"The first part of NA I’ve been paying attention to has been the examples of this spilling out, the bits of the city not meant for us. The second part of NA I paid attention to was what happened when artists began to deconstruct and respond to that encroachment, how can designing for robots influence our own design?" "current computer vision can probably “see” computer graphics from around 20-30 years ago. Which in turn means to design for machine eyes we need to be at the level of computer graphics from the 8bit era, and so we have QR codes all over the place. … NA is about what machines can see now, rather than what they could produce back then, it’s just that vision is 20-30 years behind creation and so there are many similarities."

"One common argument for humanoid robots is that as our homes are based around the scale and form of humans it is logical that robots operating in this space should be based on the same form. With Robots approaches the issue from an alternative perspective looking at how our homes and objects might change in order to accommodate the needs of robots. The changes on the objects were designed thinking on the tasks domestic robots will be doing such as folding bed sheets, setting the table, washing, cooking and learning to interact with the 3D world. The photographs presented also aim to capture the atmosphere generated by the adoption of these objects."

"one of the metaphors for what our future is going to look like: a bewildered human stands in the dark as hundreds of quiet robots route around him doing all the work. And a marketer looks on."

"there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. … once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this. … I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” … Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most"

"We live in a world that is increasingly coded, that is, it exists as a composite of physical space and language and software, a strange hybridity that I have been trying to articulate in the New Aesthetic that others have been pointing at too, in Kevin Slavin’s algotremors, in BERG’s robot-readable world, in Timo‘s beautifully compelling compilation of machine visions … I’ve been talking about the fact that the best arrangements for our most complex spaces rely on a highly specialised cooperation between humans and intelligent agents, and the fact that the best chess is not played by computers against humans—they outstripped us long ago—but by teams of computers and humans. Twenty-two of the top thirty Wikipedia editors are bots. Knowledge and literature are coded spaces too. Stuart Geiger puts this succinctly: “a non-vitalistic ethnography: an account of a culture devoid of life. Like with Latour and agency, once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins.” This is why I am increasingly pro-Artificial Life. … I want to build a system for cooperating with software and chance."

"the more of these I saw, the more the effect started to feel truly other: like a coherent, but alien idea of what faces were. It made me wonder what I was missing. “What is it seeing there?” It’s a feeling akin to having a conversation with someone who’s gradually losing interest in what you’re saying and starting to scan the room over your shoulder." via Matt (Twitter)

"Line of sight to our clock now gives us a ‘trusted’ or ‘authenticated’ place. A human-legible sense of place is matched to what the phone ‘sees’. What if digital authentication/trust was achieved through more human scale systems? … Timo again: "In the film there is an app that looks at the world but doesn’t represent itself as a camera (very different from most barcode readers for instance, that are always about looking through the device’s camera). I’d like to see more exploration of computer vision that wasn’t about looking through a camera, but about our devices interpreting the world and relaying that back to us in simple ways." … We’re curious as to what might happen if you start to use these dynamic signs for computer vision"

"Computer vision is a deep, dark specialism with strange opportunities and constraints. The signals that we design towards robots might be both simpler and more sophisticated than QR codes or other 2d barcodes. … Living in the middle means that our limited human sensoriums and their specialised, superhuman robotic senses will overlap, combine and contrast. Wavelengths we can’t see can be overlaid on those we can – creating messages for both of us. … the opposite of camouflage – the markings and shapes that attract and beguile robot eyes that see differently to us – just as Dawkins describes the strategies that flowers and plants have built up over evolutionary time to attract and beguile bees, hummingbirds – and exist in a layer of reality complimentary to that which we humans sense and are beguiled by. And I guess that’s the recurring theme here – that these layers might not be hidden from us just by dint of their encoding, but by the fact that we don’t have the senses to detect them without technological-enhancement. … it is a phenomena to design for, and with. It’s something we will invent, within the frame of the cultural and technical pressures that force design to evolve. … we’re the ones making the robots, shaping their senses, and the objects and environments they relate to. … The Robot-Readable World is pre-Cambrian at the moment, but perhaps in a blink of an eye it will be all around us."

"The designers of android robots we see being developed today have concentrated on humanising them with very broad and obvious qualities; fleshy skin, bright eyes and teeth, with clothing covering everything else. I am interested it how the more complex and private parts of the human body would be translated onto the robot. These are the parts that we ourselves sometimes find disgusting but yet are integral to our humanity. I like to beguile the viewer from a distance drawing them in to the imagery to appreciate the detail only to disgust them as they draw closer. Conceptually I mirror this approach too, whereas initially the ideas I present seem innocent and functional, as the viewer learns more an underlying darkness becomes apparent. … While there has been some research into chemical communication between robots and also into developing a robotic sense of smell, there is very little inquiry into the use of smell or chemicals in human-robot interaction."

"Cool URLs don’t change, and these have just gone. And in their place: marketing. I’ve never pretended to be an official account; I’ve never dissimulated; no-one from the exhibition has ever got in touch with me about the bot. So, for the time being: this is why the bot has disappeared. I’m very, very cross, and perhaps a little upset; the robots are our friends, after all."

"The value of books to Google is not like the value of books to a library, it is like the value of books to people, who might understand them and act on that understanding. We should be asking about the algorithms which are being developed not for search but for understanding, the value of n-grams and the capabilities of financial news-readers and recommendation engines. What does a book look like to a machine?"

""these days I find myself unconsciously walking behind rather than in front of people so as not to obstruct some invisible field of view." … If the robot-read world becomes part of the vernacular, then it’s going to affect behaviours and norms, as well as more visual components of aesthetics. That single line in the Kinect QA tester’s blogpost made me realise: it’s already arriving."

"Lingodroids are language learning robots that play location language games to construct shared lexicons for places, distances, and directions."

"there’s a much faster rate of advancement on the software layer. And if this is true it has broad impacts for computing, and computing enabled society, as a whole. … The hardware is rapidly becoming an abstraction in a lot of cases. … Our friend the cloud is making this an even more dramatic separation as hardware resources become elastic, dynamic, and much easier for the software layer folks to deploy and use. And, as a result, there’s a different type of activity on the software layer. I don’t have a good answer as to whether it’s core algorithms, distributed processing across commodity hardware (instead of dedicated Connection Machines), new structural approaches (e.g. NoSql), or just the compounding of years of computer science and software engineering, but I think we are at the cusp of a profound shift in overall system performance"

"Again like Boxcar2d, we do the work, we ascribe hurt and pain to something that absolutely cannot be proven to experience it – and we are changed. So – we are the emotional computing power in these relationships – as LIREC and Alex are exploring – and perhaps we should design our robotic companions accordingly. Or perhaps we let this new nature condition us – and we head into a messy few decades of accelerated domestication and renegotiation of what we love – and what we think loves us back."

"The third kingdom is corporations. The philosopher Manual DeLanda, in A New Philosophy of Society, diagrams societies at multiple levels: social networks, organisations and governments, cities and nations. His book is a zoo of these inhuman macro buckyballs. Such massive animals have flows of money, power, and people instead of blood and nerves. In Platform for Change, Stafford Beer outlined the intrinsic behaviour of corporations: that they have a desire to continue their existence, and this dominates their response to stimuli. At the very smallest, cellular level, organisations are small groups of people, and their actions are dominated by group psychology -- at a national and planetary scale, economics. But cities and corporations cannot be understood in the same terms as dumb matter or organic life, so that's why they're the third of my kingdoms of nature"

via Matt

"Dr Mori’s ideas of familiarity and comfort level do not properly get at the quality of uncanniness. … the researchers eventually lighted on 19 that described aspects of four underlying qualities that they dub attractiveness, eeriness, humanness and warmth. … all four are important qualities for designers. A robot that exhibits warmth and attractiveness will be easier to interact with than one that looks cold and ugly. Only two of them, however, are needed to explain the uncanny valley … humanness and eeriness. Eeriness is not quite the same thing as comfort level, likeability or even strangeness. Levels of eeriness were indicated by eight descriptive scales, including “ordinary/supernatural”, “boring/shocking” and “uninspiring/spine-tingling”. By plotting perceived humanness along the horizontal axis and eeriness along the vertical, Dr MacDorman … can recreate Dr Mori’s chart of the uncanny valley, this time using real data about how people feel about a particular robot or animation."

"Be As Smart As A Puppy … and for want of a better term, consumer-grade artificial intelligence. BASAAP is my way of thinking about avoiding the ‘uncanny valley‘ in such things… Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies. … the algorithms involved are old. It’s just that the data and the processing power is there now to actually get to results. … BASAAP services are here. BASAAP things are on the horizon. … we’re talking about things that change their behaviour based on their environment and their interactions with us, and that have a certain mobility and agency in our world. … staying on the puppy side of the uncanny valley is a design strategy here – as is the guidance within Adam Greenfield’s “Everyware”: how to think of design for ubiquitous systems that behave as sensing, learning actors in contexts beyond the screen." "What is this going to feel like?"

"I've written before about how Karel Capek's play, "Rossum's Universal Robots" was the first science fiction television production in the UK, and introduced the word 'robot' to the English language. … The first time 'robot' is used appears to be in a Guardian review of an English language production of the play, some 18 months later in April 1923. … It only takes another month for the term to have transferred into political discourse"

“Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said that a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk. Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably was at least 50 years away, he added. However, he said that for the first time, US forces mentioned resolving such ethical concerns in their plans. Robots that can decide where to kill, who to kill and when to kill is high on all the military agendas," Professor Sharkey said at a meeting in London. … he warned that work toward ever more autonomous killing machines is carrying on, noting the deployment of Israel's Harpy - a fully autonomous UAV that dive-bombs radar systems with no human intervention.”

"The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists. There needs to be a considered debate about the rules and requirements governing all forms of robot devices, not a panic reaction when matters have gone too far. That is how bad law is made - and on this issue time is running out."

"being trialled at a primary school in Tokyo ... can speak different languages, carry out roll calls, set tasks and make facial expressions – including anger ... The humanoid was originally developed to replace a variety of workers, including secretaries, in a bid to allow firms to cut costs while still retaining some kind of human interaction. ... She is the latest example of robots spreading to every aspect of life in Japan. They already guide traffic, attempt to lure university graduates to sign up to courses and one is even being developed to provide company to Alzheimer's sufferers. The Japanese government has said that by 2015 it wants a robot in every home and is pouring $35 million (£23 million) into robotic intelligence to make it happen."

via Russell (Delicious). Includes Big Dog.

"The robotic moment will bring us to the question we must ask of every technology: does it serve our human purposes, a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. When we connect with the robots of the future, we will tell and they will remember. But have they listened? Have we been "heard" in a way that matters? Will we no longer care?"

"Our mission is to understand the science, engineering & social role of robotics & embedded intelligence. Our multidisciplinary approach aims to create autonomous devices capable of working independently, with each other, or with us in our human society"

"Overcoming our ... body's weakness via technology is a vision into which the Pentagon is ... investing ... billions ... "We must give the individual soldier the same capabilities of stealth & standoff that fighter planes have.""

"SF (& nonfiction futuristic speculation ...) is a tool ... to understand ... aspects of the contemporary world that are unfinished, still in process ... redolent of futurity"; "How can robots be both rational subjects & infinitely manipulable objects?"

"robots.net, the place to read the lastest news on personal and industrial robotics, robot competitions, and other cool stuff."

reviews of books about automata, AI, etc

"We are only beginning to discover the power of Internet-based social networks and virtual worlds. Physical devices like The Huggable ... are playing tricks with minds, but in a somewhat different way than the tricks involved in the Turing Test."

"illustrated accounts of the world's first robot, the Steam Man, created in 1865! Subsequent automatons such as the Electric Man & the Automatic Man are also profiled. The most comprehensive section ... concerns the mechanical man known as Boilerplate"

"Foster-Miller, maker of the armed SWORDS robot for military use, is also actively promoting a similar model to domestic, civilian police forces."

"3 "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system" (SWORDS) robots have deployed to Iraq, armed with M249 machine guns. ... "haven't fired their weapons yet" ... SWORDS program manager ... [says] "But that'll be happening soon.""

"They've started to build the robotic society already - but they forgot to set the rules."

"What the battle bots are teaching us is how easily we identify our own creations as animate. ... It's not about how the machine works. It's about how humans are wired."

"a machine’s struggle to construct its own identity. … a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future."

" Would you like to participate in an experiment to help researchers better understand the Uncanny Valley? ... you can help researchers determine the relation between human likeness and sensitivity to facial proportions"

"Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating?"

"Morgui … has sensors in its eyes that let it track where people are in the room and stare at them. … this has so totally freaked out observers that Reading's ethics committee told Warwick he couldn't show it to minors, or use them in any experiments"

"By building almost an entire house from just two materials — concrete and gypsum — the robots will eliminate the need for dozens of traditional components, including floorboards, wooden window frames and possibly even wallpaper."

"as these devices become affordable to consumers, they could have just as profound an impact on the way we work, communicate, learn and entertain ourselves as the PC has had over the past 30 years"

"The Foresight Directorate of the U.K. Office of Science and Innovation has released the results of two wide-ranging "strategic horizon scans" of the next 50 years. The "delta scan," ... [and] the "sigma scan""

"Real-time visual tracking, motion and 3D shape from image sequences * Visual guidance of mobile robots, navigation * Man-machine interfaces using visual gestures, pointing * Face detection and tracking, face recognition" …

"UK's first museum of kinetic art … actively encourage the convergence of art & technology … an exhibition space … where the most important examples of kinetic, technological & electronic art, both past & present, can be properly stored & displayed"

"When we see children & the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic pets the most important question is not whether children will love their robotic pets more than their real life pets or even their parents, but … what will loving come to mean?"