Monthly Archives: January 2010

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Garage ribofunk redux – DIY biohacking gaining popularity

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While we’re on the subject of garage industries, here’s a piece at pop-transhumanist organ H+ Magazine on the expanding field of garage biotech [via GlobalGuerrillas; image by mknowles]. We’ve covered DIY biohackers and ribofunkers here before, but the H+ writer has a cautious optimism about the scene’s potential once the dabblers have fallen by the wayside:

It‘s not just enhancement technology that can benefit from DIYbiology. As the popular distrust of doctors grows, people will want to understand and monitor their own body. Likewise, as personalized medicine becomes a reality, we will probably see a rise in the number of hobbyists who treat their own bodies as machines to be worked on — like a radio or a car — branching out from personalized genomics to things like DIY stem cell extraction and manipulation, DIY prosthetics, DIY neural prosthetics and sensory enhancements (infrared vision, anyone?), immune system testing, and general tweaking of whatever system strikes the hobbyist‘s fancy. This hacker‘s paradise has not yet come to pass, but it is, perhaps, our exciting future.

[Given that most distrust of doctors that I’m aware of is based in religious beliefs, I’m not sure the demographics are going to overlap quite that much… though the idea of the First Church Of Jesus Christ Geneticist is an appealing story hook.]

The road to true DIYbiology will not be easy. It‘s not a magic bullet. It will probably not produce the next Bill Gates, at least not for a long time. Biology is hard, messy, and failure is more common than success. The knowledge required takes time and effort to acquire, and even then, so-called textbook knowledge is being revised almost daily. Many are attracted by the glamour of it all. They‘re drawn to the romance of being a wetware hacker — the existential thrill of tweaking life itself. They tend to become quickly disappointed by the slow, tedious, difficult path they face.

I’m struck again by the similarity between DIY biotech and Chris Anderson’s recently-mooted maker-manufacturer revolution; the latter is much closer to reaching some sort of real economic escape velocity, granted, but the essential concepts and culture behind both movements are very alike.

Personally, I’m all for the ability to mess with my meat-machine, but I think I’ll wait until the field is a little more mature before getting my wetware tweaked. After all, if a hack-mod of my computer or car goes wrong, I can always switch off and try again, or – if the worst comes to the worst – replace the broken device; to the best of my knowledge, that facility doesn’t yet exist for the human body.

However, that’s not going to stop people more desperate than myself from turning to black clinics in the hope of fixing problems that the medical establishment won’t mess with. Hell, people already fly to Eastern Europe for cheap no-questions-asked cosmetic surgery… so when some back-street lock-up in Chiba City starts promising a fix for a congenital illness, a failed organ, a missing limb or just the ravages of ageing itself, the customers will come.

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Chris Anderson on the “new industrial revolution” of bespoke manufacturing

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Wired ed-in-chief Chris Anderson emerges from the back rooms once again with a lengthy piece lauding what he calls “the next industrial revolution” – which is, in essence, the imminent explosion of small companies using modern fabrication equipment and outsourcing techniques whose agility and low overheads will enable them to sweep away the old guard of corporate giants. [image by oskay]

That’s the theory, anyway, and it should be fairly familiar to regular Futurismic readers: we’re talking consumer-price-point 3D design software; 3D printing and fabrication; outsourced manufacturing; garage-industry electronics assembly techniques; open-source designs; hardware and software hacking; crowdsourcing for ideas, designs and feedback. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a slice that captures the spirit:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

From a globalist perspective, it’s pretty optimistic – as you might expect from the guy who came up with the concept of the Long Tail. That said, it’s not what the big corporations want to hear… and that’s probably the main stumbling block between the here and now and Anderson’s entreprenurial utopia. It’s become embarassingly obvious how much of a hold corporate America has over the engines of policy, and it probably won’t take much effort to spin Anderson’s vision into a dark and unpatriotic future where American manufacturing jobs are sent overseas (to those sneaky Chinese, no less!), garage makers are enemies of freedom (and probably a glass fiber’s breadth from becoming terrorists), and the people’s right to not be shafted by those who already hold all the aces is swept under the carpet so as to maintain a precarious economic status quo.

OK, so I’m overstating for effect, there… but you can see where I’m going with this, I hope. Given the staggering levels of obfuscation and deceit involved with the US healthcare reforms, I can’t see Anderson’s revolution happening without some serious back-room dealing and political psy-ops from those who stand to lose the most from it. And I doubt it will be a uniquely American problem, either; the government to which I pay my taxes is just as compromised, albeit in slightly different ways, and the richer countries of the Old World are all in the same boat.

What remains to be seen is whether Anderson’s maker revolution is an economic inevitability or an avoidable alternative. It’ll come as no surprise to most of you who read here regularly that I’d like nothing more than to see the bloated corporate behemoths of the world get their shoes wet while doing a King Canute impersonation, but only time will tell. This is one story where we can’t just skip to the last page to find out the ending; let’s just hope we don’t get squashed by the plot mechanics, eh? 🙂

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ZOMFG MosesTablet!

Jamais Cascio pretty much nails my feelings on the imminent sermon from Mount Cupertino:

Yes, I’m sure it will be wonderful, whatever it turns out to be. I’m also sure it’ll be overpriced, packed with glossy proprietary software and matched by more affordable (and more open) hardware within six months… but hey, I’m just one of the haterz, yo. I can live with that.

If you want a less partial and more sensible response, Charlie Stross has a post detailing what he hopes to see from Jeebus Jobs later today, including this important point:

Finally, if I’m going to ask for a pony, I’d like Apple to pursue a more enlightened policy towards folks who want to, er, compute on the computing device they just bought. The iPhone OS is locked down tight because under the hood it’s a kluge; if you jailbreak it you discover to your horror that everything runs as root, and there’s even a hopelessly weak root password (“alpine”) on what is actually a networked UNIX box as powerful as a mid-1990s Sun workstation. I’ll settle for a virtualized sandbox if inecessary, instead of a fully implemented security system — but please can I have a shell, a python interpreter, and some elbow room? (Not likely, but I can hope …)

Not likely, indeed. But hey, there’s only a last few hours left before the product specs get spuffed all over the intertubes like joyous geek ectoplasm, so there’s still time to get some dreaming done… feel free to catfight in the comments if you’re so inclined. 🙂

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Aliens might be just like us… greedy, violent and short on resources

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If you’re waiting patiently for saintly extraterrestrials to come and rescue us from our civilisational follies, you might want to reassess your hopes.

Simon ­Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary ­paleobiology at Cambridge University, suggests that aliens (should they ever arrive on Planet Earth, the likelihood of which is another question entirely) may well turn out to be more like us than we’d have thought… warts and all. [image by Markusram]

[…] while aliens could come in peace they are quite as likely to be searching for somewhere to live, and to help themselves to water, minerals and fuel, Conway Morris will tell a conference at the Royal Society in London tomorrow.

His lecture is part of a two-day conference at which experts will discuss how we might detect life on distant planets and what that could mean for society. “Extra-terrestrials … won’t be splodges of glue … they could be disturbingly like us, and that might not be a good thing – we don’t have a great record.“

And here’s some soundbite action from Albert Harrison of the University of California, appearing at the same conference:

“I do think there’s a risk in active searches for extra-terrestrials. The attitude seems to be they’re friendly, they’re a long way away, and they can’t get here. But if you wake up one morning and an armada of extra-terrestrial spaceships are circling Earth, that prediction won’t necessarily hold,” Harrison said.

If life has evolved elsewhere in our cosmic neighbourhood, we should find out by detecting their waste gases in the atmosphere of their planet or by discovering remnants of extra-terrestrial microbes in meteorites or alien soil samples, he said.

Harrison dismisses fears of public panic if alien life is discovered, of the kind which reportedly followed Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938.

“The public reaction was overstated. Most people who thought the broadcast was real took sensible actions to protect themselves,” Harrison said. “Surveys suggest most people think they will be fine, but they worry about others freaking out.”

Yeah, that makes sense. Or it will do, right up until the point when the aliens deploy their HUGE FRICKIN’ LASERS.

Given that the SETI people are somewhat emboldened by the flood of newly-discovered exoplanets [via Mark Chadbourn], perhaps we should keep a contingency plan on the back burner? “Git ’em afore they git ye”, as the saying goes…

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Sexbots sashaying across the Uncanny Valley

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2010 is shaping up to be a busy year in robotics, if the number of robo-related posts flowing through my RSS pipes are anything to go by. Here are just a handful of ’em for you…

First of all, nascent sexbot company TrueCompanion debuted Roxxxy [see image] at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at Vegas just after the new year [via SlashDot and Technovelgy]:

“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,” TrueCompanion’s Douglas Hines said while introducing AFP to Roxxxy.

Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.

“She’s a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person.”

Roxxxy stands five feet, seven inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, “has a full C cup and is ready for action,” according to Hines, who was an artificial intelligence engineer at Bell Labs before starting TrueCompanion.

[…]

Roxxxy comes with five personalities. Wild Wendy is outgoing and adventurous, while Frigid Farrah is reserved and shy.

There is a young naive personality along with a Mature Martha that Hines described as having a “matriarchal kind of caring.” S & M Susan is geared for more adventurous types.

Aspiring partners can customize Roxxxy features, including race, hair color and breast size. A male sex robot named “Rocky” is in development.

Somehow, I find Hines a bit more creepy than Roxxxy. And if you find the notion of people building sexbots a little odd, wait until you hear Hines’ motivations for creating her…

Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, when planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and an empty field in Pennsylvania.

“I had a friend who passed away in 9/11,” Hines said. “I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion.”

Ummm, OK…

Meanwhile, South Korean roboticists are focussing on more, ah, domestic applications as they work on building a walking robot housemaid:

Mahru-Z has a human-like body including a rotating head, arms, legs and six fingers plus three-dimensional vision to recognise chores that need to be tackled, media reports said Monday.

“The most distinctive strength of Mahru-Z is its visual ability to observe objects, recognise the tasks needed to be completed, and execute them,” You Bum-Jae, head of the cognitive robot centre at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, told the Korea Times.

“It recognises people, can turn on microwave ovens, washing machines and toasters, and also pick up sandwiches, cups and whatever else it senses as objects.”

Ideal for the frat-house with money to spare, then. But careful programming is of the essence if we’re to live side by side with robots, as is a legal framework that accomodates the ethical and social grey areas that our mechanical servants will bring with them [via Cheryl Morgan]:

Driverless cars may be one of the more gentle uses of robotics but even they will need a host of new rules written to help them fit smoothly into our society.

Take questions of insurance, for example – in the event of an accident, who do you hold responsible? If the crash involves an artificially intelligent robot, do you blame its creator, or the robot that can think for itself?

It’s a problem that would apply to any autonomous robot large enough to do accidental or erroneous damage to humans or property, according to Sharkey. “[It’s] going to be the same with any robot in the public domain that’s independent. Who’s accountable? Who’s responsible?”

There would also be the issue of which humans associated with the robot would be blamed for any misuse…

“There could be a very long chain of accountability,” he added. “The manufacturer, the person who deployed it, the person who’s using it currently. If I’m irresponsible with my autonomous car is it my fault? That’s one of the problems with it.”

And then there are the robots that are actually designed to damage people on purpose – there’s a whole raft of ethical OMGWTF wrapped up with military robotics (as we’ve discussed here before):

While robot fighters may remain on every military’s must-have list, the structures needed to define how such armed and potentially deadly autonomous agents should be used and not used are not yet in place.

“This is not science fiction anymore,” said Ron Chrisley, professor of philosophy at Sussex University. “This is really a pressing question – because in particular the US military is building more and more artificial systems that are going to be responsible for in some sense deciding whether or not to bomb co-ordinates or something. Now we need to get ethical principles in place to say, well, even if this system is in some sense responsible that doesn’t mean that this other system – namely the people who deployed it – are not also responsible.”

“I would hope that in the very near future a very rich field of machine ethics, machine-human ethics starts developing,” he added.

Looks like not everyone has heard about Roxxxy, however:

“I’m surprised frankly that the sex industry hasn’t yet cottoned on to robotics,” the University of the West of England’s Winfield said.

“For better or for worse, whatever your opinion on the subject, it is true that the sex industry has been responsible for a good deal of innovation on the internet, in terms of web technologies and so on,” he added.

Sex with robots is inevitable, in Sheffield University’s Sharkey’s view. Marriage, however, is not, according to another AI researcher, David Levy.

“I don’t agree with him that people will marry robots, except slightly perverted people. I can’t imagine you’d want to marry it but certainly robots will be used in the sex industry, there’s no doubt about that. And you could think of that as dystopian – I would. But people have sex with dolls, so you just make the doll move a little bit and you’ve got a robot.“

Levy’s theories sound a little weird at first, but he’s very persuasive – not in a sleazy way, but in the manner of someone who really seems to have thought things through. Only time will tell whether he’s right, of course… but I wouldn’t bet against him at the moment, for whatever that’s worth.

Last but not least, the Uncanny Valley of the title is a well-known buzz-phrase, at least among the geeky sort of circles that read this site… but it may also be a completely bankrupt theory. There’s certainly no research that supports it, according to Popular Mechanics:

Despite its fame, or because of it, the uncanny valley is one of the most misunderstood and untested theories in robotics. While researching this month’s cover story […] about the challenges facing those who design social robots, we expected to spend weeks sifting through an exhaustive supply of data related to the uncanny valley—data that anchors the pervasive, but only loosely quantified sense of dread associated with robots. Instead, we found a theory in disarray. The uncanny valley is both surprisingly complex and, as a shorthand for anything related to robots, nearly useless.

I know that I can vouch for the occasional creepiness of humanoid robots (not to mention metaverse avatars, which can be alarmingly ultrarealistic), but I guess it’s a tricky thing to quantify and measure… because it seems to be a predominantly remote effect:

According to all of the roboticists and computer scientists we interviewed, the uncanny is in short supply during face-to-face contact with robots. Two of the robots that inspire the most terror—and accompanying YouTube comments—are Osaka University’s CB2, a child-like, gray-skinned robot, and KOBIAN, Waseda University’s hyper-expressive humanoid. In person, no one rejected the robots. No one screamed and threw chairs at them, or smiled politely and slipped out to report lingering feelings of abject horror. In one case, a local Japanese newspaper tried to force the issue, bringing a group of seniors to visit the full-lipped, almost impossibly creepy-looking KOBIAN. One senior nearly cried, claiming that she felt like the robot truly understood her. A previously skeptical journalist wound up smiling and cuddling with the ominous little CB2. The only exception was a princess from Thailand, who couldn’t quite bring herself to help CB2 to its robotic feet.

Royalty notwithstanding, the uncanny effect appears to be an incredibly specific and specialized phenomenon: It seems to happen, when it does, remotely. In person, the uncanny vanishes. There’s nothing in the way of peer-reviewed evidence to support this, but then, there’s almost nothing to confirm the uncanny effect’s existence in the first place. As an unsupported theory that has morphed into a nerdy breed of urban legend, anecdotes are all we have to work with.

I expect we’ll discover a whole new load of phobias and neuroses when humanoid robots are more commonplace. How long it’ll be before that happens is an open question, but I’d suggest that the next decade will see robots invading our homes and workplaces in ever greater numbers. So smile and be friendly… but keep your multitool handy, OK?