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.

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!

TEDxCMU update

Fig. 1. Do you trust this man
with the future?

The intrepid, astonishing youngsters who staff TEDxCMU have honored me by asking me to become the event's faculty advisor. I guess they liked me! Maybe next year I will get a suit that actually fits [Fig. 1]. I am very excited to be part of this team in an ongoing way. Here is the video website, which they promise will be full of cool things [e.g.; Fig. 2] by next week:http://tedxcmu.com/videos.

The reason the jacket doesn't fit is because I lost about 20 pounds since I bought it. Just sayin'.

Fig. 2. Two cool performance artists.

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.