Technoculture(s)

Sunday Quotation: When the artificial and the natural become the "machinic phylum"

Strange symmetries beyond the natural/artificial divide  

 

In strong theories of ALife these machines are understood not simply to simulate life but to realize it, by instantiating and actualizing its fundamental principles in another medium or material substrate. Consequently, these machines can be said to inhabit, or "live," in a strange, newly animated realm, where the biosphere and artifacts from the human world touch and pass into each other, in effect constituting a "machinic phylum."' The increasing number and variety of forms of machinic life suggest, moreover, that this new realm is steadily expanding and that we are poised on the brink of a new era in which nature and technology will no longer be distinctly opposed.

 

John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life

I have just been trying to catch up with recent developments in biomimicry applied to robotics and artificial intelligence. I also tried to read some references on biologically inspired computation, biologically inspired robotics and related subjects, such as the use of living cells to perform programmed tasks of computation. 

 

                            (from stelarc work here)

They made me go back to the classics and unearth and old characterization of “techné”:

 

Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη (Ancient Greek: [tékʰnɛː]) which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. Techne resembles epistēmē in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or doing, as opposed to "disinterested understanding."

(from Wikipedia)

 Just let us mention in passing that an intelligent robot may not fit with this definition since it can show a certain level of autonomy from its creator. But just let’s keep the definition to see what is happening now.

 On one hand, we are transforming our concept of living matter as well as its reality so that it shares features previously reserved to technical objects. We “program” matter and in its most simple understanding “programming” is just reduce the set of rules of autonomy to the set given by the programmer.  On the other hand, we strive to infuse technological objects not only with the procedural, adaptive, strategies of living organisms but also with the autonomy that formerly we observed only in living organisms. 

 The technical object becomes as autonomous as the living organisms and living matter as programmed as our former technical objects. 

 Interesting symmetry. What it tells about ourselves, is worth exploring.

 

 

That robotic moment of you (yes, also you)

Some days ago I started reading Sherry Turkle’s last book: “Alone Together, why we expect more of technology and less from each other”. 

I am still midway through it (actually, a third of it) but I cannot get rid of one the very first anecdotes in the first chapter that Turkle used to paint the uncanny feeling she had about the notion of “live enough”. This is just one of the components of what she calls “the robotic moment”, i.e., that turning point in society when we stop being conscious about the difference between the reality of (at least, today’s) robots and the impulse to project on them humanlike traits. In a way, the “robotic moment” can be defined as that cultural moment when our relationship to robots becomes more “human” than the ones we sustain with other fellow humans. The whole book seems to be about the societal consequences of such a shift. I won’t be able to confirm if this is the case until I reach the final chapter, however. In the meantime, I am having a feast. Turkle’s books are always interesting.

 

But let’s go to back the anecdote that caught my attention. Picture this: an exhibition about Darwin and his theory of evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The curators have strived to get as many “real things” about Darwin as possible: original notebooks, Darwin’s magnifying glass, etc. They also brought several live Galápago’s turtles as part of the exhibition. The reaction of kids to the presence of these turtles was what called the anthropologist in Turkle into action. In her own account:

 

It was Thanksgiving weekend. The line was long, the crowd frozen in place;I began to talk with some of the other parents and children. My question -“Do you care that the turtle is alive?”- was a welcome diversion from the boredom of the wait. A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: “Its water looks dirty. Gross”.  More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looked at her, mystified: “But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point’

 Ever since I read this fragment I have been going back to it again and again. “Is this such a problem? Is this a good example?”, I find myself asking. Did the kids really prefer the robotic turtles because they would be “more real” than the living ones? Or the children were willing to renounce to the “real thing” (living turtles) so that the “real thing” could be left unbothered in their original habitat instead of suffering a long journey to NYC (or just from the Bronx Zoo)?  Did the kids show greater concern for the “real” turtles and than the designers of the exhibition and the adults visiting it, mad about associating authenticity with “real things”? Did the children show a better understanding about the mechanics behind the narrative of an exhibition? Did they assume that an exhibition could very well be based on mock-ups and still be a strong narrative? Were the kids more postmodern (as narratives go) than their parents? Did they hold true that authenticity and reality may not be synonymous?. Am I projecting too much of myself on the kids behaviour?. ;-)

I am still puzzled about this example. What I have read in the rest of the book (which I find highly interesting) is not helping me getting myself out of this puzzle.

 

Citilab-Digital Birmingham: considerations on the social context

Yesterday Dave Harte gave an excellent opening keybote speech at Urbanlabs09.  Here you have it on SlideShare. He explained at length the different dimensions along which Birmingham has evolved as a Digital City. 

It is difficult to summarize all the aspects he talked about. However, I think he very clearly showed that for him (and not only form him!) a Digital City is not just a city that uses digital technology for accessing and distributing information. A Digital City, as the different examples from Birmingham that Dave gave showed us, is a city where technology is also an opportunity for citizens to cooperate together and innovate in different spheres of civic activity. Possibly, the most spectacular example he gave was the hacking of the City Council website by a group of citizens that got together and set up a different website with all the services and information they really wanted ("BCC DIY").

He also showed how behind this type of initiatives there is a concept of innovation that is open. Not only it is open in terms of access to public data but also in the final goal and expected results and evolution of the innovation process itself. That is, it is an open-ended process that helps in learning new things, innovate and how this has social and economic impact.

He identified several key aspects to develop this type of initiatives:

1. The interest of citizens to get together and discuss

2. A culture of civic engagement and a culture of contributors

3. There should be public data available and a will  from individual citizens to share their own data (he showed what he did with his own home energy data or his jogging data)

4. Some big trigger that sparks the reaction of citizens  (in the case of Birmingham the cost of the City Council website was identified as such: 2,8 Milion Pounds were thought too expensive and started the whole hacking project)

This made me think on another conference by Ethan Zuckermann that I got to know (thru Ismael López Peña) about the key factors to trigger social innovation projects from and around technology. This connection made me think about where do we stand here as current state and possibilities for social innovation and what we can do here.  And by "here" I think on the community that is physically close to Citilab but I think I could extend this consideration to Spain.

 

I could elaborate on the relationship between both types of "key factors" about social innovation. I will try to go through all f them in the future.

For today I'll just mention that, in my view,  one of the main differences between Birmingham and our closest environment is not just how different the proportion of citizens with technological knowledge is but specially the different attitudes in terms of "contributor culture".

I think that the former (extent of digital knowledge) is correlated with the latter (contributor culture).  So,  to be successful in spreading digital social innovation here, and if Zuckermann is right, one urgent task for Citilab is to understand very clearly which are them main traits of local culture here.  Having this this in mind we have to devise better ways to contact with the leading citizen contributors and how to adapt our digital culture programmes to their context. We are putting  a lot of effort to get to know better (through ethnographies, workshops and other means) and we are rethinking our current formats. As a next step I'd love to see citizens codesigning  Citilab activities.