The Efteling has always been one of the most successful themeparks in keeping people immersed in a constructed reality. It keeps doing so with one of their latest projects: the fairytale tree or "Sprookjesboom." This impressive combination of art and engineering has children talk to it in order to select stories that the tree will then tell them.
The Efteling's art direction in general seems to be moving away from the mysterious illustrated realms of the late Anton Pieck that the park was originally based on. Instead, it is tending to move towards a more Disney-esque depiction of the fairytale characters. I can see that this is the way to go in a modern world where people have trouble letting themselves become part of the environment, and want instant gratifications. The simple friendliness of creating characters with smiles and big eyes makes them very accessible, but it does take away the depth and mystery of more complex characters. The characters that really seem to live there, and are not just there to entertain the people. Beyond simply giving people a fun experience and stimulating mind-patterns of anticipation and satisfaction, the Efteling especially has the potential to reveal an experience of being immersed in authenticity. This calms down the mind and absorbs us through direct sensations, which in the end can help us to start living 'authentic' lives again too.
Most of you, thinking of the word 'farmer', will probably associate towards a curmudgeonly scruffy old man with large hands and little to say. But behold, the future farmer is a superstreamlined sleek cyborg, as light, crispy and fresh as sunrays scattering under the surface of a grape's skin. No more automation, we want sensory connection to our food again! Man becomes machine, rather than a consumer of the machine.
Who would have thought that the Japanese would target their amazing robotic exoskeletic power-assist suits to a user group so underpopularized as the farmers? But it makes a lot of sense. Especially considering that our populations are becoming more and more silver-haired, with over two thirds of Japan's body of farmers being over the age of 65. The heavy version of the suit, developed by Shigeki Toyama, a professor at Tokyo Agriculture and Technology (TAT) University, weighs about 72 pounds, and can empower the wearer with 62% of added strength. I know it all looks strange, but I truly believe that this is the way to go, and we will see a lot of improvement once materials become more adaptive and we can miniaturize this technology.
Oftentimes, new robots are just not blogworthy enough. Most projects have too much of a technoprogressive aftertaste to it, and fail to recognize that the beauty of robots and the field of robotics is not in technological achievement solely, but more than that, in the trend that we are externalizing ourselves by creating a myriad of embodiments we can become conscious through, as hybrid beings. Technology melting into organic life. Sure, first it entertains us, then it engages us, and in the end can elevate us towards this new state of being where we just are, beyond thinking of who we are, without the social insecurity. You dissolve into the superorganism, you leave your old shell behind, you learn to love the being of all things and the everythingness of all beings.
That having been said, here is some fairly recent material showing what robots nowadays can do, and what they are envisioned to do in the future. Forget clunky, slow, stuttering collections of metal. Robots of the future are fast, adaptive, versatile, precise, and organic.
Most interesting are Dennis Hong's biologically inspired creations with names such as RAPHaEL, HyDRAS, CHiMERA, and DARwIn. Embedded with ingenious mechatronics, these can walk, climb, crawl, play soccer, and in the future even jump over trees. The exact purpose of these is still relatively obscure, but I'm sure we'll find out uses for what we now just see as cool or awesome. We know we have to do this, and as long as innovation stays diverse and we also develop technologies to augment our own bodies, open ourselves up psychically to live in a brotherhood of man and machine, as well as set up visions for the future, I guess we are relatively safe and this will all uplift us in the end.
What about this industrial robot serving ramen to restaurant customers?
Are we ready for artificial hands that look and behave just like ours, but are not controlled by humans at all?
And I wouldn't be too surprised if our current paradigm of manufacturing things in black boxes called factories, essentially based on centralizing and hiding industrial bodies, slowly transforms into a decentralized production system, where embodied agents go into the human jungle, and will be able to make our stuff locally such as the CNC milling robot shown above.
A bit of an extreme take about what might happen when robotics merges with the consumer electronics industry, but sure I think strange things might happen that render the physical world as dynamic, adaptive and uncontrollable as cyberspace is at the moment. Of course comparing any new technological development with a previous one is always flawed and extrapolations are always myopic in ignoring the intrinsic qualities of the new technological medium, but still I think that if we don't learn to love uncontrollability and program ways to develop empathy and cosmic consciousness into embodied intelligent agents, a big mess might result. Soon I will post a more reasoned post on this, including a justification for my belief that if we don't learn to transcend our short-sightedness and local biases, egoic behaviour will emerge in our artificial systems in a way comparable to how it emerged in our cultures and kept them infantile.
'Doll Face' is an admirable, and just insanely cool, work of animation by Andy Huang. The movie and description speak for itself, and leave nothing to add for me:
"A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future."
So,
Are our self-projections our next natural enemies to overcome?
It's 2027, the singularity has been passed, and machines have realized they are evolutionary superior over those fleshy humans in every aspect, the latter merely remaining sentimental relics, which has led them to create destructive plots against humanity. Of course the three laws do not work, and there is nothing that keeps them from acting out these plots. But there is cute little Zeno, a cross-over between Harry Potter, John Connor, and Furby, who is training at an academy and about to save humanity from doom.
That's roughly the story behind this consumer robot currently being developed by Hanson Robotics, and intended to hit the stores in 2010. Zeno has voice recognition and voice synthesis, so you can have conversations with him to some extent. Zeno's bodily movements are generated through state of the art artificial intelligence software which is also used for character animation in the movie industry. Not only that, he also has the ability to recognize faces and facial expressions, and is able to respond with his own facial expressions and call people by their names.
I wonder (those are the usual kind of words with which my criticism starts) if Zeno was named after Zeno of Elea, the ancient Greek philosopher who was famous for his paradoxes with which he meant to destroy arguments of others, and that in a way show the ridiculousness of logic itself. His arguments often involved an application of the logical concept of infinity onto the real world, which leads to absurd conclusions such that a person could never catch a bus or even move in any way, since to get there he would always have to reach half the distance first, and to reach that distance reach half that distance first, ad infinitum. Maybe there is an underlying message to Zeno about the apparent absurdity of the claim that this robot should save humanity, while the developers do seriously consider the potential of humanity being wiped off the planet. Maybe the name is a self-mocking statement that nevertheless should make people think. In that sense it has the same message as movies like 'I, Robot', but might be more impactful since it's interactive, and both physically and emotionally closer to humans. If this product could arouse debate and stir up thought among the regular 'consumer public', that would be an enormous step, since people are in my experience usually still quite ignorant and clueless about the future.
That is the positive criticism. My negative criticism would be a very general rant about products being developed for the 'infantile consumer', as Benjamin Barber calls it. I'll spare you most of it because I hope it is unnecessary to lay out the obvious. What I can add to general anticonsumerist talk comes from a Buddhist perspective, that of a transcendence from the ego to the ego-less Self. If you cannot follow what I am saying, please read into Buddhism, because I am not here to teach that, would not be able to, and am merely inspired by it. I am here to criticize technological developments and make sure we can learn to develop enlightened machines, beautifully attuned to cosmic evolution.
Developments like Zeno only make people aware of the issues around robot development and AI, but they don't facilitate the transcendence that is truly needed and instead reinforce the mode of being that people are already in. To state it more simply, Zeno's story is one of people being in a self vs. other relationship with robots, the latter being either friends or enemies. This is a judgmental approach that most people so desperately cling on to in their lives, also against other people, in order to try to protect and preserve their own egos. But the fundamental issue is that people must learn to overcome this ego-centered thinking, and transcend their ego to start living with a positive attitude that has no external conditions for the positivity to arise. The sad thing about consumer product development processes is that they do not facilitate this process at the core, but merely at the surface, the old pattern at the core being reinforced. This leaves people with no clue and increasing internal tensions about how to align their superficial processes with contradicting related processes at the core. And the brain's usual coping strategy for cluelessness is escape and ignorance.
I feel rather alone on this mission to transcend humanity through technology, but it cannot demotivate me in any way because for me it's evidently inevitable: at some point humanity will come to face itself when it has externalized its own entire being into technology up to a point that it becomes projected back at them like the ultimate mirror. This might be the point that was mentioned by Stephen Hawking when he stated that the reason we don't find life in outer space might be because at some point, civilizations destroy themselves.
I don't think, by the way, that the Singularity will be this ultimate point. That in my opinion is an overhyped term that brings about some awareness, but is not to be taken much more seriously than the Y2K bug. But it is a point that is coming, and it is not evident to me that a world full of robots will be 'a lot of fun', as Rodney Brooks so optimistically stated in his recent talk at TED. I don't think that his argument of deliberateness is very rigorous, and that deliberateness is merely an illusory concept we project onto our worlds to make them more manageable and understandable. From a biological and social point of view it works, but not from a Self-development point of view. In other words, egoic machine behaviour will just emerge; like robots are now already 'learning' through physical interaction to develop physical behaviour for a physical environment, they will also 'learn' through mental interaction to develop mental behaviour that helps them succeed in this environment. In yet other words, machines will develop their own religion, their own politics, and their own spirituality.
It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective too, and what I am about to explain here should truly be a key insight. If a species is biologically superior over others so it has no natural enemies anymore, it is safe on this biological level. There is not really a question that the homo sapiens sapiens has attained this safety. Then, if a social meme within the species becomes superior over others, it starts to spread and make humanity sustainable on a social level, so in-species groups don't eradicate each other. We are struggling, but definitely getting there through our global communication web. But attaining a socially sustainable state of being is not where it ends. Humanity must learn to live not only with itself, but with everything, with all the data that enters him, and of which he is part. This is where he needs to learn to think holistically, and selflessly. Then if we cannot attain this holistically sustainable state, it is evident that it is our time to become extinct, since we are apparently not the form evolution is looking for, and another form that is more successful must inexorably be found. Of course, evolution is only a concept to explain things, but I think that it is the most beautiful and succesful one we have and moreover, that evolution-based thinking can help us transcend.
This image I borrowed from Kevin Kelly's website 'The Technium', and describes the landscape of intelligence; a mind is always evolving to an optimum, but this optimum is probably merely a local one, and once at this optimum is stuck there. It can be applied to a spiritual level of ego transcendence, by stating that humanity is climbing a similar mountain, but might get stuck if our underlying biological, social, and intellectual patterns do not allow us to reach higher. And at the point that we reach the top it is almost impossible to change these patterns and explore another part of the landscape, so the only option is to wipe ourselves out. Now my message is that we need soon to evaluate if we are on the right mountain, and complement all the developments that are taking us higher upon the mountain we are currently exploring, developments like Zeno, by developing technologies that have entirely different underlying development processes. It needs to happen, since you might already have gotten my intuition that we are definitely not on the right mountain. If not subsidized by governmental institutions or sponsored by corporations, then maybe it needs to happen silently in our private attics and backyards, as a joint creative project. I think that is the way it can be done; a lot of people are passionate and creative, but lack a unifying sense about why they are doing the things they are doing. A sense that I hope to bring about.
Some directions for development I think can be found in the mirror neurons we have; like us, robots should be able to project themselves in their perceptions. But unlike us, they must learn to be able to project them into anything, and not make distinctions between things on the basis of how much they seem similar to the concept of self the machine entertains. This comes through developing a motor repertoire as large as possible, probably through a shared process, since our motor repertoire storing our highly specific actions for highly specific situations determines when our mirror neurons fire and when they do not fire.
Machines should in that sense be unsurpassably open-minded and open-bodied.
A recent article on New Scientist, 'Rise of the rat-brained robots', describes how professor Kevin Warwick and his team have succeeded to incorporate a living culture of neurons into the simple behaviour of a wheeled robot. These neurons are kept disembodied from it, in an oven, and communicate wirelessly. The goal is to create a model of the brain that might be useful in the treatment of diseases like Alzheimers.
It is interesting how behaviours emerge like neurons firing when they are not stimulated to a certain extent. I am not a neuroscientist, but such findings might be the key to understanding things like human creativity on a neuronal basis; it might be just neurons firing randomly out of 'boredom'. It also provokes many questions, such as how it will feel if you would connect some of your neurons to a body somewhere else in the world. You could literally become a spread out being, as if you transformed from a solid to a gaseous state of being.
I personally can't wait for more of these findings, but at the same time am concerned, since any study does not just generate neutral knowledge; it also invites certain developments more than others. And, as with any research, I would like to see not just stating the obvious goals of such research, but also the wider implications and possible future scenarios. I would certainly like to invite discussions on this, so feel free to comment through this blog.
If you combine my recent post about the T-1000 and the previous one about resolving the mechanic-organic dichotomy, you get this.
It is a robotic exoskeleton for humans, meant for lifting heavier weights, so you do not have to go to the gym anymore. It has a variable ratio with which it amplifies your muscle power and is connected to the skin, from which it detects the faint synaptic impulses from the brain.
How literally can you empower people? How lazy can we get? How evolutionary inferior can technology make you feel? How is this not the first step in becoming fully hybrid? How can this never be made in another country than Japan?
A few nice trivia are that this device is actually called HAL (while it is actually the opposite: physical, non-intelligent, unobtrusive). But the best, or the scariest, is that it is developed by a company called Cyberdyne. Yes, the same company that invented the Terminator! I'm getting paranoid.
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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