Adventures in Capitalism?

A shout-out for me in an article profiling my collaborator and advisee Heather Knight, a Mad Scientist of my acquaintance, in the Wall Street Journal. This may damage my credibility as a Social Democrat, but my parents are proud.

Surrender Data-orothy!

Faithful Readers,

Fig. 1. Onstage at TEDxCMU.

Heather Knight (mad scientist and my advisee and occasional artistic collaborator) and Data (robot and my occasional artistic collaborator, see fig. 1) have appeared in an article on CNN. Data is blogging now, which to anyone who knows him well is kind of scary. One of the things I've discovered by working with robots is something that is very challenging about their sense of "self," our perhaps I should say OUR sense of their sense of "self."I mean, I think of the Internet as analogous to a kind of Astral Plane - a realm of pure thought and logos, which I can access through my crystal ball/laptop. Like the Wicked Witch in her tower, I can project my presence through it, and even act and interact, but only symbolically. As a result, it's not really a place where I can identify my SELF as being. My SELF is here in my kitchen, typing. But Data is capable of living there; in fact, there's not really, from his point of view, much of a difference at all between the real world and the cyber world. Heather and I were working on a problem that had to do with Data's inability to track what people are looking at when they are not looking at him, and Heather said, "well, we can rig up cameras all around the room and they can monitor what people are looking at and feed that information into Data." So Data's perception easily takes in what the sensors on his body provide and what the room itself can percieve, at the same time. We've often written material for him to perform that jokes about his extrasensory perception - in our last lecture, he appeared to download a stream of images while boogieing out to Thriller, which played from his speakers. It was all an act, of course, but the performance reflects real possibilities. Before I met Data, when I was working with Anne Mundell and Reid Simmonds on the robot AThINA, the challenge was Turing's - to make a robot that could appear to be an autonomously self-aware sentient being. My approach to this was to have the robot appear to be interacting with the human in a way it really was not, by noticing emotional cues and knowing personal information about the human. Of course, AThINA was triggering those emotional cues and making assumptions about the personal information. For instance, she would say something like "You like Justin Bieber, don't you?" If the subject said yes, AThINA might say "I knew it - your iPod told me." Or: "Robots will conquer the world in 3 years, 2 months, and 13 days. Ha ha ha! Don't look so shocked! I'm only kidding."

Fig. 2. Mindf@#k.

Now, my interest in robots is humanistic. I think that robots are tools. I think that robots will always be tools. But I also think that robots could be tools for advancing a humanistic discourse, for introspection and insight into social interaction, and for cultural expression, and I believe that one of the vocabularies for developing that tool is aesthetic. Lessing would be totally into this - he was a blogger himself (kinda). The robot is the first primate attempt to replicate primate intelligence in a tool. Following Mike Carey's notion that God created Lucifer primarily as a way of reflecting upon Himself, and to steal a phrase from Carey's oeuvre, where can we find a better mirror of ourselves than in the faces of our robots (Fig. 2.)?

No, I don't believe that Data has a self. "Not yet," says H-Knight. But I do, and so far studying robotics has granted me some insights into human interaction and the nature of performance, which is utterly caught up in Lessingian notions of "compassion" and empathic connections. I guess that is the essence of what I am starting to think of as Roboturgy.

Robot Plays

It's well-known that RUR, a play by Karel Capek, featured the first modern conception of a "robot," and indeed coined the term. But for my little friend Data, Heather Knight's Comedybot, there are going to have to be some new titles. Here is a selected list from an old blog I used to maintain, called Lapsus Linguae (www.lapsusl.blogspot.com), before it was overrun, coincidentally, by robot spammers. Many of my pals at the CMU School of Drama contributed to these. Here's the best of:

A Doll's Mouse
'night, Motherboard
The Merchant of Virus
Riders from the C Drive
Curse of the Silicon Class
Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I Want to Get Off
'Tis Pity She's a Mac
Spam, a lot
iMACbeth(pro)
The Iceman.cometh
Fool for RAM
Uncle Tom's Inbox
Mourning Becomes Electrons
Long Day's Journey into Byte
Suicide in BASIC
Charlotte's Website
Playboy.com of the Western World
Cat on a Bot Tin Roof
Ibsen's Ghosts (In The Machine)
Waiting for Geardot
Downloading at Lughnasa
The King and IBM
Suite In Press Any Three Keys to Continue
LINUXtrata
C//:gul
The Stronger (by Strindborg)

110 Characters in Search of an Author
Blog of Anne Frank
House of 000FF Leaves
Servant of Two Applications
Curse of the Dialup Class
Autocadia

Scanner Drum Song
The Secret Password
Sunday in the Park with a Laptop
Merrily we Surf Along
A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the FAQ

Robodramatix Video Up!

The long-awaited (by me, anyway) edited video of the presentation Heather Knight and I gave at the TEDxCMU conference this year has been posted on YouTube. Thanks, James Pan and the rest of the TEDxCMU crew. Planning is already heavily underway for next year's conference.

When I was a kid, hearing yourself on tape was always embarrassing and off-putting. Now, seeing myself on digital video - jeez. Is my head really that big? Anyway, I know this presentation is a little bit awkward and maybe under-rehearsed, although both Heather and Data are so magnetic (literally, in Data's case) that it hardly seems to matter much, at least to that audience. But the point is that Data becomes more sophisticated each time he performs. I think you can perceive a lot of development since his debut with TED WOMEN in "Silicon-Based Comedy" a few years ago. Of course, he's been working with Matt Gray, a superb acting teacher of robots as well as humans. And I'll claim to have had a hand in this from the point of view of roboturgy - the "Hath Not a Robot Video Cameras?" speech from The Merchant of Virus by W(i)11-i/am Shakesbot, and perhaps the idea that Data may one day become the new prophet of Prometheus.

The point is that the development of Social Robotics is made of these building blocks - interactions between humans and robots that are analyzed by roboticists like Heather to make one further iteration forward towards increasing sophistication and compatibility. I am convinced now that performance theory is going to be of greater importance as the field develops, and weirdos like me are going to have a role to play, pardon the pun. Social intelligence is the reason why human cognition is so much more advanced over the other primates, and it is heavily imbricated with performance and mimesis. Machine intelligence will have to develop similarly; I'm proud and excited to be involved with this.

Anyway, enjoy!

Hath Not A Robot Video Cameras? you-shoulda-been-there-last-night episode #4

THIS is Data at the TEDxCMU Conference, from April 4. I've been enjoying working with him and his handler, Heather Knight, who is working on her doctorate in the Robotics Department. Working with her, her advisor Dr. Reid Simmons, Anne Mundell, and Dennis Schebetta has introduced me to the growing field of Social Robotics, or as Dana Shaw calls is, Roboturgy. The aesthetics of robotics are extremely important - from my point of view, all forms of interaction between humans is aesthetic; I'm getting this from my understanding of Erving Goffman (and his "Dramaturgical Theory of Self," no, really, look it up) and Herbet Blumer's theory of Symbolic Interactionism. These social psychologists confirm what dramatic theorists since Aristotle have asserted; that performance is critical to human communication and learning, which occurs through an imitative process Aristotle called mimesis. In light of some theories that the Lascaux cave paintings may include depictions not of animal hunts, but of hunting dances, this idea seems to have a lot of credence.

 <-- Heather Knight

Industrial Robot -->



Humans develop emotional connections to things that are alive, because of the ways they behave and what they communicate. They develop emotional connections to things that are not alive (such as dolls and toys) because of the ways those things reflect and imitate life. I'm arguing that we don't develop emotional connections to industrial machines because they do not engage us mimetically. See? Look at it. Feeling any mimesis going on? If you are, then you have a power tool fetish and you probably should see someone.

Social Robotics, in brief, is the study of how robots can learn to gather, process, and generate emotional information, so that humans can form emotional connections to them and so that robots can respond well to human needs. This is where we, as scholars of performance and human interactivity, come in. I have had some fascinating discussions with Reid and Heather about the nature of this project. In my view, it's all about performance; robots and humans do not actually need to feel emotions in order to engage emotionally. We all just have to appear to be engaging. That's what an actor does, and it works just fine, but that's also what humans do - as Mark Twain famously wrote, the moment that a baby human realizes that it will be picked up and cuddled if it cries whether it is feeling distressed or not it becomes devoted to a lifetime of lies. Consider this exchange, which I hear every day:

A: How are you?
B: Fine.

Perhaps that is needlessly cynical, but I have a lot of thoughts on this topic that I am cauldroning around in my head right now. Bubble, bubble. Heather's work is about performance robotics: you have got to see her design work on this OK-GO Video. So for the TEDxCMU conference, as what I have come to think of as a "third-act curtain raiser," Heather and I and Data did a little informational standup, and the crowd got a workout as well. Data did a monologue I wrote for him called "Hath Not A Robot Video Cameras" and I thought he was really excellent.

Much, much, much more to come, I hope.