C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I'll post a thorough report of my weekend tonight. In the meantime here's a quick post.

Has no one else noticed that the breakthroughs which led to the motion-sensing technologies in the Nintendo Wii can be applied to robotics? Robots have almost never had the slightest clue where their bodies were positioned in space, except through dead reckoning from their memory of commands they sent to their moving parts, from a presupposed starting position. If an exterior object moved them by bumping them, they usually could not tell at all-- or at most, barely. My Robosapien has no idea when he's not standing upright.

Now that ultra-sensitive mechanical accelerometers have been wildly miniaturized, and more importantly the infrastructure is in place to mass-produce them at radical cost reduction for the new generation of game controllers, some hardware hacker is probably already planning to repurpose them for the vestibular (inner ear) and proprioception (body pose) senses of robots.

MIT's Technology Review has a video documentary series titled "The Impact of Emerging Technologies" which is exclusively online. It's really interesting! It covers stem cells; robotic prosthetics with a mind/machine interface; artificial polymer muscle; computer interpretation of body language; nano-scale valves; and more.

The video about using lab yeast instead of lab mice for a 50,000-fold decrease in cost and slowness of new drugs showed them using robot laboratory systems. It reminded me of an article on Edge.org by Kevin Kelly, editor of WIRED Magazine, about using robots, Google, Wikis, "Zillionics" and more, to practice science in the future.

Wow.

This robot is controlled by a trackball mounted to it. More to the point, it's controlled by a giant hissing cockroach on the trackball which shies away from lights that are shined in its face when the robot approaches an obstacle. Cool!

Cory Doctorow asked to present a panel at Penguicon about "The Hidden Totalitarian Assumptions of I, Robot." I've been curious ever since he told me this.

Now it turns out he's published a new story about it on the Infinite Matrix website titled I, Robot. After the story he writes, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

It's an excellent story but I still don't get the point. The money quote is probably this from a Eurasian missionary/secret agent to a Canadian cop: "You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt?" But as far as I can tell, some characters decided to be totalitarian dictators, and other characters in their society allowed them to be, for reasons which I can only dimly connect to the three laws or to Asimov's book, probably because it's been years since I read it. (The movie, which was a script called Hard Wired until they slapped the I, Robot name on it for no good reason, doesn't count.) Why don't the Eurasian robots, who are not "3 Laws Safe," run amok and take over the world? The story does not say. In asking that question, am I making one of the totalitarian assumptions of I, Robot?

A few months ago I bought it the e-book from Fictionwise.com, but from this LJ entry you might recall how Digital Rights Management screwed me out of my property. I don't know if I'd call that totalitarian though.

Scientists today detected a slight wobble in the earth's orbit. It was determined to be caused by Isaac Asimov spinning in his grave. I was seriously annoyed when I saw the trailer to I, Robot and realized it was yet another modernity-phobic action movie. The book I, Robot was a thoughtfully philosophical collection of detective stories about the communion of mindkind. Just like with Paul Verhoeven's film of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, the director of the film probably never read the book.