Robots and habermans, and the body in the deep future

A story I find myself coming back to over and over again is Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain (1950). There are many reasons for this, but today I'm thinking more about robots. When Smith was writing this story, it was not known whether humans could survive in space. Or even what space was like - the geomagnetic storms, the plasmas, the corrosive atomic elements, the radiation. All this would have to wait for the first satellites.

Smith didn't imagine physical hazards for the first astronauts: he imagined a psychological hazard. (Actually, now that I write this I realise that is how I interpret it. His vision might have been more physical). Anyway, people in space did not die of radiation or exposure: they died of pain, the pain of space. Just to be in space was to endure unimaginable pain. To overcome this, space ship crews were made into habermans: their bodies were surgically severed from their brains and run by machines. As Martel, the protagonist, says,

.....you know what I am. A machine. A man turned into a machine. A man who has been killed and kept alive for duty.

He goes on to say some revealing things about this state of being:

Don't you think I remember what it is to be man and not a haberman? To walk and feel my feet on the ground? To feel a decent pain instead of watching my body every minute to see if I'm alive? How will I know when I'm dead? Did you ever think of that, Luci? How will I know when I'm dead?

The pain of space is almost malevolent, like a surf crashing against a rocky outcrop, trying to get past the blocks to the sentient being within. Any sensation would give it a tiny crack to enter the mind and overwhelm it with pain. The senses have to be obliterated so the mind can withstand the pressure. Martel can't taste, feel, hear, touch. He communicates with his fellow scanners by writing on a tablet. He monitors his physical body with a control box set in his chest, which you can just make out here:

Illustration by Jack Gaughan from the cover of Fantasy Book, 1950

He's not a robot, but he's not quite human either; and as the story unfolds, the ways of thinking that arise from being cut off from the senses become quite important. But I won't go any further in case you haven't read it. (In which case, do .....).

The scanners are the forerunners of many literary explorations of the insertion of human cores of sentience into different types of machine. Normally we would consider, like Martel, that losing our accustomed senses is a sacrifice, something done under compulsion or for the most noble of motives. But it doesn't have to be that way. In the video below, the characters from Sealab 2021 go wild imagining the new worlds of experience open to them in robot bodies:

(Cracks me up every time)

But it's all about the interface, the exact way in which the biological and the technological are meshed. Contemporary late industrial societies have generally inherited an approach to the body in which the skin is coterminous with the individual and more importantly, with the self. What's inside it is me, and what's outside it is not. Things like hair, fingernails, excrement, fluids, are highly dangerous because they transgress the boundary of the skin (see Freud, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva and others for more about this). They threaten to overwhelm the sense of self and have to be carefully controlled, socially and ritually. (Think about it).

Other societies in both the past and present have had other ways of understanding the body and the self, and they haven't always mapped directly onto each other. Gatherer-hunter-fisher people, once dominant in the world and now increasingly under threat, frequently have complex logics where boundaries between categories like alive, dead, human, natural, physical and spiritual are drawn in places modern industrial people might not recognise (early colonialists certainly didn't, and used these cosmologies as evidence of 'primitivism'. Another story!). If you grew up with such a worldview, it might not be such a big deal to have, say, your consciousness distributed over numerous sites, or to have a sense translocated somewhere else.

This isn't quite where I expected to end up when I started writing this, but it turns out there is a point here. In the future, biotechnology and robotics might transform what we think of as human, and there is likely to be a lot of human-machine interfacing in radical ways. We already see it in performance artists and the cutting edge of technology. Science fiction writers have gone much deeper into the social and personal consequences of such changes. But, and this is the bit I wasn't expecting, it might be people from marginalised societies with very different approaches to the body who are going to best at this sort of stuff. The distance they have to travel may not be as great as for western industrial  people committed to a consuming, desiring, capitalist body. It's going to be important to foster cultural diversity so that humans have the capacity to adapt to the future.

As Martel's friend Parizianski observes in Scanners,

Everybody will be Other.



(Afternote: I never thought my doctoral research on body modification would come in handy when discussing space!)

Dead or alive, the Yutu rover says much about how we relate to robots

This weekend, the moon’s fortnightly rotation cycle turns China’s lunar rover Yutu (the Jade Rabbit) and its solar panels toward the sun once again … but whether the rover wakes up or not remains to be seen, as Yutu already announced its impending death to Earth-based watchers with a series of first-person messages on January 25.

The messages were posted on China’s equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from an unofficial account believed to be run by a group of enthusiasts.

The rover has been on the lunar surface since December 15, when it was deployed from the Chang’e 3 lander.

Since then, it has covered 100 metres with its six-wheel locomotion.

As space scientists struggled to get Yutu to respond to commands to fold in its solar panels and external equipment, the two-week lunar night descended, plunging the exposed equipment into -150C temperatures without protection.

In 1971, Russia’s Lunokhod 1 similarly failed to make it through to the next dawn, even though it had successfully entered mechanical hibernation.

It’s not impossible that Yutu will survive the night. But it certainly doesn’t look good.

What is different about its probable death, though, is the way that it has been conveyed to the public via the Chinese state news agency Xinhua:

I’ll tell everyone a little secret. I’m actually not that sad. I’m just in my own adventure story, and like any protagonist, I encountered a bit of a problem. Goodnight Earth. Goodnight humans.

More than 6,000 people have responded to the posts with messages of hope and appreciation. (Some, though, thought it “creepy”.)

For them, it doesn’t matter that Yutu is not actually sentient, nor directly responsible for the messages.

Space fandom

Yutu is not the only spacecraft to have a public fan base. Social media such as Twitter and its equivalents play a prominent role in this. Other high profile spacecraft which communicate in first person include @MarsCuriosity and @NSFVoyager2.

But is this a trivialisation of serious scientific endeavours? It could be argued that these engagements are cynical attempts to gain public support for funding space exploration; perhaps a means of glossing over the vast amounts of money spent on space while (in the view of critics, more urgent) terrestrial problems remain underfunded.

However, many of these accounts are not official, but run by fans. This is the case for Yutu’s microblog, as well as @NSFVoyager2 and the popular @SarcasticRover. Unconstrained by communications policies, these accounts sometimes use humour to great effect.

     

@SarcasticRover in action. Twitter

The question, then, is whether this approach makes for effective science communication. Does following an anthropomorphised spacecraft lead people to engage with the science behind it?

Vanessa Hill, CSIRO’s Social Media Manager, argued in an article last year that:

By personifying the spacecraft in the form of social media accounts we’re characterising spacecraft in an easily accessible way which allows people to connect with specific missions.

Human-robotic interactions

The issue, however, is much broader than it at first appears. We can take this a step further into the field of social robotics.

While the development of the fully humanoid robot has been a longstanding scientific ambition, any human-like feature can be co-opted into building a relationship with machines. We can see this in the natural tendency to see faces in inanimate things.

On rovers like Yutu, cameras and antennas often look a little like necks with a head emerging from the body. It’s enough for us to attribute emotional states to them.

A scale model of the Yutu rover shows its more anthropomorphic attributes. Joel Raupe

In this engagement, whether or not the robot is capable of feeling these emotional states is irrelevant. It’s more whether the robot appears to have them. This is what is commonly known as the Turing Test.

Of course, humans reading emotions into a space robot and conveying them as if they originated from the robot is very different. But perhaps the time when such robots will be designed to translate their mechanical states into statements that they tweet directly is not too far off.

In all of this, though, we are still thinking of “us” and “them”. Even if it’s not actually the case, we like to treat the robot as a separate being with sentience. It makes the communication exciting.

We can even take this a step further. These first-person communications as if from spacecraft bridge the distance between remote and proximate interaction.

     

Mars: it’s far out (literally). NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)

In remote interaction, humans and robots are separated in space, and even sometimes in time, such as the time lag in communication between Mars and Earth.

In proximate interaction, humans and robots are co-located, for example, in the same room or facility. The physical distance affects how people behave around machines, as well as the robot’s level of autonomy.

What these social media interactions do is make people feel more present in the remote location, collapsing the distinction between near and far. It doesn’t end there, though.

A post-human perspective

If we take a “post-human” perspective, we can look at space robots as extensions of ourselves. We don’t have to anthropomorphise spacecraft: they can actually be our senses. This is how metatechnology researcher Robert Pepperell explained it in a 2004 conference paper:

This state of co-extension requires that we revise our attitude towards human-machine interaction: if technology is now regarded as an extension of human cognition, then the classical model of interaction whereby two distinct entities are interfaced, one sentient and one insentient, is inaccurate. In its place we must posit an exchange of cognitive activity between the sentient user and the cognition embodied in the device.

Yutu’s live microblogging of its own death from the first-person perspective could be seen, on the one hand, as a measure of the extent to which social media have become pervasive in engaging the public with civil space exploration.

But I think it’s something more. Space robots are not yet fully autonomous, as they rely on human commands. As Yutu shows, however, the exchange is not all one way. Even if the machine itself is not generating the posts, there is still an interaction whereby the actions and “experiences” of the rover are translated into a verbal message which elicits human emotional responses.

The public may not be influencing Yutu’s behaviour, but it sure as heck is affecting ours. These kinds of interactions are charting future territory in social robotics. Yutu’s legacy is part of this new cognitive exchange.

By Alice Gorman, Flinders University.
This article was originally published at The Conversation, 5 February 2014
          Read the original article.