Things are looking up for Farewell, My Robot, the movie I’m working on. We’ve had a nice set of designers and artists come forward expressing interest in volunteering to work on the project, and we should be meeting with them sometime in the near future to hammer out details of the project and (hopefully) get the ball rolling on preproduction design.
Right now, we have two design student on board for sure who are interested in the design and construction of our two practical robots for the film, as well as a VFX guy who seems interested in doing CG work. I’m more comfortable than I was earlier in the week now that I know there’s at least *some* design support moving forward. That said, I’m still slightly disconcerted that we don’t yet have a dedicated concept artist. I feel like we need someone who can do general concept art for characters, settings, and props so we can get a better feel for the scope of the project (as well as have some visual accompaniment for the screenplay when we shop to directors and potential funders).
Incidentally, anyone know any designers with time on their hands in the Seattle area interested in doing concept art? >.>
Wow. I’m kinda surprised this is actually happening…
Last quarter, I took this “Science Fiction Prototyping” class where we all wrote short stories to explore societal issues involving the use of robotics 20 years in the future. One of the stories that came out of the class was this super cool noir detective story that had a very cinematic feel to it. Now, this quarter, I’m working with the original author to actually make it into a short film.
I just finished up the first (mostly) complete draft of the screenplay, which I adapted from her short story. Fleshing it out like this makes me realize that this is going to be quite an endeavor. I’d roughly say we’re looking at about a 35 minute film as-scripted, and there is quite a bit of production work that’ll need to be done to actually pull it off. If we can do it, though, this won’t be your typical no-budget class project film. I’m optimistic that we might have something festival-worthy.
At this point, the first things we need to take care of are a) find a director, and b) putting together a design team. Nicole is spearheading the director search, and I’m going to see what I can do about designers. Personally, the design team is the biggest X-factor as far as I’m concerned. There’s so much design work to be done, ranging from preproduction concept art to VFX & post, I think the quality of the team we put together will make or break the film. Fingers crossed I can actually track down some people that are interested…
As I was waking up this morning, I tried to bring form and specificity to my vision of the world of 2030; to come up with some key differentiators that define how our world today will drastically change. Try as I might, though, nothing really jumped out at me. The more I think about that lack of epiphany, though, the more I think it might actually be right.
When I honestly consider how things will change on the global scale in 20 years, I can’t help thinking that –at least on a fundamental level– things will be pretty similar to how they are now. Looking back 20 years, I wasn’t living in a world that seems archaic or alien. All of the technology that today’s information society is built on was present in yesterday’s information society. Sure, it’s faster, and there’s more of it around us, but no unparalleled breakthroughs have shaped the world anew during that period. One possible exception is the net, which was technically around over 20 years ago, but really didn’t become widely popularized until the early 90s.
But being realistic, I don’t see another Internet-scale development occurring in the next 20 years that changes society. Instead, I see a slow and steady evolution of the Internet, the technologies that leverage it, and the ways by which we connect to it. In 20 years, I think the Internet will be fully ubiquitous. Will that be a result of a direct neural connection for the bulk of the populace? Most likely not. But with the increasing ubiquity, decreasing form factor, and progressively more natural interaction paradigms of mobile devices, I predict that nearly everyone will be “plugged in” one way or another.
What does that mean for robotics, though? I see it as being an analog to the current direction of application-based computer moving off of dedicated devices to the cloud. A world where most robots are “brainless” and dependent on a connection to the cloud for most critical computational functions is quite logical. It would undoubtably lower the price point on individual units to a point where they become financially accessible to most of us, and would allow the manufacturers and distributors a direct avenue of control over their products (something current software and hardware manufacturers are already striving for). The only limiting factor, really, is the communications protocol. I don’t for a minute doubt that low power, high bandwidth wireless communication technologies will become prevalent in the next two decades, though.
And this shift from individualized, dedicated robots to “cloud agents” has an interesting repercussion when paired with the exponential ubiquity of Internet connectivity for humans. These two factors together represent a world where every human can theoretically be in contact with their robots at all times. Human-robot interaction becomes the status quo; no longer would it be an event that a second thought is given to. Robots would become, in some ways, part of a person. The world’s robots would be the extra limbs of humanity.
It’s a crazy thought, and maybe on the outer threshold of believability for 20 years, but it’s certainly not impossible.
Just got home from class. During one of the student-driven presentations, I saw a picture of the iARM, and it made me wonder…
Over the last year or so, I’ve toyed around with the idea of writing a novel. I’ve actually started it, although it’s still in quite an early stage. It’s specific story, while robotics does play a part, wouldn’t be suitable for this course. But the world and the underlying technology might present a viable foundation.
The fictional world presents a field of assistive robotics that’s best described as a hybrid offspring of the iARM and GERTY (in the sense of being a single “intelligence” in control of multiple modular components such as manipulators or avatars). In many ways, that technology is the most developed part of my fiction at this point –probably because of how it relates back to my research interests– so from a pragmatic perspective it could certainly support a short story. It’s just a matter of coming up with an interesting related issue worth exploring. When the technology is just one element of a story, simply showing how it impacts and/or facilitates the daily lives of a character can be enough. But here, I’d really need a specific topic to probe.
Ideas:
- How might this technology become an advantage for users? I’m reminded of a part of Aimee Mullins’ talk concerning how disability-related limitations can actually afford opportunities for advantages over the typical able-bodied (especially as a result of AT).
- Assuming the intelligence in charge of these robotic systems had some degree of actual social interaction capability (real, authentic social engagement, not just scripted sequences), how might a user’s prologue and perhaps exclusive exposure to it affect them?
Of course, these and other issues might speak more to a social model of disability than the actual technology that it seems to be about at first glance, so they may not be terribly suitable as sci-fi prototypes after all.
Spent a little more time thinking about story ideas whilst trying (and failing) to get to sleep last night. The more I let the robot nursery idea cook, the more I like it. Unfortunately, I also realize more and more that it’s almost certainly beyond the 20 year scope.
The “Get off My Lawn” idea has potential too, though. First of all, I’m really attracted to the idea of doing something to do with assistive tech and it’s social/ethical/emotional implications, so from that angle this is a solid choice. Perhaps most interestingly, though, this idea would afford me the opportunity to do some really interesting things with presentation and focalization.
If I’m going to tell the story of a paranoid individual and their relationship with their robot, there are basically two fundamental directions I can go with it. The first, more obvious one would be the more traditional omniscient route, with a disembodied lens of narration that shows the reader exactly what’s going on at all times. But the second option, and the one I think has the most to offer, is to go with the complete opposite by having the entire story told by & from the perspective of the elderly individual.
This would allow for a more interesting reader experience, I think. By literally being confined in the mind of this person, the entire world will be colored by their own fears and paranoia. I can (theoretically) create for the reader the almost claustrophobic sense of imprisonment that the character feels by not granting them the escape to other parts of the world and other characters. Plus, this way, the lack of an impartial view of the robot means that the reader won’t really know whether to trust it or not.
We shall see…
Since the first class session, a couple ideas have been rattling around the old noggin for my story. At this point, they’re really just seeds (ungerminated, at that), but maybe just getting them down will help me formulate things further.
Get off My Lawn, Robots!
This summer, my internship revolved around doing some design work for assistive-care robots for the elderly. Something I quickly figured out through my own research is that old folks & robots don’t necessarily mix. Now, that’s not to say that every elderly person is a crazy old coot that thinks robots are out to steal their pills, but there are plenty who aren’t comfortable with the idea of high-technology in their lives at all — let alone the kind that’s responsible for taking care of them.
So that got me thinking about telling the story of an old person that was absolutely convinced that their assistive robot was out to kill them. Convinced wrongly……probably. It’s a logical extension of the unease that a lot of current folks feel towards the idea of robots taking increasingly significant roles in our lives, really. And in 20 years, when (maybe) it’s actually feasible that a robot might be able to feel emotions or some imitation thereof, it’s entirely possible that people might have that nagging concern. For an individual completely dependent on said robot for their daily needs, that concern could easily intensify to downright fear.
Obviously, that wouldn’t be a likely scenario that manufacturers would need to worry about occurring frequently. It’s serious enough, though, that it might be worth exploring the implications of a bit in this class.
Robot Babies
Y’know, like Muppet Babies. But with robots.
During a brief brainstorming session we had in class, we were all trying to come up with interesting subject matters and/or potential ethical dilemmas that could be used as foundations for stories. A lot of them were pretty straightforward and obvious, but one of the ones suggested by a classmate really stood out to me: a robot nursery.
The argument behind it was that, as we progress towards a true AI in robotics, we’ll need to start giving serious thought to how it gains knowledge. If we ever create a truly learning machine, it follows that simply programming a complete set of knowledge into it wouldn’t be the most effective (or even appropriate) way of teaching it. But what if we taught it the same way we teach our own young?
This concept carries with it myriad interesting issues that could be explored.
- Would the robots be taught the basics of cognitive and social skills alongside human children, or would they be isolated in their own system — a sort of “special ed,” if you will?
- Would the robots be taught by other robots, or by human instructors?
- Which would be the best choice for teaching the different things they would need to know?
- If the instructors were human, how would they feel about their work? Clearly, opinions wouldn’t be homogenous.
- What would happen if a robot “spent too much time” with humans during this developmental period? Would the development of proper inter-robot social skills be impaired?
Of the two ideas, this is definitely my favorite at this point. It’s a world I’d love the opportunity to try to tell a story in, but I’m not sure it passes the timeframe test. The fictional world we set our stories in has to be a realistic depiction of 2030. While I have no doubts that we’ll make massive strides in technology and robot intelligence in that time, it’s a bit iffy to contend that we’ll have the sort of AI that would call for this kind of education.
Until next time…
Over the last few days, I’ve been working on a old-school terminal style interface for Omnius. So far, it doesn’t actually…y’know…do anything substantive. The underlying architecture of it is in place, though, and the interaction works pretty decently, so that’s something. Plus, it looks decent.
The biggest challenge to get it working—to the extent it currently does, at least—was learning and implementing AJAX. In v0.1, every command issued in the terminal reloaded the entire page to get the posted data to the script that handled the screen output. It was a workable solution, but pretty janky in the grand scheme of things. Before I worried about starting to develop actual functions for the system, I decided to take some advice I’d received and handle the screen updating with AJAX.
After a little trial and error…err…make that extensive trial and error…I rolled out v0.2: now with 100% more asynchronicity! To the casual observer, there’s not really a noticeable performance difference. The page was relatively small to begin with, so reloading wasn’t much of an issue once all the images were cached. I did some automated stress testing on it, though, and definitely saw an improvement in this version.
So, next steps:
- Make a registration/login system
- Try to make an application to control my IRC bot through Evermind
- Make a file upload/download system
- ……Profit? Maybe? Probably not…
For once, I have a bloggery-worthy topic to post about: Omnius liiives! Mwahahaha!
Alright…so it’s not really that dramatic. Omnius (sadly) isn’t some sort of Frankensteinian monster. It’s just my server. But just because it hasn’t terrorized the unsuspecting townsfolk yet doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen…
Surprise, surprise! Another few months have come and gone with naught in the way of activity hereabouts. Go figure.
So this quarter has been…interesting…if nothing else. Certainly the busiest quarter I’ve had in a long, long time. And that’s saying something, considering I’m rocking a schedule sans-MSE this quarter. I suppose I’d better try to break down recently goings here in one giant chunk, because infrequent and massive content dumps seem to be my status quo. So it begins…
If you stay remotely up to date on the goings-on in the video game industry, or if you have a sizable assortment of news outlets on your RSS reader for that matter, then you’ve most likely seen the name Alexander Stern lately. It seems as though the entire interwebs are abuzz with coverage and discussion of his recently-filed lawsuit. For anyone who doesn’t know about it, I’ll attempt to give a readers digest version before giving my two cents on the whole situation.