I always thought it was pretty silly to put wheels under a pet animal who misses a part of his hind legs. Here's the solution in the form of a pair of prosthetic paws for a cat named Oscar. Apparently it was not so simple to get the skin to grow onto the artificial limbs. In the end, it all worked out wonderfully, and Oscar can continue his jolly frolicking. If you want to know more, watch the BBC documentary 'The Bionic Vet'.
This technology would have freed up a lot of time in my childhood years, as I spent hours figuring out where that one LEGO element needed to be put. On the other hand, isn't the endless puzzling an intrinsic part of the creative process, and the satisfaction resulting from completing such a complex task? Doesn't this prepare children for the inherent complexity of the world, by showing them directly that the things around them can be purely the result of their own actions?
Yes, technologies like augmented reality can make things all too easy. But it depends on how they are used. They can also completely change the paradigm of instruction manuals. What if it challenged children to memorize the construction process visually? This would take them more and more out of associative, language-based thinking, and stimulate holistic, visual model-based thinking. Which is crucial in developing creative intelligence.
I sometimes wonder if everybody will be a genius in, say, 50 years.
We've seen it before that artists show a natural form as if it was digitally constructed. But every time we see such a thing, we can't help but being impressed by the beautiful strangeness of it. Here's another artist who shows what digitized nature can look like: Shawn Smith. This Austin-based pixelpaster creates sculptures from strips of MDF wood, painted in a dazzling array of colors. Check out the pictures.
And a soft female voice speaks with a lovely techno-optimistic undertone: "It flies, filling the sky with colorful light, and produces diverse styles of performance in the air"
This interactive airballoon is called 'Beatfly', and was created by Hideki Yoshimoto. as an open-source project based on the Arduino platform.
The Japanese have done it again. They set another step towards replacing themselves with this robot baby, cutely called 'Noby'.
The rationalization behind the project is that the prototype should help scientists understand the learning process of infants. This they intend to do by programming several behaviors into the babybot, seeing how they react to actual, meat-based people, and comparing this to the behavior of real children.
Next to the knowledge generated by the project, the scientists state that this project should lead to the development of more human-like robots with better social behavior.
Noby is also quite a technological feat: it simulates the human senses with cameras, microphones, and 600 sensors that allow it to feel touch.
If I may suggest an improvement, I would press on the aesthetic of the thing: from a superficial perspective, it just looks rather creepy. If we want robotic realizations to radiate a positive light towards the 'mainstream' people, it starts by the simple notion of making it look nice and acceptable. Noby was definitely born in the uncanny valley, and needs to start crawling its way up like a baby turtle to the sea.
In this playful animation, Jeremy Rifkin pleads for empathy as the key principle for a new civilization. He starts from the discovery of mirror neurons to explain that we are soft-wired for empathy, and explains:
- Development of selfhood is directly linked to empathic development - Empathy is key for coping with suffering and death, during the "existential trip" that life is - The empathy civilization is no utopia, as in a utopia there is no mortality so there is no empathy. "There is no empathy in heaven" - Civilization is empathization. Through empathy we can "cohere into larger social units". - Currently we have developed empathy for a large social group called the nation state. But this nation state is a fiction created by markets. Now we need to extend our empathy to all humans, all other creatures, as well as the biosphere. - Technology extends the nervous system to think viscerally as one family. Twitter is a good example of this, as there was a huge empathic response during the time of the Haiti earthquake.
Well, I couldn't agree more. I know that a life of consciously limiting your empathy and identifying with one particular social group, as opposed to others, is somewhat nice and comfortable. But once you step out of it, you realize that it's just not worth it playing such games all your life and missing out on the larger things you can discover. Empathizing with others can lead you to this ultimate transcendence of identifications, and help you merge into something larger, something extremely beautiful, something supreme. I know this is hard, but what works for me is to just stay aware of your less empathic tendencies, and when they arise, think in terms of empathy to slowly rewire yourself and your reactions until it becomes natural for you.
I like how Rifkin mentions technology as a large factor in developing universal empathy. My thoughts has been pointing towards this too, as our civilization relies more on technology than on psycho-spiritual methods of self-transformation. When we can develop technologies that consciously and unconsciously guide people towards empathy, we can realize first this global civilization and later perhaps what you could call a cosmic civilization.
In a cosmic civilization, people don't just empathize with organic or living things, but empathy is extended to everything that we interact with, including 'inanimate' things like technological objects. In this civilization, people realize that the difference between life and death is a fiction too, and that all human behavior can be described as a machine. That in fact, thinking of yourself in terms of a mechanism liberates you from all your worries, and makes the 'you' you think you are immerse into what you really are: consciousness. Thus liberated from form-identifications, triggered by the development of universal empathy, we realize ourselves not just as humans, but as what you could call cosmic consciousness.
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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