Many of us have one or two political issues surrounding our bodies that get us fired up. Many of you reading this right now probably have some hot-button issue on your mind. Maybe it’s abortion, or recreational drug usage, or marriage rights, or surrogate pregnancy, or assisted suicide, or sex work, or voluntary amputation, or gender reassignment surgery.

For each of these issues, there are four words that define our belief about our rights, “My body, my choice.” How you react to those words determine which side of any of those debates you are on. That’s just the thing, though – there aren’t a bunch of little debates, there is just one big debate being argued on multiple fronts. All of these issues find their home in my field of philosophy: bioethics. And within the bioethics community, there is a small contingency that supports a person’s right to choose what to do with their body in every single one of those examples. Transhumanists make up part of that contingency.

If you are pro-choice on abortion or think that gender reassignment surgery is an option everyone should have, you agree with transhumanism on at least one issue. Many current political arguments are skirmishes and turf battles in what is a movement toward what one might call somatic rights. In some cases the law is clear, as it is with marriage rights or drug usage, and the arguments are over whether or not to remove, amend, or change the law. Other cases are so ambiguous that the law is struggling to define itself, as with surrogate pregnancy and voluntary amputation. And sooner or later (I’ve given up on guessing time-frames), instead of merely arguing over what we’re allowed to do with the body we’re born with, there will be debates about our rights to choose what kind of body we have. By looking at the futuristic ideas of genetic engineering and robotic prosthetic technology, we can understand how transhumanism maximizes the “my body, my choice” mantra.

We have a lot of laws about what you can’t do with your body. On the other hand, think about how many different things can be defended with “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want!” Why do we say that? The answer seems painfully obvious: because we’re the only ones who know what it’s like to have our body and it’s probably the only thing we really, truly own. No one can take your body without also taking your life – which as it turns out, is a great way to put your money where your mouth is when you’re a philosopher. Like any good philosopher, however, my job is to examine the painfully obvious. In part, because if it’s all so damn obvious, then why does every lawmaker, religious leader, and jerk with a megaphone think they have a right to tell you or me what to do with our bodies? Is it just jealousy?

Let’s say we live in the future and I have the option to get a robot body and genetically modify my brain to make myself smarter, kinder, and happier. My guess is many people would be very upset if I was traipsing around with a glorious, glistening body made of heretofore unheard of alloys with a genetically tricked-out brain. I would be a magnificent testament to science and engineering. I would be happier, healthier, and smarter. So what possible justification would the paternalists of the world have for telling me I can’t upgrade my physical body?

There are three responses:

• Response One: “Your life is just too important for me to let you ruin it, let me set some ground rules to make sure you don’t make a decision you’ll regret later.” The paternalist rule-makers paint themselves as bearing the burden of responsibility for our lives. We don’t know what is good for us, but they do.
• Response Two: “What about the children?” Somewhere, out there, is a person with a permanent scowl on his or her face, of whom children are frightened, who has already figured out how my robot body will hurt the children. I imagine it will involve something like “sets a bad impression.”
• Response Three: “It breaks with tradition and is immoral.” Understand here that tradition and morality are not ethics. I differentiate morals and ethics in the following way. “Thou shall not kill” is a moral rule. “The biological mother should carry and raise the child, anything else is strange and wrong” is tradition. “Banning marriage between consenting adults of the same-sex is unethical because it infringes upon the life, liberty, and happiness of those individuals based on sexual preference” is ethics. See that “because?” Only in ethics do you have a logical reason following the normative claim. Morality and tradition rely upon the authority of some figure (imagined or not) or history (accurate or not).

In each case, the actual right to your body is deferred to some third party, either the paternalists, the hypothetical children, or unreasoned authority. Transhumanists and like-minded bioethicists recognize that somatic rights are individual rights. That means that, unless they harm someone else directly, you should be able to do as you please. I find it amazing that for all of our amendments protecting freedom of religion, and assembly, and the press, we lack an amendment protecting freedom of bodily self-determination.

A rough and ready version of what freedom of bodily self-determination might look like has three key principles:

1. “My body, my choice” means that if what you do only affects your body, you should have the right to do it. Period, full stop.
   That includes allowing someone to do something to your body. So:
2. If you want to have something done to your body (e.g. surgery to modify your body or to allow a person to pay you to do something with your body), then you should have the right to do that.
3. If you don’t want something to happen to your body (e.g. for your body to become pregnant or for it to be kept working at all costs (both in terms of money and dignity)), then you should have that right as well.

Because you have the right to do something, you are also responsible for the results of that decision. For example, if you choose to do drugs, you are culpable for decisions you make while under the influence of those drugs. If you choose to modify your body and, later regret the decision, the fault is no one’s but your own. These simple concepts have a huge impact on not only current laws around issues like abortion, sex assignment surgery in infants, and assisted suicide, but possible future ones surrounding technologies like genetic enhancement, anti-aging medicine, cognitive enhancing drugs, designer babies, voluntary prosthetic augmentation, and cybernetics. As technology advances, we will have more and more ways to choose what to do with our bodies.

As the politics of the body continue to generate controversy, it is important those on the side of choice and freedom of bodily-determination recognize where their allies are. Transhumanists and liberal bioethicists, yes, but also feminists, marriage rights proponents, sex worker advocates, those who would end the drug war, libertarians, and the LGBT community. These groups are fast coming to the conclusion that it is important we cherish our basic biological freedoms and protect our somatic rights.

That means arguing for pro-choice body issues now, in the present. And for those out there who find themselves pro-choice on some issues (e.g. gay marriage and abortion) but anti-choice on others (assisted suicide and genetic engineering), you’d best reevaluate why you have conflicting stances. You shouldn’t. If you disagree with me, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image by ginger gal via buzzfeed.

Health care is broken. In the US quality of care is tanking. Even in countries with successful universal health care systems costs are rising too fast for the systems to cope. So what do we do?

Atul Gawande, who knows a thing or two about improving healthcare, argues in his commencement address to Harvard that doctors need pit crews:

We are at a cusp point in medical generations. The doctors of former generations lament what medicine has become. If they could start over, the surveys tell us, they wouldn’t choose the profession today. They recall a simpler past without insurance-company hassles, government regulations, malpractice litigation, not to mention nurses and doctors bearing tattoos and talking of wanting “balance” in their lives. These are not the cause of their unease, however. They are symptoms of a deeper condition—which is the reality that medicine’s complexity has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors.

Gawande has two main arguments. First, that when doctors use checklists they prevent errors and quality of care goes way up. Second, that doctors need to stop acting like autonomous problem solvers and see themselves as a member of a tight-knit team. Gawande is one of the few sane voices in the health care debate. However, later on in his speech, he says that the solution to the health care conundrum is not technology. To a large degree, I agree with him. But not completely. Tech still has a big role to play. If we take a closer look at Dune and Star Trek, we’ll see why Qualcomm and the X-Prize Foundation are ponying up 10 million bucks to fund a piece of medical technology that could help make Gawande’s dream of team-based medicine a bit closer to becoming reality.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Beverly Crusher is responsible for a starship with just over a thousand crew members of varying ages and species. Sickbay is, however, not manned by a huge number of staffers. Normally it’s just Dr. Crusher and an assistant or two. Furthermore, Crusher is no Gregory House MD. She lacks both his encyclopedic mind and his caustic personality. Yet Crusher is able to handle a hypothetical complexity that should blow to smithereens anything current doctors could possibly face. How?

The X-Prize Foundation has some ideas – Crusher has a few pieces of tech that let her treat the patient instead of requiring her to be an all-in-one interspecies diagnostician, surgeon, disease knowledge database, and bedside manner superstar. Two tools – the tricorder and the ship’s computer – enable her to access a huge amount of precise data and then compare every known condition or disease against that data to find relevant and probable causes. Qualcomm has teamed up with the X-Prize foundation to fund what they call the Tricorder X-Prize. I wrote about the prize when it was first in the works a while ago. At that time, the prize was called the A.I. physician X-Prize. A new press release renamed the prize and Gawande’s Harvard address has cast the competition ($10 million are at stake) in a new light.

The goal of the prize is for a team “to develop a mobile solution that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.” Thanks to cloud computing and ubiquitous internet access, pretty much any smartphone can access a server-based data-bank of medical diagnostic information. The trick is to make symptom and data input consistent and accurate, such that the information can be processed and compared against the database. On first glance, it seems the prize may be misnamed. The tricorder only collects data, it is Crusher and the computer that diagnose the disease.

Yet for the solution to be a success, the mobile solution has to be able to, in a sense, force the person utilizing it to become the tricorder. That’s where we come back to Gawande and his justified love affair with checklists. My suspicion is that the winning team will use a checklist based interface to ensure the human-based proxy-tricorder gets all the details and data necessary to ensure a proper diagnosis.

For the Dune fans out there, the Qualcomm X-Prize may sound neither like an A.I. nor a Tricorder, but a digital mentat. Sentient or “thinking machines” are anathema to the inhabitants of the Dune Universe. As a result some human individuals undergo intense conditioning to train their brains in processing data and finding the most logical solution supported by the data provided. These individuals are called mentats. Give enough good data to a mentat and the mentat will provide the right answer. Mentats are used by everyone, particularly governments, to calculate outcomes of complex political decisions. Digital mentat may sound oxymoronic, but recall that a mentat is merely a person trained to achieve the skills of a computer without the risk of sentience. Data processing is the simplest of mentat tasks, but requires a level of mental acumen that is probably impossible in current real humans.

But consider who would be most qualified for this data collection and entry: nurses and physicians. Instead of burdening themselves with a crushing cognitive load of patient history, symptoms, measurements, test-results, and nuances of reporting, the doctor could focus on beside manner, coaching the patient’s treatment and seeking the most accurate and complete information possible. The digital mentat, given sufficient data, could do the diagnosis on its own, just as the ship’s computer does for Beverly Crusher.

Whether it comes in the form of a mobile solution, or even a piece of software connected to a secure database that coordinates symptom and data input, doctors are going to need a medical data processor on their pit crew. The Qualcomm X-Prize “mobile solution” will be a kind of medical mentat, able to deduce the diagnosis from the data provided. To get that data, the doctor and the rest of the medical team will have to become the Tricorder. Whether or not Qualcomm’s Tricorder X-Prize will make that happen, I just don’t know.But the $10 million Ansari X-Prize was enough to jump start a second space race. Maybe a combo of tech and teamwork will be enough to turn health care around.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image via the X-Prize Foundation Qualcomm X-Prize press release page. Also strikingly familiar to the image I whipped up for my first article on the Tricorder X-Prize.

I am a scientist and academic by day, but by night I’m increasingly called upon to talk about transhumanism and the Singularity. Last year, I was science advisor to Caprica, a show that explored relationships between uploaded digital selves and real selves. Some months ago I participated in a public panel on “Mutants, Androids, and Cyborgs: The science of pop culture films” for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, WBEZ.  This week brings a panel at the Director’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, entitled “The Science of Cyborgs” on interfacing machines to living nervous systems.

The latest panel to be added to my list is a discussion about the first transhumanist opera, Tod Machover’s “Death and the Powers.” The opera is about an inventor and businessman, Simon Powers, who is approaching the end of his life. He decides to create a device (called The System) that he can upload himself into (hmm I wonder who this might be based on?). After Act 2, the entire set, including a host of OperaBots and a musical chandelier (created at the MIT Media Lab), become the physical manifestation of the now incorporeal Simon Powers, who’s singing we still hear but who has disappeared from the stage. Much of the opera is exploring how his relationships with his daughter and mother change post-uploading. His daughter and wife ask whether The System is really him. They wonder if they should follow his pleas to join him, and whether life will still be meaningful without death. The libretto, by the renown Robert Pinsky, renders these questions in beautiful poetry. It will open in Chicago in April.

These experiences have been fascinating. But I can’t help wondering, what’s with all the sudden interest in transhumanism and the singularity?

The media is so saturated with the claim that the Singularity will arrive by 2045 that skeptics are by default on the defensive. Worth noticing amidst the rancor is a recent result by friend and colleague Konrad Kording, who just showed that the number of neurons that we can simultaneously record from is following Moore’s Law. Not long ago, we were limited to recording the activity of a single brain cell at a time; more recently, we can record from several hundred at once. When you examine the trend over 56 different studies, Kording and his student showed that the number is doubling every seven years. Although this is a longer interval than Moore’s Law (two year doublings), what’s really important is that the growth is exponential. Exponential growth lies at the heart of the arguments for the nearness of the Singularity. Given Kording’s result, however, how long do you think it will be before we can record from every neuron in the brain at once? You might be surprised: even with this incredible exponential growth, it will take 220 years. If we suppose that uploading our consciousness will at a minimum entail recording the pattern of activity of the entire brain (why not–it’s no less plausible than every other argument out there), then we can’t even get cracking until 2231.

Of course, the time of the Singularity is not the time when we can upload consciousness, but rather when we create super-intelligent machines (which, according to some, will then devote themselves to figuring out how to beat aging and upload our consciousness, rather than chasing us to the ends of the galaxy). Whether 2045 is reasonable is hotly debated. I expect it’s on the short side by a century or so–but as someone who often thinks in evolutionary time scales, I still view this as an inconsequential amount of time.

But if we weigh the evidence for when the Singularity will occur versus the evidence for world-wide environmental destruction (such as that we’re now exceeding three of ten “planetary boundaries” for sustainable human existence), it’s pretty clear that these threats to our continued existence as a species are looming far faster on the horizon than either the Singularity or uploaded immortality.

So what’s going on? Is environmentalism “tired” and transhumanism “wired”? Is transhumanism just a fleeting new fascination like colonizing space was not long ago, and this soon will also pass? Or is there something more primal going on?

As I pondered these questions recently, it occurred to me that perhaps the transhumanism trend has something to do with secular people–as scientists, engineers, and sci-fi fans tend to be–having an outlet for talking about things that people with religion have more established frameworks for expressing.

Consider this: Scott Atran, among others, has argued that the urge for religion has an evolutionary basis, rooted in our fears of death and predators. Since Darwin, if not before, it’s become increasingly difficult, though, for scientifically-minded people to put stock in religion. Added to this, it’s difficult to have conversations in public about religion, not least because we live in a multi-denominational society where the public expression of creed can be viewed as exclusionary. It’s simply not politically correct in many instances. What if the reason for the rapid spread of Singularity and transhumanism talk is that it’s giving people a secular outlet for thinking through their fears of death and dreams of immortality?

A great deal has been written about relationships between religion and transhumanism. Much of it has drawn parallels between transhumanism and religion. But I don’t think that transhumanism is trying to be a religion: I think that it’s giving secularists (like me) an opportunity to talk publicly about death, the afterlife, and the strange puzzles of personal identity that will someday arise in transforming ourselves into cyborgs, copies of our original selves, or fully digital beings (which I’ve explored here, here, and here). It is letting us safely explore these ideas in a less morose way than the typical meat-to-worms narrative to which secularists are usually limited. In doing so, perhaps it is filling a void that religion used to fill but no longer can for many of us.

Image of cylon by Shawn Sharp, from DVICE’s steampunk cylon contest, via GIZMODO.

Plot from “How advances in neural recording affect data analysis,” by Ian H. Stevenson and Konrad P. Kording, in Nature Neuroscience. Published online 26 January 2011; doi:10.1038/nn.2731.

People who work in robotics prefer not to highlight a reality of our work: robots are not very reliable. They break, all the time. This applies to all research robots, which typically flake out just as you’re giving an important demo to a funding agency or someone you’re trying to impress. My fish robot is back in the shop, again, after a few of its very rigid and very thin fin rays broke. Industrial robots, such as those you see on car assembly lines, can only do better by operating in extremely predictable, structured environments, doing the same thing over and over again. Home robots? If you buy a Roomba, be prepared to adjust your floor plan so that it doesn’t get stuck.

What’s going on? The world is constantly throwing curveballs at robots that weren’t anticipated by the designers. In a novel approach to this problem, Josh Bongard has recently shown how we can use the principles of evolution to make a robot’s “nervous system”—I’ll call it the robot’s controller—robust against many kinds of change. This study was done using large amounts of computer simulation time (it would have taken 50–100 years on a single computer), running a program that can simulate the effects of real-world physics on robots.

What he showed is that if we force a robot’s controller to work across widely varying robot body shapes, the robot can learn faster, and be more resistant to knocks that might leave your home robot a smoking pile of motors and silicon. It’s a remarkable result, one that offers a compelling illustration of why intelligence, in the broad sense of adaptively coping with the world, is about more than just what’s above your shoulders. How did the study show it?

Each (simulated) robot starts with a very basic body plan (like a snake), a controller (consisting of a neural network that is randomly connected with random strengths), and a sensor for light. Additional sensors report the position of body segments, the orientation of the body, and ground contact sensors for limbs, if the body plan has them. The task is to bring the body over to the light source, 20 meters away.

A bunch of these robots are simulated, and those that do poorly are eliminated, a kind of in-computo natural selection. The eliminated robots are replaced with versions of the ones that succeeded, after random tweaks (“mutations”) to these better controllers have been made. The process repeats until a robot that can get to the light is found. So far, there’s been no change in the shape of the body.

With the first successful robot-controller combination found (one that gets to the light), the body form changes from snake-like to something like a salamander, with short legs sticking out of the body. (All body shape changes are pre-programmed, rather than evolved.) The evolutionary process to find a successful controller-bot combination repeats, with random changes to the better controllers until, once again, a controller-bot combination is found that is able to claw its way to the light.

Then the short legs sticking out to the side slowly get longer, and rather than sticking out to the side, they progressively become more vertical. With each change in body shape, the evolutionary process to find a controller repeats. Eventually, the sim-bot evolves to something that looks like any four-legged animal.

That was all for round one of evolution. For round two, the best controller from round one was copied into the same starting snake-like body type that round one began with. But now, the change in body forms occurs more rapidly, so that by the time 2/3 of the “lifetime” of the robot is completed, it has reached its final dog-like form. For round three, this all happens within 1/3 of the robot’s lifetime. For round four, the body form starts off as dog-like and stays there.

So there are changes occurring at two different time scales: changes over the “lifetime” of the robot, similar to our own shape changes from fetus to adulthood; and changes that occur over generations, through which development during a lifetime occurs more rapidly. The short time scale is called “ontogenetic” and the long scale (between the different rounds) is “phylogenetic.”

The breakthrough of the work is that it found that having these variations in body shape occur over ontogenetic and phylogenetic time scales resulted in finding a controller that got the body over to the light much faster than if no such changes in body shape occurred. For example, when the system began with the final body type, the dog-like shape, it took much longer to evolve a solution than when the body shapes progressed from snake-like to salamander to dog-like. Not only was a controller evolved more rapidly, but the final solution was much more robust to being pushed and nudged.

The complexity of the interactions over 100 CPU years of simulated evolution makes the final evolved result difficult to untangle. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that the cause of accelerated learning in the shape-changing robots is that the controllers developed through changing bodies have gone through a set of “training-wheel” body shapes: a robot starting with a four-legged body plan and a simple controller quickly fails—it can’t control the legs well and simply tips over. Starting with something on the ground that slithers, as was the case in these simulations, is less prone to such failures. So not any old sequence of shape changes works: mimicking the sequence seen in evolution garners some of the advantages that presumably made this sequence actually happen in nature, such as higher mechanical stability of more ancient forms.

Less clear is the source of increased robustness—the ability to recover from being nudged and pushed in random ways. Bongard suggests that the increased robustness of controllers that have evolved with changing body shapes is due to those controllers having had to work under a wider range of sensor-motor relationships than the ones that evolved with no change in body shape. For example, any controller that’s particularly sensitive to a certain relationship between, say, a sensor that reports foot position, and one that reports spine position would fail (and thus be eliminated) as those relationships are systematically changed in shifting from salamander-like to dog-like body form and movement. So that means that if I suddenly pushed down the back of a four-legged dog-like robot, so that its legs would splay out and it would be forced to move more like a salamander, the winners of the evolutionary competition would still be able to work because the controllers had worked in salamander-like bodies as well as in dog-like bodies.

In support of this idea, the early controllers, that were purely based on moving the body axis (“spine”), appear to be still embedded in the more advanced controllers; so if something happens to the body (say, one leg gets knocked), the robot can revert to more basic spine-based motion patterns that don’t require precise limb control. Bongard observed that the controllers evolved through changing body shape exhibited more dependence on spinal movement, using the legs more for balance, than those evolved without changing body shape. (It would be interesting to try his approach with simulated aquatic robots, which can be neutrally buoyant like many aquatic animals are, and thus don’t have the “tipping over” problem that Bongard’s simulated terrestrial robots had).

To be fair to existing robots, even with a controller that worked under every conceivable body shape and environmental condition, they would still break all the time. This is because the materials we make them out of are not self-healing, in contrast to the biomaterials of animals. Animals are also constantly breaking (at least on a micro level), and the body constantly repairs this. Bones subjected to higher loads, like the racket arm of a tennis player, get measurably thicker. Not only is the body self-repairing, recent innovative computer simulations of real neurons that generate basic rhythms like walking and chewing have shown that the neurons keep generating the rhythm despite big variations in the functioning and connections of these neurons. These functions are so important to continued existence—the body’s version of too big to fail—that embedded within them are solutions to just about everything the world can throw at them.

This new work provides the fascinating and useful result that fashioning controllers that work through a sequence of body shapes mimicking those seen in evolution accelerates the learning of new movement tasks and increases robustness to all the hard knocks that life inevitably delivers. It suggests that without the sequence of body shapes that evolution and development bring about, we might have nervous systems that are much too finely tuned to our adult upright bipedal form. Instead of crawling to help after we twist our ankle in the woods, we’d be left with nothing but howling for help.

Can you have an emotional connection with a robot? Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, believes you certainly could. Whether or not you should is the question. People, especially children, project personalities and emotions on to rudimentary robots. As the Chronicle of Higher Education article on her shows, the result of believing a robot can feel is not always happy:

One day during Turkle’s study at MIT, Kismet malfunctioned. A 12-year-old subject named Estelle became convinced that the robot had clammed up because it didn’t like her, and she became sullen and withdrew to load up on snacks provided by the researchers. The research team held an emergency meeting to discuss “the ethics of exposing a child to a sociable robot whose technical limitations make it seem uninterested in the child,” as Turkle describes in [her new book] Alone Together.

We want to believe our robots love us. Movies like Wall-E, The Iron Giant, Short Circuit and A.I. are all based on the simple idea that robots can develop deep emotional connections with humans. For fans of the Half-Life video game series, Dog, a large scrapheap monstrosity with a penchant for dismembering hostile aliens, is one of the most lovable and loyal characters in the game. Science fiction is packed with robots that endear themselves to us, such as Data from Star Trek, the replicants in Blade Runner, and Legion from Mass Effect. Heck, even R2-D2 and C-3PO seem endeared to one another. And Futurama has a warning for all of us.

Yet these lovable mechanoids are not what Turkle is critiquing. Turkle is no Luddite, and does not strike me as a speciesist. What Turkle is critiquing is contentless performed emotion. Robots like Kisemet and Cog are representative of a group of robots where the brains are second to bonding. Humans have evolved to react to subtle emotional cues that allow us to recognize other minds, other persons. Kisemet and Cog have rather rudimentary A.I., but very advanced mimicking and response abilities. The result is they seem to understand us. Part of what makes HAL-9000 terrifying is that we cannot see it emote. HAL simply processes and acts.

On the one hand, we have empty emotional aping; on the other, faceless super-computers. What are we to do? Are we trapped between the options of the mindless bot with the simulated smile or the sterile super-mind calculating the cost of lives?Turkle’s primary concern, and I believe it is a legitimate one, is communication and technology’s influence upon it. Return to one of my favorite pieces of technology, the smartphone (or app phone, as David Pogue describes it). How often have you found yourself uncontrollably pulling the damn thing out of your pocket to check it, regardless of the situation. I have been at parties with friends, at intimate dinners, at funerals, in meetings, and even presenting for class and had to fight the urge to see which piece of junk email set off vibrations in my pocket. Every spare moment it seems like I’m checking Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or email to see what decontextualized scrap of communication I can consume to slake my thirst for that simple thing communication is supposed to create – community.

And therein we find the crux of the matter. Our communication through a lot of technology is not communication at all. It’s one-way “shouting into the void.” Like the defecting Red October we send out one sonar ping, hoping for one ping, just one ping, in return. Kismet and Cog provide that ping, that perfect response, immediately and wordlessly. Every day it seems like there is an article on how to read body language, to understand the wordless communication that happens every day in every interaction. Turkle’s reaction to Kismet and Cog dovetails nicely with Haraway’s lovely line, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”

Kismet and Cog are designed to mimic genuine body language. As such, they represent a kind of complementary Turing test. The original test was to see if a human could distinguish between conversation with a human and an A.I. by chatting over a computer terminal. The Turkle test, as we might call it, would be the ability to form a genuine relationship with a human – to show concern, to mirror emotion, to recognize the other self. The Turing test tells us if an A.I. can think like a human, the Turkle test tells us if an A.I. can communicate like a human.

The first group of robots to be subjected to the Turkle test may be just around the corner:

“There are advantages to it not being a person—robots can be seen as not judgmental; people are not at risk of losing face to a robot,” [leader of Kismet project, Cynthia] Breazeal says. “People may be more honest and willing to disclose information to a robot that they might not want to tell their doctor for fear of sounding like a ‘bad’ patient. So robots working with other people can help the patient and the care staff.”

During her research, Turkle visited several nursing homes where resi dents had been given robot dolls, including Paro, a seal-shaped stuffed animal programmed to purr and move when it is held or talked to. In many cases, the seniors bonded with the dolls and privately shared their life stories with them.

“There are at least two ways of reading these case studies,” she writes. “You can see seniors chatting with robots, telling their stories, and feel positive. Or you can see people speaking to chimeras, showering affection into thin air, and feel that something is amiss.”

Some robotics enthusiasts argue that these sociable machines will soon mature, and that new models may one day be judged as better than humans for many tasks. After all, robots don’t suffer emotional breakdowns, oversleep, or commit crimes.

Hospice and end-of-life care requires a daily heroic effort. Though I do not deny there are some fantastic and wonderful caretakers, but it would require superhuman abilities to provide a listening, understanding ear to each and every person one is helping live day-to-day. Hospice and elderly care robots designed to pass the Turkle test might provide a solution. Yes, these robots would not really be listening or understanding in the same way a real human hospice worker would. Further, we would need to make sure we avoided the confusion of the little girl from the beginning, ensuring an understanding that yes, this was a robot and, yes, it might break down. But, if we did that, couldn’t hospice bots provide a huge service? Nursing home animals don’t understand a thing either, yet they provide a measurable medical benefit to patients, as well as a general improvement in mood and quality of life. Why shouldn’t we make robots that do that as well?

I end with a story. My grandfather talks to his cat, Mickey, constantly. Mickey is not the brightest of cats and has pretty much one emotion, which is a mix of hunger and disdain. My grandfather is quite aware that Mickey is neither aware of nor concerned with the fact that there is no more beer in the fridge or that the internet is infuriating. But my grandfather loves telling these thoughts to his cantankerous feline companion. He simply likes to express his thoughts vocally; Mickey is his living breathing diary – no response is expected, no worry needed for Mickey’s opinion or mounting frustration with the tedium of petty complaints and pedantic observations.

My family and I visit my grandfather and grandmother regularly. We love chatting it up, contributing our opinions, arguing, and generally communicating with one another in vigorous discussion. My grandfather always seems to get the first and last word, as is his wont. He is not lacking for human companionship by any stretch of the imagination.

But, Mickey is different. Mickey makes my grandfather happy because he listens. He is an un-judging ear and a comically loyal companion. Mickey would pass the Turkle test. Were I to pick the cat up, pop the hatch on his side, and reveal that Mickey is, in fact, a robo-cat, I don’t think my grandfather would give a damn. And that says something vital.

I have a confession. I used to be all about the Singularity. I thought it was inevitable. I thought for certain that some sort of Terminator/HAL9000 scenario would happen when ECHELON achieved sentience. I was sure The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix was a fairly accurate depiction of how things would go down. We’d make smart robots, we’d treat them poorly, they’d rebel and slaughter humanity. Now I’m not so sure. I have big, gloomy doubts about the Singularity.

Michael Anissimov tries to restock the flames of fear over at Accelerating Future with his post “Yes, The Singularity is the Single Biggest Threat to Humanity.”

Combine the non-obvious complexity of common sense morality with great power and you have an immense problem. Advanced AIs will be able to copy themselves onto any available computers, stay awake 24/7, improve their own designs, develop automated and parallelized experimental cycles that far exceed the capabilities of human scientists, and develop self-replicating technologies such as artificially photosynthetic flowers, molecular nanotechnology, modular robotics, machines that draw carbon from the air to build carbon robots, and the like. It’s hard to imagine what an advanced AGI would think of, because the first really advanced AGI will be superintelligent, and be able to imagine things that we can’t. It seems so hard for humans to accept that we may not be the theoretically most intelligent beings in the multiverse, but yes, there’s a lot of evidence that we aren’t.

….

Humans overestimate our robustness. Conditions have to be just right for us to keep living. If AGIs decided to remove the atmosphere or otherwise alter it to pursue their goals, we would be toast. If temperatures on the surface changed by more than a few dozen degrees up or down, we would be toast. If natural life had to compete with AI-crafted cybernetic organisms, it could destroy the biosphere on which we depend. There are millions of ways in which powerful AGIs with superior technology could accidentally make our lives miserable, simply by not taking our preferences into account. Our preferences are not a magical mist that can persuade any type of mind to give us basic respect. They are just our preferences, and we happen to be programmed to take each other’s preferences deeply into account, in ways we are just beginning to understand. If we assume that AGI will inherently contain all this moral complexity without anyone doing the hard work of programming it in, we will be unpleasantly surprised when these AGIs become more intelligent and powerful than ourselves.

Oh my stars, that does sound threatening. But again, that weird, nagging doubt lingers in the back of my mind. For a while, I couldn’t place my finger on the problem, until I re-read Anissimov’s post and realized that my disbelief flared up every time I read something about AGI doing something. AGI will remove the atmosphere. Really? How? The article, in fact, all arguments about the danger of the Singularity necessarily presume one single fact: That AGI will be able to interact with the world beyond computers. I submit that, in practical terms, they will not.

Consider the example of Skynet. Two very irrational decisions had to be made to allow Skynet to initiate Judgment Day. First, the A.I. that runs Skynet was debuted on the military network. In the mythos of the film, Skynet does not graduate from orchestrating minor battle plans or strategizing invasions in the abstract, but goes straight from the coder’s hands to getting access to the nuclear birds. Second, in the same moment, the military rolls out a fleet of robot warriors that are linked to Skynet, effectively giving the A.I. hands and then putting guns in those hands.

My point is this: if Skynet had been debuted on a closed computer network, it would have been trapped within that network. Even if it escaped and “infected” every other system (which is dubious, for reasons of necessary computing power on a first iteration super AGI), the A.I. would still not have any access to physical reality. Singularity arguments rely upon the presumption that technology can work without humans. It can’t. If A.I. decided to obliterate humanity by launching all the nukes, it’d also annihilate the infrastructure that powers it. Me thinks self-preservation should be a basic feature of any real AGI.

In short: any super AGI that comes along is going to need some helping hands out in the world to do its dirty work.

B-b-but, the Singulitarians argue, “an AI could fool a person into releasing it because the AI is very smart and therefore tricksy.” This argument is preposterous. Philosophers constantly argue as if every hypothetical person is either a dullard or a hyper-self-aware. The argument that AI will trick people is an example of the former. Seriously, the argument is that  very smart scientists will be conned by an AGI they helped to program. And so what if they do? Is the argument that a few people are going to be hypnotized into opening up a giant factory run only by the A.I., where every process in the vertical and the horizontal (as in economic infrastructure, not The Outer Limits) can be run without human assistance? Is that how this is going to work? I highly doubt it. Even the most brilliant AGI is not going to be able to restructure our economy overnight.

So keep your hats on folks, don’t start fretting about evil AGI until we live in an economy that is solely robot labor. Until then, I just can’t see it. I can’t see how AGI gets hands. Maybe that’s a limit on my vision. But if the nightmare scenario of AGI going sentient and rogue over night comes true, then I think we’re all in good shape. Sure, it might screw up our communications networks, but it’s not going to be able to do much of anything outside a computer. Anytime you start getting nervous, remember all the things we still need people to do, and how much occurs beyond the realm of the computer. In that light, the Singularity is just a digital tempest in a teacup.

Image of a very scary computer bank by k0a1a.net’s photostream via Flickr Creative Commons

Follow Kyle Munkittrick on Twitter @PopBioethics

But then, there it was: A Robot Christmas. Two weeks ago, the team at Robots Podcast put out a call for robotics labs to make holiday videos, and so far six different robotics labs have responded with videos of their machines singing or playing Christmas carols, decorating, and otherwise wishing us seasons greetings.  Since I can’t be the only who wanted to know how our future overlords celebrate the holiday, I thought I’d share. Happy New Year everyone!

A Robotic Christmas,  Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Flying Robot Plays Jingle Bells, Flying Machine Arena, IDSC, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Christmas Commercial Shoot, starring NAO,  Aldebaran Robotics, Paris.

Well, they used to not have those traits.

Earlier this week, the Japanese Agriculture and Food Research Organization presented its strawberry picking robot: A droid that rolls along a track through fields of strawberries, scan the strawberries through stereoscopic cameras and check their color, then pick them if their ripe. In this way it can whip through 247 acres in 300 hours, far faster than the typical rate of 247 acres in 500 hours using human pickers.

Naturally it’s not ready for the market, but it’s also not the only such project out there. The Japanese have direct competition from a pair of private companies, Agrobot and Robotic Harvesting LLC, both of which keep tighter wraps on their devices, but are laboring to get them ready for commercial production.

And then there’s the brainiacs at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who are using swarm robotics and a complicated array of sensors to raise tomatoes from seedlings and then harvest them. The precision agriculture lab features four clay pots sunk into the floor and surrounded by artificial turf. Each pot is filled with soil and a tomato seedling, and equipped with sensors to measure soil nutrients and moisture. Then the sensors engage in constant communication with caretaker robots that can add water or fertilizer as needed. The swarming software allows the robots to deploy efficiently.

As the tomatoes ripened, the robots check them for size and color, and when ripe, the robots pluck them off the vine. Like the Japanese robot, the system was designed for a controlled lab environment and not the woolly world of an actual farm. But the program’s goal is to create an entire greenhouse in which the plants are raised and harvested by robots.

All of which support any number of science fiction futures, especially ones in which most of the back breaking labor once performed by people is now performed by automatons. But I’m not entirely convinced this would be a good thing. Is a highly automated future a recipe for paradise on earth, or a Time Machine-like world in which the highly skilled have evolved separately from those with less education or abilities?

Here’s the scoop on DARPA’s flying car from CMU:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a 17-month, $988,000 contract to Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute to develop an autonomous flight system for the Transformer (TX) Program, which is exploring the feasibility of a military ground vehicle that could transform into a vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) air vehicle.

The TX vehicle envisioned by DARPA would be capable of transporting four people and 1,000 pounds of payload up to 250 nautical miles, either by land or by air. Its enhanced mobility would increase survivability by making movements less predictable and would make the vehicle suitable for a wide variety of missions, such as scouting, resupply and medical evacuation.

“The TX is all about flexibility of movement and key to that concept is the idea that the vehicle could be operated by a soldier without pilot training,” said Sanjiv Singh, CMU research professor of robotics. “In practical terms, that means the vehicle will need to be able to fly itself, or to fly with only minimal input from the operator. And this means that the vehicle has to be continuously aware of its environment and be able to automatically react in response to what it perceives.”

It’s official, folks. Between all the secret wars and reptilian invaders, we are now living in a Nick Fury comic. The flying robot car is just the nail in the coffin.

This post originally appeared on io9.

io9. Escape to the world of tomorrow.

The full audio of the event can be streamed or downloaded from here.

We all pitched in to comment on the clip featuring Keanu Reeves learning kung fu through an apparently painful download in The Matrix. The panel consensus: if something like a neuroprosthetic arm for everyone is in the near future, downloading skills a la The Matrix is at the far end of the far future. Reasoning: there are hundreds of thousands of sensory and movement neural channels being activated while learning of kung fu (not even counting vision, which has a million channels per eye). To train the brain via download, we’d either need to excite those channels in just the same way artificially — at roughly normal speed — or figure out how to directly modify the many millions to billions of neurons in the brain that are changed while learning kung fu. Either option presents technical challenges we are far from overcoming.

I picked the Minority Report clip, which featured robotic spiders artfully killing any last doubts you might have had of having privacy in the future. In this clip, some police come to an apartment complex that they are searching for a person in, and release a platoon of nimble robot spiders. These spiders spread out and crawl up people to scan their retinas to identify each person in the building. They sense in the infrared (which is why Tom Cruise hides in a tub of cold water) to detect the warmth of live bodies to be scanned. One of the brilliant aspects of the way it’s shot, as a pan over top the exposed rooms of a floor of the building, is how it shows just how “normalized” the loss of privacy has become in the future, with one couple in the midst of a fight hardly pausing their exchange of blows to let the scan happen before starting to whale at each other again. It’s as natural as selling a row of pumpkins on FarmVille and losing your privacy through Facebook application data misuse.

There’s a few things I love about this segment of the film. The first is that, like most good sci-fi, it simultaneously makes you say “oh wow that’s cool,” while terrifying the crap out of you that this may be the endpoint of all the privacy failures we are being subjected to. Sci-fi as incubator of dreams and place to work out our anxieties about technology.  On a professional level, I also liked how center stage was not a humanoid robot for once, but rather a non-human biologically-inspired robot. I appreciate that story-tellers need robots that people can relate to, but the disconnect between what actually goes on in robotics (where humanoid robotics is a tiny fraction of research effort) and what’s always in the movies is sometimes jarring. Not only did Minority Report show a biologically-inspired robot, it showed them in exactly the context in which they make a lot of sense: solving problems that conventional machines and robots don’t do well, such as high agility motion that needs large amounts of sensory intelligence. Animals are fantastically agile. But agility requires a lot of flexibility in the way a body can move, and with that flexibility comes the great challenge of how to control all that movement for stable motion, and how to acquire enough sensory information to guide the body in a highly nimble way. It’s a fantastically complicated problem, and understanding how it works is precisely what motivates some of us who do research in this area.

I also liked how the makers of the movie went to the trouble to seek out a colleague who studies jumping spiders, Damian Elias at UC Berkeley, to get good sound of the spiders scampering around.

It’s interesting, as Sean Carroll noted for a similar panel he was part of  at Comic Con, how much demand there is for this kind of discussion. With the blogosphere and traditional media saturation of science and tech news, maybe this all portends the dawning of a new age of sci-fi for viewers who will be a lot more sophisticated in the kinds of stories that will get them intrigued.

Modular robotics is inspired by biology on two different levels:

1) The understanding that the secret of the dizzying diversity of life is modularity: having basic building blocks of the body that lead to mutations in which whole functional modules are duplicated or removed.

For example, it turns out that the antenna of insects arose through a duplication of a two-legged body segment. Initially, that segment was probably used to move, but because it’s so easy to have more legs, over many generations these extra legs slowly got pressed into serving other roles, such as serving as antennas. This modularity is enabled by the presence of Hox genes, master control genes that pattern the developing body. We share most of our Hox genes with all other forms of animal life, including insects, which diverged from us around 500 million years ago.

2) The cellular basis of life: although we have about 50 trillion cells in our body, we only have around 120 different cell types, most of which we share with other species. With the right general purpose modules, then, we can flexibly recombine them to make a huge number of different things.

Roombot furniture uses these two principles to adapt to the needs of the user in ways your regular sofa/bed/table sets cannot. Conventional furniture is expensive, large, and heavy. You pick pieces you think will serve your needs most of the time, and you make do when it doesn’t because it’s too costly to change (like having more people than usual come over to watch a movie on your TV). Because it is large and heavy, you pick a location for each piece and only rarely change it. What if furniture was more dynamic, so you could switch your furniture just like you can switch the playlist that is the music for the evening? This is the vision of Roombots. A coffee table turns into a stool. Several stools can collaborate to turn into a sofa. If you decide to set up shop in a different part of the house, like your front porch, the legs of your Roombotic furniture become more than metaphors, and become the means by which it walks over to where you need it, as seen in the video above.

Synthetic image of imagined Roombot table, and simulation of Roombot table walking, courtesy Auke Jan Ijspeert.

For further information: See A. Spröwitz, S. Pouya, S. Bonardi, J. van den Kieboom and R. Möckel et al. Roombots: Reconfigurable Robots for Adaptive Furniture (pdf), IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, special issue on “Evolutionary and developmental approaches to robotics”, vol. 5, num. 3, p. 20-32, 2010.

Take Titan, for example. Two weeks ago, I wrote that observations of Titan from Cassini have been interpreted by some as possible signs of life, in particular:

Now it turns out that computer simulations based upon Cassini observations, simulations which hint at depletions of various chemical species at Titan’s surface may again hint at the possibility of life on Titan. The results are very preliminary, but fascinating nevertheless.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever be able to make a positive determination if there’s life on Titan based upon Cassini data alone. Cassini is, after all, an orbiter, and its observations of Titan’s surface come from hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers away–limited to those that can be attained during flybys. To ascertain the presence of life, we’ll need what scientists in the field of remote sensing call “ground truth”–we’ll have to wait until we are able to send a followup probe to the surface of Titan. Perhaps we’ll send a probe to Titan similar to Tiny–the Titan rover who has guest-starred in episodes of this season’s Eureka.

Even then it could turn out that, unless NASA’s version of Tiny returns samples to Earth for human examination, the results could remain ambiguous and leave scientists scratching their heads. That is what’s happening with Mars.

Titan hides its secrets beneath a thick photochemical haze, but when it comes to planets that jealously guard their secrets, Mars is the champion. The Great Galactic Ghoul of Mars destroys our spacecraft. Mars throws us curve balls; Mars lies to us. Mars even laughs at the spacecraft it does allow to explore it.

When the twin Viking probes landed on Mars in 1976, each carried three experiments designed to detect microbes in the Martian regolith (though the term “soil” is often used, we can’t really call it soil until we verify the presence of organics). Two of three Viking experiments produced negative results. The Viking Labeled Release (or LR) Experiment was a different matter, and seemed to indicate that there was life in the Martian regolith. Some scientists maintain to this day that the Viking LR experiment yielded a definite “Yes!” on the question of “Does Mars support life?”

In 2004 the European Space Agency probe Mars Express detected the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane can be produced geologically (and Mars is not short on volcanoes), or biologically. (Though media reports of that observation got a bit out of hand.) Either way, this is an important observation and research on the source of this methane is still ongoing.

Recent Earth-based experiments and observations by the Mars Phoenix lander serve only to muddy the waters still further, and reveal how Martian soil could be teeming with life that went undetected by Viking (and, interestingly, in experiments subsequent to the Viking mission, some bacteria in Earth soil also went undetected by Viking).

Size comparison between NASA’s Curiosity Rover and one of the Mars Exploration Rovers.

In November 2011, NASA will launch the Mars Science Laboratory rover, known as Curiosity–its Martian version of Eureka’s Tiny (though not nearly as intimidating). By far the largest Mars rover to date, Curiosity is the size of a Cooper Mini.  After a nine-month cruise, it will arrive at the Red Planet in August 2012. Rest assured that Curiosity will answer many of our existing questions about previous science results, and the potential existence of life on Mars. Rest assured that it will raise more questions.  If Curiosity gets past the Ghoul, it’ll be interesting to see if previous signatures detected by our probes did prove to be life.  It’ll also be interesting to see what tricks Mars has up its sleeve this time.

Below are short excerpts of the guest scientists’ responses, with links to the full versions:

Ken Caldeira: “…If you could directly produce chemical fuel from sunlight and do it affordably, that could really be a game changer…”

Jack Horner: “…If we want to see an animal like a velociraptor, we will be able to create one by genetic engineering. It might even be possible to make something that looks like a T. rex…”

Oliver Sacks: “…We thought that every part of the brain was predetermined genetically, and that was that. Now we know that enormous changes of function are possible…”

Sylvia Earle: “…We’ve explored only about 5 percent of the ocean. For us to have better maps of the moon, Mars, and Jupiter than of our own ocean floor is baffling…”

Rodney Brooks: “…The arguments we have about drugs and sports are minuscule compared with what’s coming, such as ‘What is the definition of human?’ We have the Paralympics now, but we’ll have the Augmented Olympics in the future…”

Debra Fischer: “…Every year since 1995, we have discovered more extrasolar planets than the year before. A parallel thing could happen with extraterrestrial life: After we find one example, we’ll hone our strategies to be smarter and more efficient…”

Tachi Yamada: “…I don’t believe just because you’re poor, you shouldn’t have access to lifesaving technology…”

Neil Turok: “…The science has reached the point where questions that used to be just philosophy could be observationally testable in 10 or 20 years…”

Ian Wilmut: “…We should be able to control degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and heart disease…”

Sherry Turkle: “…Sometimes a citizenry should not ‘be good.’ You have to leave room for real dissent…”

Brian Greene: “…We may establish that there is not a unique universe—that ours is just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained…”

Anyway, Stanford offered a fine video of its invention:

Devised by a team lead by Zhenan Bao, puts highly specialized rubber between two electrodes. The rubber holds the electric charge until something alights on it (or has its dessicated corpse plunked on it). The rubber distorts, changing the amount of charge its holding, which is picked up by the electrodes and transmitted as a signal.

Javey‘s e-skin also measures extremely small changes in pressure: from 0 to 15 kilopascals (equivalent to 2.17 psi), about the level of force needed to type on a keyboard or hold an object.

Javey’s team impressed a “C” for Cal on their e-skin

Instead of specialized rubber, the e-skin uses a fine mesh of nanowires made from germanium and silicon, layered under special rubber. The nanowires hold the charge the rubber did in the Stanford experiment.

The skin holds potential (get it?)  for providing sensitivity for artificial limbs for people and robots alike.

I hate to use press release quotes  but  Javey explained it well: “Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it. If we ever wanted a robot that could unload the dishes, for instance, we’d want to make sure it doesn’t break the wine glasses in the process. But we’d also want the robot to be able to grip a stock pot without dropping it.”

Of course work on e-skin has been ongoing for decades:  a University of Tokyo team devised an electrically sensitive rubber that reacted to being stretched back in 2008, and the British firm Paratech released a skin-like material using carbon particles, called QTC, in 1996.

As for calling all this stuff e-skin, well, what are you going to do, that’s what the researchers chose. At least it’s not iskin.

(Video courtesy Standford University, photo courtesy U.C.- Berkeley)

These artificial intelligences, not likely to have had the “nostalgia module” installed, may quickly flee the home planet like a teenager trying to pretend it isn’t related to its parents. If nothing else, they will likely need to do this to find further resources such as materials and energy. Where would they want to go? Shostak speculates they may go to places where large amounts of energy can be obtained, such as near large stars or black holes.

Stephen Hawking imagines aliens covering stars with mirrors
to generate enough power for worm holes

Stephen Hawking has suggested one reason to go to high-energy regions would be to make worm holes through space-time to travel vast distances quickly. These areas are not hospitable to life as we know it, and so are not currently the target of SETI’s telescopes searching for signals of such life.

In the same article, Shostak also makes the argument that since biological intelligence is a short stepping stone to artificial intelligence, “the majority of the intelligence in the universe could well be artificial intelligence.” There’s clearly a missing premise here, which is that biological intelligence means an intelligence that invents radio or TV, or more broadly speaking, technology. But this is clearly false. From cuttlefish to corvids, the scientific evidence for high levels of intelligence in non-human animals is rapidly accumulating. At the moment, it’s not even clear that the invention of technology will be good for us as a species: an analysis of nine planetary boundaries within which human life can flourish shows that we are now transgressing three of these. Given that life has flourished for billions of years, for this to happen with just a few thousand years of agriculture and a few hundred years of industrialization shows that the step from advanced technology to artificially intelligent descendants roaming the galaxies is not one to be taken for granted.

In any event, given we can’t look everywhere, should thoughts about AI inform where we look? I don’t think so. First, based on our very limited experience, only Homo sapiens, just one of tens of millions of species of life on Earth, have developed technology. Were it not for our species, it’s unclear whether technology would ever have come about on Earth. Second, it’s far from obvious that our species will have the maturity to survive the power of our achievements for more than a blink of evolutionary time–the development of AI that leaves this planet, or at the very least serious efforts toward space colonies, is probably our best hope for long term survival–but we may not get there. Perhaps the situation is no different for other forms of life that have developed technology. They will have all emerged from a Darwinian primordial soup, a soup where certain vicious and short-sighted traits will have been essential to survival. Third, it would probably be both more successful and more scientifically useful to adjust our search strategy to improve the chances for finding extraterrestrial life, rather than intelligence.

My personal favorite for such a tweak to our search strategy is to look for places that have the hallmarks of increasing entropy. All forms of life take in energy that has some degree of entropy and re-emits it with increased entropy, such as heat. For our biosphere, we absorb sunlight and reflect heat, which appears as a “red edge” in the spectrum of reflected energy. The same, incidentally, seems likely to be true of artificial intelligence: it will require energy such as electric power, which will be radiated at higher entropy, such as the heat of integrated circuits. Sean Carroll has written an excellent explanation of the red edge in one of his postings over at Cosmic Variance. If we build better red edge detectors, we will both improve our chances of finding the much more common non-technologically savvy forms of life in the universe, and as an added side benefit, we might just detect the much rarer roaming AIs out there — although, as Hawking suggests, we may want to avoid hailing them down for coffee.

Image from Stephen Hawking’s Universe, “Fear the Aliens”

Having robots with minds implementing the scientific process rather than math problem solving is essentially what’s happening in a few corners of robotics, most recently with the Xpero project, an effort to develop an embodied cognitive system that learns about its world much like an infant would. It’s one of a host of robo-infants being worked on (here’s a nice overview graphic). This approach has led to some very impressive achievements including an “evil starfish” robot that can quickly learn how to control its body after several of its “limbs” have been chopped off.

Hod Lipson (left) and yours truly pulling legs off the evil starfish in 2006.

In 2006, Hod Lipson and co-workers published a short paper with the sexy title “Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling.” In it, he demonstrated how a small, starfish-like robot (aka, “the evil starfish”) could automatically learn its own body shape and movement capabilities. It did this through an automatic process of scientific inquiry. It worked something like this: first, make an arbitrary movement. What this means is that the robot sends out signals to its body, without knowing what those signals will do. While sending these movement signals out, the robot records sensory signals that tell it about what happened to the body due to that movement (scientific process analog: experiment). Second, generate a small number of models of the body that are compatible with movements resulting in the recorded sensory information (analog: hypothesis generation). Third, through some fast on-board simulation (aka, thinking), the robot figures out what movement(s) would give it the most information to distinguish between the different body models that are compatible with the information it has collected (analog: prioritizing hypotheses for testing). Fourth, the robot executes these movements, and uses the resulting sensory information for further refinement of its guess as to what its body is (analog: hypothesis testing and refinement).

What is great about this process, as I discovered when I visited Lipson’s lab some years ago to give a talk at Cornell, is that the robot has an amazing degree of robustness. The starfish robot shown in the photo has had one of its arms pulled off, and after a brief learning process, it figures out its new body shape and saunters off! It was slightly unnerving to witness this process. There is something about an animal recovering from damage that gives us a sense that it cares about its continued existence. In some sense, this is part of the essence of what it means to be a living organism: something that cares about its continued existence and acts so as to further that goal. When you see a machine act in this manner, it triggers certain associations that make it feel biological.

If indeed, as Alison Gopnik and others have argued, we all grow up absorbing all the important things we need to know through something like the scientific process, then the current work on making an algorithm that emulates the scientific process may be just the thing that AI needs for making breakthroughs on solving the problems we really want our robots to solve, such as making us a coconut mojito with just the right amount of muddled mint.

For more information on the European Xpero project, visit their website. A prior project, also EU-sponsored, was the iCub. A nice overview graphic of different robot infant approaches was in this July’s issue of IEEE Spectrum. Some interesting recent work on formalizing the discovery of regularities through experiments can be found in Hod Lipson’s “Selected Recent Publications.” Here is a thoughtful commentary on the starfish robot work by Chris Adami. Using data to automatically do science has also received attention in bioinformatics, most recently highlighted in articles about Sergey Brin’s datamining efforts to find a cure for Parkinson’s, in this podcast, and in academic circles here and here.

Image of robot in crib by Malcolm MacIver using free 3-D models on TurboSquid.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

ALIEN SCIENCE

What might aliens look like?  Where might we find them? Are alien life forms most likely to be (from our viewpoint) extremophiles?  While astronomers and planetary scientists often make the claim that “we study other worlds to learn more about Earth,” this section emphasizes the reverse:  What have we learned about our planet, its life, and the Solar System to further help us find life “out there.”  There are exhibits that describe potential abodes of life in the Solar System, extremophile life, even bizarre Earth creatures that simply look alien. Of the four sections, this is the least speculative, most grounded in science. Later one of the docents told me that, surprisingly, this section is overwhelmingly the most popular with kids.

ALIEN WORLDS

To me this section was, by far, the most interesting of the exhibit. This section details the hypothetical worlds Aurelia and Blue Moon: the worlds and their ecosystems.  Aurelia is a hypothetical planet that is tidally locked to a red dwarf; Blue Moon is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a jovian gas giant planet. These planets and their creatures were designed by scientists who study extremophile life forms, planetary scientists, and scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the creatures inhabiting both of these worlds are very reminiscent of those from Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition. It was also in this section that I was “adopted” by a very nice docent named Ann who personally showed me the aspects of various exhibits that she found most interesting.

Thor! Buddy! Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An Asgard walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

ALIEN COMMUNICATION

What is the like likelihood of there being other civilizations out there? If they are out there, how would we communicate? That’s the theme in the final section of the exhibit.

Hey I recognize that! The Drake Equation.

After examining all the bizarre earthly “alien” life forms in “ALIEN SCIENCE”, and after being transported to both Aurelia and Blue Moon in “ALIEN WORLDS,” I found this last section relatively anticlimatic, and probably the least interesting of the four sections. There was, however, a fun little alien gift shop immediately beyond. I like little shops.

Yes, I realize that I should have visited/posted before San Diego Comic-Con, when so many more people — the kind who are likely to enjoy this kind of thing — could have stopped in. Still, the San Diego Air and Space Museum will be hosting the Science of Aliens from now until the end of the year.

1) Rex

Rex Bionics has created what will be a commercially available set of robotic exoskeleton legs. The only currently existing set, custom built for Hayden Allen, allow him to walk up and down stairs and take awesome, super-mecha pictures like the one above. In an interview, he talks about basic quality of life issues (blood circulation, knowing when you have to go to the bathroom) that come from being ambulatory. Take that, paralysis!

2) Tooth Regeneration

Have you ever had a cavity? How would you like it if you could just undo the cavity instead of getting a filling? Instead of drilling and filling, a gel containing the peptide melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) could let teeth grow back from within! According to Discovery News “Previous experiments, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that MSH encourages bone regeneration.” What good news! Now where is my barrel of Mountain Dew?

3) Organs to Order

Right now two major universities, Wake Forest and Yale, are trying to grow organs in a lab to put in you. At Yale, Thomas Peterson’s team is trying to master regrowing rat lungs. At Wake Forest, Dr. Anthony Atala’s team is attempting to master growing, um, everything else. Peterson, and Atala, who has spoken at TED, are rightfully skeptical of speed but hopeful for the eventual success of their experiments. Before you take up smoking, Laura Niklason, the member of Peterson’s team who lead the rat lung study, has a sobering statistic:

“I think that 20 to 25 years is not a bad time frame,” says Niklason. “I previously developed an engineered artery that will be ready for patients next year. It was first published in 1999.  If an artery takes 12 years from first report to patients, then a lung will take 20-25.”

4) Mind-Controlled Prostheses:

Dean Kamen isn’t the only fella trying to replicate Luke Skywalker’s amazing prosthetic arm. The good folks at Johns Hopkins University, working with DARPA–military funder of all things futuristic–have just received over 30 million bucks to continue developing and testing their own robot arm. The creatively named Modular Prosthetic Limb has 22 points of actuation, weighs as much as a human arm, and is uses mind control.

For an idea of how mind-controlled prostheses work, check out the Dean Kamen DEKA “Luke” arm video and this surreal monkey robot-arm clip from the New York Times.

5) Osso/dermal Integrated Prostheses:

Oscar the cat had a run in with a combine harvester that lopped off his back two feet. A British veterinary surgeon, Noel Fitzpatrick, decided to get the little black cat back to being a quadruped, and, in doing so, revolutionized prosthetics. One of the holy grails of artificial limbs is osso and dermal integration: that is, fuzing metal and plastic to the bone and having the skin grow naturally over it. Just look at the joy on Fitzpatrick’s face when the bandages are removed from Oscar’s stumps and, then again, when the cat has to be reined in because he’s exploring a bit too heartily with his new kicks.

6) Replace Your Face:

Another unlucky Oscar, in this case a frightful shooting victim, has had the first full-face transplant. Muscle, bone, nerves, blood vessels–the whole kit-and-kaboodle–has been replaced. The overwhelming complexity of the operation is a testament to the progress medicine has made. Oscar, as it would happen, lives in the organ donation capital of the world: Spain. ¡Olé!

7) HULC and SARCOS

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are racing to complete the first untethered, full-body exoskeleton. Both are working on military applications, as well as competing to see who can have the goofiest nu-metal music accompanying their dry, engineer-narrated videos of their exoskeletons (Lockheed’s HULC and Raytheon’s SARCOS) doing things like helping a soldier carry a bomb and shadow box. While still very, very early in the development phases, it’s not hard to see where exoskeletons have a real potential to change the modern battlefield.

8.) All Together Now:

Every one of these innovations is worthy of our awe independently, but considered together we have a rough picture of where medical, biological, and robotic science are flowing together. Even non-human breakthroughs, like Oscar the cat, herald great things: Noel Fitzpatrick, Oscar’s surgeon, has a facility dedicated to animal prosthetics that is serving not only to help amputated animals but as a test bed for techniques which might one day be used to help people. Robotic exoskeletons like the REX, HULC, and XOS, combined with mind-synched technology, complex articulation, and osso-dermal integration pave the way for complete rehabilitation and mobility of those with traumatic amputating and paralyzing injuries and diseases. Coupled with lab-grown, transplantable organs and the necessary techniques to successfully complete even the most complex transplants, not to mention the ability to coax certain parts to heal themselves, and we have one amazing looking future.

No one technology or breakthrough is going to change how we heal ourselves, but every year cyborg science-fiction gets a bit closer to cyborg science fact.

Science fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these exoskeletons are a close mimic of our own but with much more power or size. In Avatar, we also witnessed people experience the novelty of inhabiting a three-meter-tall blue body with movable ears and a neural interface that conveniently doubles as a tail.

But why wait for the shapeshifting future? Corsets and girdles are the best known types of “foundation garments” or “shapewear,” but for me at least, they are more Jane Eyre than Madonna, despite the latter’s use of them in her performances over the past twenty years.

For those who actually use shapewear on a day-to-day basis, the most common types must be the padded bra and shoulder pads. But the past week highlighted two new ways of changing the shape of our body. The first was in a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Dodes on padded panties that promise to give Beyoncé-level gluteus maximi to the large behind-inclined; the second is from Sylvester Stallone’s comment that “action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.”

Three cheers to Stallone for bringing male shapewear to our attention. Besides those sometimes unsettling codpieces we see when we watch ballerinos perform the Nutcracker, it turns out that you can purchase just about as many kinds of shape enhancing undergarments for men–bottoms and tops–as for women. Unlike the “Booty Pops” talked about in the WSJ article, which are available at Walgreens and Bed Bath and Beyoncé Beyond, these are not quite as readily available, however (or so I’m told).

Changing our body and face shape is an old past time, of course but shapewear now seems an especially timely approach as a form of body shaping on the cheap, with no trainer or surgery required. In words that would make the hover-chaired human blimps of Wall-E eat another banana split, these two new types of shapewear have already been tied to freedom from the misery of physical movement. Stallone now realizes that he “didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years,” while Booty Pop’s website celebrates that “No expensive surgery or overpriced trainer required.” This is body-shaping custom-tailored for the calorically abundant and economically depressed times of Homo sedentarius.

The mass embrace of the Booty Pop, to choose my words carefully, hints at a new stance toward the human body as human scaffold. It’s a fitting preamble to the future envisaged by sci-fi, when robotic augmentation or more radical reshaping of our body shape through genetics may come to pass. My personal hope is that I’ll have a chance to be an octopus in some future life, so that I can answer emails with two tentacles while using others for stuffing my clam-hole with deep fried cheese, doing an experiment, and lifting barbells. Or maybe I’ll just get Octobooty Pop instead.

These are remarkable effects with many potential implications, and applications (next time you’re trying to sell something, make sure you’re seated in a hard chair, and your buyer is in soft chair, for example; and clothes designers have a whole new dimension to consider). What is their underlying basis? The researchers hypothesize that our experiences with touch early in our development provides a scaffold for the development of conceptual knowledge. In adult life, these same touch experiences activate the scaffold in the same way, and lead to unconscious influences on our attitudes and decision making. The experience of weight gets metaphorically associated with seriousness and importance. Idioms like “that’s heavy” reflect this association. Similarly, rough textures get associated with difficulty, and we say “having a rough day.”

This research is another example of how the way we think is all wrapped up in the way we body. The new results add to our growing understanding of the ways in which embodiment and thought are more intertwined than was previously believed. The ways in which cognition is embodied was also the topic of a recent volume in the Cambridge Handbook series, called “The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition”, which I had the pleasure of writing a chapter for.

Research into the ways in which cognition is intertwined with bodily experiences raise interesting issues regarding common science fiction fables and science fact predictions. Many of these hinge on being able to dispense with the body. The body, in this view, is just a convenient output device, easily replaced with another, or not replaced at all so as to be a disembodied intelligence like Hal of 2001. Our body is the computer, and who we are is the software, so if the hardware falls short we can just get new hardware. But what if who we are is this particular software running on this particular kind of hardware? The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are an interesting mix of these ideas. They never died: as soon as their current body was eliminated, their consciousness was uploaded to another body. But they were not into body swapping: you got uploaded to the same body model, or not at all (aka, death), potentially compatible with embodiment ideas.

St. John the Baptist wearing a hairshirt, by Jacopo del Sellaio, 1485.

Number Six of Battlestar Galactica, a Cylon.

Which is exactly what the students and scientists at the Institute for Dynamics and Systems Control in Switzerland pulled off at the end of the semester last year, when they created the Distributed Flight Array. The devices they engineered look like hexagons made of white plastic, each with a propeller in the center. Alone, each device is autonomous, but  pretty dumb, mostly just wandering around the floor and occasionally lifting into unstable flight. But as each device bumps into another, they dock. When they reach a critical number, the collective becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.

What’s clever here is not creating a flying device, but using multiple small intelligences to combine into one larger intelligence. From the DFA website:

Joined together, however, these relatively simple modules evolve into a sophisticated multi-propeller system capable of coordinated flight. The task of keeping the array in level flight is distributed across the network of vehicles. Vehicles exchange information and combine this information with their own sensor measurements to determine how much thrust is needed for the array to take-off and maintain level flight.

The devices have no immediate practical purpose. Raymong Oung, a staffer at the institute, said in the YouTube comments that the device is “a research and teaching tool for distributed estimation and control.” Still, it’s not hard to imagine finding practical uses for a device that can roam around an area gathering information, join together with similiar devices, and then fly off to somewhere else.

* By the way, Mattel just re-acquired the Voltron license, and there are new Voltron cartoons coming on Nickelodeon. Gen X, start your engines!

If we were ever to have a game of Survivor, the Trans-Galactic Edition, where all life forms across our local cluster of galaxies competed against each other to avoid getting voted “off the cluster,” there’d be a few attributes that might make us animals alliance-worthy. As we make worried glances toward the Stromulans from J5231, a plasma-cloud form of life with a level of consciousness far beyond our own (but alas, rather picky about what environments they will live in), we might trumpet our ability to form bodies of trillions of cells based on one single starting cell, our fantastic mobility, and the cultural productivity of our human species, which has led to amazing innovations like the George Foreman Grill.

But one of our greatest and most unsung advantages is our ability to efficiently convert the food we eat into all the energy we need to sustain our daily activities.  Take walking, for example: contemporary robots like Honda’s Asimo can use up to 30 times more energy than we do to walk. Given that in former times we spent much of our waking life walking around in search of food, we would have needed to find a whole lot more food to eat were it not for this efficiency. (Research on so-called passive walkers, which incorporates some of the energy saving tricks of human walking, has demonstrated in-the-lab efficiencies similar to humans, but are a ways off in terms of being commercialized. See link to “Cornell Ranger Robot” at the end of this post for more information).

As another example, the animal I do research on, an odd fish that hunts at night in the murky rivers of the Amazon, only needs about 4 milliwatts of power to run. That’s not a whole lot of juice–a thousand times less than an iPhone uses, and about ten thousand times less than the light you might have on if you’re reading this at night.  With that tiny bit of power it sustains not only its body and brain, but also its “electric headlamp,” an organ in its body that continually emits a weak electric field so it can sense things in the dark. We have started to unlock some of the clever tricks underlying this fish’s energy efficiency, essentially showing how it can trade off the energy it needs to move with the energy it needs to gather information.

The black ghost electric fish from the Amazon only uses 4 milliwatts of power.

Thanks to new animal-tracking techniques, we’ve recently learned about remarkable animal abilities to go long distances without so much as a nibble. As Carl Zimmer has described on sister blog The Loom, a bird called the Bar-tailed Godwit can fly 11,000 kilometers without stopping.  Eels swim from the coasts of Europe to the Sargasso sea, 6,000 kilometers away, without eating.  As for humans, not only is our walking efficient, but Daniel Leiberman has built up a strong case for the importance of exceptionally efficient long-distance running in our evolution.

Folks who build autonomous robots take note of the energy cleverness of animals, since one of the big challenges in our field is extending “autonomy time” – the time a robot can work without intervention – and currently this is constrained by its energy needs. (Robots working on The Spill are mostly powered through cables carrying electrical power from the surface and are therefore not autonomous.) My lab is working on a robotic implementation of an extremely energy-efficient fish (the Amazonian fish mentioned above). Other groups are working on robotic jellyfish, flies and bats. As efficient as these systems are becoming, they all have relatively short autonomy times because batteries need to be small or else too much energy is lost in doing the work to carry them. Instead of carrying the energy, what about eating it?

Roboticists have long dreamed of powering their devices by food to increase autonomy time. There has been some limited progress on that front. Back in 2000, Stuart Wilkinson developed “Chew Chew,” a three-meter-long train powered by sugar cubes. This was accomplished by a microbial fuel cell in which bacteria broke the food down and released electrons to charge a battery. More recent efforts include a robot out of the UK that eats flies for power–mind you it can only travel at 10 centimeters an hour, hardly fast enough to catch one.  In a different approach, water currents around underwater robots can be exploited to generate energy. Such “energy harvesting” approaches are being investigated to help power highly efficient robotic jellyfish, among other applications.

Work on microbial fuel cells has progressed slowly, however, and energy harvesting can only work in cases where there’s ambient and easily convertible energy at hand. Recent new developments on the food-to-power front may, as it were, re-energize the field. As 80beats reports, scientists have developed a transistor powered by ATP — the very fuel of your brain cells (all cells in fact). A different group has developed a fuel cell that converts glucose into electricity and implanted it in rats, generating 6.5 microwatts for sustained periods of time. While this seems an inconsequential amount of energy, pacemakers only use 10 microwatts, so such a system could have a large benefit to people who have pacemakers.

As every aspect of how we consume, produce, and–regrettably–spill energy commands our attention, our understanding of how animals convert food to fuel and the remarkable efficiency with which they use it could hardly have more relevance. While these breakthroughs can’t stanch a spill of millions of gallons of oil, they can inform new technologies that reduce our energy needs. To the consternation of dogs everywhere, we could even see a day when our robotic helpers power themselves with our leftovers.

Photograph of the black ghost knifefish Apteronotus albifrons courtesy of Per Erik Sviland

Via Hero Complex come these ingenious public service announcements and travel posters from a near future in which time travel is possible and robots are self-cleaning.  Designed by artist Amy Martin, the posters are $20 each and proceeds benefit 826LA, a non-profit writing center for kids 6 to 18.

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Moderator Faith Salie introduced the panelists: Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Michael Hogan, also known as Colonel Saul Tigh; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis group at Cornell University; Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin; and Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.

Salie asked each panelist to define what a cyborg is. Everyone had different answers: Warwick said it’s something that is part human, Lipson said it’s a moving target or a physical device that takes on biological life, and Bostrom said it’s the essence of human intelligence.

When asked about what research the stars had to do prior to playing their role, Hogan said researching how to be a robot for the part was more about understanding mental illness. “I had irritable shell shock, chronic pain, and was not well–off balance. Lots of people in the world are in chronic pain,” he said.

McDonnell weighed in after experiencing the world of cybernetics for herself through her role in the show: “If we can find a way to use parts of the brain that are dormant, more creative, and less fearful—I would like to be more efficient, more active..”

Warwick, whose research, as well as Lipson’s, served as inspiration for the show, explained how he was creating a biological brain in a petri dish. By applying an external voltage to the dish, he was able to create brain activity. Lipson had a different approach: He tried to breed the robots instead of designing them from scratch. When he showed a short video clip of it, Salie remarked, “It looks like a drunk starfish.”

Warwick said the robots developed in the military right now are designed to destroy humans. “We are now pushing things to act quite negatively towards humans,” he says.

The thought of upgrading our brain is appealing for a number of reasons—or, at least, Warwick thought so, since he had a chip surgically implanted in his brain to link him directly to the Internet. One thing he experienced was the touch of a robot picking up something. “It felt like a hand applying force,” he said. He even had a special necklace made for his wife that was hooked up to his brain, and it lit up to show his mood.

And Bostrom left us with something interesting to chew on: When robot AI reaches the complexity of the human brain, robots should be treated the same as humans, whether or they are based carbon or silicon atoms.

Image: Flickr /Courtesy of the World Science Festival

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

Our first expert-answered Codex question goes to J Storrs Hall, an independent scientist and author who’s also president of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech-oriented think tank. Thanks especially to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the director of SEEx, for connecting us with Hall. Without further ado, here’s the question of the day, asked by an (imagined) big-time Hollywood director/producer who thinks getting the science right might help nail down that elusive Oscar:

“How could nanotechnology transform the world? Most importantly, how could I stop a plague of nanorobots from eating my spaceship/research facility/planet?”

Nanotechnology is going to transform the physical world in much the same way that computers and the Internet have transformed the informational world. In the long run, that means that physical things like cars and houses will see the rates of improvement that we are used to with computers. New capabilities, such as super-light, super-tough materials, will appear.

Existing capabilities that are expensive, such as photovoltaic solar cells, will become cheap enough for everyone to use. In some cases, these both will happen—it might, for example, be possible to surface the roads with photovoltaics that are tough enough to drive on but gather enough energy to power your car as it goes.

The latter half of the 20th Century was one of the most exciting times in the history of science, because it brought the solution to one of the great mysteries: the nature of life. We discovered that the almost magical properties of living things—the abilities to grow, heal, and reproduce—were because they were full of molecular machinery. (The fourth property of life, burning fuel to power useful motion, was captured in the Industrial Revolution.) Nanotechnology research and development is slowly unraveling the principles and techniques by which we will ultimately engineer new molecular machines that will be able to make high-tech products as cheaply and cleanly as biology makes potatoes.

Plagues of nanorobots, under the name of “gray goo,” were first considered in detail by the Nanotechnology Study Group at MIT in the 1980s. Their concern was that these would be mechanical bacteria. Of course, the whole Earth is covered with biological bacteria, just as small, with machinery just as molecular, as anything nanotechnology could ever make. So why was anyone worrying about a few more mechanical ones?

The main worry was that the mechanical version might be more efficient and thus more dangerous. A car can go 10 times as fast as a horse. Perhaps a mechanical bacterium could be faster, tougher, or more efficient than a biological one.

On further analysis, it turned out that the situation wasn’t that simple. Horses eat hay and grain and leaves and other naturally occurring energy sources, while cars need highly refined and expensive fuel. One reason cars are more efficient is that their “digestion” is outsourced to refineries.

Similarly, cars outsource their healing to repair shops and their reproduction to factories. They need roads and other infrastructure to be built for them. Any sensibly designed nanorobot would work the same way, for the same reason: It’s much more efficient. But that leaves the nanorobot, like the car, completely unable to go foraging in the wild and form a “plague.”

Imagine trying to build a car that ran on hay which it harvested itself, graded its own roads, made its own parts with which it repaired itself, and built new cars. Plagues of nanorobots are about as likely as plagues of hay-eating cars. And in the unlikely eventuality someone ever actually did build them, such nanorobots wouldn’t be much more efficient than bacteria, and could be controlled easily by efficient, faster, more powerful, fuel-using, non-reproducing nanomachines.  — J Storrs Hall

What exactly was Kara, and were people chasing down a rabbit hole when they assumed her father was Daniel, the missing 8th model cylon?

Ron Moore: Daniel is definitely a rabbit hole. It was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest. I was kind of surprised when I started picking up [that] speculation online.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a deep part of the cylon backstory that had to do with one of the cylons that was created by the final five [called Daniel. Daniel] was later sort of aborted by Cavill… it was always intended just to be sort of an interesting bit of backstory about Cavill and his jealously. A Cain and Abel sort of allegory. Then people really started grabbing on to it and seizing on it as some major part of the mythology. In couple of interviews and in the last podcast I tried to go out of my way to say “look, don’t spend too much time and energy on this particular theory,” because it was never intended to be that major a piece of the mythology.

David Eick: It’s like Boxey in that way!

Moore: Kara is what you want her to be. It’s easy to put the label on her of “angel” or “messenger of God” or something like that. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny in the show… We debated back and forth in the writers’ room about giving it more clarity and saying definitively what she is. We decided that the more you try to put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way for her to go out, with her just disappearing and [leave people wondering exactly what she was].

We see Galactica jump away from the Colony. Are we to assume there are a lot of pissed off Cavills out there still, or were they destroyed?

Moore: The final [cut] came out a little less clear on that than I intended…. It was scripted and the idea was that when Racetrack hits the nukes—the nukes come in and smack into the colony—it takes the colony out of the stream that was swirling around the singularity and [the colony] fell in and was destroyed. I think as we went through the [editing process], when we kept cutting frames and doing this and that, one of the things that became less apparent was that the colony was doomed. The intention was that everyone who was aboard the colony would perish.

At what point did you decide to make it Earth-of-the-past that we were going to wind up on, and what was your reason for that?

Moore: We decided that a couple of years ago. I don’t think we ever really had a version of the show where we [were] in the future or in the present, those didn’t seem as interesting. In the early [development of the show], we would talk about the fact that we would see a lot of contemporary things in the show from language to wardrobe to all kinds of production design details. That only made sense to us in terms of a lot of things that we see in the show and we feel are taken from our contemporary world are actually theirs to begin with. [They] somehow spread down through eons and came to us through the collective unconsciousness. Or, more directly, [as when] Lee said we would give them the better part of ourselves.

Eick: There was a time when we were talking about “they land, and its Pterodactyls and Tyrannosaurus Rex.” But the idea that they were part of the genus of humankind seemed like the right—and more affordable!—way to do that.

Moore: We also had this image of Six walking through Times Square that we came up with long ago.

Who attacked the original Earth?

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of cylons came to that world, started over and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare that occurred among the cylons themselves, which was another repetition in the cycle of “all of this has happened before and all will happen again.” Even they, who were the rebels that split off, [had] enough of humanity in them as cylons that they eventually destroyed themselves.

Why did Cavill decide to kill himself?

Moore: Cavill killing himself actually came from Dean Stockwell [the actor who played Cavill]. As scripted in that final climatic CIC battle, Tigh was going to grab Cavill and fling him over the edge of the upper level and he was going to fall to his death. Dean called me and said “y’know, I just really think that, in that moment, Cavill would realize the jig is up and it’s all hopeless, and he should just put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself.” And I said: “…Okay!”

For the actors, what was the last scene that you filmed and what was the mood like on the set?

Mary McDonnell: My last scene was Laura Roslin’s last moment in the Raptor. That was about 3:45 am on a very small set. I think I was one of the first people to wrap—she died and we all hugged, and my son and I went to the airport and went back to LA… It happened quickly, it was set to happen a week later and the schedule was changed, so suddenly it was over, it was really interesting, very much like the show for me.

Edward James Olmos: My last day was when I was on the mountainside and it was the last moment that I was on camera. It was quite an experience all the way around, that moment in time. I think everybody had a real easy time [acting] with the emotions that we had at the very end, it’s pretty honest all the way around. The last time that I saw Starbuck and Lee was the last scene where I saw them [in the show]. Pretty intense.

McDonnell: But we’re here, and we’re alive! I wore bright blue so you would know I was alive.

With the use of “All Along The Watchtower,” are you trying to get at some notion that there is some universal consciousness that goes back as far as the human/cylon races’ arrival?

Moore: The notion is sort of how you posited it. The music, the lyrics, the composition, is divine, eternal, it’s something that lives in the collective unconsciousness of everyone in the show and all of us today. It’s a musical theme that repeats itself and crops up in unexpected places. Different people hear it and pluck it out of the ether and write songs. It’s a connection of the divine and the mortal. Music is something that people literally catch out of the air and can’t really define exactly how they composed it. [So] here is a song that transcends many eons and many different people and cultures and the stars, and was ultimately reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan here on Earth.

Eick: It was a simple way, I thought, to communicate clearly the idea [the show is not set in the future.] That this is a story about a culture that gave birth to ours. There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives. They hole up in a diner and there’s a cylon centurion cornering them. For the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play “Yesterday”, or whatever we could afford—

Moore: Not “Yesterday.”

Eick: —Probably not “Yesterday.” Something from The Guess Who perhaps. I think we felt it was too soon. It would confuse things and…people would just be thrown by it, but we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to say to the audience that it follows [a] cyclical theme of “this has all happened before and will happen again.” This culture is the one that gave birth to ours, so that all the colloquialisms and all the slang that you hear and the behavior that is idiosyncratic—playing cards or whatever—we get that from them, not the other way around.

There’s been a lot of talk about how setting an end date for a scripted serial helps to recharge it. Did you find that true?

Moore: In terms of the writers’ room it certainly focused us. We made the decision that fourth season was going to be the last season once we got to the end of the third season. We had writers’ retreats, and we had dedicated sessions to say “this is the end, what’s the last story, what’s the final arc?” It really made everybody very focused and very specific about exactly how this was going to line up. Part of the motivation to make it the final season was that we didn’t want to get to the place where we felt like the ship was keeling over and we were having a problem. We all instinctively felt that the show had the reached the third act by the time the show got to the end of that third season.

Eick: Going back a year before that, Ron and I sat down for our biannual “what the hell do we do this year meeting?” Heading into season three there was a real sense of creative frustration. We wanted to expand the show and … find a new ways [of] story telling. [So season three] became what we call the cylon-centric season. It’s when we introduced the base ship, it’s when we introduced some new cylons. It gave the show life, but after a year of that, when we sat down heading into season four, it was a much shorter conversation. It was basically “okay, what if we end it? What if we just decide it’s over?” Let’s call this…the dovetailing season. If we know that going in, how would that inform story telling decisions?” So it was a very early decision. I remember from my perspective going into that 4th season there was a different energy on the set. There was tremendous focus and concentration that I was getting from the entire ensemble.

McDonnell: Part of what was extraordinary about that is as you are able to view [the end approaching] you can then kick into gear and plot your finish. What that ends up doing is simplifying things for you. You know where your head is and you can let go in many moments were you probably would have worked very hard [before, but] you didn’t need to. So a lot of us felt a kind of simplification. A kind of humility that came over us and that gives you a lot of energy. You just know where you are going and you are proud to be a part of it. And you let go. That was the experience I think many of us had.

Olmos: We had a meeting at the very beginning of the show and we all, 13 of us, sat down in my trailer—

McDonnell: He had the biggest trailer.

Omos: —it was beautiful! And we sat down as we discussed the possibilities. I talked to them about making sure we understood that if, by chance, this situation was to move forward and we were to do this as a series, and this was to go on to for one year, four years, ten years, who knows, that we had to understand what that meant… I just knew that…the story would have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that we had to pace ourselves.

So at the end of the third season, beginning of fourth season, we had a meeting, and we were told then that this was going to be the final season. Everybody got very depressed…I don’t think any of the actors wanted to stop the show… But we had hit the end, we were going into the fourth and final act. And we knew it. So we talked about the very first time we ever got together, and we said it’s like a marathon. In marathon you have to start off fast, really really intensely strong, your first mile has to extraordinary. Then the next 24 miles have to be consistent…. And then the last mile has to be the strongest mile that you’ve run the whole 26 miles…To win it, your final mile has to be your strongest mile… So we knew where we where coming from, we knew where we were, and now we knew where were going… I think that led to some of our strongest performances.

In the last scene, are “Six” and “Baltar” angels or demons?

Moore: I think they’re both. We never try to name exactly what the “Head” characters are—we called them “Head Baltar” and “Head Six” all throughout the show, internally. We never really looked at them as angels or demons because they seemed to periodically say evil things and good things, they tended to save people and they tended to damn people. There was this sense that they worked in service of something else. You could say “a higher power” or you could say “another power,” [but] they were in service to something else that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, and sometimes tempting the people on the show. The idea at the very end was that whatever they are in service to continues and is eternal and is always around. And they too are still around…and with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch, and at some point they may or may not intercede at a key moment.

The Chief being mysteriously pulled toward the Temple of Five?  Turns out he was one of the aforementioned five and had been there before (my apologies if that’s a spoiler for you, but really, catch up already).

BSG is best when it revolves around people and politics, as opposed to the god(s) and the lost tribes of whoever.  Desperate people, dirty spaceships and ragtag resistance movements?  Gripping and relevant TV.  President Roslin’s visions and imaginary shamans?  Not so much.

When I saw Galactica’s hull break open and the Six shoot into space, I was reminded of BSG science adviser Kevin Grazier explaining what happens when you fall out of a spaceship.  We’re hoping for a post from Kevin on the potential explanations for artificial gravity, but we appreciate that the show has a solid science adviser and appears to listen to him occasionally (no aliens, no time travel, real constellations).

With all that in mind here are non-supernatural solutions for my five favorite Battlestar mysteries (note that these are suggestions not spoilers):

1)  The Opera House – Roslin and Baltar are both part Cylon.  If everything happening now has happened before, then it makes sense that human-Cylon hybrids happened before.  Roslin and Baltar can project because they are descendants of the ancient human-Cylon combo.

2) Kara Thrace – An old school Cylon who resurrected after arriving on the irradiated Cylon “Earth.”  She’s the “harbinger of Death” because her return means the end of resurrection and the return of natural reproduction for the Cylons.

3) Earth – Earth as we know it exists apart from the nuked Cylon Earth that the refugees landed on, thereby giving the refugees a final destination.

4) The Defeat of Cavil & Co. – One last rousing space battle for the old man and crew, with an assist from Sam Anders as the hybrid controller of Galactica.  It’s going to be awesome.

5) All Along the Watchtower – Bob Dylan is the creator of the ancestral cylons.

At Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, researchers have adapted a technique using artificial neural networks that can help a robot actively evolve to understand its own body. A neural net tries to mimic the human brain by using discreet processing centers, known as neurones, and letting them link themselves to accomplish programming goals. Sethuraman Muthuraman, in Aberdeen, wanted to make a robot that could teach itself how to walk, regardless of the configuration of its legs. He started with a torso that had two unjointed legs. The robot used a neural net to evolve the means to walk from one point or another by testing different sets of neurone connections and killing them off if they failed. When the robot solved that task, he attached another leg segment to the robot, essentially giving the robot a two sectioned leg with knees. The robot used the original neural net program it had already devised and then added additional neurones  to solve the problem of the newly jointed leg. In this way, the robot taught itself to walk with it’s newly enhanced body.

The whole movement toward self-programming machines is both exciting and a bit unnerving to anyone raised on the original Battlestar Galactica or Terminator movies. Hans Moravec, one of robotics’ pioneers and leading thinkers, argues that artificial intelligence evolution is mirroring the evolution of life, only far faster. In a 2003 talk available online he writes:

I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century.

He includes  an excellent chart comparing the two rates of growth. He argues that the standard issue G3 Macintosh had the same computing power as a lizard brain, but that it will only be another 20 years before computers with same computational power as the human brain appear on the market. This is not the same as saying there will be human-intelligent robots as that time, since there’s still a long way to go on the programming and theory of AI. Those, he says, won’t come until 2050.