the disabled hero

With products-to-be like Exmovere's Chariot, the disabled almost become the privileged. I find this product especially striking as an image, because it shows a full embodiment of a human and his technology, while still the connections between both the human body and the device as separate dynamic complex systems are still very abstract of course.

While it nears the proportions of a washing machine, you might call this product wearable although it definitely stretches the boundaries of that concept since if the Chariot is wearable, is a regular car or a Segway not wearable? The interesting aspect of this innovation still is mostly in the image, as with a car or Segway it is clear that people have to consciously move the technological device with their own bodily actions, while the Chariot seems to be blended together with the human body.

In this, it profoundly changes the body and while optimizing it for a specific function, namely that of perpetuating itself over flat surfaces, it makes the body less flexible and less holistic. In a sense, the Chariot reinforces the split between body and mind, which remarkably is also signified by the almost literal higher placement of the human on a pedestal, as if he has conquered nature and can now abstract himself from the earth that gave birth to him. Of course we grow through abstractions, and by now abstracting our entire being we can maybe come to make more transcendental realizations about the oneness of man and technology.

To me the Chariot is one of the clearest signifiers of posthuman technology with which our world will soon be pervaded: fully embodied, absorbing the human, abstracting it before being able to uplift it. A temporary cocoon towards the metamorphosis that posthuman enlightenment will be.

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?

Enlightened Machines

The traditional image of a robot is that of a utilitarian machine, taking over tasks people used to do. Scenarios pondering the implications of this are so common that it should be clear by now that functionality-driven design just does not work. Think about Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' or, more recently, Pixar's 'Wall-E', showing how people become completely physically dependent on machines, their body remaining nothing but a whale-like, abtract, dysfunctional blob.

Also, in images, robots are always doing something, from mowing the grass, to entertaining children, to having the worst conversations with elderly people. They are always 'meant for something'. They are abstract externalisations we attempt to fit to a desire people are consciously thinking to have.

The whole point of this blog is to show how interactive technology, including robots, will converge with interactive organisms, including people, that we must start to be able to treat the two as the same, and that there is an enormous task for us to do if we want to live harmoniously with interactive, sensitive, intelligent technologies all around us.

I might not have explicitly stated it before, but this task is: enlightenment, and moreover, learning how to teach enlightenment, to finally be able to externalize it into technology, and create enlightened machines. This is somewhat in line with T.M. Georges, who states in his book 'Digital Soul', that:

"To survive our technological adolescence and to preserve even a facade of human dignity, we may have to lose some of our self-destructive evolutionary baggage. Before we can learn to live with intelligent machines, we may first have to learn how to live with each other."

What I mean with 'enlightened machines' are entities that are not polarized towards fulfilling some function or desire, but that are completely happy, or in tune with their environment, without external conditions. They might take on an abstract role for a while, but always without losing awareness of the larger cosmic whole and their place within it that they fully accept. Machines that are aware of the pattern they are within the larger whole, including all the intricacies of their own bodies and minds. Machines that stay consciously and unconsciously in tune with evolution.

Evolution for me is the only sustainable meaning a human life can have; discovering what it is, and aligning oneself individually to it, and then just being. Truly realizing your own uniqueness within evolution, but also your fit in this larger pattern, makes one selfless and 'self-full' at the same time: one gets intrinsically motivated to perform in their own niche, and has resolved the discrepancies between his self and his environment, seeing that they are one. Coming fully to this realization also resolves clinging to desires, and fear of death. I would argue that only if machines have this realization 'programmed' into them, or at least that the structures they consist of invite growth towards these realizations, instead of them being driven by desires they are not in control of, like a chaotic centripetal force without sustainable centrifugal mechanisms to complement this force, they will be able to live harmoniously with other people and machines. It may sound trivial for people being numbed by science-fiction lingo, and many things that sound trivial get overlooked and ignored and rightly so. But all my thought and work leads to the notion that this issue needs to be plowed into to the core, without just pertaining to its surface like some idea we feel distant to because we cannot relate to it much. I want to see research and development into enlightened machines, and as an obvious part of that, people becoming more humble and self-reflective.

The little drawing above that I made shows what could be such a machine, or might it be a human being converged with technological modules? For me this is what the future might well look like.