This is a pretty cool demo, and the robots are neat-looking but the part of this that’s the most interesting is the problem this is solving. Listen to how often they talk about “low self-weight” and “yielding to human operators”. The top feature of these things is that they can operate in the same area as human workers without tearing their arms off.

In other words, the top-selling feature is that they figured out how to make gentle robots.

What are they finding? Secret underground airfields!

Sunchon appears to have a “1350 meter taxiway extend[ing] from the UGF [underground facility] to a point beyond the main parking aprons. This taxiway may in fact be an auxiliary runway, allowing aircraft to be prepared for flight while concealed within the UGF and then launched with little or no warning for a strike” against South Korea.

Noah Shachtman for Danger Room Online Spies Spot North Korea’s Underground Airfields

There’s a lot going on in the article.

For one thing, there is the glorious Thunderbirds/Voltron/Power Rangers (pick according to age and nostalgia) resonance.

For another, think about profoundly weird the balance between information and analysis has shifted in this arena. Instead of carefully hoarded classified satellite imagery, we have such a surfeit of data that it’s worthwhile to just let amateurs run amok.

This kind of searching isn’t just for military surveillance either. The world’s largest beaver dam was discovered using Google Earth imagery and then further analyzed by digging through historical aerial photography of the area.

In related news, amateurs are combing through the Toronto G20 videos, looking for evidence of agents provocateurs. They think they’ve found one. I don’t know what to think.

She spends some time reliving Neda Soltan’s death and some time talking about the growing consensus that access to the Internet should be a fundamental right. What follows is some depressingly muddy thinking about how to proceed.

photo credit: killerturnip

One in seven of those who do not use the Internet think they should have the right to if they want. Yet only half of those surveyed felt the Internet was a safe place to express their opinions, and more than half thought that it should never be regulated by the government. Which may suggest that some people are willing to accept some compromises to privacy to avoid the creeping censorship that too easily follows government intervention. The basic tenet of the Internet is openness: you don’t need to forfeit all privacy, but if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly.

The debate about quitting Facebook certainly takes on a different hue when exposure, not secrecy, becomes the critical fight. In the past few weeks, both Pakistan and Bangladesh shut down Facebook in response to the group Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, because it is considered blasphemous to create images of the prophet. Facebook has been slammed by clerics in Egypt and Syria for being a gateway to adultery; and a woman was shot in Saudi Arabia after her father discovered her chatting online with a man she met on the site.

Increasingly, the idea that everyone should be able to log on, publish, upload, download, update, or tweet at will—and whim—seems vital.

Julia Baird – Newsweek The Front Line Is Online (emphasis added)

Baird sets up a false opposition between freedom and privacy, and then undermines the argument with her own evidence. The key insight missing is that privacy isn’t in conflict with freedom, it’s a component of it.

Most liberal democracies have a whole pile of rights that recognize this. It’s the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It’s why the government can’t read our mail in most free countries. It’s why we get so upset when we learn that we’re getting wire-tapped.

When “if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly” holds sway, the woman in Baird’s last example has two choices: get shot for chatting with men or don’t talk to men at all. That’s not freedom. The thing that could have freed her from her father’s insane grip is secrecy; she lives and is free only insofar as she is able to keep her private life away from his murderous attention.

When social networks make it hard to keep your doings private, you put yourself at greater risk of discovery. We should have learned this lesson when Google Buzz exposed a woman to her abusive-ex. We should have learned this lesson when Evgeny Morozov pointed out that “once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook.” We should have learned this lesson when US activists used Twitter to wiretap themselves and megaphone it to the police.

A world where you can’t keep your list of friends hidden is a world where governments can figure out networks of dissidents. psychotic family members can find out you are talking to the wrong people, and the police know which door to kick in. Removing censorship makes posting easier – it doesn’t make it safer. Shielding from prying eyes does. That only happens with good, reliable privacy controls.

To have real freedom, we need both.

photo credit: tozzer

Tabloid Science

Why do I say sensationalist? Adam Rothstein of the Interdome explains it best.

William Gibson used the term “Tabloid Science” the other day on Twitter, and this couldn’t be a better example (unless it also threatened to increase global warming, discover aliens, and involved robots becoming self-aware).

This story is, as I understand it, about a guy who figured out how to transmit a computer virus using RFID. And yet, we have this all-star headline, reposted everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. It’s reminiscent of the back pages of popular science magazines (“enslave ants to grow all your woman-attractive pheromones, now only $2.99!”) except this is now science reporting, on the Internet: a domain supposedly rational and free of all that “headline” crap.

Adam Rothstein, private correspondence

From the perspective of the systems being compromised, there is no difference between an RFID attacker that’s moving around the world inside someone’s skin or on top of it. There’s no benefit to doing the implant part of the procedure except that it gets you headlines. Which, I guess, is a pretty big benefit.

There’s something hilariously hair-splitting about how a variation in placement of just a few millimeters – fundamentally cosmetic – makes all the difference in coverage. Malware RFID has been around for years. Here’s the BBC covering it in 2006.

We might be better off conceiving of Dr Gasson’s move as a sort of performance art intervention in the mediasphere.

Under my skin

The tone of coverage speaks directly to the conception of the self. Because the chip is under his skin, the BBC calls it a human infected with a computer virus (though couched in scare quotes) rather than a human wearing a device infected with a computer virus. Slashdot goes further.

Why? I have a much deeper and more integrated relationship with my smartphone than Gasson has with a chip that stays in his body for a few days. It’s like saying that someone with cheap earrings is the first human to rust.

Indeed, the chip as worn by Gasson is substantially less useful than if he’d just stuffed it in his pocket (aside from the “getting media coverage” utility, which we must not dismiss). For one thing, the one in his pocket can be thrown down the sewer when security notices him.

It reminds me of the perennial prediction that cellphone implants are imminent. No they aren’t. Cellphone contracts last 2-3 years and new phones come out even more frequently. Say what you will about the stuff that’s carried on you instead of in you, but at least it’s modular.

For it to be worth accepting implants, they have to offer significant benefits that carry-able items don’t. Medical prosthetics are one obvious category of this kind of thing (though even most of these are things that you wear). Devices or interfaces that give you new senses might be another.

Kevin Warwick’s Project Cyborg 2.0 is relevant here. Implants connected to his nerves allowed him to control a robot arm remotely and to exchange sensations with his wife wirelessly through a rig she also had implanted.

Further intervention

Moving away from hard realities of the current achievement, let’s take for granted for a moment that there will be abilities and senses worth having surgery for. Let’s allow for people with networked nervous systems, reaching far out beyond themselves to a whole host of new conveniences for the modern consumer. I’m thinking about flexible ego boundaries and an artist who replicates Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, 1974 for the cyborg era.

In Rhythm 0, 2014 (2024?) the artist turns off her firewalls and publishes her personal IP and secret key. She is almost immediately compromised by the sea of ambient malware that’s just part of the background Internet. The participant/audience of the performance swoop in and begin a battle to take over and clean her system, while others attempt to reroute it for themselves.

The artist’s body goes haywire. She sometimes shouts the names of consumer pharmaceuticals along with other gibberish. She begins to develop a fever as all of her microcontrollers run at full tilt, generating dangerous amounts of heat. After an hour, her assistant intervenes. Her firmware must be wiped and restored. A great debate erupts in the art world about whether this is a success or a failure of the piece.

The debate is part of the performance.

I leave you with these words from Simon Bostock who pointed me to the BBC article in the first place.

I’m pretty sure the best depiction of flexible ego boundaries I’ve read is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which, if you can get over the fact it’s a space opera about pirates using enforced-autism as a method of slavery and a war between a race of giant spiders, shows how we’ll probably accrete layers of tech and cyborg accoutrements until we all become reefs.

If we’re going to manage our future selves we’ll all have to get a grasp on what topology means.

Simon Bostock, private correpondence

Sturdy, printed books present the illusion of fact. Weightless, in-the-cloud PDFs present more as fiction.

John Maeda on Twitter

I can’t stop thinking about this. It reminds me of banks. To give the impression of security and longevity, they built in stone (now, they build in expensive real estate). They say: “We are not fly by night. We will be here tomorrow. We built this temple to permanence.”

Of course we know that the paper world is rife with disposable paperbacks and other futuretrash. It turns out it’s pretty cheap to make books. But it’s even cheaper to make a PDF.

I need to think about this more. This seems important.

Related: David Carr’s characterization of 48 HR magazine as “a testament to the proposition that even the most wired cohort of journalists in the country retains a fetish for the printed product” in the article about the recent legal troubles.

In this Newsweek article, we learn that 60% of stock market trading volume is automated. Machines are doing lightning fast trades according to complex quant-designed algorithms. The machines are needed to do this because they can make decisions faster than people and when you are dealing in fractions of a penny, speed matters. There’s a lively debate going on about whether or not these battlebots (yes, they are called that) are a good idea, but they’re not inherently bad. There are plenty of decisions better outsourced to machines. Trading could be one of them.

The point is that 60% of stock trades are being done by machines, operating according to a set of algorithms and inputs, which (I’m pretty sure) do not include natural language parsing of the news.

Yet whenever the stock market makes a move, the financial press constructs post hoc narratives that explain what’s happened as a reaction to the news of the day, as if the news is what was was motivating the trades. For example, here’s Reuters confidently explaining today’s nose-dive in terms of various events that made headlines, none of which are a computer glitch. (15 minutes later, Reuters tweeted the alternate explanation.)

This fascinates me. Most stock market trading is being done by machines, but the stories we tell ourselves are about humans responding to new information. You can’t interview an algorithm about why it made a certain choice. In the absence of that knowledge, it seems clear that the financial press just makes educated guesses and acts as if correlation is causation. It’s speculative fiction.

Cameron Moll has created a poster that depicts the Coliseum using type. The Colosseo is a gloriously hybrid entity, digitally produced but mechanically reproduced. The prints are these beautiful objects, but the Colosseo is also data. You can buy parts of the data as vector art glyphs, while a low-resolution digital copy flies around the Internet.

The artwork is great but I’m sharing this for the video, which first lovingly depicts and then explicitly discusses the fetishistic craftsmanship of printing the posters. In fact, the video devotes far more time to the process of reproducing the work than to the time spent creating it, which was done on a computer and much more time-consuming. (Moll has released other videos focussing the act of digital creation.)

Here’s why this fascinates me:

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.

I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).

What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.

I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one:

I want to make things, not just glue things together.

Mike Taylor Whatever happened to programming?

photo credit: christian.korsager

I couldn’t help but think of this story when I came across the following pair of headlines.

From WIRED:
Humans, Shmumans: What Mars Needs Is an Armada of Robots and Blimps

From the CBC:
Russia hopes nuclear ship will fly humans to Mars

In fairness to NASA, it’s worth pointing out that the legend is totally false. Fischer developed the Space Pen on spec and sold it to both the Americans and the Russians. A pen that can write is space in much better than a pencil – pens don’t have lead tips to break and leave dangerous particles floating around a spaceship and they aren’t flammable. After the Apollo 1 disaster, non-flammable objects seem pretty useful.

Move along, no pithy lessons about technology here.

photo credit: Spanish Flea

I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of stories away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys.

Eventually he figured out, “hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want, and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?” So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet – so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine.

Now, that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because the chip in the machine didn’t just say, “The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty,” but had all sorts of information; it said, “There are seven Cokes and three Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that.” There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their fifty cents in and not pressed the button, i.e., if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, bang! – there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? Well, obviously somebody five thousand miles away!

Now that was a very, very silly but fascinating story, and what it said to me was that this was the first time we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating.

Douglas Adams Q&A after a speech entitled Is There an Artificial God?

Adams is gave this speech in 1998 about something that happened a ‘few years earlier’. So let’s say 1996 or 1995.

When you get excited about things like @towerbridge, @lowflyingrocks, Google energy monitors, and Spimes, remember: the idea and the means was already there, we just had our attention elsewhere for awhile.

photo credit: MatthewBradley

1. Sound Ecology.

Picking up on the Augmented Audio Reality post, Justin Pickard pointed me to this interview with an acoustic ecologist.

Anecdotally, there is a feeling that the increasing homogenisation of the soundscape (i.e. places all sounding the same) is speeding up, yet no one is systematically keeping tabs on this change. This is not a prompt for some kind of museum-like stance, but it begs the question, shouldn’t we be considering the soundscape as an integral part of our heritage in the same light as we do for historic building facades?

Paging Nick Sowers and Dan Hill: Imagine an app that let you walk through the city and experience how it sounded a decade ago?

2. Dubai’s Artificial Islands.

I already told you that they were drowning. Well as it turns out, no one wants to live there, either. I wonder if one of the proposed Michael Jackson memorial islands would help the situation. (No.)

3. Nurse Homes.

After finishing up the Buildings That Protest series, I came across this story about smart houses as omniscient robo-nurses. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” 2.0.

The path for the adoption of voluntary prosthetics seems to go amputees -> disabled people -> wider use? I wonder if monitoring systems for the elderly which give them MORE freedom and independence (at least, felt independence) will be the path that drives the adoption of self-surveillance technology.

4. Drones.

After I posted The Lost Drone Army, Geoff Manaugh pointed me to his piece about UAVs controlled with thoughts. Which then quickly spirals into a roving fantasy about all of the crazy things that can happen when you link machines directly to the brain.