This invention is a terrific example of how nature and technology are blending to create a humanized nature that is in ways better and more beautiful than the kind of nature we used to live in.
Taiwanese scientists, in their search for better light sources, have unintendedly created luminescent tree leaves. They implanted gold nanoparticles into the leaves, and after subjecting them to UV light they started emitting a reddish glow. What's more, this glow creates a kind of internal feedback loop in that the leaves' cells will photosynthesize more and thus further reduce carbondioxide in the air.
Unbelievable as it may sound, this might be the streetlight of the future. So if we invest more into researching the possible transformation of natural, seemingly useless things into 'products' with direct economic value, our cities can come to feel a great deal more 'natural.'
Nanotechnology to the common eye seems to be a little veiled in mystery, and to make it visible on a concrete level how this all could work, there is this video of a 'Nanofactory' as imagined by Eric Drexler. It seems almost incredible, but if we could ever manage to create this, it would be about the apex of the modernist dream and we will have almost completely taken control over nature. Watch it here:
I don't think it's impossible in the long term, but I tend to think that the enormous amount of resources that this will suck in building and maintaining it so it stays in tact, as well as controlling all the unforeseen errors that will happen from time to time, make us have to treat this as, and forgive my language, a kind of utopian nano-porn for the extremely wealthy.
Along the lines of Jens Dyvik's sculptable hotelroom is Michael Harboun's equally sculptable 'living' kitchen. He imagines that through nanotechnology we will be able to design into physical structures preprogrammed movement paths, so that with the flick of a finger you could have a faucet, a plate, or a cutting board pop out of any surface in your kitchen. Of course nanotechnology is still mostly in the early 'hype' phase and we are probably decades removed from having anything like this, but at least this way we are exploring the conceptual canvas a little first.
The NextNature organization is growing as it should, and it's also becoming a serious thinktank for a future based on radically different technologies. Nanotechnology is one of these technologies, and NextNature has devoted a project called the 'Nano Supermarket' to it. Creatives from around the world were asked to dream or think up conceptual products based on nanotechnology, and evoke debate around this product.
The fruits of this project are to be seen in the upcoming Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven as from next Saturday, so don your color-changing attire and don't miss it.
A little concept I did for the Nano Supermarket, organized by the Next Nature blog and Eindhoven University of Technology.
Describe your product in less than 200 words. "The most innovative and revolutionary cereal currently on the market, Dr. Nano’s new N-flakes are the dream of any informed and connected consumer. These crunchy little nuggets have a completely safe form of nanotechnology inside that allows them to form a personal message for you after you pour them into your bowl of milk. All you have to do is wait a few seconds, and the flakes will rise to the surface to show you the weather for today, the amount of e-mail waiting for you, the score of that football match you missed, or even a personal message from a friend. And besides all that, N-flakes are simply scrumptious and highly nutritious, too!"
Describe the use of nanotechnology in your product, as well as its feasibility. "Nanotechnology is necessary in this product in several ways: - Having each individual flake receive a command from a central processing unit (mounted on the box). This command tells the flake where to position itself relative to other activated flakes that become part of the message displayed in the bowl. - A mechanism need be present in each flake that allows the flake to, when activated, rise to the surface. For this, you can think of cells engineered to contain a pressurized gas. When activated, the cell would release the gas into the flake, hence propelling it upward to the surface. - A mechanism need be present in each flake that allows the flake to position itself relative to other flakes while the flake is rising, as well as across the surface of the liquid in the bowl. For this, you can think of ‘nanomotors’: molecular motors that propel the flake in a certain direction. - A nano-scale chip should be present in each flake. This chip would continuously receive signals about the position of other activated flakes, and control the nanomotors to get the flake in the desired position, within a short amount of time.
Realistically, I think this product can not make it to the market until about 2050. It requires nanotechnology of such a sophistication that the food industry will probably only take a hold of when it is available for a very low price. I do see it happening that nano-scale units will be standardized and produced on a massive scale for the food industry, maybe in the form of responsive and programmable powders."
Describe how your product can change our everyday life. "Implications on people’s lives:
- The biggest implication, I think, is that through nanotechnology food can basically appear to ‘come alive’. As such, the distinction between product and ‘living being’ fades almost entirely, as our experience of these two always seemingly separate categories of things in the world will be less and less distinct. With food becoming physically active and responsive, people might feel as if they are eating something alive. In the N-flakes concept, the ‘it’s alive’ experience is minimized though, through not having the flakes physically change, and only having them give a single message, after which they become passive again like ‘ordinary’ foods.
- Putting nanotechnology in edible foods could make people very uncomfortable because they are eating parts of a ‘machine’ rather than ‘naturally’ grown food. Future generations have to grow up trusting that nanotechnology will not cause any significant harm to our bodies just like current generations have to trust a world where electromagnetic radiation is ubiquitous. It’s a big question how nanotechnology can be introduced to the world without entire cultures tipping into a state of distrust of this development.
- In a society revolving around information, people can tend to disconnect from their physical surroundings, such as the food they are eating. If the food itself starts to behave intelligently though, and becomes part of the information world, people may start to pay more attention to it, and less to technologies that deemphasize physical interactions. So where an information-overloaded person may simply devour food without any mental connection to it, in a world where the physical becomes the information this person can be led into a kind of ‘dance’ with the food. A disadvantage is that it could be quite a hassle interacting with things this way for just a little bit of information. Advantages are that the information can be more personal and meaningful, and that the interaction as a whole could bring you more into the present moment."
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.
If horribly corny children's songs about some topic appear, involving handmade puppets with flat personalities, it just proves that the topic is quickly ingraining itself into society.
Where once our technologies used to be mechanical and centralized, after the invention of electricity the form of products started to be less and less a factor in their functioning. In fact you could even say that we live in a dualistic world, where form and information have become separated. The information surrounding us that we call physical is mostly distinct from the information we say belongs to the mental realm.
With the advent of bio-engineering and nano-manufacturing, this is changing. The material physicality will more and more be able to match the patterns of the electronic; complex, parallel, minuscule and fast. A concept depicting beautifully how new technologies will mean a paradigmatic shift in our manufacturing processes and interaction with technologies is Nano Vent-Skin, by designer Agustin Otegui. He designed a building with an outer layer that can generate energy from the sun and the wind. This skin would consist of nano-scale elements that transform sunlight into electrical energy, and moreover contains tiny turbines that rotate when the wind blows against them, subsequently conferring this energy to micro-organisms that generate electrical energy. The structure also contains nano-wires that can send information about potential failures to a central system, that in turn sends new micro-organisms, so the system can regenerate through self-assembly.
This way, we can integrate functionalities holistically into a structure that hence becomes more like a biological organism than a 'piece of technology'. It all sounds too good to be true.
Here is a link to the website of the project: NanoVentSkin
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?
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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