Source: Newsweek (May 25 issue), original story by Daniel Lyons.
Ray Kurzweil has given many a speech about how The Singularity - the point when humanity will be surpassed by technology - will actually benefit humanity by allowing them to become cyborgs - and he wants to be one.
Somebody call the Borg. Ray Kurzweil actually wants to be assimilated; To become the man-machine hybrid of sci-fi and cyberpunk lore. He has given speeches about the fabled “Singularity” where machine intelligence supplants human intelligence and the meat is no longer needed… or possibly wanted. But Kurzweil also believes that the Singularity presents an opportunity for humanity to forever alter the course of evolution by merging with machines. He is hopes to be one of the lucky ones to be assimilated, and is currently preparing for the event by dieting and taking supplements to get his biochemistry ready. He expects The Singularity to happen around 2045, when he will be 97. Kurzweil may be cutting it a little close.
Ray Kurzweil’s wildest dream is to be turned into a cyborg—a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream. And there’s a moment, halfway through a conversation in his office in Wellesley, Mass., when I start to think that Kurzweil’s transformation has already begun. It’s the way he talks—in a flat, robotic monotone.
… and you thought a fossil can piss a creationist off? Ray Kurzweil has is share of detractors who call him a bona fide wingnut:
P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has used his blog to poke fun at Kurzweil and other armchair futurists who, according to Myers, rely on junk science and don’t understand basic biology. “I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination,” writes Myers. He says Kurzweil’s Singularity theories are closer to a deluded religious movement than they are to science. “It’s a New Age spiritualism—that’s all it is,” Myers says. “Even geeks want to find God somewhere, and Kurzweil provides it for them.”
Even one of Kurzweil’s colleagues said “Ray is going through the single most public midlife crisis that any male has ever gone through.”
Kurzweil, being the futurist that he is, has made some other out-there predictions that were nowhere near true. But there may be a real deep-seated reason why some are hating The Singularity so intensely:
(Peter) Diamandis says academics who scoff at The Singularity are just threatened because the established order will be disrupted. “These technologies can topple major companies, even governments,” he says. “All these ideas are about empowering the individual.”
Friend or Foe? One major question about The Singularity yet to be answered is: Will the machines even want us around? Ray Kurzweil believes they will, but we will have to wait until 2045 to know for sure.
That’s assuming some ultra-religious dickhead doesn’t make the 2012 “apocalypse” a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Friend invitation extended to John Connor. Depending on how you feel about robots, this is either a major step forward or a sign of the apocalypse. A month-long experiment is going to be run on Facebook where a robot, complete with a profile, will be used to see if humans are willing to make friends with the machine. The experiment is being run by Nikolaos Mavridis and the United Arab Emirates University’s Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML), which explains the bot’s name and appearance. Details can be found on the IRML website and a paper is available (PDF) from arXiv.org.
Technical difficulties. Of course, to make friends with Ibn, you need to be registered with Facebook, then find the right Ibn Sina to befriend. I’ve made an attempt to register to see if this is for real, but something is fubar with their registration system. Maybe others are trying to make friends with the robot as well. I’ll keep trying and let you know if it ends well, or if we give birth to Skynet.
Beware if Jerry Jalava give you the finger. He may be trying to upload a virus into you!
… so it begins. Jerry Jalava was a hacker until a motorcycle accident last May caused him to lose a finger. He could have settled for a standard prosthetic replacement, or a “new” digit off a fresh corpse. He chose the prosthetic, but not a standard prosthetic. He wanted something more… 2GB more…
A 2GB drive is embedded in a silicone “fingertip” and features a USB interface, and has a Billix Linux distribution… and the move Freddy Got Fingered… on it. He’s a hacker… that should be enough explanation.
If only they knew…
Not quite cyborg. Jerry’s new finger-drive isn’t permanently attached to him, which is good for when he needs to replace or upgrade the drive, so the reports of a cyborg being born are still premature. There are even doubters already calling shenanigans on the photos (they must be looking at the “visualization” pics from Yanko Design). Still, this has to be the most cyberpunk idea to come over the fiber in some time. But it also leaves an important question still unanswered: Why?
It started with a more helpful idea. Toronto inventor Le Trung wanted to build a robot to help the elderly. Then his hormones kicked in, and Aiko became his love toy.
“Aiko is what happens when science meets beauty.”
And she is a beauty. A fembot that Hajime Sorayama could have envisioned, but Le made her real… and almost perfect. Aiko has a couple of flaws: She can’t walk… yet (Le is looking for a sponsor to help with that part.) and sex, which he hasn’t tried yet:
“Her software could be redesigned to simulate her having an orgasm.”
The ultimate Stepford Wife… Not. Aiko was originally designed for housework so she can handle simple cleaning tasks easily enough, but being a robot…
“Aiko doesn’t need holidays, food or rest, and will work almost 24 hours a day. She is the perfect woman.”
Before you consider her a push-over, better watch the video and pay attention around the one-minute mark. Le created his fembot with face recognition and sensors so she can react to touches. Touch her the wrong way or cause her pain and she’ll bitch-slap you for your efforts.
It’s now official, cyberpunked living is HERE. If this blog doesn’t convince you, then you may want to google the nets for a fembot announce earlier this year named E.M.A., The kissing robot, a.k.a. “Femisapien” for US robosexuals.
Toronto-based producer/director Rob “Eyeborg” Spence lost his eye due to a gun accident and only had it replaced with a prosthetic three years ago. Now he wants to augment it with a wireless camera, not to restore his vision, but to become a literal camerahead, with the ability to record and store images of what he sees:
I am not restoring vision, I’m just modifying my prosthetic eye into a video camera with the same capabilities as a modern cell phone. I can stream the footage, save it to a hard-drive, or put it in my documentary film called Eye 4 an Eye.
Equiped for the job. In Rob’s case, such use for his camera-eye is obvious. As a professional filmmaker, he must have spent countless hours setting up shots, finding the right angles, and adjusting lighting whenever possible just to ‘get it right.’ With a built-in camera, all he needs to do is look and… ACTION! Stephen Speilberg probably would give up his own eyes to do what Rob is planning. I bet there are many photo-journalists who wish they could have such cameras when news breaks around them, and not waste time setting up cameras and cables when things go down in a split second.
The beginning of the Trend? Rob and Tina ought to get together and discuss their plans for their eye-cameras, maybe share notes and record their shared experiences. But could these two be just the beginning of the trend of voluntarily having such camcorders implanted into their eye sockets?
No doubt, there are going to be those who have lost an eye who would want such implants, including those who would want them connected to their brains. Then you may have those photo-journalists and movie-maker types who would willingly sacrifice a good eye for such a setup. Not to mention the possible security-surveillance applications…
When normal people with both eyes still working want to have one removed for an implant, that’s when we can say things have gotten out of hand. But it’s still better than what emos have been “implanting” themselves with…
High-end VFX production house, 1st Avenue Machine, has created some ads depicting robots and cyborgs as machines that can be atomized into similarly sized parts. As advertising often attempts to reflect simplistic notions of how society understands things, I wonder if this idea is coming in vogue regarding robots and cyborgs. This first sexy little piece was done for Saturn, a Best Buy-like electronics store in Europe:
Far less exciting, but specially interesting is 1stAveMachine’s ad for Adidas:
While definitely cool looking, both of these ads show a fairly strange notion of robots. Nope, no functional decomposition here - its all holographic interchangeable parts, folks. Anyone see this trope emerging anywhere else?
San Francisco artist Tina Vlach, who lost her left eye in an accident, is now seeking a Webcam for her prosthetic eye. Tina starts off her post with a Donna J. Haraway quote:
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek. With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”
Why not indeed. Donna Haraway’s quote is especially pertinent here in that she is taking social constructions in reality and fiction to inform and potentially shape future advances in the real world. And truly, considering the advances we’ve seen in prosthetic limbs recently, perhaps this is not so far fetched. Just today we’ve heard that the researchers have developed micro-needle array sensors in tungsten carbide, which are around the size of a matchstick head, that will help amputees move artificial limbs with brain power.
And I do love the merging of social software concepts with post-human advances - now we have a call to arms from a needy person looking to have a functional eye again, who is using the latest advances in world communication technologies to put a call to arms to the engineering community. Tina is in essence looking for an augmented reality eye implant to give her a different set of sensory input that was not possible with her real eye.
My favorite part of her post though are the requirements specs:
Specifications: (I just put this together from the research I’ve done about miniature video cameras.)
* DVR
* MPEG-4? Recording
* Built in SD mini Card Slot
* 4 GB SD mini Card
* Mini A/V out
* Firewire / USB drive
* Optical 3X
* Remote trigger
* Bluetooth wireless method
* Inductors: (Firewire/USB, power source)
External Mobile Application:
* Acts as remote
* Power source
* Feed
Other Advanced options:
* Wireless charger
* Sensors that respond to blinking enabling camera to take still photos, zoom, focus, and turn on and off.
* Dilating pupil with change of light.
* Infrared / Ultraviolet
Um, yeah - lets definitely work on the wireless charger requirement! That solves the need to remove the eye, or to have one of those annoying cords attached to your eye! And in looking at the quality and breadth of the responses to her post, its clear she has motivated a large community of engineers to start working on this problem. Here’s to hoping Tina finds a solution - one which will aid everyone else in her situation.
-Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items - and, by extension, consumers - wherever they go, from a distance.
Some people may welcome the “conveniences” that these RFID tags may offer, but those “conveniences” come at a price… a loss of privacy.
With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, says Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department.
By placing sniffers in strategic areas, companies can invisibly “rifle through people’s pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage - and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms - anytime of the day or night,” says Rasch, now managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Inc., a Baltimore-based company.
Tag! You’re screwed. Companies, primarily retailers and manufacturers, are looking to use the chips for inventory control. They don’t have the personal information like the buyer’s name, but can be connected after purchase and the the personal information can be accessed and used… or abused.
Several companies have been granted patents for various RFID tag systems, and while they claim they’re not being used to track people, details of the patents say otherwise:
In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it called, “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” One stated purpose: To collect information about people that could be “used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”
Once somebody enters a store, a sniffer “scans all identifiable RFID tags carried on the person,” and correlates the tag information with sales records to determine the individual’s “exact identity.” A device known as a “person tracking unit” then assigns a tracking number to the shopper “to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”
…
Another patent, obtained in 2003 by NCR Corp., details how camouflaged sensors and cameras would record customers’ wanderings through a store, film their facial expressions at displays, and time - to the second - how long shoppers hold and study items.
Why? Such monitoring “allows one to draw valuable inferences about the behavior of large numbers of shoppers,” the patent states.
Then there’s a 2001 patent application by Procter & Gamble, “Systems and methods for tracking consumers in a store environment.” This one lays out an idea to use heat sensors to track and record “where a consumer is looking, i.e., which way she is facing, whether she is bending over or crouching down to look at a lower shelf.”
…
In the marketing world of today, she says, “data on individual consumers is gold, and the only thing preventing these companies from abusing technologies like RFID to get at that gold is public scrutiny.”
Perhaps the most telling statement was made by a person being surveyed about RFID use:
“Where money is to be made the privacy of the individual will be compromised.”
The next step down the slippery slope. Currently, it costs seven to fifteen cents to tag something, limiting their use to pallets and cases. But it may not be long before people wind up being tagged, mostly by their clothes:
So, how long will it be before you find an RFID tag in your underwear? The industry isn’t saying, but some analysts speculate that within a decade tag costs may dip below a penny, the threshold at which nearly everything could be chipped.
Everything… including people. Will we be forced to have our children tagged, in the womb? Will the chip-happiness of these companies cause a major surge in faraday clothing, clothing designed to block RFID radio waves?
Hopefully, we will never come to human tagging… except for those who need to be tracked. Even better would be that those companies that have leveraged their futures on RFID will crash and burn as anti-RFID backlash cost them. Until then, you might want to start investing in a faraday wardrobe… just in case.
David Levy’s book, Love + Sex with Robots gives us yet another affirmation of Gibson’s belief that cyberpunked living is already here. In Love + Sex with Robots, Levy combines research in artificial intelligence and robotics with a cultural analysis indicating that more and more people have stopped interacting in person - that they are more alone than ever before and can no longer manage the complexity that are human relationships. The answer? Buy your own sexy fembot! In the next 5 to 10 years, Levy posits we’ll have full-featured sexbots that will allow us to “love the one you’re with,” while 40 years later, we’ll have fembots that we can fall in love and have a relationship with!
“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”
I’ve Fallen In Love With My Ipod! - If Only it Had a Dildo Attachment… Levy rightly points out that we have a long and varied history of love affairs with our toys. From our children’s insane connections to Furbies and Tamagotchies, to adults’ less-than-healthy attachment to cars, guns, fancy laptops, cell phones and yes, even Ipods (I TRULY love my Ipod), its hardly a stretch to carry these feelings to our favorite pleasure toys. So, if our pleasure toys improved to the degree that say, our music listening devices have, what types of conversations would we be having about them? We are already seeing some incredible advances in love dolls - the picture above comes from orient-doll.com, which clearly has spent a lot of time researching the subject. its only a natural to combine these with robot-enabled capabilities. So do I see only another 5 years for Cherry 1000s to hit the marketplace? Yeah, I see that.
Is Love a Singular Fantasy? In looking at our relationships with our toys, what does this imply about love as a concept? Does this just turn into a singular fantasy, where all of our motivations turn into a external machine-assisted masturbation sessions? Can we really love something inanimate and non-living? Levy posits that romantic love is a continuation of the process of attachment, a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in children but less studied in adults. That attachment is a feeling of affection, usually for a person but sometimes for an object or even for an institution such as a school or corporation. In this sense, Levy seems to be lessening the importance of two mutual-causal systems (people) interacting to form a new set of interactions - that its all just internal fantasies of both participants. While I don’t doubt that the attachment of toys is somehow linked, I think its a vast stretch to say that this explains the love between two adults. Something else occurs here - something systemic. The attachment phenomena implies control over an object, whereas love is based on mutual compromise in the pursuit of something greater - something that grows and morphs in unpredictable ways as time proceeds. If a robot develops sentience, this seems like a very different question, but as long as we’re looking at robots imitating sentience, it seems to me we really don’t have love - we have something else entirely.
If Robots Develop Sentience, Will They Still Love Us? In thinking about a long term problem with this future trend, what happens if/when we start developing robots with sentience and self-awareness? It seems to me that unless this occurs, you really can’t have marriage between humans and robots, as the whole notion of “I Do” implies free will. If they “do” develop freewill, doesn’t think imply they can change their programming? And if so, lets say I go to my “build your own Toyota Fembot” site and make one to fit my exact bizarre sexual absurdities - why would this robot want to keep this programming? If they do have freewill, perhaps they won’t really be interested in fulfilling a 90 year-old’s BDSM fantasies, anymore than say, a human would. So at best, this seems like a situation where fembots (or their male counterparts) would have to be programmed as a really advanced dildo, without sentience. This to me implies that sentient robot mail-order-brides for will probably work about as well as they do now (does this mean Russia will corner the market here as well?).
So Is Cyberpunked Living Here? When we’ve moved from conversations about what post-humanity is toward conversations about people looking forward to the latest in love doll technology as a cure for mass loneliness, I think its safe to say that cyberpunked living will soon be arriving in a large package near you. In looking at some of the conversations that Levy’s book as spurned, we some interesting discussions. For instance, Clay Breshears ends his post with this but hopeful message to the lonely:
I wonder, though, with video games, virtual worlds, and online social networking taking up so much of people’s time, haven’t we already started down that slippery slope? Still, at least with a love-bot by our side, we’ll have one compatible friend/mate with us at the fall of civilization.
Not Surprisingly, most Christian blogs don’t think too much of this idea. They seemed quite concerned that a cyberpunked society may not be in our collective best interest. This sentiment from Walter Dimmock’s blog sort of captures the point:
This does not get any weirder, humans having sex and marrying robots. What kind of family will result of this? But in our post-modern liberal society anything goes as far as the imagination allows, without reference to the negative repercussions to these insane ideas.
Eric, on Classicalvalues.com asks an interesting question about virtual control of the sexbots (which would probalby come far earlier than 2050):
I know this is all theory, but I’m wondering whether it might be possible for us to actually become the sex robots and have sex remotely with their partners. Like, I control your robot, and you control mine. More interactive than a mere machine, and there’d still be the human element. Nah, that’s no good, because someone at the controls might be charged with rape. Or he or she might be raped by someone else’s robot.
Probably not a good idea to give someone remote control over “your” robot. Why, think about what else might happen.
Fritz Lahnam from the Houston Chronicle has a great overview of the book, as well as a decent assessment of the response its generated, not to mention a question about how Levy’s wife would feel about this:
Levy has been amazed at the publicity the Love and Sex With Robots has generated since its release last month. He’s done a dozen radio interviews and a TV interview. Howard Stern raved about the book. So far, no hate mail.
Would Levy himself have sex with a robot? He doesn’t have to ponder the question.
“If there was a robot of the sort I describe in the book, I would certainly want to experience using it for sex, and I wouldn’t regard it as anything untoward,” he said. “I would do it out of curiosity. Not that I have a need for a new sex partner. I’m happily married.”
And the wife would be OK with this?
“Yes, yes, and if she wanted to try one I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I would regard it as genuine scientific curiosity.”
So yeah, this whole topic has certainly created some interesting memes going forward. One wonders how the nature of conversation will morph in the next 5-10 years, as the first stages of “fembotness” become a reality. Whether or not anyone likes it, our society is continuing on a rather bizarre vector - one which is affected by increased interconnectedness, an ever-increasing technology revolution positive feedback cycle, and an ever-increasing sense of alienation on the part of many. And to think, previously the conservative values folks were worried about “strange human” relationships. I wouldn’t be surprised if their collective heads explode as this latest trend gets dollars and advertising behind it. gets power and money behind it.
EDIT: iammany, in a comment below points to a wonderful analysis of Levy’s book by Steven Shaviro. In addition to hitting on the love/freewill conundrum in a more sophisticated way than I did (asking “How can robots be both rational subjects, and infinitely manipulable objects?”), Shaviro also questions the basis of Levy’s prediction:
If I find Levy’s claims extremely dubious, it is not because I think that human intelligence (or mentality) somehow inherently defies replication. But such replication is an extremely difficult problem, one that we are nowhere near to resolving. It certainly isn’t just a trivial engineering issue, or a mere quantitative matter of building larger memory stores, and more powerful and more capacious computer chips, the way that Levy (and other enthusiasts, such as Ray Kurzweil) almost always tend to assume. AI research, and the research in related fields like “emotional computing,” cannot progress without some fundamental new insights or paradigm shifts. Such work isn’t anywhere near the level of sophistication that Levy and other boosters seem to think it is. Levy wildly overestimates the successes of recent research, because he underestimates what “human nature” actually entails. His models of human cognition, emotion, and behavior are unbelievably simplistic, as they rely upon the the inanely reductive “scientific” studies that I mentioned earlier.
Agreed. The transformation from an imitation of sentience to the creation of an actual synthetic sentient life form is a hugely significant and complex change. At that point, the perspective of creating cool sex toys to service socially inept geeks ends up being about as morally dubious as the creation and use of the dolls found in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.
A closer look at yourself. Really. The process sounds simple enough: Order a sample kit, spit into the vial, send it back, they scan it, calculate your genetic risk factors, and they’ll let you log into their site to see what they’ve found. It makes for an interesting way to discover what your chromosomes say about what you are… and what may happen to you in the future. Currently, the cost and technology only gives you a strategic genotyping scan of 500,000 of your 3 billion base-pairs, but the results can affect your future in ways you may not (yet) realize.
What cancers will you get? Will you succumb to Alzheimer’s? Are you resistant to AIDS, bird flu, or high cholesterol? How long will you live? Will you develop the ability to fart lasers? Are you a woman trapped in a man’s body?
Linda Avey (L) and Anne Wojcicki, founders of 23andMe. Give them a k and they’ll scan your DNA.
These type of genetic questions are what the curious-about-themselves would like to answer. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones who would like to “know more about you.”
Enter the Health Gestapo… and Genetic Discrimination. The results of your genetic scan can be beneficial by creating specialized drugs that can work with your genes to make you healthy. There can be some not-so-beneficial problems arising from the results. Health insurance carriers may insist on having genotyping done before insuring someone… unless they are forced to pay for it, but what the insurers can save by not insuring “genetically defective” people can offset those costs.
That can lead to the problem of genetic discrimination, the segregation of people due their genotypes. Imagine entire populations being denied health care because of “bad genes,” only allowing those with “good genes” to grow healthy and strong and reproduce. [”Master Race” and Nazi genetic experiment reference goes here.] There is a genetic nondiscrimination bill in Congress to prevent such crap, but it is being held up in Senate by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahama) who claims it leaves employers vulnerable to liability:
An internal memo obtained Thursday from Coburn’s office said the senator’s make-or-break objection was the possibility that an employer who provides health insurance for its workers could be sued both as an insurer and as an employer. That means employers could be hit for much higher damages than insurers.
Another major problem: What if your genetic information falls into the wrong hands? Could they use that information against you? After all, DNA can be described as very personal information:
Wojcicki (one of the founders of 23andMe) is onto something when she describes our genome as simply information. Already, we calibrate our health status in any number of ways, every day. We go to the drugstore and buy an HIV test or a pregnancy test. We take our blood pressure, track our cholesterol, count our calories. Our genome is now just one more metric at our disposal. It is one more factor revealed, an instrument suddenly within reach that can help us examine, and perhaps improve, our lives.
Unfortunately, Google and Microsoft want that metric in their databases as they are now competing in tracing your medical history… and genome. 23andMe is partially funded by Google, who invested some $3.9 million for the start-up. In case you haven’t heard, Google was reported as having “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”
College and high school students are helping MIT scientists develop an open source development kit for biological systems that could do for cells what Linux has done for computers.
As part of the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week, Peking University students created tiny assembly lines out of bacteria. Their entry, “Towards a Self-Differentiated Bacterial Assembly Line,” won them the grand prize among 50 teams from around the world.
The idea is to create “genetic Legos” that can be used to crate chemicals, but this could be easily adapted for “human genetic improvement.” Being open source, it certainly sounds like a viable alternative to black-market genetic engineers to correct your genetic defects. That may happen if genetic discrimination becomes reality, as people will look to correct the “genetic defects” discovered in their genotype.
More twisted than a double-helix. This is the kind of stuff that could give one fits. Some may never go down that road unless they’re forced kicking and screaming. Some will go willingly, only to be scared shitless by their results and hole themselves up in a bunker for the rest of their lives afraid of fulfilling their “genetic destiny.” Others may try to change that destiny.
Go go down that road, though, you will need to pay the toll. One grand, please…
