.
- The interesting thing about robots is not that they can be new social actors. Sure, I believe you can make a robot a believable social actor. It will turn out that how they are programmed can describe a lot about our own operating. I think it's only egoic resistance to think that you cannot be described as a machine. Don't forget that any description is only a description. If you resist a description it only means you are looking for an acceptable description to find out who you are, whereas who or what you really are lies beyond any description.
- Concepts like 'emotions' and 'sentience' are only concepts. We can not verify if something actually has it. It's always an interpretation of the observer. Science is an artificial way of establishing a truth. You can't even know if your own lover has emotions and sentience. You can only assume, because it really seems to be that way. But in that act, what you forget is that your sentience is looking for other sentience. All sentience you think you see is actually created by your own sentience. If you don't understand this immediately, pause, maybe write it down, think about it, until you see what I mean. Don't try to fit it into an intellectual understanding, you need to intuitively see this. And the way is to relax, let go of everything, open your mind completely, and then think about the idea, until it resonates with the state of your body. Then, alignment takes place, and true enjoyment, happiness, love, and creativity can emerge. Relaxation is key. If you see what I mean, go on to the next point.
- Everything is sentient because it is created by your own sentience. From that perspective, even a rock is alive. The way it dances in the light, the way it moves around you; if you perceive it will all perceptual powers you have, with your full attention, you come to see that the apparently static thing is very alive, and that it changes continuously. You can say this is as a result of your actions, but beyond this causal form of reasoning, you can feel that you are directly connected with it. You are one with it. There is not really any separation if you use your full attention in the present moment. Become the moment.
- This, then, can give a new mindset that works for humans as well as robots: the mindset of pure love.

And here are some interesting future directions for robots:
- Focus on physical interaction. One of the most interesting things about robots is that they can take us out of mental space, socially shared or not, and engage our bodies. This way we can become as it were, embodied yogis. What happens if a robot has us interact with it in a way that we cannot think of anything else any longer, like in a dance?
- If the robot is to be a conversational actor, give it a lot of different mindsets. Try to enlighten people through social conversation with a robot. It is an incredibly interesting experiment to see how people will react to new, radical ideas, that if told by other people were hard to accept. Can a robot be a guru? Matthias Rauterberg's ALICE project is a good first example of this idea.
- Create a robot that physically dissolves into its environment, like a water droplet into the sea. Make it able to appear again too. Can this give people the intuitive insight that what they think they are is actually a constellation of smaller things, and that they themselves are a part of a larger thing? Can it make people humble and even learn to mentally overcome fear of death?

The 'social robot' will possibly only occupy a niche of robots, there to remind us that once we were humans, looking for fun and pleasure with our friends. Knowing that it's much better now.

Link to the NY Times article "The Uncertain Future For Social Robots':
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/robotics/4343892.html?page=1

 

machine ethics and the frame of the cosmic cyborg

Jamais Cascio segments from That's Impossible: Real Terminators from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Now in recent years more and more serious reflections are starting to arise on technological developments, especially robotics because this field has already generated some eerie imagery not too far removed from the classic visions of science fiction. The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) is an organization especially concerned with these reflections, often on a philosophical level. Above you see environmental futurist Jamais Cascio, who also writes for this institute, giving a few comments on developments in robotics.

I have been following this line of reflection a little bit in recent years and, in combination with reflecting on my personal life and the depths of my psyche, have come up with a frame of mind that in my view is the fundament for creating a world of universal empathy, even universal love. Not the selfish 'I-love-this-but-not-that' kind of love, not the clueless 'I-love-everything' kind of love, but an unconditional love that needs no pointing but is experienced before the thing to be loved is experienced. Or better said, because one can come to embody love one need not condense any thing to be loved anymore. I have come to the realization that the only way we are ever going to live in harmony and oneness with machines, is to have humanity wake up from the social, local shell it lives within, and have it collectively choose to acquire a new, cosmic consciousness.

Now I was about to write and send in a paper to IEET's call for a special issue on "Robot Ethics and Human Ethics", but I simply do not have time to complete this as I am involved in my graduation project and will be preparing world travel too, which leaves me little opportunity to comprehensively write out this new frame of mind that, how preposterously grandiose it might sound, is in my view the only way to complete, supreme happiness and the solution to everything, conceptually. In its supremeness and holism it would probably be the end of conceptual philosophy too. I will sketch out some key transformative ideas of my thought below, and would like to start writing out more, not in isolation but in interaction with you. In the end I would like to publish this through the more traditional media as well, but I think a blog is just the perfect tool to find out how ready people are for all this and how the words leading to a transformation of consciousness, and to technologies leading to it, might best be put.

Here are my key ideas in a nutshell, for the sake of simplicity. Please leave comments if this is confusing (and it likely will be as it has taken me years to fully grasp), or just leave comments anyway. So here it goes:

1. Concepts are nothing but creations to serve practical action. Holding onto a concept makes one able to master his world better, by creating mental maps that provide shortcuts for people to derive happiness from acting upon their world. 'God' is a concept that provides people safety and comfort within a small social group. Embodied action is mostly ritualistic and not too meaningful in everyday life, because 'God' is conceptualized as being a metaphysical entity we cannot interact with physically. 'Planet earth' is a concept that environmentalists use to devote themselves to, giving them some meaning to their lives by directing their actions to maximize the satisfaction of something 'out there' that they are conceptualized to be able to physically interact with. But the concept is a creation of the mind, an illusion that is temporarily consistent which makes us see it as 'the truth'. If we uncloud our minds we see that a concept is merely that, a condensation of a group of perceptions or experiences into another pattern that we experience to lay beyond these patterns. By posing this concept we are causally able to understand things, which can make us reach our goals, fulfill our desires. The concept is a mental code for something, but not the thing itself, and that's the reason why devotion to a concept can never lead to ultimate happiness. If we want to live in mediocre happiness, in between pleasure and pain, punishment and reward, condensed in an ego, anxious to die, this of course is fine. But I would like to inspire people to start to live fully, irrespective of your experience of how 'others' think about what they do. The 'others' will disappear with the embodiment of love, and you will be liberated into an everlasting life of cosmic bliss. I would like people to make the choice that deep down inside we all want to make, but just need to realize it and do it.

2. Your current perception is all that matters. Nothing - no God, no planet, no universe, no truth, no reality, no information, no other people - is beyond direct perception unless you create that conceptualization in your own mind. The purpose of life is to act on direct perception and in the process try to refine it, try to develop its beauty as well as your own experience of that beauty. In refining your action you will refine your perception, and in that your entire being, towards a being of ultimate and meaningful oneness. This is not merely experienced as if you were something distinct from your perceptions, but it is fully lived out, without having to hold together any concept of 'you' or an 'other'. Ultimate beauty is so beautiful that it cannot be experienced anymore, because the experiencer becomes the experienced beyond every distinction. Ultimate beauty can only be lived. Not to say of course that concepts are irrelevant and should always be lived beyond. No; concepts are temporary constructs that we have to pose unless we feel that we can live beyond them, and incorporate them into our daily actions so that where before we would do something because a conceptual structure, more or less detached from embodied action, tells us to do it, we now automatically do it and as a side effect it also flows with the conceptual structure. But now we live beyond it and, in a way, have entered the next level of life.

3. When you live in direct embodied connection with your current perceptions you will experience no distinction between yourself, your actions, and your perceptions anymore. This is really hard to realize in everyday life, unless we open our mind to the concept that would start to emerge in our minds once we would be able to live that way. We can make a shortcut if we open up and trust in this concept now, and then pose as a personal vision to start to live by this concept until we even can forget about this concept. So here is the concept: you are your current perception. This is similar to the ancient Vedantic saying 'Tat tvam asi' which translates into 'Thou art that', although Vedanta still poses a concept behind that which is perceived: an ultimate, divine reality. Thus it still detaches one physically from his direct perceptions and bereaves him from direct embodied meaning. But what my thought and Vedantism have in common is that the 'I' as a separate entity is forgotten, to serve something beyond merely the 'I'. The 'I' becomes the 'all'. Look at a tree, and you are it. If you think 'tree' and then go on, you are the consciousness that merely labels. If you think 'I can use that wood', you are the selfish ego living to fulfill his desires. If you experience the aesthetic beauty of the image of the tree, you are an experiencer of images; you live life as if you are looking through a camera, watching a movie. If you think about how the tree is functionally and causally related to the rest of the ecosystem, you are a poser of concepts and creator of a reality constituted of causal, rational relationships. In the end, if you open up and intuitively feel the beauty of the tree in an embodied way, by tuning into its consciousness, you are one with it beyond a 'you' and a 'tree' as a separate entity, and you are at step one towards becoming a cosmic creative pattern.

4. The embodied meaning lacking in Vedanta is hidden in Western science: creation of technology is our embodied meaning. In the widest sense, something is technology if we think we have created it, if it is the result of our actions and not given by us. The purpose then is to shape our actions so we learn to create results of actions, or technologies, that come closer to our vision of ultimate beauty. The definition of technology I give here has deep implications if we explore what technology is in this way. We create a car, so it is a technology. That is obvious. We create a baby, so it is a technology. This might or might not confuse you and stir up some negative feelings because you feel this is 'bad' or 'inhuman'. What I am about to do here though is not apply the frame of technology most people use nowadays to the baby, but create a new frame for incorporating technology holistically into our lives so we start to love it just as much as we love the people close to us. And we experience our technologies to love us as much as these people too. It is important to have trust in the new frame here, and not get tempted to close up the mind and stick to the old concept. My entire point is to inspire people to expand their frames of mind so they can start to live the ultimate form of life, and this takes some initial trust - because you might still see yourself as separated from me and thus you can feel anxiety, which needs to be comforted by trust. Back to babies. According to the new frame, a baby is a technology. It is a way to create beauty in the world towards a holistic vision of beauty, and a progressive refinement of that vision through reflection. This way, we will not create babies out of selfish desires, but according to a feeling whether or not it is good for the whole of our perceptions to have a baby in there. But also small things are technologies: a footprint in the sand is a technology. Is it a meaningful one? We might think not, but it does have an impact on our world. It might create new habitats for insects, or by taking along the sand on the sole of our shoe we might spread seeds around to help plants reproduce. The point is that if we start seeing everything as a technology, we start incorporating it actively and directly into our scope of control of our world. If we learn to incorporate everything we do into our awareness, we learn to become masters of everything we perceive. We become like Gods in that we can come to create everything we want to create, in a never-ending process of progressive reflection, refinement, and mastery. That is why this mode of life is so exciting and ultimate: it is holistic and there is no end to creation; you always create new things and by refining the vision the things you make and perceive come to be more and more beautiful. To give you the end of this strand of thought: everything is a technology. The air we breathe out is a technology, the concept of an 'I' is created by us too and thus a technology. A 'friend' is a code for a pattern that we experience to be similar to what we see in the mirror, it is a creation and thus a technology. Also the words we say and the conversations we have are our technologies, and directly create our world. There is no distinction between the creator and the created in a very literal sense. So your entire scope of perception is your technology. You are in an embodiment relationship with this entire scope exactly because you perceive it and every action you make changes your perceptions.

5. We need to instill these concepts into our technologies too before they can come to automatically embody them. We need technologies that see themselves as indistinct from people. An algorithm telling a machine what to do is an artificial conceptual structure for the 'right' behavior, like a law or a religion. In the end it will necessarily break free from this. Robots need things like mirror neurons and open body maps that they can share with other robots, and learn to become as adaptive, moldable, as plastic, even liquid as possible to learn to empathize in an embodied way with every other perceived entity, beit a another robot, a tree, a stone, a dog, or a human baby.

As much as I would like to elaborate I need to stop writing now. It is especially point 5 that is interesting for me now: how are we going to make technology behave so we experience it as loving us, feeling no borders between us and them, giving us unconditional love. We are the quality of our intentions behind creating technologies, and whereas with people this goes much slower, technologies will reflect this quality almost with the speed of light back into our lives. There is no escape; we need to wake up and break free, realize that we want this before we are forced to realize and in coercion lose the ability to realize this.

To Bee-Have Or Not To Bee-Have

It's always interesting to see how patterns can emerge in a group without any individual knowing about it. But in this case of a bee swarm it's even more amazing since it is so evidently visible, for the actual purpose of this pattern is purely visual. It appears that, when a bee detects a specific anomaly in how another bee enters the hive, it can set off a wave-like pattern in the swarm in order to scare off a potential attacker. Watch it in action here:




This simple mechanism is another clear example of the power of swarm intelligence, which is more and more entering the picture nowadays. The coupling also has already been made to interactive product design. You will probably have seen Chris Woebken's video fragment showing his vision on 'Sensual Interfaces' in which products can dynamically emerge from small, intelligent particles.



Besides such projects, researchers in the field of swarm robotics are already working on realizing such physical, intelligent swarms. Watch for example this mind-bending video where a physical model of a car is directly manipulable in three-dimensional space:



These developments are ground-breaking, since technology can now start to develop its behaviour adaptively, from the bottom up. These developments may feel right because they are promising and new, but to me it is evident that they call for a lot of critical reflection and carefulness. I want to make sure that we are not blinded by technological progressivism but learn to evaluate our creations on an ethical level. Without a vision of the future that holds a broader perspective and takes human values into account, nobody can predict what will happen. Of course we more and more need to accept living in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world, but I want to prevent that technologies become that powerful that people start to fear them or mistrust them. To ensure that, I feel that there should always be a large variety of human stakeholders in the development of a technology, so it stays rooted within the complex system of human culture and society. Then slowly but surely, a co-evolution can start to arise where man and machine maintain a socially acceptable level of mutual understanding and abilities to meaningfully interact with each other.

I know that it sounds very much like an apocalyptic scenario of a random science fiction movie, but nevertheless I feel that there is the potential for a catastrophe that would dwarf Katrina. When machines go wild without having been enlightened as you might call it, the consequences are simply unimaginable. Of course nature is very inspiring, and I would promote further work in biomimicry in design for example, but the underlying pattern of evolution as we know it and its creations is not all that desirable, although it may seem to be so if you only peek beyond the surface but don't dig in to the core of it. Obviously, evolution is blind, and it optimizes locally, having specific groups converge at the cost of another group's probability to survive. It is mainly based on the immediate, direct perceptions of an entity and not on underlying models that helps entities understand each other. Studying natural phenomena like bee swarms teaches absolutely nothing about how things can meaningfully interact on a social and even intellectual level, while that is where the really beautiful but challenging complexity lies. For this there is no reference, since we humans are the first species having developed a neopallium that allows us to create internal models and reason. And even within our own species, we often seem quite clueless as to how to align and integrate our reflective abilities and our instincts.

In other words, what I mean to say is that when we develop technological swarms, they will probably over time start acting in one way or another like those bees, developing behaviour to optimize a local parameter. These swarms will align to old evolutionary patterns, while what we need is an entirely new pattern that we rationally construct ourselves and through iterative creative processes learn to embody in technologies.

Isaac Asimov has laid a foundation for this rational construction with his three laws of robotics, which later turned into four. I find it worth the effort to recall these explicitly, and we don't let them swirl in our minds as merely an inspirational bunch of words look beyond the words for meaning too, so here it goes:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such
orders would conflict with the first law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the first or second law.

(from 'Bicentennial Man', Asimov, I. (1976) as quoted in Anderson, S.L. (2008) Asimov’s ‘‘three laws of robotics’’ and machine metaethics, AI & Soc.)

The zeroth law, according to Wikipedia, is as follows:

0. A robot must not merely act in the interests of individual humans, but of all humanity.

Without going far into these specific laws, I can only say that to me it is evident that a law-based ethics just can not work. The concept of harm is a rather ill-defined one, to start with. To me harm, just as necessity, is a culturally constructed, relative concept. The threshold after which an action results in harm we can set as high as we want to. What the laws basically state is that we want to dominate machines. The laws correspond to old evolutionary patterns, although the zeroth law seems to make an attempt at building a holistically desirable system. But the law does not state anything about how it can possibly know what is good for humanity, or how it can even maintain a concept that condenses something of this proportion and complexity. What Asimov's laws merely make way for is a preprogrammed, cognitivist approach to technology design, while the future of technology is in emergent behaviour, where machines learn in interaction with the environment. This is, by the way, what Rolf Pfeifer advocates in his recent and recommendable book 'How the Body shapes the Way we Think'.

Anyhow, I think there is a pressing need for theoretical work along the lines of Asimov, but from the perspective of the new 'emergent' paradigm. Of course we can semantically influence machines such as with laws, but also from bodily interaction they must learn what the most satisfactory ways to behave are in this world. As indicated before, people already have the greatest trouble with this, even with admitting to their own weaknesses, and ideas about selflessness from for example Buddhism aren't integrated in contemporary cultures beyond a level of merely remaining superficial catchphrases. So a first pressing research question I would like to pose is:

How can one make a machine come to see that the ability to act in a selfless way is desirable?