You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘robot’ tag.
A fortnight ago, Ferrebeekeeper put up a review of “Requiem for a Good Machine” a science-fiction novel by friend and collaborator, Daniel Claymore. The book describes a future police officer’s attempts to solve a chain of murders (and related crimes) in Mirabilis, an ideal city built by robots to serve as a habitat for the faltering biological humans of the post-singularity age.
As of today, Claymore’s work is now on sale and you can get an e-copy (or better yet, a real copy!) of his book by going to any purveyor of fine literature. Different parts of stories stick with different people, and ever since reading Claymore’s novel, I have been thinking about the gleaming city at the heart of his work. Paradoxically, thinking about this future city is causing us to go backwards in time for the subject of this post.
Back in 2015, I built/drew the Apollo and Marsyas miniature theater, a theater for 1:18 figures (mainly the Kenner Star Wars figures…but it turns out there are lots of other little actors at this scale jockeying for position on stage too). Anyway, the fun of that project was drawing some strange background scenes (like a medieval castle, a pleasure garden, Timbuktu, a spooky cemetery, Hell, etc.). One of the backdrops I drew was a glowing city of the future filled with robots, meta-humans, droids, and transgenic chimera animals. Here it is:
My recollection of this work is that I enjoyed drawing all of the future beings (look at that quantum computer clock guy (or thing?) at the left side beneath the pink organ wall…or the purple owl woman standing above the metal dog-robot at right!) but then I got lost coloring in the asphalt and threw the whole thing aside in disgust. Looking at it afresh, however, it is better than I remember. You are getting an impossible peek into the world of the far future thanks to the one power capable of opening such a window–the imagination!
Yet, although the imagination is capable of peering through deep time, it is also fallible (just look at all of that confusing, hard-to-color future asphalt!). I was hoping to portray a city made of cities–where super-arcologies stand next to each other, rank upon rank, stretching to the horizon. I wanted an effect which was akin to the troubling urban art of George Grosz–with all of the maddened machine-people and transgenic organisms spilling out of the architecture like confetti and tainted candy pouring out of a psychedelic piñata.
The fun of painting like Grosz is creating a river of chaotic heterogeneous lunatics! But the peril of creating such an artwork is getting lost in a world of visual clutter (which is a less-flattering way of describing a river of chaotic heterogeneous lunatics). With this work I certainly experienced the fun…but I also fell prey to the peril. Even so, this glowing drawing captures some of the effect of looking into a bewilderingly complicated social ecosystem.
The dancing, crawling, and flying robots running from dome to dome in a world of strange machines may not be exactly what the future holds…but they inspire us to think about where we are going (and we need to think about that a lot harder). Maybe I need to get my fluorescent ink back out and paint some more fantastical cities glowing in the purple twilight of ages we will never get to see.
Congratulations to NASA for orchestrating the first flight of an aircraft on another world! Today, early in the morning (in East Coast Time, here on Earth) NASA’s miniature robotic helicopter “Ingenuity” rose three meters (ten feet) into the thin Martian air (the pressure of the Martian atmosphere is a mere 1% of what we experience here at sea level on Earth, so there was not a lot of air beneath those rotors). I will leave it to professional news sites (or NASA’s own site) to describe the exact parameters of the feat, but I would like to take a moment to look at the little aircraft as though we were Martians ourselves. One of the things which I find funny about our amazing unmanned space missions is how alien our Earth technology looks on alien worlds. The most egregious example of this effect was the flying-saucer-looking Huygens probe which landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. That particular craft combined a flying-saucer aesthetic with steampunk design such that it would look perfectly in place in a Jules Verne novel or if little green men had stopped by to watch the Monitor versus Merrimack battle.
However other probes of other worlds have also looked uncannily like pulp fiction from the 1950s as well (the hopping robots of Hayabusa2 leap into mind as does Messenger on its kamikaze final run into the surface of Mercury). Anyway, Ingenuity partakes of this tradition in that its minimalist design and utilitarian construction of make it look like an alien mosquito. Perhaps if the picture at the top of the post does not show what I mean, this picture taken by Ingenuity of its own shadow will explain better.
Doesn’t that look like a lander sent by waterbug people or by the Great Gazoo’s race? It makes you stop and take a second look at humankind as though you didn’t know us (an exercise which proves both inspirational and dreadful). Perhaps that sort of perspective shift is one of the purposes of our offworld explorations too…
More information has come in concerning last week’s fatal incident involving an autonomous car and it is not good. That robot car just straight up murdered the poor woman walking her bike across the road: it didn’t even try to stop. The human “back-up driver” onboard was also utterly useless (although this might actually be a pretty accurate representation of how people will be once they get in one of these things and start watching Netflix or writing opinionated blog posts or whatever).
Now Uber is far from my favorite company. I dislike their creepy name (with its third Reich overtones) and their extraction-based business plan of squeezing drivers/franchisees as hard as possible while avoiding all meaningful oversight and liability. They perfectly exemplify the MBA’s “heads I win-tails you lose” mentality and it doesn’t surprise me that they have botched things so badly right out of the gate. Additionally, the homicidal actions of their sloppy robot have made it harder to ignore the voices questioning what sort of autonomous future we want for the roads. So maybe it is a good time now to heed those voices and brainstorm about the things we want from autonomous automobiles! Here are some of my requests to the powers that be, just jotted down as loose notes:
1) Non-monopolistic: We need more than one or two big companies making these transportation units, or we are going to all be held hostage by their cartel. The big company will make the decisions about national (or international) transportation priorities and the rest of us will all be dragged along for the ride (as it were). We already had this model in the middle of the 20th century when automobile companies ruthlessly dominated infrastructure/land-use planning and suppressed other modes of transportation or city planning. It worked barely…for our huge growing country, but those days are gone and now we need…
2) Trains trains trains: America has one of the finest freight rail networks in the world, but our light/passenger rail is terrible. China has leapfrogged us completely. In the Middle Kingdom, you can make a trip from Beijing to Shanghai (a little farther than New York to Chicago) on a high speed train in a bit more than 4 hours. During peak hours the trains run every 5 minutes and cost about 80 dollars.
3) Ability to recognize things: An idea which has come up is that robot cars won’t be able to recognize humans with lidar/radar/sonar and suchlike electronic sensors alone. Pedestrians and bicyclists will need to wear beacons to avoid death by Uber (domestic animals and wildlife will obviously be out of luck). This is unacceptable! Back to the drawing board, tech guys—your cars will have to do better than this
4) We need these cars to be tamper-proof. If hot-rod teenagers can hack the things and make them go 300 miles an hour over washed out bridges, then the technology will not be sufficient to keep riders safe from tampering or to keep car companies safe from litigation, or to keep the roads safe at all.
Cars are all made in some robotic factory anyway—the price comes from setting up the automated equipment. This means that there is not much price difference between making a super luxury car and an ultra-economy model (they are both twisted into shape from the same steel and wires). The fact that the luxury car costs 4 or 5 times as much as the hatchback is because some MBA guy decided people would pay that much more for increased status.
One of the biggest problems with our roads are the extent to which they reflect status. Somebody driving an expensive car often takes liberties and chances with other people’s lives which make it apparent that they really think they are worth many times more than the underclass nobodies they are crushing. Will robot cars reflect this dynamic? Traditional car companies must be desperate for such an outcome (they make a lot of money with luxury models), yet I hope we have a more egalitarian result. If the future consists of giant robot tank/limousines going 200 miles per hours with carte blanche to knock anyone off the road, we might as well keep the dangerous broken system we have.
I have been enthusiastic about robot cars and I continue to believe they offer astonishing new realms of freedom, leisure, and opportunity for all. I can move to the country! Grandma can go shopping whenever she wants! But after looking at the inhuman mess which big companies have made out of the energy industry, the medical industry (shudder), the aviation industry, or the telecom industry, it seems like corporations might need some guidance from the rest of us.
RIP to the first victim of an autonomous car. Details are still coming in, but it seems like an Uber robot SUV being tested in Tempe, Arizona killed a woman who was walking her bicycle. Well, I guess technically some rich guy was already killed while incorrectly operating his semi-autonomous Tesla, however today’s accident feels more real to me and, judging by headlines, to everyone else as well.
I used to be deeply in love with the idea of cars. They represented power, freedom, and status…until I tried to drive one and realized A) I am terrible at it; and B) it is profoundly easy to hurt or kill someone with a car. American society is designed to normalize this in all sorts of ways… to such an extent that most people don’t even notice our rising traffic fatality statistics. In Holland, if you kill somebody with a car, no matter what the circumstances, it is a real problem, but in America, even if you pretty much straight-up murder somebody through volition or grotesque incompetence, the police will come and rationalize a way it was the bicyclist’s or pedestrian’s fault and give you a hug and a root beer sticker. (If you kill more than six people you get a free foot-long hero sandwich!)
The deep indifference of the authorities is born out by the numbers: in 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the United States. If 40,000 people died in a war or by gun violence, society would be up in arms (so to speak) and we would be having a national conversation about how to improve things (editor’s note: in 2016, 38,000 Americans were killed by guns. What sort of dark carnival are we running over here?).
America is too spacious for us to ever be free of automated carriages. I live in New York because, despite the cars, I can bicycle here (barely) and because there is a 24-hour subway (also barely…thanks a lot, Cuomo). But beyond the coral-reef lifestyle of America’s one worthwhile city there is too much distance to cover. Even if we were all Lance Armstrong (and we’re really not) we would still need motors to get around.
We have decided not to invest in effective national mass transit. Likewise, we are not redesigning roads in ways which have been proven to make them safer in Europe and Japan (safer for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists alike). Our only hope of diminishing the carnage and damage wrought by our 1950s/60s era national transportation system is effective robot cars. This won’t work if we take the lamentable current state of transportation as something to aspire to.
So, although today’s headline was scary and terrible, we need to keep looking at the bigger picture. We are fixated on the person tragically killed by a robot car because it is novel and garners attention (look, here I am writing about it too), but the real headline should be the hundred people who were killed in the United States today by normal human drivers. Of course, that is the same story every day so nobody remarks upon it. So Uber (and Google, and Tesla), get your act together. Break down the data and figure out what went wrong and fix it. Why didn’t your car stop (they are supposed to have faster reflexes than any person)? Also, why was the “car” a giant hulking tank to begin with? What is wrong with robot cars that are adorable little soft alien bug cars, like the Japanese are working on?
Robot cars are coming and I believe they will be glorious, but a lot more work is needed…and more imagination and creativity are needed too. So let’s slow down for a moment, but then speed up. Think of the one person killed, but think of the hundred too.
M-type asteroids are high albedo (i.e shiny) asteroids made partially or mostly of metal. Of all of M-type asteroids currently known in the solar system, 16 Psyche is the most massive. It is a hunk of iron and nickel (and other heavy metals?) which has a diameter of 250 kilometers. Psyche orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter and is believed to be the exposed core of a planet approximately the size of Mars which was obliterated by a catastrophic impact. The asteroid is named after the intrepid mortal who found love and ultimately apotheosis in an “Eyes Wide Shut” type Greek myth of great suspense, horror, and beauty.
Are you curious to know more about 16 Psyche based on this description? I certainly hope you are, because NASA has just announced future missions for the 2020s and 16 Psyche is on the list. As currently conceived, the Psyche exploration mission will send a robot probe powered by solar electric propulsion out to the obliterated core to examine the planetoid. The probe will be equipped with a magnetometer and a gamma-ray spectrometer to find out more about the composition and history of the enigmatic relic.
Of course other long term aspects of the mission are of interest as well. Although we have not yet mastered nuclear fusion, safe comprehensive control of such boundless energy is probably only 20 years or so away [winky icon]. What if humankind had sophisticated manufacturing robots and near infinite energy? In such circumstances 8 million cubic kilometers of steel might come in very handy indeed. So far the good news keeps rolling in for 2017. This Psyche mission can’t happen fast enough for my taste.
Last week I blogged about flatfish. These fascinating benthic predators can be found in oceans worldwide…however my interest in the asymmetric masters of blending in transcends pure ichthyology. I have been busy drawing a series of intricate pen and ink drawings of flatfish for a project. I will show you some of these large drawings one of these days, but I have also been drawing a series of small humorous and surreal flatfish in spare moments…during the commute or lunch break. I am putting these whimsical, comical, and absurd flounders in brightly colored frames for fun.
Here is some of the series:
This flounder seems to have an industrial refinery in Kazakhstan on his belly. In accordance with his landlocked status, strange mythical beasts of Central Asia gambol in the twilight skies around him.
This flounder has Greco-Roman objects around him. The chameleon above his back reminds the viewer of the true nature of flatfish. The strange quadripeds on his back betoken a different age of agrarian labor.
This flounder is at home in the ocean (where he is joined by apparitions and animals which look curiously like molecules or primordial forces. Indeed, Gauss’ Law for electrical fields reminds us of the subtle but ineluctable flux which pervades interactions at all levels.
I have been trying to garner greater commercial interest in flatfish-themed art, and what is of greater commercial interest (and general prurient interest) than pop-superstar Miley Cyrus? The famous singer coos atop a stolid turbot in the midst of an exotic and sensuous garden. A musically literate person can play the musical phrase above the singer for a true multimedia experience. Miley’s cowgirl footwear hint at the true nature of this artwork.
Trailing streamers of ragged blue plasma, a wild eyed flatfish covered in squirming parasites rides a beam of yellow energy over an elongated pink woodchuck ghost. What could be more straightforward?
A radiant orange flounder with the sun in his belly soars above some sort of pumping station or acetylene factory. In the sky above him, an overly eager gundam has fired an air-to-air missile at an endangered crane. Oh no! What will happen next?
A long faced flounder made of stitched together toruses looks down upon a futuristic city of arcologies and bioengineered structures.
Mechanical innovation and the aristocratic southern lifestyle begin to seem increasingly at odds. Predatory animals stock the riverine boundaries. A flying machine whirrs through the heavens.
The flounder at the top of the post–which features fanciful animals gathering around an elegant flounder with a brittle star on its belly is my personal favorite since I drew it with a dip pen–a style of drawing which generally results in the total destruction of the piece with the final stroke of the pen (as a huge blot of ink falls out), however in this rare case that did not happen so you can see some of the linear elegance of the medium. All of these flatfish are created with ink and (generally) colored pencil, by yours truly Wayne Ferrebee in this year 2016 AD. I’ll put up the second batch next week. Thanks for looking and kindly leave any comments!
Happy (belated) Fourth of July! While everyone was out barbecuing and amusing themselves with colorful novelty explosions, there was big news in space exploration: NASA’s Juno probe, which launched from Earth five years ago, has finally reached the gas giant planet and entered orbit. The robot spacecraft, which is about the size of a basketball court, is now dancing nimbly amongst the system of moons and rings and radiation belts around the giant world.
The probe is a remarkable spacecraft. It traveled 2.7 billion kilometers (1.7 billion miles) to reach the exact orbit which NASA planned for it. The secret behind its astonishing precision (even when traveling at 165,000 mph) is the autonomy of its sophisticated navigational computer. Mission controllers do not have to radio the probe from half-way across the solar system (which would take minutes—or longer. Instead the probe navigates itself. The ship computer is shielded beneath a titanium vault to keep radiation from frying its clever electronic brain.
Oh man!
Among the planets, Jupiter is a sort of greedy eldest child. Scientists who study planetary formation believe that the gas giant formed first of all the planets and it took the lion’s share of available matter left over from the formation of the sun. Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets in our solar system put together: indeed, it is three hundred and eighteen times more massive than Earth. Yet we know shockingly little about this bruiser. Very basic questions about Jupiter remain unanswered. For example we still do not know whether the planet has a rocky core beneath its vast colorful atmosphere.
As we learn more about exoplanets which orbit other stars, questions about the formation of solar systems have become more numerous. Astronomers have been particularly perplexed by the number of “hot Jupiters,” giant gas planets which are extremely close to their stars. Was Jupiter such a world at some point before moving to its current location, or is it a huge freak? We simply do not know. Scientists would also like to know more about the unimaginably vast cloudscapes of Jupiter. What dynamics move these huge bands of pressurized gas?
As Jupiter formed, it was bombarded by strange radiation. The depths of Jupiter’s storms must still feature giant lightning strikes. This sort of treatment can cause hydrocarbons and ammonia to form amino acids. Maybe life has a Jovian origin. Maybe Jupiter still has life floating around like aerial zooplankton. Again, we just don’t know much about the giant world…
Did anybody see that amazing episode of “Cosmos”?
However, now that Juno has arrived we can start to answer some of these questions. The probe will go through various start-up and test sequences until Oct. 19 when it moves to a 14-day orbit of the planet and really starts scrutinizing our giant neighbor.
Oh, one more thing—NASA has been getting better at PR to make space more accessible and “fun” for us laypeople following at home (as witnessed by the July 4th arrival). Juno also has a crew of three Lego astronauts: Galileo, Jupiter, and Juno herself. This leads me to write about Juno herself, for she is a terrifying figure among the gods. More about her tomorrow!
A quick post today from the bottom of the ocean where this unknown octopus species was just found by an unmanned robot probe. The endearing cephalopod was photographed by Deep Discoverer, a robot submarine which launches from the NOAA Ship “Okeanos Explorer” a federally funded research vessel. Since 2008, the Okeanos Explorer has been travelling the world’s oceans exploring and mapping unknown parts of the underwater world. The octopus was photographed on a barren ledge of rock 4,290 meters beneath the surface (just off the northeast coast of Hawaii). The octopus appears to have a complete lack of chromatophores—special pigment-containing cells which cephalopods manipulate in order to change colors—so it appears ghostly and transparent. Here is hoping we learn more about this amazing underwater creature!
The North Pole of Enceladus during the October 30th, 2015 Cassini Flyby (NASA/ESA/ASI)
Since 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn. The robot probe (a joint effort of NASA, ESA, and the Italian space agency) received the most press when it launched a flying saucer lander onto Saturn’s planet-like moon Titan, but it is still out there doing amazing work. Last week, while I was busy writing about Halloween themes, the probe made its closest pass yet to Saturn’s ice moon, Enceladus. Enceladus is only 500 kilometers in diameter and it is coated in ice, but it is of great interest to scientists because ice plumes venting from the moon’s south pole seem to indicate a large polar subsurface ocean of liquid water. Warmed above freezing by tidal flux, this ocean beneath the ice probably has a thickness of around 10 km.
View of Enceladus’ south pole geyser, backlit by Saturn
On October 30th, Cassini flew by the icy moon at the dangerously close distance of 30 kilometers (18.6 miles). The probe was directly above the south pole of Enceladus and it collected a little flake of ice to analyze (which strikes me as incredibly amazing and beautiful). It will take some time for the ship’s devices to assay the drop of water from an alien ocean, but Cassini also snapped some photos which we already have. These are taken from point blank range above the south pole. The ocean is down there beneath the scratches and scars. What is the nature of this icy ocean? How long has it been there? Could it possibly harbor life?
A ghastly Crown-of-Thorns Starfish denuding a coral reef
Today’s post is simultaneously inspiring and hopeful and terrifying. Marine researchers have long been worried about the crown-of-thorns starfish, a monstrous invasive invertebrate which eats coral, doing irreparable damage to the Great Barrier Reef (the world’s largest coral reef). Human divers have proven ineffective at stemming the onslaught, so conservationists have teamed up with mad scientists to build COTSBOT—an autonomous killing robot submarine which will haunt the reef like a bright yellow uboat/shark. The COTSBOT will locate and identify crown-of-thorns starfish with robot eyes and then jet over and deliver a lethal injection to the vile invertebrates. The injectable solution is uniquely poisonous to starfish so any goddamn MFAs doing starfish cosplay projects on the reef do not necessarily need to worry about more than being jabbed and pumped full of weird chemicals by a nightmarish (albeit comic) undersea robot.
COTSBOT (image from Queensland University of Technology)
COTSBOT (which I should have mentioned stands for “Crown-OF-Thorns Starfish Robot”) is going to debut in Moreton Bay by Brisbane, a starfish free location where the operators can refine its navigation systems. If all goes well it will then move on the Great Barrier Reef itself. The robot (or fleets thereof) will scour an area of the reef killing, Then human divers will sweep in afterwards to mop up any hardened survivors. I am extremely impressed at how quickly science managed to make my futuristic ocean sketch come true. I am also struck with admiration at this high-cost high tech salvation for one of Earth’s most diverse and imperiled ecosystems. Take that, evil starfish! You have messed with a reef protected by the fell hand of man. The alarmist in me can’t help but notice that this is like the first 15 minutes of a horror movie, but, presumably if COTSBOT becomes sentient and decides to protect the reef from ALL dangerous invasive animals we can still pull the plug. I’m also a bit sorry that humankind has so injured the Giant Triton–nature’s COTSBOT–that the lovely snail can not do the job.
ferrebeekeeper 