arms and grippers for Anybot's full scale humanoid teleoperated robot

No matter how interesting it seems, there is something disturbing about teleoperating robots. And the amount of psychiatric problems of people who operate unmanned drones from their clean desks in Las Vegas that are currently killing people in Pakistan definitely testifies to that. Still, the people from Anybots in this movie seem not to be aware of this or concerned about potential large scale consequences of these technologies, when they break out of their niches that they were originally marketed for. My favorite neuroscientist Vilaynur S. Ramachandran has described laughter as "nature's false alarm". In other words, laughter could arise because there is something upsetting, stressing, or dangerous going on, but it just turns out innocent for the people in the current situation. I just can't help being a little bit concerned, especially when seeing the crude responses of the robot, the commentator's words "scary" and "useless", and the people who try to test the robot for its strength. If we're going to play that game with the botpeople it just may turn out to get nasty.

A copy can just never be as good as the original, and full control over any technology is an illusion that will always bite back.

how to get rid of the hidden killer in ourselves

"Man is an enigma to himself" - Carl Gustav Jung (1958), The Undiscovered Self.

In the astounding movie on top of this post, mentalist Darren Brown has an unsuspecting bar visitor participate in a first person zombie shooter arcade game. Brown then plays Wizard of Oz with the gamer in that he sends flashes of light out of the device that bring the gamer into a catatonic trance for a few minutes, just enough to bring him into another room that looks just like the virtual one he had just been in. The participant wakes up with an airgun in his hand in a room full of people dressed like zombies. What happens is shocking. In a pandemonial panic the protagonist starts screaming and running around shooting the zombies, and the realization that he is actually killing people seems to bring him into an even more extreme state of terror. He has just discovered the hidden murderer in himself, and before figuring out how to solve the situation, he blindly accepts this short-sighted role. To me, this is the story of humanity up to now.

People can be highly manipulated by their environments and lack a consistent internalized fundament to guide them in every situation. Because people's inner selves are largely undefined and people are insecure of them, they can easily forget about them and be absorbed by behavioral patterns that are biologically or socially ingrained into them. It often seems more like these patterns evolve through us as mostly blind individuals, instead of us completely mastering ourselves.

This also seems to be happening with the digital mediaspace we have created; it is running out of control but dramatically changing our lives mostly outside of our own awareness. Our digital technologies are mostly alien to us, but because they provide us shortcuts to pleasurable states of being, we accept them into our lives in the conviction that it is good. This is an illusion though, just another trick of the selfish brain, which becomes apparent in cases like the one mentioned above, where the boundary between projected and real fear blurs. Our technologies create temporary lifeworlds for us that often seem innocent and neutral, for they are often only the means to fulfill a purpose in the 'real' world. But they never were neutral; the way we act in digital realms influence the way we act in what we perceive as reality. A projected action can easily become a real one, since we have already adopted it mentally, activating the same neural patterns that would have been activated had we really performed the action.

Where virtual, computational environments seem distinct to us, we must realize that this is not so. The dichotomy between 'real' and 'virtual' is merely constructed by us, to make our lives manageable without having to expand our sense of self. We must realize that there is no such thing as virtual; all is just data we simultaneously perceive and act upon, and that we can derive happiness out of by creatively organizing that data so that we transform our lifeworlds into ones that we feel more at home in, and that we can more easily incorporate in our sense of self. There is no such thing as a simulated world, for it relates as much as the 'real' world does to the optimization of our experiential patterns towards ones in which we are happy.

Along the same line, it is not very useful to wonder if we are living in a real or a simulated universe. If we discover that we are in a simulation, and find a way to live outside of it, nothing really changes. Still, we will be conscious, creative patterns that act upon experiential data, but only this data will transgress its borders and we will need to learn to incorporate it into our sense of self in order to become one with it. Trying to figure out whether or not we already live in a simulated world then, is an act stemming from an inacceptance of the current experiential lifeworld, an act of seeking happiness in something outside of what we already have, in the silent hope that there is more. More than that, if there appears to be more, this is a mere creation of ourselves, not a discovery. It will be the result of the search, that we already created with the creation of the search itself. The universe is not outside of us; we have created our own universe by means of our own loops of action and reflection in which we continuously shape it.

Then if we realize that nothing is outside of us, we come to realize that we are already everything. We are not distinct from anything we perceive as outside of us unless we choose to perceive it as outside of us. The illusion our social brain imbues us with is that we are people inside a physical body, who identify with a certain group of people and objects but not with others. This alienness to others creates an unconscious aversion to them that, in critical moments where resources like time are scarce, will result in actions like that man in the experiment aforementioned, who attempts to murder what he perceives as zombies.

As long as we identify with our own bodies, we will maintain a fear of death, which in the end is the cause of all suffering and misery. When we see that also the body is a mere concept constructed by us, we can mentally let go of it, and it is only then that we can live fully, and have the energy that is already within us guide our actions instead of illusory concepts we at some point have pasted onto our existence, as a patch to make a seemingly inherently hard life more liveable and pleasurable. When we lose our fear of dying we transcend a life in between pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, good and bad, but we see that everything is the way it should be already, and we can be invulnerably happy at every moment, only acting from a love and compassion towards everything, without first making the comparison as to whether some perceived entity or concept is similar enough to us.

We then can even come to see that there is no difference between life and death, but that this also is a constructed dichotomy stemming from a narrow self-identification with the body concept. When somebody dies, be it you or somebody else, what really dies is the concept you have of that person. The body just remains part of life in that it will get transformed into other organisms. As long as we try to condense ourselves into a concept, yes, we will inexorably remain an enigma to ourselves. But if we throw away all concepts as necessities for a good life, and act based on the creativity that stems from pure being, we know everything that there is to know already and we will act out of compassion instead of confusion and anxiety.

Second Universe

Spore is the latest game developed by Maxis and comes out this year September. It lets you play mr. almighty over your own entire planet, and gives you the opportunity to fill it with any bizarre creature you'd like to live on it. The game is basically a virtual simulation of an evolutionary process, where you follow the development of the creatures you made during various evolutionary phases, from individual cellular organisms to in the end becoming an entire galactic species, if all goes well.

A demo of Spore's 'creature creator' software is already freely available for download since last Tuesday. While trying it out I was immediately struck by the reasonably large freedom and intuitive interface, so I could let my imagination run wild. If humans would be entirely free to create intelligent organisms, the boundary between the natural and the artificial would be entirely eliminated. Animals become products, products become animals. So I created a few species of my own, including Ipodius ipodius - a very narcissistic and self-conscious species, and Showerius Pleasedontsoakus, who tends to be a little emotionally fragile:



And here is an interview with game designer Will Wright:



But seriously, it's not just a fun game, but also definitely a development that makes us ready to face the revolutionary technological developments we're facing. Of course I'm talking about GE here. If we can take control over the complete evolution of our planet we might want to practice a little bit first, and understand what evolution is about. It's not about making pretty little things and seeing what happens; it's about survival and continuous adaptation, and I hope people will start seeing that this is where real beauty comes from. Only things that survive are beautiful, and the more elegantly they are adapted to their environment, the more beautiful it is to me.

As I have mentioned earlier, I am looking forward to the time where our interactive products come alive, i.e. where products are not designed to be unchanging during their lifetime, but actively co-evolve with their environment, including the people they interact with. A time where we don't use crude, linear production processes, but let products emerge molecule by molecule with, like in natural evolution, only some minor differentiation and determination processes. We then don't need to specify the parameters of the design beforehand, but instead have them emerge through natural growth. I would love to see a game where the co-evolution of humans and bio/nano-engineered technology would be simulated.

Still, however, and I pointed to this before as well, there is a big challenge we face. On the one hand, freely creating intelligent, self-evolving new species will be a great step for mankind as cocreators of the universe, aligning with its inherent evolutionary way of operating. On the other hand, giving birth to new life requires great responsibilities. We must take great care over our technologies, as if they were our children. And given that humans are not hard-wired to care much for things that are too different from them, we must both make sure that firstly, we transform ourselves spiritually into a mode of behaviour that makes us always feel connected to the whole, responsible for every action that happens within it. Always helping to create it with a full individual self, in tune with the whole. And secondly, we must make sure that the intelligent entities we do create evolve quickly towards a state where they can socially and satisfactorily interact with humans.

The first requirement is already happening: we are all getting connected to the internet, and start seeing that trying to stay isolated in a small local culture does not work anymore, since everything that is not good for anything outside of it will inexorably loop back into your life. It is for more and more people undeniable that we are now actively part of our spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it. This more and more forces people to keep developing themselves psychologically and spiritually in order to be able to lose their egoic ways of thinking and being able to be part of our global organism. So, again, this is going on already and will develop more and more. When the amount of people that are spiritually transformed into more global, individually liberated people, reaches a critical mass, I believe that soon the whole of humanity reaches this new mode of being.

The greatest challenge lies however with the second requirement: having our intelligent creations develop themselves so that their benefit to humanity and the evolutionary system as a whole is the greatest. We must make sure, for example, that these things don't start killing themselves, or us. In Spore, evolution is still based on local behaviour, so the system is still based on physical survival. So it doesn't really go beyond what we already know. In our world though, we must make sure we transcend this local way of acting and keep continuously connected to the whole. The most important thing is that we have our future evolutionary products not just evolve based on what maximizes their chances of self-replication, but in terms of what makes humans happy. The first and foremost requirement for a holistic system we create ourselces is that we feel at home in it, and be happy, simply said. Because these developments are still in their early childhood, my words sound obvious, though I feel that this is where I should start, before going into more depth about how exactly it should happen. Another important aspect of our future evolutionary products is that they should not be myopic and limited to sensing their local environment, but always actively connected to a global network where they can tap into to get information that guides their behaviour.

I will stop here for now, the main point being again that if we take evolution into our own hands and become a universal species, the task is daunting. Ervin Laszlo said that a reason why we don't see intelligent life in other parts of the universe might be that at one point of evolution, civilizations destroy themselves. We are in a very dangerous period, since we are now about to pass the point of the Singularity, as Ray Kurzweil puts it. We are becoming one with our technologies and must make sure we can do this harmoniously, and with complete empathy for each other. If this is not the case, we might cause our own extinction. Or at least the extinction of the biological, human form as we know it.