TED Thursday: Robots

It's Thursday and that means Robots, this time out.

For a change of pace, I'm only posting two specific talks from the TED archives.  But I'm also tossing in a link to the New York Times which talks about Metropolis, one of my favorite movies.  The folks at Kino are releasing a newly restored version of this classic that now has another 25 minutes of lost or forgotten footage replaced.  You can read about Kuchimbra and her femdrones after the TED talk stuff, for a Riskail version of Maria.

And who could forget that scientific rascal Doctor Rotwang, now there's an Insane Genius that'd be right at home in Riskail.  He reminds me of the post-singularity sentiovector cultists and those tinkerers who keep trying to wake up any and everything, like a toaster ever needed self-doubt to make its existence more fulfilling...Now that's some serious evocation via techno-alchemy.  Radionics, weird cheistry, Poe-style galvanics, Frankensteinian and Faustian delving into things Man Was Not Meant To Know, brute-force German Prometheanism at it's finest and most mystical while delivering a ton of ritualized scientific-looking eye-candy as well.  It's a great scene, timeless and a wonderful counterpart to the more masculine Golem.  You can watch the legal trailer for Metropolis here.  It's not the scene I was referring to, but the other video-clip at Youtube got yanked for copyright violation.  Not so cool.  Oh well.

Dennis Hong talks about Seven Species of Robot that have already been developed.  Note, this is about stuff that has already been built and is out there in the world, not science fiction whining about what might happen someday -- this is a sample of what we already actually have on-hand.  Off the shelf.

Robert Full talks about biomimicry and designing robots with springy legs as well as how geckos really manage to cling to surfaces.  Do a search on Robert Full and you'll have your hands full of all sorts of stuff on engineering, evolution, designing robot limbs based on how animals actually function, and more.  There's a lot of stuff there, and it's very interesting to me, just in terms of what it implies for the aesthetics of robot design.  As much as I admire Maria of Metrolpolis as a timeless and elegant design, it's an extravagantly over-engineered prop to the human ego and many (most?) robots may very well take completely other forms.  Unless laws, regulations or cultural conventions intrude on the process.  All very good fodder for Riskail.

Spoiler: Geckos are manipulating nano-scale Van der Waals forces to cling to surfaces.  They beat humans to the development of nanotechnology by millions of years.  No wonder they own the largest car insurance company, uh, they are so successful in catching bugs to eat.  Who knew they were so high-tech?  I like geckos.  Like my friend Alex has said in the past; they have an ugliness that is primordial.

Robots are cool.  I will have more for you on robots in Riskail shortly.

While you're digesting the ideas in those two TED talks, let's get back to Riskail, shall we?

Kuchimbra is a beautiful, charismatic and poisonous demogogue who came to Riskail from across the Shale Waste, ostensively via some relict and abandoned gate out amidst the vacuum-choked craters beyond the Etched Plateau.  At least that is her story and the records tend to back it up somewhat.  But the more anyone looks into this woman's past, the more hazy, murky and indistinct it all becomes.

Since she appeared, a homeless waif cast adrift and all alone in the city of tiers -- Devukarsha -- Kuchimbra has managed to insinuate herself into the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.  She proved to be quite precocious and quick to learn any and everything that she could about the inner workings of things, how the infrastructure functioned, the various industries relegated to the grottoes and caverns beneath the city, how it all worked.  The grimy indentured-mechanics and barbarian industrialists who worked on the all but forgotten machines far below the world's crust told her their tales, shared with her their troubles and tribulations and came to confide in her as they served out their sentences within the troglodytic penal enclaves.  She learned the crude argot of the fungispawn hominids who illegally aided and abetted the indentured-mechanics in their ritualized work-routines and in their wild bacchic parties held off-premises and away from the prying eyes of the underseers and their rolling-orb drones.

Kuchimbra worked alongside the mechanics, shared their meager rations and danced for them, comforted them and all but became one of them.  She came ot hold a special place amongst them.  They revered her.  Some of the fungispawn worshipped her.  A few considered her a Cthonic-Madonna, others regarded her as a houri-saint.  In time the more self-aware drones and robots began to cluster about the perimeter of Kuchimbra's performances.  People noticed.  Whenever there was a dispute or a feud was about to break out, Kuchimbra stepped in and restored the peace, settled the matter wisely, justly, fairly and with good humor.  She made the drudgery and toil almost bearable and patiently, like a drizzle of morphine in an intravenous tap she sowed seeds of unity and solidarity even as she sparked considerations of justice, fairness and their dismal fate as defacto slaves to the great machines.  No one ever suspected that hse herself was a machine.  An autonomous robot.  One of the autoi.

Never once did Kuchimbra advocate violence.  Not a soul would ever blame her for fomenting dissent as she never directly said a thing against the underseers, nor the Treaty of Langzalle which most of the indentured-mechanics could thank for their sentences to the machine grottoes.  Always and ever Kuchimbra smiled sweetly and offered a soft hand, a warm embrace, a kind word and all the while the underclasses around her simmered, seethed and became increasingly upset at their situation.  The real reason for their indenturement -- to repay their debt to society for the ecological degradation and eventual destruction of their world -- was forgotten and brushed aside as just so much rhetoric and lies.  Few amongst them were able to remember their old world as anything but a children's story and a bitter myth of something lost long ago and that they would never have again.  Anger and resentment boiled in their agitated minds.  They lived in terrible conditions, even though those same conditions were what their ancestors had bred and shaped and forced them to adapt to long ago and far away.  They ranted and they raved and they blamed the underseers and the fatcats and the upworld aristocrats for all their perceived ills and in time the doctrines of revolution blossomed forth from the mouths of babes and a host of proscribed viruxes and feral AI slithered through the crowded throngs like so many spirits at a gathering of pentecostal voodooists.

Kuchimbra laughed and smiled and danced and all the while the social structure of the underclasses crumbled and caved and collapsed until at last she was the one shining light in the midst of the imending wreckage, the sacred maiden who spoke the soft words of goodness that sparked rebellion in the deep, dark recesses beneath the city.

As she ascended to her position of absolute authority amongst the underclasses of the machine grottoes and the fungispawn zealots who worshipped her with frenzied dances that mimicked her early days amongst the miners and sappers, pipe-layers and repair-teams.  Psychoactive sporebrews were developed in homage to her little songs and Kuchimbra's every word became a chant that reinforced her dominance even as it set terrible things into motion.  But never directly.  Kuchimbra never, ever acted in any way but to show kindness, generostiy and virtue.  She was unimpeachable, impeccable and immaculate in the midst of filth and degradation that quickly became intolerable to those actually adapted to it.  The emotional manipulation was staggering and a work of sheerest foulest genius beyond anything seen since mad old Hitler and it made the ancient tyrant look pathetic in comparison.

Paranoia was cultivated amongst the followers of Kuchimbra and all of their own volition the indentured-mechanics and others gathered in secret and began a special project that they thought was unknown to her.  They collected pieces and parts from all over the machine grottoes and even traded with some of the peripheral gangs of roachers and others for what they needed and somehow, despite the odds against them, they succeeded in manufacturing a clandestine manufactory far away from the designated areas to which they were supposedly confined.

Then the day finally arrived, the manufactory was online and the first femdrone created in Kuchimbra's image was ready to receive her imprint.  Soon there were hundreds of the things, all acting as a direct replica of the Pale Lady of the Underworld, the delicate dancer who sparked an uprising unlike any ever seen before.  Class warfare was coming to Devukarsha and Polite Society would soon feel the sting of ruinous civil war and it would all be brought about by a little girl who was kind and wonderful and never, ever said even so much as a single disparaging word.  The zealots began by setting fire to the underseer's offices.  It escalated quickly from there.

It was months until the fighting was curtailed, having had the air cut off from their caverns took the fight out of most of the rebels and flooding took care of the rest.  They found hundreds of defunct Kuchimbra-shells, femdrones and surrogate forms, but never the primary instance, never the one that was Kuchimbra herself.  They likely never will, now that she has been transfigured as a cultural icon amongst the underclasses, the sweet Cthonic-Madonna of Bitter Tears.

TED Thursday: A More Immersive Reality

"Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality."

Jane McGonigal

 
From McGonigal's recent talk at TED titled

'Gaming can make a better world'

“There is an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money, in online worlds. And he says, 'We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.' And he's an economist. So, he's rational. And he says ... (Laughter) Not like me -- I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says, that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life. They get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So, he says for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world more like a game.”

“We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers, blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism, and the desire for epic meaning.”

“I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. And that's my hope that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure, that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So, I say let the world-changing games begin.”

***
 
Will Wright makes toys that make worlds

“Chris was kind of wondering what kind of gods that the players would become. Because if you think about it, you know, you're going to have 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds, whatever, flying around this universe. And they might be a nurturing god. They, you know, might be boot-strapping life on planets, trying to terra-form and kind of spread civilization. You might be a vengeful god and going out and conquesting, because you actually can do that, you can go in and attack other intelligent races. You might be a networking god, kind of building alliances, which you can also do in the game, or just curious, going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can.”

“But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there's one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it's that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now is the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100 years, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, you know, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we're doing now, what it's going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing, probably, to help the world. And so that's why I think, personally, that toys can change the world.”

***
 
As Real As Your Life, from David Perry's talk on videogames
 
***
 
Using toys and games to teach philosophical concepts and to literally change the world from the ground up via gaming are both fairly radical notions.  I included the short film on videogame addiction in the mix as it relates to both of the previous talks rather nicely, or so I thought.
 
Games are integral to Surrealism and they are intrinsic to the underlying cultures of Riskail, including the virts and the isocolonials who have withdrawn into their fortified arcologies to totally immerse themselves in their games and constructs, having no further use for what once passed for consensual reality.  Polite Society recognizes the utility of various forms of gambling and duelling as means of both maintaining the peace and providing an outlet for competition and the regulation of opinion.  In that respect things are a bit more medieval than expected.  You literally have to back-up your opinions with force of arms, not just in academia, but in society as a whole.  In Academia things are less straight-forward and there are far more opportunities for ambushes, assassination attempts and worse.  There may be honor amongst thieves, but precious little amongst the grad students jockeying for a shot at their mentors and their position within the hierarchy.
 
The practice of utilizing ritualized games distributed via social networks to solve large-scale problems, plan macro-scale projects, or to wage distributed warfare against various Outside Interests, is nothing new to Riskail.  Ever since the Gamers of Jontolon won their bloodless war of independence without firing so much as a single shot, gaming has been an accepted, proven and honored component of the Rituals and Codes of Civilization.  Hives, nodes and complexes of gamers who've eschewed meatforms and colonized various dataspheric regions enmasse are recognized as equivalent to many similar-sized city-states.  Some of these nodes have become incredibly influential, such as the Estarza Goldrim who are engaged in the macroscale terraforming of worlds along the periphery of those accessed by the primary gate-networks or the Ielzuud Collekt, an eccentric collective that is obsessed with mega-engineering of system-scale construct-artforms in orbit around obscure stars outside the bounds of the Known Worlds.  Another group of disembodied gamers occupy the so-called Green Level from which they disperse an inconceivable array of biomorphisms across the void in their efforts to foment panspermia, not as a past theory, but as a present practice.  Others are less grandiose either in scale or efforts, but they are forces to be reckoned with nonetheless.
 
Another gamerphorm are the Oracles, (see illo above) massive and often impassive sculpted material-form entities that act as avatars for gamer-collectives or open-ended contributor networks that listen in to supplicants and plaintiffs seeking solutions to various problems which they then voluntarily take on, wrestle with, and either solve or address in their own ways.  Oracles wander across the settled regions of Known Worlds, some travel widely, others remain mostly within one urban district.  All of them are dedicated composite entities that originally had no real personality apart from the vestiges and aspects left-behind by those who chose to work through them from the dataside.  Over time they have become unique individuals in their own right, some of whom have adopted distinct names for themselves, and a few who have developed their own processing capabilities apart and aside from those of the virts and softborn who still collaborate with them, and who are now sometimes their petitioners as well.
 
Games embody humanity's attempts at unravelling the dynamics of chance or expressing and exploring the interplay of probability, or so say the gamblemancers who treat everything in their immediate experience as a sacred game of chance played between them and the universe.  As far as sects go, they are minor and relatively obscure, considered mostly harmless, and uncommon enough that no registered study has been undertaken by any reputable academic.
 
The Casinos of Riskail are notorious for offering their patrons a chance to participate in any game they care to mention.  The Bosses take this pledge to heart like a mantra seared across the mechanism that passes for their hearts and they go to extreme lengths to accomodate the whims and wishes of their patrons irregardless of ethics, morality, legalities or anything else.  As long as the price is right, they'll set things up, no questions asked.  There are no judges in the Casinos, apart from those who might be amongst the other players in the crowd, and they're none too eager to be identified.  Morality is best left at the door, or so goes the old saying attributed to Parmedreon, one of the last known aspects of the Embodied Principle of Honesty.  Of course Parmedreon was murdered in an alley by assailant or assailants unknown and so far unapprehended.  It's only been three hundred years, give or take a decade.
 
The Arenas are directly tied into the Casinos, and the gladiatorial pens are Casino property, which makes them morally autonomous as excluded sovreign territories that are technically no longer part of Polite Society, despite all appearances to the contrary.  The Casinos are a culture unto themselves, one that operates along opaque and byzantine rules known only unto itself and those who gain admission to the virtulects, philosatars or other dataside communities that have elected to segregate themselves behind the black voidwalls of the Casinos' residential datasperes where they engage in games so far removed from anything that the occupants of meatspace can even conceive that it is literally unspeakable, unthinkable and unimaginable.  Even the AI require dedicated filters to interface with the Casinos.
 
But not all gamers in Riskail are disembodied or virts.  There are numerous groups who sponsor competitors who settle new worlds, explore ancient ruins, develop trade routes, just about any activity that results in some sort of economic or social gain for some group out there has its own sponsors, supporters and circuit of competitions, many of which are fed into the datasphere and voyeuristically enjoyed by uncountable numbers of virtual spectators for all time to come.  Any and every form of adventure is a commercial commodity, one that can make more money for a roving band of mercenaries than fighting ever could.
 
There are also the games of the sorcerers which they play at their various salons, museum-gatherings, gallery-showings, and other rendezvous-style events.  New spells are demonstrated prior to being released into the Open Source Databases and competitions are held where specific old spells are redesigned or modified and the results of each competitor's efforts are compared and voted on by a jury of their peers.  Contests are held that play off of the old idea of cut-ups, one-in-the-other or the exquisite corpse games of old.  Only with real scrolls, actual objects and sometimes fresh corpses.  Homunculi-gladiators face-off in clandestine combats outside the Casinos, at least until the Bosses find out and move to bring the fights under house sanction and they get their cut, one way or another.  The sponsored contests between competing sorcerers and biomantists, genartists and scylloi-traditionalists are some of the most highly anticipated, violently fought and lucrative events that the Bosses have found and they have made great efforts to recruit and sponsor more and more up-and-coming competitors, often allowing dangerous individuals from outside the established cliques, cadres or colleges to come and try their luck in the arenas.  People love an underdog.  And the media surrounding these competitors serves as the fodder for countless telenovelas, psychodramas and other popular forms of mass entertainment.
 
Each of the Grand Houses of Riskail maintains a pool of competitors who represent them in the various games, both sacred and profane, that take place throughout the year.  Sometimes the Houses use the competitions to settle old disputes, other times it's a way to avoid ruinous internecine wars.  Some of the newer Houses have disdained to compete and lost their credibility or found themselves besieged by rioters who demanded that they field a competitor for one of the Four Great Games which have been a tradition in Riskail for over a thousand years.
 
The Great Games combine the Olympics with a planetary-scale circus and what amounts to a small-scale ritualized war within a contained space that is set-off from the rest of the world just for the Games and every gladiator, combat-thespian, cutter-clown, wrestler and extremiac in the near vicinty of Riskail participates.  It's a good way to make a killing, amongst other things.  It's certainly immersive.

TED Thursday: Earthday Thoughts

It's Thursday and it's Earthday as well.  So I've pulled three interesting ideas from TED, again, to share with you.  If this works out, I think that I'll start doing 3 From TED Thursdays as a feature.  Depending on feed-back.  If you find this interesting or useful, let me know.

"Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power -- economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed."

&

“I believe we can accomplish great and profitable things within a new conceptual framework—one that values our legacy, honors diversity, and feeds ecosystems and societies . . . It is time for designs that are creative, abundant, prosperous, and intelligent from the start.”

William McDonough on cradle-to-cradle design.
t
***

"...It seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will."

Alex Steffen on Worldchanging and Sustainability.

***

"All buildings today have something in common. They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All of this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it."
&
"Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment, may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one."

Rachel Armstrong on Architecture That Repairs Itself, using metabolic materials such as protocells.
You can also find her novel The Gray's Anatomy at Amazon.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm considering it.***

Excellent stuff.  Most of this would have been mind-blowing science fiction just a few years ago.  Now it's out in the world, being applied and getting deployed and developed for real.  Cities should not only be places where people live, but ought to be alive themselves...or at least there is every indication that there will be cities that develop into living meta-organisms.  Maybe they'll develop a personality unto themselves.  Consider the implication of a sort of reverse-anthropomorphism; instead of projecting human values/traits onto inanimate structures, we'll be experiencing these structure's traits and values in their own right.  Will we get along or will there be conflicts between living cities and their inhabitants?  Will cities develop sentience?  Should they?  Who would oppose such a thing, and who would push for it to happen against all opposition?  What will a truly New City be like?

Riskail is a mostly desolate world, pock-marked and heavily cratered, where life huddles in the deep ravines and vast chasms left in the wake of a series of massively destructive geologic events that included the eruption of a super-volcano that was triggered by the impact of a cometary core that might have been a deliberate act.  The Great Rift is home to several independent city-states, the largest and most prosperous is Devukarsha, the so-called City of Tiers.  Devukarsha is a thriving, hustling, bustling megapolis that extends outwards across numerous worlds, planes and other spaces and even certain prescribed parallel timelines, as do almost all great cities that arise from the deep Infrastructure that propagates and maintains the various over-lapping and inter-penetrating/interconnected gate networks such as the Twelve Pylon Gates that pour forth the waters of twelve distant worlds, each filling a gargantuan harbor-basin that in turn flows into the cascading torrent of the staggered waterfall that becomes the very headwaters of the River Senube which flows outwards into an estuary-zone where dozens of smaller, lesser and minor gates connect with various tributary worlds, most of which are virgin wildernesses or hellish wastelands.  Out past the Lacework Atolls and the floating wharves, in the deeper waters closer to the equator, the Sea Gates blend together the atmospheres and hydrospheres of countless worlds into a unified meta-ecology that zeppelins, steamers & sailing ships, cargo-carrying macro-barges and flocks of migratory birds all use to travel from world to world to world as they spiral around and around.  Then there are the Mugallo Arches that form an ever-expanding tesseractive labyrinth of overlapping worlds that reaches outwards unto entirely new galaxies and the Obelisk Gates previously detailed, just to name two more such networks.  The city is huge, vast; it contains multitudes on myriad levels both figuratively and literally.

"Devukarsha squats provocatively over the River Senube and its attendant canals as it welcomes all the world to come unto it, enter it, and become infected by it like some fat, overly-decorated whore from one of the impromptu sailor's markets down along the waterfront."

The Poet-Martyr Vu-Chong

Twelve Primary Tiers have been elegantly sculpted out of the overlapping layers of regolith and fractured bedrock left in the wake of the cosmic violence that shaped Riskail.  Each Tier is an ecology unto itself, yet they all interact as part of a greater whole.  The oghmic-tribes wander the old growth forests cultivated deep within various subsidiary canyons while tall cernun, sleek hourynn and luminous dryanni tend to the forty-thousand different species of trees that grow down the jumbled and tumbled sides of their canyon-preserves to form copses and woodlands extending across and over and through the main precincts of the main cluster of the megapolis into the estuarial parks and down to the shores of the central sea itself.  Green parklands, botanical gardens, herbariums, mycodomes, and jewel-like hothouses in a multitude of designs and geometrical shapes criss-cross the entire expanse of the city-state.  Trails extend outwards from the very heart of the most central urban districts to the farthest agrifields, freeholds, isogardens and the wilderness regions beyond.  On foot, by bike or tram, however one chooses, the most crowded sections of the city are less than ten minutes away from the howling wilderness, and that is without resorting to the gates or the more rapid forms of mass transit that flow seamlessly beneath the skin of the city.  Self-pedalling rikshaws prowl the lower esplanades looking for passengers, while translucent streetcars connect a series of platforms that extend from the waterfront to the Second Tier.  Like electricity, fresh water, clean air or greenspaces, public transport is just another amenity that has assumed the ubiquity of a civic-right.  It's expected.  Taken for granted.

Utopia?  Hardly.  Beautiful, certainly.  It should be; it was designed to be beautiful.  Many of the people who live within the city were likewise designed to fulfill their roles or obligations to Society as well.  But the designers, the care-taking machines, the self-perpetuating Infrastructure and all the other features, functions and processes intrinsic and endemic to urban existence in Devukarsha can not do a thing about human nature.  People are people, no matter if they have enough to eat, a place to live or mechanical slaves to handle all the drudgery for them, they will always find the fly in the ointment, the flaws to complain about, the things that they cannot have and desperately want all the more precisely because they are out of reach.  Just as in all of previous human history, one thing leads to another and someone lets loose a smart-ass serpent in the garden.

Survival is not enough.

The City knows this, understands it on a level that the inhabitants are incapable of appreciating. In a million little decisions and subtle choices behind the scenes, the City acts to maintain a healthy and prosperous balance, to perpetuate itself and provide for its inhabitants.  All of its inhabitants.