More moving structures

Nothing new here, just listing a few nice moving structures for the sake of inspiration.

Most interesting is the iris dome by Chuck Hoberman. This design seems complex, but it is based on a simple invention; a scissor mechanism with angulated members, so the angle of the elements the scissors connect to remains the same, which allows the structure to expand and collapse to and fro a central point, as in the iris dome. 

Here are a few interesting table designs. The last one is based on the Chebyshev walking mechanism.

Chebyshev walking mechanism, from "Sandler, B.Z. (1999). Robotics. Designing the Mechanisms for Automated Machinery":

What can I say about the following movies. I love these kind of Japanese comments, because not understanding them is ok; you understand what they're saying anyway because of the typical way they're saying it. This was never meant to become a very serious post.

The commercial partly shown at 0:14 of the following movie, about Hoberman's toy expandable spheres is one of my all time favourites. If anybody finds a link to the full movie, I'll post it on this blog.

Robotic prosthetic legs

This is exactly what it looks like; people having motorized robot legs to help them walking. More Japanese crotch-robotics. I wonder what  happens when these things get a will of their own,  and start evolving their own ways of walking. So your 300 pound bearded boss might suddenly start hopscotching around the office like his 7 year old granddaughter.

Anyway, this is the next development by Cyberdyne, and the 'hybrid assistive limb' suits are for rent for 2,200 USD in Japan as from last Friday.

No question about it, but it's now really evident that we are already post-human.

Zeno, saver of humanity

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.

Dr. Pekoppa to the rescue

Sometimes the only thing you need is someone, or something, that listens to you and understands you in an intuitive way. Something that just responds minimally and does not talk back. As most partners do not fulfill this requirement, the Japanese at SegaToys filled this gap in the market by introducing for once not a robotic fembot, fish or chick, but a cute little plant called Pekoppa.

This wiggly artefact moves its stem and leaves in a surprisingly expressive way, and because it's shape and movements are so ambiguous it gives people all the space to create their own narrative around this artificial plant, especially because it actually reacts to human voices. The following movie mainly shows some Japanese people getting things of their chest with this little healer, but some simply seem to have a nice social conversation with it, or decide to sing a song for it.



It is interesting that this 'device' is marketed under the nickname 'Healing Leafs', and I strongly believe that such developments can have significant psychological impact on society. It is maybe not very noticeable, but humanity is undergoing an enormous psychological crisis, desperately labeling any anomaly as yet another disorder, and rates of suicides, addiction, and depression are staggering. We lost a connection to our selves, are distracted by all sorts of fairly meaningless chunks of data and abstract goals imposed upon us mainly by the mirror of the media, and society, and I believe strongly that technologies can help us reconnect and have us reflect more, in a playful, empowering, and motivating way.

Muto by Blu; surreal wall-painted animation

Fantastic wall painted animation 'Muto' by Blu studio, touching upon themes like multiple identities, morphing bodies, blending of flesh and technology, metamorphosis, and even mind-body dualism as at some point a man's brain starts living an own life and evolves into a new man with butterfly wings, seemingly signifying that the most beautiful self we can become is hidden in our minds and needs to evolve separate from our body. This animation, definitely inspired by genetic engineering, is sometimes a bit silly but nevertheless highly inspirational once you take it seriously that this sort of art can be a precursor to actual developments that become more and more prevalent in our everyday lives.

Yayoi Kusama's Happiness through Self-Obliteration

Be quick if you have the opportunity to visit an amazing exhibition at the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for until October 19th the work of Yayoi Kusama is displayed there. In my opinion this is one of the most fascinating artists ever, because her work is so intimately connected to her own psyche which represents very much the problems people faced in the 20th century and still, and with which I can very much identify. Frustrated by the superficiality of technology and information overload, Kusama has spent her life escaping this by creating her own repetitive universe of polka dots or 'infinity nets', in a drive to show people how everything is one, and how we can "become one with the Absolute, all together in the altogether" and "lose our egos in timeless eternity, and finally discover the naked truth".

It appears to me that she tried to embody the cosmic energy underlying all of which we are part in one symbol, the dot, which she applied in her paintings, sculptures, but also on her own body and that of others. The latter she did in the 1960's in her controversial 'Happenings' in which she for example gathered up a group of people to dance around naked at well-known sites such as Central Park, while painting each other with dots. Also, she covers spaces with mirrors to create a feeling of infinity, which is quite mind-bending if you stand inside it, as shown in the image above. All this Kusama did to make people see and feel that they are "just another dot" in an eternity of dots, as opposed to having to struggle in developing an essentially illusory self-concept that can be framed into an equally illusory, culturally constructed system.

But Kusama ignores one fundamental notion, in that also representing both the hippie movement and many contemporary escapist cultures like gamers, Otaku, or Harajuku, namely the notion that simplifying life does not come through imposing simple elements onto it, but through mastering the complexity through intelligent thought and action. Human culture and individuality is part of the cosmic whole, which is never an absolute but always transcending itself through processes of chaos, separation, and union. It is through aligning one's ego and individuality into a larger whole to which it can devote itself, that a deeper meaning arises. Kusama, in escaping this and commenting on it in a rather superficial way, has probably done what she could have done as an artist, but when looked upon more critically it is apparent that it is actually quite contradictory that she tells people to be part of a unified whole by ignoring the actual unified whole.

Now that we are ignited by such artists, it is time that we passionately learn to really transcend the brittle systems we have created.

The Flowers have Eyes

Here's some visual nourishment for the true fetishist of everything about biological technology, or  technological biology, whatever. I still am looking for a good term for this. I kind of like McLuhan's term 'hominization of the planet' (from 'The Global Village', 1989). Maybe George W. Bush would rather use 'planetary humanification'. Couldn't resist mentioning him at least once on the blog, excuse me.