Grizzly @ Adams

Senior Seminar. Now that you’ve all read the “Book of the Machines” chapters in Erewhon, I’d like you to move from Samuel Butler’s 19th-century fantasies to some 21st-century realities, such as the Slugbot and the EcoBot — predatory robots that capture and consume food from their environment, digest it, and turn it into the energy they need to continue operating. According to the Slugbot’s creators, the goal is greater autonomy for the machines:

Most mobile robots are not truly autonomous; most operate in simplified environments. Almost all non-industrial robots still require a helping hand from humans, e.g. battery charging, the odd push if they get stuck, obstacles that are suited to their sensors, etc. The notable exceptions are smart missiles, satellites and torpedoes which carry enough fuel and computational resources to successfully complete their missions. However, we are interested in building robots which will be self-sufficient in terms of decision making and energy — robots which can be left unsupervised to organize their work and nourishment.

The work on energy autonomy in robots is an on-going process. The initial stage looked at the problems faced by a robot predator. It is not only the energy transformation process but the necessary behavior of the robot which we wish to study. This is an important point — the two processes are tightly interlinked. In this case the robot “hunted” slugs. The collected slugs would be fermented to produce biogas in a separate off-board digester unit. The gas would then be passed through methane fuel cell to generate electricity. The electricity would be stored in batteries and could be downloaded to a “hungry” robot. We are currently working on the employment of a different type of “digester” — the microbial fuel cell (MFC). In this type of cell microbes are employed in a special container with a semi-permeable membrane to extract electrons from the nutrient (such as carrot peelings) and pass them onto an electrode. In this way a form of “biological battery” can be made.

The EcoBot II eats flies instead of slugs. What do you suppose Butler might have made of all this? And what about Erewhon’s form — does “The Book of the Machines” make the book quasi-dystopian?

Speaking of dystopia, do you see anything potentially dystopian about the possibility that job interviews might routinely include brain scans? According to a recent post at one of my favorite blogs, Next Nature,

MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam. He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: Let me recap some highlights from class today. The philosophical status of artificial life depends on how we define “life.”We could approach the question by isolating a set of attributes that all life necessarily possesses qua life, and then asking whether these defining attributes could also be possessed by a human-built machine.

Here’s one plausible list of the attributes all life necessarily possesses qua life:

1. Perception and response (living organisms sense and respond to things going on in their environment).

2. Metabolism (living organisms capture part of their environment and turn it into energy).

3. Reproduction (living organisms produce copies of themselves, and the copies are themselves capable of reproduction).

Machines are already quite capable of 1. and 2. The real question concerns reproduction. It’s possible to imagine that at some point in the future artificially intelligent robots might be capable of building replicas of themselves. But Samuel Butler offers a more subtle approach to the problem of machine reproduction. Machines reproduce themselves with our help, as part of a symbiotic relationship. If that kind of reproduction does not count as satisfying criterion 3. above, then what are we to make of the flowering plant that cannot reproduce without the help of the bumble bee? If the plant’s symbiotic dependence on the bee does not disqualify it from “life,” then on what grounds can we rule out the possibility of machine life?

Miscellaneous Note 1: The Very Smart MIT Scientist who believes we’ll be able to upload human consciousness into a computer is Ray Kurzweil. The (IMHO) Even Smarter MIT Scientists who revolutionized robotics are Rodney Brooks and Cynthia Breazeal (check out the bit about her “social robots” here).

Miscellaneous Note 2: You might want to watch the “birth of technology” clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can find it here.