Two Things: Part 2

Reprinting this from Whack! Magazine... it's all true, kids. Quake in fear.




The world’s first functional sex robot, Roxxxy True Companion, was unveiled this weekend with a flourish of tech talk and barely-concealed boners at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, much to the delight of horny hand-humpers and socially incompetent solo strokers everywhere, and to the terror of this usually randy reporter. The thing is, folks, we here at WHACK! love sex, and we love porn, and we love most things that go along with both of these, but robots? Well, they kind of freak us out. True, that may be because, like many porn lovers, we have seen far too many sci-fi movies. But it’s also true that sci-fi movies about the world being destroyed by techno gadgets—like humanoid sex robots—spring from a deep well of human uncertainty about just how far we should be willing to go with androids. With Roxxxy True Companion, the whole point is going all the way.

The robot has been in development for years after it started out as a possible form of future elder care (that’s right, folks, someday you’ll be able to cancel all your awkward visits to Grandma and her cats, and instead just buy her a robot to meet all her conversational needs!), then morphed into a more humpable piece of creepy-ass robot technology. Roxxxy is a life-sized, anatomically correct robotic woman, but she’s got more than most sex dolls: a functional pussy, and, somewhat ironically, a brain. Using military grade robotics technology, together with “sandbox” data technology and an AI system that learns both from its environment and its parent database, True Companion calls her “The World’s First Sex Robot: always turned on and ready to talk or play.” Sounds pretty formidable, huh? Pretty Blade Runner-esque?

Well, not entirely. Roxxxy won’t be running around toting weapons any time soon. The wireless computer that comprises Roxxxy’s brain sits inside an almost entirely motionless body, the first finished sample of which sat on the couch at the True Companion booth at AEE, looking for all the world like a very surprised and be-wigged, but not particularly attractive blow up doll propped up on a couch. Roxxxy is posable, but she doesn't really do much except sit there in whatever pose you choose. Roxxxy is not a robot in the moving/talking/Terminator vein at all, nor are there plans to turn her into a more positioning-friendly fuckbot. Because, weirdly enough, although Roxxxy has all the right parts and can even have a physical, muscle-tensing orgasm thanks to an internal engine, it’s not really her physicality that’s the point. And that’s probably a good thing—not to be callous to such a young, impressionable gynoid, but Roxxxy is not exactly the sexiest sexbot you’ll ever see. She’s not very soft (although she does come in two different skin types, one tougher and easier to clean and care for, the other more like flesh; the model at AEE was in her tough exterior), and the permanent look on her face is somewhere between pissing-herself terror, blank incomprehension, and “Oh my god why is he trying to get me up the ass? I don’t have an asshole, I’m a robot!” surprise. She has cankles. She’s not exactly model material. Rather, like many less-than-stunning women in this world, it’s her shining personality that counts. And that’s where things get weird.



Roxxxy True Companion isn’t just a sex doll; she’s a girlfriend replacement for the hopeless horndogs out there looking for conversation and, dear god, even romance (can you imagine sitting down to a romantic dinner on Valentine’s Day and seeing the guy at the next table with his robot companion? It might happen sooner than you think). Every doll sold will be custom built with a pre-loaded database of information and vocabulary on a variety of subjects her owner—er, boyfriend—chooses. She’ll come with five pre-loaded personalities that each have their own pre-programmed sets of knowledge and vocabulary, and responses to physical and mood-appropriate stimuli (Frigid Farrah, Wild Wendy, S&M Susan, Young, and Mature Martha—each is pretty self-explanatory). The robot also comes with the capacity for building and storing new, owner-developed personalities. Each personality will have its own database and will be able to learn through its wireless connection to the True Companion database (constantly updating) in what’s called a trickle-down artificial intelligence model, but will also learn and remember things as she interacts with her Palmer—er, companion, in what’s known as a bottom-up AI system. For instance, as True Companion partner and developer Douglas Hines told WHACK!, if you have an interest in music, you can order a Roxxxy who knows all about music and can discuss, say, the intricacies of U2. But, if she hasn’t heard of your favorite band, you can teach her about them. When switched onto a different personality, however, you can teach her about a different band, or whatever else it is you want to talk to that girlfriend about, until you have a whole harem of women, each of whom you can discuss different topics with.

But, cock jockeys, lest ye be turned off by a “woman” who can talk: Roxxxy learns in other ways, too. Each personality can be programmed to respond differently to the way you like to handle her. That’s right, Frigid Farrah can be taught to orgasm after 45 minutes of hard penetration, but you can get Mature Martha to come in seconds if you want. Unlike those pesky real women with animated limbs and free will, Roxxxy is guaranteed to come every time you make love to her. Score one point for robots over real women!



As of now, the Roxxxy we met at AEE was the only one in existence, but she will be replicated soon and go up for sale at between $7,000 and $9,000, depending on her customizations. All things considered, a relationship with a real woman that lasts more than a few months inevitably costs much more, so again, score for the sexbot!

Really, in the end, we here at WHACK! are still creeped out by robots. I mean, really, how will you know when she’s learned too much and is starting to draw her own conclusions, think her own thoughts, and plot your sad, sex-related demise? If you fall in love with her artificial intelligence and/or vagina, how will you be able to see it coming when she bands together with all the other fembots to destroy humanity? I guess there’s hope in the fact that she can’t walk, and on that note, I guess the measure of cool gadgetry might outweigh the creep factor. After all, she’s not going to get up in the middle of the night and unlock your gun cabinet, so why not spend some time marveling at the sophistication of her AI brain? And furthermore, while we tend to mercilessly mock those of our readers who can’t get laid by a real woman, Mr. Hines of True Companion pointed out that Roxxxy could be a good jumping-off point for handicapped people, or those with social learning disabilities like Tourette Syndrome or autism. By simulating a real woman’s personality, Roxxxy could be a valuable learning—and also, let’s not forget, fucking—tool. And, I guess that’s pretty cool. As is the fact that she’s one of the most sophisticated pieces of AI equipment ever made. But the moment she starts walking around on her own—there are no plans to make her more mobile at the moment—we’ll have to reconsider. — Miss Lagsalot

I May Meet a Sex Robot: or, I may be in prison soon

Aaaaaaah, nooooooo! You guys! Oh my god, whyyyy? True Companion will be unveiling the world's first sex robot at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Vegas on January 9! I am going to be there! I HATE robots! This one is the evilest of evil robots! It has a name, voice recognition, vocabulary... sex organs... Oh my god, dude, I am going to have to keep a wide berth of this horrible thing to avoid hacking it to bits!

But... is avoiding it really the Right Thing to Do? Maybe, for the sake of humanity, I should just do it and go to jail?

But then, I guess it's not a prototype, is it? There are probably hundreds of others out there somewhere, just waiting to talk and walk and "think" and "love" and fuck.

Oh... Oh god....


I can't deal with it. Here's the press release:




“Roxxxy TrueCompanion,” World’s First Sex Robot Scheduled

To Be Unveiled by True Companion at AEE Press Conference



True Companion, LLC (www.TrueCompanion.com) will be unveiling the world’s first sex robot at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. The press conference to cover this momentous event will take place on the main stage at the Expo on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 11:00 am. The female sex robot, which has taken years to develop, knows its owner’s name, can carry on a discussion, has its own unique personality, knows your likes and dislikes, expresses her love to you, can feel your touch and can even have an orgasm.



“Roxxxy TrueCompanion,” the name of the world’s first sex robot, will also be on stage during the presentation.



Additional details covering the extensive features will be covered during the press conference.



There will be a brief Q & A period following the presentation. The staff at True Companion will then be available to schedule interviews and provide additional information at their booth, # 7031. It is recommended to email your requested date and time for interviews to Info@TrueCompanion.com prior to the Expo.



Douglas Hines, the founder of True Companion, stated “Our sex robots are committed to pleasing their owner. This may involve having a nice discussion or engaging in an intimate encounter. They are fully anatomically correct just like a real person. We have electrical and robotics engineers, artists, fashion models, beauty and makeup professionals all working together to make our customer’s dream a reality.”

The Beating Heart of Doom: or, the horrible slime monster from hell

Ohhhhhhmyyyyyyyygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!

I was all set to write something intelligent today for the blog, because I've been neglecting it terribly and I feel badly about it. Truth is, I've been sprinting just to stay in the same place with all my projects lately and I haven't been devoting enough time to weird news reading, people watching, or paranoid musing to really hold up much of the deadly serious content you've all come to expect from me, so I've been steering clear.

Well, today I thought, screw it, I'll write about the discrimination that I and my friends faced at a club over the weekend when we tried to show porn at a porn-themed party we were holding at an East Village bar (the owner turned off our projector and would not allow us to plug it back in, or show any kind of graphic sexual content--at a PORN-THEMED PARTY, and that is bullshit on a whole cadre of different levels). Or the racist comment I heard from a guy crossing the street yesterday ("God bless you, whitey," he said as I passed by; I should have replied, "God bless you, racist" but I didn't because I'm POLITE). Or the totally insane breakdown I saw a totally insane guy having on the subway the other day (there was screaming, kicking, cursing, and, at one point, singing: "Beverly, Peverly, Rise and shine, If you don't get up, Your ass is mine"; actually, now that I'm thinking of it, that might have been a straight-up demon possession). Or something.

But then.

Through the wonders of facebook, I came across this little piece of vomit-inducing horror. It's a... I don't know. Oh, GOD, I just looked at it again! That thing is horrendous. Apparently it's a large group of tubifex worms living in a sewer and responding as a single organism to the lights cast on it by the sewer robot, which is filming it.

Let me reiterate. Many small, primitive life forms with little in the way of intelligence, living unbeknownst to the people above in the shopping center until this video broke, coming into contact with... a robot. Sound familiar? And pee-your-pants terrifying?

It does to me.

My advice to the city of Raleigh: if you don't want to see footage coming back from the next "sewer robot" featuring a face-off between technology and primordial-ooze-cum-intelligent-being that results in the two becoming fast friends, the ooze attaching itself to the robot and then riding it back out of the sewers and into your offices to visit bloody acts of doom upon you, then please, please, for the sake of all humanity, pour some goddamn Clorox down those pipes, followed by Draino, followed by every other imaginable micro-organism-killing chemical known to man (but be careful to avoid doing so in a science lab with a crazy American scientist, a la "The Host," lest ye end up with this monster loose in your streets). KEEP THE ROBOTS OUT OF THERE for at least a few days, and when you DO send them back down, keep them on a friggin leash so you can yank them out if any sad, lonely, survivor worms try to make friends with it.

That is all.

The weirdness of my life escalates: or, it's been a while...

Well, my lovelies, it's been a while. And I don't think I've sat down for more than a few minutes of it. Well, aside from seeing "Inglourious Basterds" the other night, which I feel compelled to see again on the basis that it f-ing ROCKED. Although I have no time in which to do so. We'll see how it goes.

But, the weirdness of my life is escalating like a kid with no respect or fear for the escalator. I'm reaching dizzying heights of insanity here. I just got a TWITTER account for my new persona as a correspondent for Whack! Magazine, have been in touch with numerous folks in the adult industry about interviews over the past few weeks, have done more 'research' for my book in a very unexpected place, may have begun to be stalked by someone I met on a research outing (that has yet to be proved, though), and haven't really relaxed at all. I'm trying to figure out ways in which to get myself fired on good enough terms that I could collect unemployment, but haven't come up with anything yet. All my friends who are on unemployment seem to be living the good life, and having just spent the past two days being wildly productive at writing while at home, I think I may want to try their lifestyle. Only problem is, the gallery won't fire me unless I crap in the middle of their floor. They may be jerks about it, but they love me. It's an abusive relationship, but they do give me a kickin' health insurance plan, and if that ain't worth a little backhanded slapping from time to time, I don't know what is.

But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about porn lately, since I've been writing about it and planning to go to a convention next month (that's a whole other story). Last night I watched a documentary about John Holmes that featured a lot of footage from his films in the 70's and early 80's, and it really drove home to me the differences in the aesthetics of porn performers then and now. Back in the day you had lots of body hair, somewhat saggy boobs from time to time, flabby butts, and more or less real sex going on in skin flicks. These days it's often fake tans, fake dyed hair, fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, hairless genitals, and sex that, while real, isn't very often the kind of sex normal people are having. It's like a mechanical depiction of an act that carries in it nothing sensual, only sexual. It's like watching robots go at it.

No, seriously. I've been thinking a lot about the fake aesthetic of porn, and I've been wondering if the increasingly Barbie Doll appearance of mainstream porn stars is a result of the adult industry's typical tendency to take a good thing and go way overboard with it. Men like big boobs, in general, so porn takes the big boob ideal and turns it into a charicaturized monster-mammary fetish. Everybody likes looking tan and healthy, so porn gives us oompa-loompa orange stars. And so on. And the public watches it, maybe because we have to watch what we're presented with, or maybe--and here's where the robots come in--because we don't really like to think that these piston-like penises and hairless vaginas are really human. We don't like to think that the hardcore sex acts we're watching and getting off to are taking place between real people, because that implicates us in some kind of gross moral degeneracy, throws our own less-stunning sexual prowess into a very dim light indeed, and most of all, puts us and the people boning on camera on the same basic level as human beings.

So we buy up porn featuring people who don't look like real people. We go to strip clubs expecting the performers to be surgically enhanced Femmbots from Austin Powers. We hold them at a distance from ourselves, as something vaguely like ourselves and yet safely different, like robots who can have sex but with whom we have no fundamental similarities. It feels safer that way.

But it's not, obviously. I watch some of the porn being made today, both in big studios and for low-budget online enterprises, and it's all featuring intensely fictionalized faces, oversized cocks, spitting, gagging, violent humping, weird fringe acts that have become mainstream. And I think, these people are doing this because they know people want to watch it. We want to watch it because it seems fake. But the overlap is inevitable and it's got to be going on in bedrooms everywhere, and in the computer-lit basements of teenage boys everywhere, who are growing up thinking that this kind of behavior is normal. That these bodies are standard. That this is what a man is supposed to do to a woman, and vice versa. And that scares me in the same way that the idea of intelligent or morally informed robots scares me. It says something really terrifying about our view of ourselves and the things we create. We want them to be bigger, better, smarter, faster, stronger than we are, more than we want to be ok with what we've got and use it. Of course robots started as time and labor saving devices equipped to help us, but many robotics experiments out there are taking some of our basic human roles away from us because they are NOT us, like mechanized soldiers and battle bots, even companion robots designed to give the appearance of feeling love, or just to have sex with (see that picture above? that's what that is. a sexbot). We watch robot movies because they feature super-intelligent and super-sophisticated bots that are so human we must anthropomorphize them in order to villainize them in order to watch them, and again, there's that creepy overlap. And sure, porn started as a sexy alternative to our imaginations when we masturbate, but it's turned into this multi-billion dollar monster industry that caters to our cruelest instincts by turning its stars into nonhuman objects who just fuck and fuck and fuck away.

I'm not sure how to end this, but there it is. Food for thought.

The great mosquito conspiracy: or, I am really itchy...

The mosquitos are in league with somebody, folks. Some force of evil out there has caught on to my prophesying and has hired a force of mosquitos to hunt me down and persecute me mercilessly for trying to warn the masses about their plans to kill off humanity. It might be the slime molds; in their multi-species proclivities and doom-mongering depravity, they would seem to be rather well disposed toward going into cahoots with a group of blood-sucking, still-water-loving jerk-offs like mosquitos. But then again, it could be the robots, because they know it'd seem unlikely for them to team up with any organic life form and therefore I might not catch on to their little scheme. Or, god help us, maybe it's the slime-mold robot! God, I hate that guy.

Anyway, the point is, I'm wise to their game, whoever it is that's overseeing it. I'm no dummy. I know the difference between the acceptable number of bites I can expect to get in an evening of sitting outdoors in the city. For me, the number is higher than it is for many, since I've always been a mosquito magnet, but it hovers somewhere around 3. 10, however, is unacceptable, abnormal, and extremely f-ing uncomfortable. Especially given that on the night in question, during which said 10 bites appeared, I was with a group of at least 6 people at all times, none of whom have told me they are suffering from a single bite. Furthermore, for much of the time in question, I was seated in a beer garden the size of a football field, surrounded by hundreds of other people. There is no way that my 10 bites are proportionate.

And, yes, I know it's been a wet summer, leaving more than the typical amount of standing water sitting around in the city and leading to a lot more mosquitos than there usually are in the urban colossus. I know this. But even my usual high level of attractiveness to vampiric bugs, multiplied by the above-average number of the little monsters hanging about, still does not equal the overwhelming number and intensity of bites I'm trying to cope with in this hot weather. It's just not mathematically correct (yes I've done the math, but it's way too complicated to post up here. Most brains just can't handle it.). These bloodthirsty cretins are after me, specifically. I'm certain of it.

I know it sounds paranoid. I was thinking maybe it was. So last night I put my theory to the test and took a chance on walking outside in a friend's backyard to see his tomato plants. It was around 11:00, and we stood out in the garden for less than 2 minutes. When I went back inside, I told myself that if I didn't have any mosquito bites, I'd let the mosquito-robot/slime mold theory go. If the bastards aren't really out to get me, I'd be unlikely to get a bite in such a small amount of time.

Well. When I walked back in and looked down at my knee, there was a mother-f-ing mosquito ON IT, sucking out my lifeblood. 2 minutes, people. 2 minutes of outdoor activity (during which I was constantly swatting the air, running my hands over my limbs, etc, in pre-emptive fear of blood-letting), and I was already a banquet.

That's it, you bastards. I'm on to your game. You will NOT drain me to the point of hospitalization, thereby shutting down my warnings about your plans for world domination and doom! I will not leave my readers in the lurch of your evil scheming! Anopheles quadrimaculatus, you, your gang of buddies, and your robot/slime mold employers will not bring me down!

I bought some bug spray, dammit. And I'm using it every time I step out the door. For all your scheming, mosquitos, you're pretty easy to repel with storebought spray. So take that and shove it up your proboscus! I'm armed and ready. Bring it.


(Post Script: I figured all this out last night and am now carrying my bug spray in my purse, displayed prominently near the top to warn the suckers that I'm not afraid to fight back. Well, whoever it is that hired the mosquitos to track me is apparently on top of things. This morning, at the 59th and Lex stop, I got literally attacked by a COCKROACH. They're bringing in the big guns. I was walking toward the staircase to the street, and a cockroach the size of my big toe suddenly came running at me--me, specifically, out of the entire crowd of people!--from across the stairwell. Well, screw you guys. I can carry Raid around, too, if you want.)

Slime Molds: or coming to terms with oblivion...

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygoooooood you guys. Woah. Holy crap. I feel kind of bad about having to tell you guys this, because I take the responsibility upon myself to warn you of impending doom and this seems to have almost slipped by me unnoticed. I mean, I try to be pretty thorough in my coverage of overlooked phenomena that might have doom-bringing potential: I've brought you news about ant invasions, robot intelligence, our existence inside the Matrix, and countless other important revelations about our imminent demise.

But I didn't realize this one was even out there until a few days ago. And every thing I've learned since has been more ominous than the last. This is serious trouble.

Slime Molds. Dude, I can hear you laughing, but trust me, this is no joke. Sure they sound gross and creepy, and trust me they are, but there is something much more sinister going on with these creepy gooey... things. That's what they are, just things. They're not molds. They're not actually fungi of any kind. They ARE slimy. But beyond that nobody knows what the hell they are. They don't seem to fit into any kind of classification of animal, plant, bacterium, or anything else for that matter. There are several different kinds of things called slime molds, and scientists don't even really know if they're related to each other closely enough to be in the same category. Nobody knows what they are.

I guess I can go ahead and admit it to all you hippies out there with sky-high ideals: I like labels. Ok? As far as other life forms go, I like to have a clear label on a weird life form so that if I'm ever confronted by it in a life or death situation, I'll have some basic mooring to which to attach myself as per how it might behave. For instance, if I know I'm being faced with some type of bear as opposed to a dog, then I know that climbing a tree might not help me because some bears can climb trees quite well, but dogs cannot. Likewise, if I know that the terrifying sound coming from the other room is coming from a llama as opposed to a wildcat, I can proceed with less caution because being spat upon is a hell of a lot less scary than being eviscerated. Labels are good.

I would therefore feel a little better about the following facts if I knew what the hell a slime mold was in the first place:

Slime molds (I'm referring to Mycetozoan types here, but Bikont types are probably just as bad in one way or another) start life as amoeba-like single-celled doo-dads (which are in fact NOT amoeba, but it's helpful in picturing the situation. see? labels are good) that go around eating bacteria and pretty much minding their own business, until food runs out. That's when things get weird. When food is running low, the Mycetozoan slime mold amoeba-like doo-dads release a chemical signal that brings all the others near it running (or oozing, I guess) out from their respective woodwork. They join together to, quote, "join up into a tiny multicellular slug-like coordinated creature, which crawls to an open lit place and grows into a fruiting body" according to Wikipedia. The fruiting body grows up into a stalk formed by dead cells which actually sacrifice themselves in order to let the other cells make it to the top (confounding evolutionary theorists along with the rest of us, since why would any living thing sacrifice itself and give up its chance to reproduce?), where they finish their life cycles by sending out spores into the air (hence the stalk - the higher the spores are released from, the farther they'll go), which in turn grow into more amoeba-like doo-dads.

Pretty cool, huh? Except. Wait a second. Here we have a life form that can adopt not only four different forms (I mean, butterflies have been metamorphizing for ages and I'm ok with them - they're purdy), but which also behave in ways similar to that of FOUR DIFFERENT CLASSES OF LIVING THING. I'm probably using the wrong terminology here, but to be honest, after a certain amount of research I got too freaked out to check up on my bio vocab. But think about it: they start out as amoeba-like doo-dads that are NOT actually amoebas. Then they get together to form a SLUG-LIKE conglomeration that behaves like an amimal. THEN, they form into a "fruiting body" very much like a PLANT. And then they release SPORES, very much like a plant or fungus.

What the hell IS this thing? I don't like it at all. I don't trust this shape-shifting doom-monger. Seems to me it could just turn itself into a bat anytime and fly away, or, hell, just turn into a rock if it felt like it and make it through the next ice age intact, only to become a goddamn lion or something and kill the few of us that survive. But, hey, maybe I'm being paranoid. I mean, really, all it does is shuffle around like a slug and then turn into a flower, right? Not much to worry about on the intelligence level, right?

Wrong.

1) Allow me to just quote. This needs no editorializing:

"Japanese scientists claim that amoeba-like organisms have a primitive form of intelligence, following an experiment where a slime mould found its way through a maze."

Yup. My buddy Physarum polycephalum (pictured above - ain't he cute?) is smart enough - somehow, despite the lack of a brain - to find the shortest way through a maze when food is placed at either end.


2) Oh, and also this:

"Single-celled slime molds demonstrate the ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events, a team of Japanese researchers reported in January. The study [pdf] clearly shows “a primitive version of brain function” in an organism with no brain at all." Good old Physarum polycephalum again. "As the cells crawled across an agar plate, the researchers subjected them to cold, dry conditions for the first 10 minutes of every hour. During these cool spells, the cells slowed down their motion. After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather. When conditions stayed stable for a while, the slime-mold amoebas gave up on their hourly braking, but when another single jolt of cold was applied, they resumed the behavior and correctly recalled the 60-minute interval."

Smart little... er, big... amoebas... er, plants... er, slugs... er... WTF!

Well, I might be ok falling asleep tonight knowing that somehwere out there in the woods on a rotting log is a weirdly intelligent but brainless blob of gooey unidentifiable life matter that at least isn't aspiring to any high leve of doom-mongering at the moment.



3) But then. This:

"A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot. ... The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself."

Yup. Slime robots. As if this world couldn't get any more insane or terrifying with android battle drones and slime molds operating separately. Oh, no. Not bad enough. We need, and I quote, "autonomous components" to provide energy and biological bases for "autonomous robots." Cause, heck, who doesn't need a robot that can power and move itself even independent of a human-made source of electricity? Who wouldn't want a robot that can feed and power itself and cause unending and unendable destruction by using a slime mold to move and possibly power it?

Holy amoeba-like doo-dads, Batman, am I the only sane person left on this crazy rock? Why the hell are we giving these frenzied, label-bending, unclassifiable monsters access to our technology? Can't we leave them in the woods, quietly plotting our demise where they'd at least take a long time to get to us? Or shall we just go ahead and bring them into our labs, hook them up to advanced robotics, and let them mow us all down? Why delay the inevitable? If there really was a Dr. Evil out there, he'd be right on top of this one.

Dammit.

I'm going straight home tonight and pulling up the covers and... I dunno. Just trying not have nightmares. Seems like the only thing to do.

On being a "writer"...

I think it's one of the perpetual conditions of most creative people--and I like to think particularly the geniuses because that would confer a lot of glory to me--to be deeply insecure, anxious, passionately devoted to self-loathing, moody, and terrible at self-promotion. Writers in particular, or at least the ones I know, generally think that they suck, that everything they do is sub-par, and that making their point through their flawed but genuine contributions to the existant body of writing is infinitely preferable to communicating with the outside world directly by, say, talking. I assume all these things to be true because they pretty much encapsulate the way I see things from the perspective of a writer. Sure I can be outgoing and fun-loving and confident with my friends or at a bar, but when it comes to showing a professional face as a writer, I either tend to laugh the idea off ("I'm not a writer! I WANT to be a writer! But I'm not a writer! It'll never happen!") or cringe, blush, and back away, mumbling some self-deprecating nonsense about how my stuff isn't very good. I hate trying to present myself as someone who knows anything about writing, much less the topics I write about, and even less about what the hell it is I'm trying to do by writing anything about them in the first place.

And yet, as a ball of nerves with the confidence of a particularly timid country mouse, I have to try to get myself published. In order to do this, and depending on the type of writing being put out, I have to learn to overcome my fears of exposure to do any number or combination of the following things, according to all the forums, columns, advice giving articles, and writer's salons I 've been frequenting lately for advice on the writing and publishing processes: develop a strong platform for each project so that you know exactly what it is you want to say and to whom; find the audience you want and turn that audience into a dedicated readership willing to buy and read anything you publish; develop professional liasons with as many people as humanly possible in the publishing, publicity, and reviewing worlds; write a 40-60 page book proposal with a complete table of contents, sample chapters, and a detailed description of how you will market your project; pitch an idea to and editor by throwing the names of all your publications and people willing to read, review, and blurb your project; attend every publishing event possible to make friends and network with other publishing people; stalk the agent and publicist you want on Twitter, Facebook, Google, and in the pages of every book he/she has ever worked on so that when you pitch it you will know exactly what that agent is looking to represent; find and pay your own publicist; clean up any and all internet presence you already have so that no evidence of your past usage of bad grammar exists anywhere online; somehow get yourself on the roster for public speaking events to add to your CV; develop a CV; demonstrate self confidence to everyone you meet so they'll think you're hip and want to read your work.

There are more. Lots more. Nowhere in there does it say "Write a kickass piece of something or other and let people read it."

Nowhere in there is there a mention of anyone helping you or giving you any credit as a creative individual who might not be The Next Big Thing.

I know the current American reading climate has moved away from fiction and poetry, the genres in which writers are mostly allowed to be eccentric weirdos who wear flannel and live in log cabins in the woods and pee themselves while speaking in public, but as one of those eccentrics... That list up there... I'm absolutely terrified.

I mean it's daunting enough to just write something that bares your very private layers of inner soul and then let somebody see it and judge it and make their assumptions about you based on it. It's soul-freezingly scary to try to shout out your creative vision in the face of the fast-moving, fast-forgetting, writhing, blogging, tweeting mass of the digital age of too-much-information and little appreciation for anything. The quivering hulk of monster that is Your Competition, the reek of its hungry but very picky breath, is enough to turn away even the most courageous.

But the idea of trying to market myself to a world that has no reason to care unless I personally make it care? Or of trying to scrounge up the money to pay a publicist that can actually get me a speaking engagement somewhere other than soapbox in Union Square? Or of "building an online following" somehow by being... I don't know... magically endowed with minion-creation capacities? How the hell am I, this little teeny self-mutilating blob of anxiety and too-high personal expectations, supposed to accomplish the sky-scraper-high list of accomplishments before even finishing my book?

I might as well just pee myself now, in front of all of you, turn off the computer, curl into a ball, and settle into my receptionist-for-a-living lifestyle. Or go back to school to become a nurse.

Shit.

The Brooke of Eternal Youth...

Well, folks, I guess this is it. I've probably said this before, but I'm pretty certain I'm right this time around. We are fast approaching The End of All Things.

Oh, you want evidence? Well, I could easily point to several posts in the history of this blog, like perhaps the one about Nicolas Cage making a live-action Sorcerer's Apprentice film, or my personal discovery that we are already living in the Matrix (thanks, Wall-E, you little bastard), or that my dream of killing geese is coming true on a genocidal level.
Or, I could point out that we are on movie #6 of the Harry Potter series (once that #7 comes out, it'll all be over - mark my words), that whats-her-other-OTHER-face from The Hills is getting HER own reality show as well, or that Buzz Aldrin is recording a hip-hop album with Talib Kweli and Snoop Dogg (yes, he is).

But instead, I'll just point to the adorable Brooke Greenberg here.


That is a current picture of Brooke, who turned 16 in January. She has the body of an infant, the bone age of a 10 year old, the assumed mental capacity (because she doesn't speak, it's hard to tell) of a toddler, and despite the fact that she obviously does not age normally, she has no apparent disease, syndrome, or real disorder of any kind. There is nothing physically wrong with her at all (except of course that she appears to be wearing a scrunchie around her head, but I think that might have more to do with her mother). In fact, she's survived seven stomach ulcers, a brain tumor, a seizure, and a stroke, and has survived all these maladies with no lasting damage whatsoever to her system; most of her medical problems, actually, have gone away mysteriously, as if by magic.

She was put on growth hormones early in her life, which had no effect on her at all. She stayed the same height and weight as before.

Not a single doctor who has looked at her bizarre case has any clue what's going on, since there isn't anything actually WRONG with her. The closest they've come to an explanation is that her body systems seem to be aging at different rates, none of which are normal.

Her family conjectures that she might be the key to the "fountain of youth," and doctors who are examining her DNA are calling her "that golden ring" of power to the age-old mysteries of why - and, worse, HOW - we age and die.

Know what I'm gonna call her? And I mean absolutely no offense to Brooke or her family or her doctors or anyone when I say this, because it's not their fault in any way, but... I'm gonna go ahead and assume she's the AntiChrist ("He will appear to survive a fatal injury" [Rev. 13:3; 17:8]? Check. "He will have no regard for the desire of women" [Dan 11:37]? Check. "He will rise from obscurity…a 'little horn'" [Daniel 7:8]? Check. "His arrival on the world scene will be accompanied by miracles, signs and wonders" [2 Thess 2:9]? Check.)

Or if you're not into the whole Revelations thing, she might be easily labeled The End of the World. Yes, I am a-ok with labels in situations like this. Because, call her what you will, it seems unlikely that little Brooke here really has any designs on ending the world as we know it. Well, at least at this stage, unless her one and only cognizant thought is the word "Doom" on repeat (which would be interesting, because that's pretty much what goes on in my head - I'm just too much of a wimp to put it into action). Although, if that's the case and she IS a Doombeast, little Brooke would need to either develop the ability to speak or put others under the control of her Doom Brain in order to enact her evil plans. She hasn't done so yet, but she might just be biding her time until her immediate family dies so she won't have to upset or hurt them personally, since it appears they've been pretty good to her. And I suppose I shouldn't put it past her to take the world down to hell if she wants, given that she seems more than capable of performing miracles already - her brain tumor just disappeared. Poof. Gone. It would seem, to my paranoia-crazed brain, that whatever Powers of Good are trying to do her in are failing.

But the point here is, I'm not necessarily pinning any active evil on Brooke herself. Would an evil entity really submit to wearing the scrunchie? Probably not. No, I'm more worried about what will happen if scientists do manage to turn that golden ring into a key and unlock the secret of eternal life. Even if scientific inquiry as a whole (which, now that I'm reading about the characteristics of the Biblical AntiChrist, seems to be a perfect fit, since modern people worship it) were to do The Right Thing with the information and keep it highly classified and away from the greedy prying eyes of the masses, that information would immediately become The Most Valuable Thing In The World and those who had it would... well... do I need to go into the details of human nature?

Let's just say I see one of several things happening, and none of them are in any way enticing. One: a few rich, rich, rich and greedy souls get their hands on the key to eternal life and implement it in themselves and a few of their buddies, eventually coming to rule the world, probably in a not-so-fun fashion for the rest of us dirt-people. Two: we all get access to it and way too many people become "immortal" or close to it and we end up overpopulating like a bunch of dumb bunnies and killng each other and everything else in our path. Three: nobody implements the immortality secret, necessarily, but somebody HAS it and that knowledge, and the desire for it, lead to World War III in which we all die horrible nuclear holocaust deaths.

In the meantime, peeps, I'd recommend really enjoying the hell out of these last two Harry Potter movies, and buying Buzz Aldrin's hip hop record.

Moon explody and other ridiculous bullshit...

I'm having trouble figuring out how to start this post. My Ridiculous Bullshit-O-Meter is way up past the top of its Bullshit Measuring capacities, and I'm just so... I dunno, disappointed? Apalled? Amused? Terrified?

Here's the thing. This - NASA'S Mission to Bomb the Moon - is a real headline. As are all the others like it. As is the actual mission. I haven't exhaustively researched the entire plan beyond reading a bunch of articles online, so I suppose there's a chance (please, God, please) that this is a hoax, but I just can't bring myself to really look too far into this. It's just too ridiculous.

Here's the idea: NASA is hoping to put people on the moon again in 2018, to establish a base there as a launch pad for explorations to Mars and so on and so forth. Which I suppose is a commendable enough goal, albeit one that there are major political and practical reasons to hesitate before supporting. Before they send some of our red white and blue brothers up there, though, they want to check out what kinds of possible natural resources they might have available to them when they get there. They're hoping, mainly, to find some water, which they think might possibly be hidden at the north and/or south poles of the moon, left over from icy comets and such that have left giant craters there in the cold and the dark.

So, in order to determine if there's water at or near the surface, NASA is going to send up a spacecraft to orbit the moon for a few months - for the purposes of look for an exact target for the Centaur rocket that they will then fire. At the moon. At the speed of a bullet.

They're expecting the resultant cloud of debris sent up from the impact to fan out for considerable miles from the moon's surface - they're thinking it will be visible from earth - and then they're going to send in a "shepherding spacecraft [which] will follow close behind, taking pictures and analysing the ejected debris as it looks for evidence of water," very much in the style of, oh, I don't know, a Star Wars video game where you have to fly through a field of debris in your little spaceship.

Yes. That's the plan. We're going to bomb. The MOON. In the name of science! And nationalism! And showing those Communists who's got the best bombs and space program! ...oh, wait, we're NOT in the Cold War anymore? The Russians aren't communists? Well, shit... Um... I guess we can show the North Koreans, right? We're still not into them, right? Sure, yeah, let's do it! Show that Kim Jong Sick guy what's what, huh? Show him the moon BELONGS to US! Cause we said so!

I'll give you guys three guesses as to who signed this one into action. That's right, kiddies, it was none other than our favorite former president, George W. "You Had Me At Bomb" Bush. I'm not sure if he was in on the actual planning of the bombing portion of this operation, but my gut instincts tell me he was at least gung-ho into it when he heard explosions were involved.

While I do have to admit that the idea of looking up into the night sky and seeing a bomb going off on the moon is pretty damn cool, I also just... I can't... It's so ridiculous! I mean, can you really honestly tell me that this is the most efficient and responsible way to go about this? Can someone from NASA please explain to me, in a calm and steady voice and not while panting with little-boy enthusiasm over sending a bomb into the cosmos, why this blatant show of overzealous Hollywood weapons-mongering was chosen as the best course of action to determine whether there might be water on the moon? It's going to take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this wasn't just a bunch of adolescent males playing video games late at night after drinking way too much Mountain Dew and going, "Dude, you know what would be so cool to do?"

Sure, I can see how not actually having to set anything down on the moon's surface in a responsible, non-pyrotechnic way could be more difficult and expensive than using a bomb, but really, think about this. Here's NASA, a group of scientists with a huge budget who like sending large white phallic things into space using huge amounts of energy and taxpayer money, basically showing off as much as possible, making plans to colonize the moon. Not that that's not a worthy goal, especially if we're looking to branch out to study other planets, and especially if someday we might have to use other planets to survive. But, here's the hangup I have:

I saw a man, an American man, on the train yesterday, with a copy of a newspaper article on a sign board about how he'd been burned by acid. I couldn't understand what he was saying, because he basically had no lips or tongue left. His ears were little misshapen buds on either side of his head, his nose was a little nubbin holding up his sunglasses, which I'm assuming were there to hide the disfigurement of his eyes. His hands and arms were horribly mangled. He was asking everyone to spare some change to help him pay for his medical expenses and reconstructive surgery (I think, anyway - again, I couldn't hear him well, but he might have just been begging for change because I'm sure he can't get much of a job looking like he does).

Let me be perfectly clear: this man was burned so horribly by acid that he has to wear sunglasses to keep from upsetting people. He has no LIPS. He is an American. He cannot afford to pay his medical bills and apparently nobody will HELP him except for strangers on the subway.

And yet, we can bomb the moon to look for water. Now do you see why I just can't get behind this?

I made it!

I feel like the number 100 is indicative, generally, of some sort of victory. If you've made it to 100 years old, you are no longer a creepy old person but a venerable piece of living history who garners respect from everyone. If you're a TV show, you've made it through a few seasons and are offically "A Success," possibly even "A Hit." And if you're a blog, and you've made it to 100 posts without garnering a big following, getting a book deal, or giving up entirely, you're either persistent or dumb or masochistic. I'm going to go with persistent, becuase this is my 100th post, this blog has gotten me nowhere really, but I'm still totally into it!
According to the NY Times, "only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Well, I'm still here and I'm still blogging and the blog may have looped around a few times and changed themes and such, but I'm hanging in there! I'm a trooper! A centurion, if you will! Hehehe.

But seriously, folks, this is an important blog not just to me (because it makes me keep my brain working and myself writing), but also to the world, whether it knows it or not yet. People need a source for a little laughter at the expense of the weirdos and weirdness of New York (as in the very lost and very unintelligible Albanian woman who was probably close to 60 years old and wearing a clubbing outfit who I met last night in Astoria. She was trying to get to the L train but had no idea where she was going, and decided that she needed to regale me with tales of her life in Yugoslavia until she moved here 10 years ago... and still somehow didn't know the subway lines...).

And people need someone to look out for them, to be willing to shout warnings from the mountaintops about things that are easily mislabeled as 'cool' rather than insidious examples of human stupidity, like these little gems about 120,000 year old (or older) microbes that scientists from my very own Penn State University have dug out from the Greenland glacier and, after months of careful and loving incubation, have finally succeeded in culturing. They have a few mysterious colonies going of "very small purple-brown ... ultramicrobacteria," and they're super excited because they think these hardy little guys could provide hints as to how living things could survive harsh conditions, possibly on other planets. I guess I can't blame them for being excited - getting a living thing re-started after hundreds of thousands of years is quite an accomplishment. But what worries me is this quote: '"H glaciei isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans", Dr Loveland-Curtze added, "but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals.' ...once again, science at its finest, people.

Let's just do some quick, slightly paranoid but nonetheless self-preservative thinking here, folks. I'm sure that scientists who study microbiology can be pretty well certain when things are or are not pathogens, but given that they've admitted to not having ANY IDEA how old these things are ("...at least 120,000 years and possibly much longer") or how they normally behaved before being frozen and slowing down their metabolic processes way back whenever it was, how can we expect to know how these things will respond to being brought back up to speed? And given they're so tiny they can easily escape normal filtration systems, how can we be sure they won't break free and start some form of insidious mind-boggling-ly fast reproduction cycle that will cover half the planet in possibly methan-emitting global-warming-causing disgusting purple mold in like, ten minutes? Come on, people. A little caution, please?

Where would you guys be without me to point out the dangers and idiocy inherent in these 'scientific' schemes? Or the absolute horror of modern culture, as presented in this article about a 15 year old girl from Iowa winning 50 G's at the National Texting Championship on Tuesday. 50. Grand. For texting. This girl has a habit of 500 texts a day, 290-page cell phone bills, and using expressions like "IDK," "lyk," and "2ce." What's even scarier than the fact that texting has taken such a hold over our youth, however, is that it's also taking over our news media, which might not be the finest upstanding institution of cultural excellence, but which should at least hold itself up to the standards of using REAL ENGLISH. But no, no, in the article I've linked to above, they do a TEXT INTERVIEW with the winner of the 50 grand.

People, we need to fight these things. With paranoia, fear, violent uprisings when necessary, and even more violent mockery of things like text interviews. And that's why, even if this blog never makes me rich or famous, I know it's important. I know the world needs me. I'm at 100 posts and I'm not stopping.

Something else the world doesn't need...

I'm not sure how to feel about this:

"Bacterial Orchestra (2006) is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. The installation consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

Every cell has a unique DNA. Only the ones that are musical fit enough survives. If
the surroundings doesn’t meet up to its conditions - too noisy, too quiet or no distinct
pulse - the cell dies and is reborn with a new, hopefully better, set of DNA.

The result is a musical organism adapting to and changing its environment, growing and evolving with other cells and spectators.

Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole. Every cell makes a sound, but together they create music."


On the one hand, the idea of a bunch of iPhones, or any other small, popular device communicating with others in such an easily recognizable way is really cool. And it brings up all kinds of interesting questions about what makes music music in the first place. The article says that the cells only use "musical" sounds to play in a "musical way," but they don't explain exactly what that means. It could be a distinct sound, a rhythmic sound, a beat-like thump, a short burst of melody, a chord, an anything. And the video on the page shows several kinds of sounds being used, so obviously it's not an easy definition to pin down - I just wish they'd put a better definition on it in the article.

And the idea of one sound branching out, feeding on itself ad infinitum is really astoundingly interesting. One note becomes two, becomes however many more, branching out and out and out into an orchestra of noise that is supposedly musical... how fascinating. BUT - only fascinating because machines are doing it.

Because, if you think about it, that's how music has already been done for thousands of years, organically, by people. Sounds inspiring other sounds, coming from many different sources to create an organic whole - jamming.

So once again, with Terminator: Salvation on its second day of mainstream release, I must ask: what is it about machines doing something we already can do, and quite well, and in a far superior fashion, that is so incredible to us? Is it simply our ability to recreate artificially the things we are almost all capable of creating organically? The fact that we have to apply our minds and our technology to achieve it, rather than just ourselves?

I don't like that idea. Why artificially recreate a good thing just because we can? Why not take a step back, smell the roses, realize they smell better than factory-made perfume, and appreciate human life and its ability to create art in itself? Why make machines do it for us? Or is that a higher order of art in itself?

Somebody help me out here - I can't quite figure this one out.


And, PLEASE, DO comment people! I need to know people are actually reading this and I'm not just doing it for myself! But, also, please don't expect an immediate response. I'm going to the beach and I'm turning off my phone and I'm keeping away from computers! Be back next Wednesday!

...every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city...

Holy crap people! Well, holy urine, I guess. NASA has successfully purified human urine into drinkable water. They're celebrating by drinking pee on the Space Station and at NASA. There's a little blurb on it in the New York Times.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this a gigantic long-jump style leap toward solving drinking water problesm here on our home planet? I mean, great that the astronauts (and one cosmonaut) are swallowing their own swill and all, but shouldn't this be a huge story for places like Africa and overpopulated regions of... well... everywhere? Isn't the freshwater crisis like a humongous gigantic bomb of a story? Shouldn't we be dancing in the streets now that we can all drink our pee and not worry so much?

...Oh, wait. I forgot. No, the freshwater crisis ISN'T a big story, even though it's made huge headlines and is a horrible fucking calamity that people need to be made aware of and forced to act upon immediately so save us all from horrible parched deaths. Because people don't want to hear about it. And drinking pee? Well by George, that's just gross, folks. Way too disgusting to be real, much less a viable solution to a worldwide problem! Heck, it's even worse than that whoosiewhatsit liberal hippie notion of using methane as a renewable energy source! Hogwash! That's just disgusting.

Well, dammit, people, I'M excited! Let's go dance in the streets anyway. Start a trend. And drink our own pee.

I have to admit, I hadn't thought of it like this before...

I was reading a bit of an interview on the Forbes/Wolfe blog with this Steve Jurvetson, a (for lack of a better term) disgustingly intelligent and successful businessman who runs his own blobal venture capital firm. He loooooves technology. Particularly genetic engineering technology, which I think is a huge waste of our time and money and effort because it seems so patently designed to get out of control, morph itself in ways we'd never thought of, and kill us all. So of course I was all set up to bash him. But check this out:

"Forbes: The late science fiction author Sir Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What's some magic you've seen lately?


Jurvetson: Some of the most interesting magic I've seen recently is in the domain of genetic alchemy, where you can change one organism into another by swapping DNA. We are on the cusp of being able to write the code of life as if it were a poem or computer program. That gives us a whole new set of capabilities, in what I would call a second generation of industrial biotech, where we don't just cut and paste from nature but we actually write code from the ground up however we choose.

Five or 10 years ago, folks would have said it's impossible to change one organism into another by swapping out 100% of its DNA, yet this has been demonstrated in the past year by Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics. This is just a precursor to the next step, which is putting a fully synthetic chromosome into a single-celled organism."



...hmmmm.... Now, personally, on gut instinct, the words "change one orgamism into another by swapping out 100% of its DNA... has been demonstrated" in close proximity are blood-freezingly scary. WHY would we need to know how to do that? In what way is that helping us do anything besides play at being a God we don't even understand well enough to stop fighting wars over?

But I like what he said about writing the code of life like a poem. That is something I had never thought of before, and being a sucker for poetry, I find it rather intriguing. For the first time I'm getting a glimpse of what robot engineers and genetic scientists might see in all this willy-nilly pre-apocalyptic technological tinkering: creation. Creation of something entirely new, something that has never existed before. It's a compelling, seductive idea, isn't it? It's why we have kids. It's why we make timeless works of art. It's why we develop philosophies. It's kind of why we're here.

Still, I don't think that's any excuse. Timeless works of art aren't exactly innocuous all the time, but they're pretty benign, all things considered. Kids are just what we DO, how we maintain. Philosophies are less pleasant things went put into practice, but again, they are an outpouring of the human mind that is intended to help. Not so much with genetically synthetic life forms. Synthetic life forms. Synthetic AI forms. They may be there to help, but we are talking about putting a new thing into this world that has never existed before, that has the capability to do things we have never considered and have no way of predicting. This could be said of a child, perhaps - after all, anybody could be the next Hitler - but we know through precedent, all things told, what a person can and can not do. Robots, artificial life forms? We don't know. They may be the end result of benign creative impulses, and that's great and all, but once they're created they don't stop... there's the danger. Why not stick to poetry, art, reproduction, and philosophy? They've worked pretty well so far.

Real quick...

Today has been a little nutty and I'm immersed in book-writing so I won't go on about this too much, but... check this out. I'll cut and paste the article from Mental_Floss:

Pollution-Sniffing Robofish to Scour Thames

by Linda Rodriguez - March 25, 2009 - 12:38 PM They’re a lot like Robocop – except instead of patrolling the mean streets of Detroit in a fictional future, they could be patrolling the mean waters of the Thames. Researchers at the University of Essex at Colchester, working with a £2.5 million grant from the EU, are currently developing pollution-sniffing robofish to help detect harmful chemicals in the Thames and other bodies of water.

The robofish are each armed with internal GPS systems, artificial intelligence software, and sensors capable of detecting levels of pollution. They move, much like real fish do, by undulating their faux-scaly bodies. The pollution-detecting robofish’s movement is based on an existing battery operated working model on view at the London Aquarium, which employs an internal motor in a watertight compartment and moves eerily exactly like a real fish. Here’s a video of an early model:

The robofish will be deployed in schools of five and can communicate with one another using wi-fi; when one robofish has detected a contaminant, it sends a message to the others, which will then motor on over and take readings of the area. The fish will swim about the Thames, or another body of water, unmonitored by humans unless they find pollution. Researchers plan to have a working prototype, jam-packed with sensors, ready in as little as 18 months..."

The article goes on to describe the history of the Thames and its super-pollutedness up until the 1950's and how it's sprung back to health after the docks were closed in recent decades, yadda yadda yadda.

But check out that video of the robo-fish. Is it just me, or is it completely and utterly unecessary for a robotic pollution-sniffing device designed for the sole purpose of monitoring the river's health to look and move just like a real fish? It's creepy! It's like a real-fish doppleganger. Terminator Fish. Ahhnold Fisheneggar...

Seriously, though. What is the point of the realistic fish-like movement? Why the scales? Why the fishiness? Couldn't they just send out some little submarine-y things? I'm venturing to say that it's for the same reason that engineers think they should make androids and battle-bots. Because, well, they can. And hey, isn't it COOL?

I say hell no, it's not cool. It's bad enough that human beings are being subjected to the quiet invasion of Roombas and pro-robot propaganda at every turn. Can't we leave British salmon alone? They don't need this bullshit - being a fish in the Thames is tough enough without the confusion of faux-fish. Ridiculous.

I feel like I should write something...

...but my hand is being a total jerk. Suffice it to say these past two weeks have been stressful and difficult and my wrists and hands are responding in kind, and my doctor is right and I shouldn't be typing much. So I've been focusing on my paid and hopefully-soon-to-be-paid writing jobs. Sorry to leave you all hanging.

In the meantime...

DOWN WITH THE ROBOTS!

Continuing with all the problems I see inherent in the programming of combat robots to have 'functional morality'...

Putting aside the very real difficulties in the mere logistics of trying to program a wartime 'morality' into a machine for a moment, I find a much deeper issue with the moral questions inherent in trying to make a machine act as a human would in such an extreme situation as a war zone, in the first place. What does this say about us, our feelings toward robots and the wars we want to put them in? What would be the point of using robots instead of soldiers in the first place?

Ostensibly, I'm sure, the idea would be that using robots, we could spare the lives of our soldiers, which are worth immeasurably more to us on an emotional level than the thousands and millions of dollars we'd have poured into robot soldiers. But, let's step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture, which will tell us in no uncertain terms that most wars are fought for money these days anyway, and that in the grand scheme of things, human life has never stood up to the powers that be trying to get to the bottom line. Simply through experience, I think we can make the assumption that a military engineer saying he's concerned with protecting human life is kind of like a slave owner saying he believes that all men are created equal. It sounds nice, and we want to believe it, but there's something else going on there. In this case, it seems to me that the something else goes along the lines of: "Dude, let's make a super-powered robot with awesome firepower capabilities to do our work for us!"

Not exactly an irresponsible idea, given that we very well could save human lives with these things. But, given that they're to be 'super-powered robots with awesome firepower capabilities' (according to me), we do not seem to be too worried about anybody's lives but our guys'. We seem to want to kill the crap out of anybody who could be on the other side. Which was all well and good for, you know, the Mongol hordes, but in this day and age, a bit more forebearance and good judgment is required. Good MORAL judgment, that is, which I've already posited, is simply out of the reach of robot soliders, no matter how well-programmed. They're not people, and yes, that's the whole point, but if they can't actually understand the morality we've programmed into them, they can't be expected to use it discerningly to protect innocent lives on both sides. They're just killing machines.

So, if we can take my superior reasoning skills here as scientific fact (which we obviously can), and the robots are not going to save the lives of the innocent, nor are they really at their root being used to save our guys, then what are they for? Besides blowing things up in a science-fiction-awesome way?

I know I'm cynical and will go to almost any length to discredit robots, but honestly, regardless of cynicism, doesn't the idea of a super-powered robot with a very non-functional morality and the ability to kill lots of people in place of soldiers that have historically been trained to do that job, smell just a bit like a placeholder? Doesn't it seem like the robot here would be just an agent that, because it is not technically alive or sentient or capable of understanding the morality with which we have endowed it, can be used to absolve ourselves of all moral culpability for the destruction it will cause? Sure, we made it, and sure, we programmed it, and sure, we sent it into that town with those rocket-launchers, but we didn't actually kill all those people. We can't be held morally responsible if it screwed up. We can't be held morally responsible if it didn't.

This isn't to say that we wouldn't be responsible in other ways, as the government/military behind combat robots would be forced to accept responsibility in a practical sense, but it would sure make us feel better knowing that the agents of destruction we sent in and who blew things up and who got blown up weren't people with a moral responsibility to other people. They're just robots! They must've malfunctioned or something, who knows! But hey, we didn't lose any men, and that's great, right? More champagne!

...see the sliminess in there? I guess I had to dig for it but I think it's just as plain as any gigantic rotting tuber when you find it...

More tomorrow.

Moral machines.

I spent a lot of time in college in Philosophy classes. So much time, in fact, that in my senior year I realized that if I took just one more course, I'd have a minor. So I did, and now I do. Philosophy courses at a Jesuit university tend to have a very religious and often moralistic bent, so I had opted mostly for fun, un-think-y classes like Native American Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy, which pretty much parroted the ideas I already had about the nature of morality and human nature. But then, when I decided to take the plunge for the minor, the only class I could fit into my schedule that would qualify me was an intensely think-y class called Philosophy of Human Nature. I had a really tough time in that class because we kept bringing up questions that to me were simply preposterous and therefore not worth our time. The subject matter ranged from the agency of the human mind (if we took this person's brain and put it in that person's body, whose personality would be the result? where is the personhood of the person? etc) and the possible person-hood of artificial intelligence. I simply couldnt' see a situation in which these questions would actually become applicable, so I almost refused to do well in the class.

Well, that sure came around to bite me in the ass. I can't seem to formulate proper arguments, or bring up the necessary groundwork of philosophy that has already been laid by hundreds of years of moral philosophizing. Serves me right, I guess. I've been trying to piece together what I have to say about the article I linked to on Saturday about the difficulties that military engineers are having with programming morality into robots. I've been giving the matter some thought, have made extensive notes, and even tried to have a calm and rational out-loud discussion with Connor about it. I had hoped, through these processes, to cement a solid idea of just what it is about the idea of morally reasoning combat robots that makes me want to cry. But instead I realized that, far from reaching one solid conclusion, I have more of a tendency to fly into fits of adrenaline-fueled word-flinging that doesn't make sense. I know why I feel the way I do, but I feel it so passionately that I have difficulty articulating. So. I'm going to try to write down just one of the arguments here, to avoid rambling, ranting, and crying.

Ahem.

After some horrendous errors in the past two years in which combat robots opened fire inexplicably on 'friendly' troops, engineers and programmers have decided it might be a good idea to try to equip battle bots with a "functional morality." They are hoping to successfully use a combination of programming techniques to accomplish this goal: "top down" programming would provide the machine with a set of absolute rules (a la "I, Robot") that could not be undermined, while "bottom up" learning would be implemented, enabling the robot to apply rules to new and changing situations and to learn from past experience (Wall-E, you little bastard). This, scientists hope, would make the robots doing our slaughtering for us more capable to deal with the unexpected and morally dubious realities of war zones, while operating on a basic set of principles that would guide them in decision-making.

Lest you think this sounds cool, and without even trying to describe the creepy-crawly sensation I get when I think of robots 'learning from experience,' let me point out a few things that I know about war zones, gleaned from the watching of several war movies and the reading of several similar books. As they say, "War is Hell," and believe it or not, they say it for a reason. And what can you expect from Hell but a complete upending of morality? While might be the place to find some of the most black and white examples of human morality in action, it is also the place where normal morality often goes totally grey, gets turned on its head, and does breakdance spins. In a war zone, "the innocent" become "the enemy," "children" become "soldiers," "machine gun fire" can be termed "friendly fire," and a zillion other f-ed up things can and do go wrong every moment, turning every situation into a scene of horror that moral philosophers would pee their pants to think of. Particularly in modern war zones, where the enemy is often never seen and thus never 100% identifiable as the enemy, where soldiers fight over causes they hardly understand, and where we're trying to send in ROBOTS to do our bidding, for God's sake, to say that a "functional morality" is the end goal seems a little simple-minded. What could the basic tenets, the basic system of rules in the "top down" model possibly be?

If we're going for a general human morality to implement here, or to form as a structure for the robot rules, the author of our article points out that "there is no clear task specification for general moral behavior, nor is there a single answer to the question of whose morality or what morality should be implemented in AI," and he has a good point. But even if we were to aim for the very most general set of rules that applies to as much of the human population's idea of moral behavior worldwide, we'd be screwed. By its very nature, the set of morals we'd have to instill in a combat robot would be sideways from the beginning. "Do not kill"? Doesn't apply. "Do not kill the innocent"? What constitutes innocent when you're taking over a city full of people who would gladly slaughter you and your entire culture? "Do not kill children"? Modern Africa has proven that children can be just as ruthless as adults. ...And on and on we go.

Human beings, who ostensibly have a much more refined sense of right and wrong, produced organically after years of learning through trial and error, who have a mortal fear of reprisal for acting immorally, and whose pasts are filled with genuine decision-making incidents, still have plenty of trouble determining how to behave morally in war times. We've all seen pictures of Abu Ghraib. So then, in all our vast experience with morality, how can we expect a machine, put together and programmed by us and then taught how to react to situations in very controlled lab environments, to make better decisions than we do? And given their superior speed, agility, and strength (which supposedly is why we'd be using them in the first place - not to give ourselves the impression that WE are not the ones doing the killing and therefore not responsible for it... but that's another argument. Maybe tomorrow.), if these robots do make bad decisions based on their imperfect senses of morality, they have a lot more capability for causing serious destruction.

I have to get going because the gallery is apparently closing up early today, but I will contineu with a much more (I hope) nuanced and deeper discussion of why this is balls to the wall batshit fucking insane tomorrow.

You see what I mean?

Ok, I don't have enough time left at work today to write a proper blog about this, but I figure I may as well link to this article because it's EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/the-artificial-morality-of-the-robot-warrior/

A bit in the way of explanation...

So a friend gave me a very interesting essay to read about 'humanoid', 'sociable' robots and their development at MIT. There are a ton of things in here (sorry, it's on paper so I can't link it) that strike me as ridiculously stupid and equally ridiculously terrifying, so if no news stories pop up that strike my fancy for a little while, this may be fodder for a whole lot of posts. Here's one:

The essay describes the development of more human-like robots, their programming to learn like human beings, and the potential for them to experience their own form of very mechanistic emotion, and juxtaposes these developments with the idea that robots are intended to make our lives easier - to do the jobs we find boring or repugnant. And it eventually makes a statement that I found refreshing (and personal):

"To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction - the one between one human and another."

The author, Robin Marantz Henig, has hit the nail absolutely on the head. This idea that one day we may prefer and rely so much on robot interaction is absolutely terrifying to me in many ways, but here I'll try to explain the most practical.

In a word, it's the preservation of human interaction, which modern society seems to be trying to forget is probably the most important aspect to our survival as a species and to the planet entirely, that is at stake here. I fear and distrust robots and other high tech gadgets assimilation into the fabric of our lives for the very simple reason that reliance on them, rather than on other people, for meeting our daily needs, invites rampant individualism on a devastating scale. The more we learn to interact with computers and gadgets and robots, even if they are tools for interacting remotely with other people, the more we forget what it's like to actually interact with people. When we become accustomed to having our coffee ready and waiting for us in the morning because our coffee maker was programmed to do it, and when we're used to having conversations via texting or e-mail (giving the person on the other end ample time to carefully consider every word before sending the message), and when our entertainment options are movies so heavily computer-digitized that we hardly see a person's face on screen, etc etc etc ad infinitum, it's easy to forget that there are real people contributing to all these processes. The hands that picked the coffee beans, the mind that created the text message, the team of people that filmed and produced and labored to make that movie... all are easily lost behind the veneer of robotic precision and easy perfection we get on the receiving end.

We come to assume that all these things are easy to make because they are easy for us to get. We forget that there are people who have dedicated their lives to bringing us these things. We forget how to think about and interact with these people. We become, rather than self-supporting individuals, helpless isolationists who have no idea whose labor went into making the goods that we buy, or the real emotions behind someone's e-mail (much less how we'd deal with these emotions if confronted with them face-to-face with no time to plan out typed responses). We become a bunch of isolated freaks, sipping Mountain Dew in front of our sweatshop-produced computer screens at 3:00 am, making up characters to speak for us in chat rooms and avatars to be us in virtual worlds. Reality drops from our consciousness. We forget about other people.

And in so doing we do what we've seen the people at the top of Wall Street do. The heads of giant corporations with their private jets and gold-inlaid toilets who don't know about or understand or give a shit about what the people he stepped on to get there are doing or experiencing. And it's easy for us in America, using all our gadgets, to do the same exact thing, if on a less-grand scale. It's easy, when you're surrounded by gadgets that do everything for you, to forget that people made these gadgets and made the food they're preparing for you. To forgot that other people exist and have feelings and needs and wants and dreams just like you.

It's a slippery slope, and before you know it we've got people killing each other and dying of starvation in one part of the world, where there aren't computers to send e-mails from, or cameras to record the happenings. And we in places where we have computers and cameras and gadgets just... forget... about those people because they have no presence in our tech world. We forget that our actions affect these people. That our actions affect the world itself. We become so self-centered and self-obsessed that we develop neuroses and allergies and diseases the rest of the world has never heard of, just to keep ourselves busy, because our lives are so easy with all the gadgets we have to take care of our everyday tasks. We sit around and watch other people's neuroses on television.

Real, face-to-face, one-on-one interaction is a powerful antidote to allt hese terrors. Even remembering to make face time with a friend or call a relative on her birthday, remembering that other people are there and are real and legitimate entitites can remind us that our iPods are NOT entities, but the product of the hard work of other people, which is a slippery slope in a more positive direction. Reminders of other people. If we allow ourselves to continue making human connections, we arrive at a kind of globalization of consciousness rather than of wealth or materials goods. If, however, we allow ourselves to continue making and interacting with and relying more heavily on machines to run our lives, we are asking for problems and destruction...

That's enough for now.

RIP Russian Rambo

This is interesting, because I've seen headlines about this story a few times in the past week, but the events described actually happened almost a year ago. They happend in Russia, from whence news takes a while to migrate to the States, but a year still seems awfully long.

No matter, though, the point is: this is one of the coolest stories I have ever seen in my life. Why did we not hear about this sooner and see it plastered on as many papers and tabloids and websites as the Rihanna beatdown? As awful as Rihanna's ordeal is (I'm not trying to downplay it - that guy should be locked up with a very large 'top,' if you get my meaning), this Russian Rambo guy went down in, quite literally, a blaze of glory that's worthy of movie deals in as many languages as command a large audience.

Check it out! This guy had been living in a shack in the woods in Russia for 20 years, hunting and trapping and using home-made pistols and myriad other weapons. He was 6'7" and had a giant bushy beard, was batshit insane, and had actually managed to keep all attempts at law enforcement at bay by being, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucking terrifying. He had captured and held hostage several local officials who had wandered into his "territory" in the woods, releasing them with threats after holding them at gunpoint for hours and effectively scaring the shit out of all their buddies, then backed up those threats not to invade his space by torching 30 homes in the area. He'd become such a legend in the area that locals say they wouldn't let their children out of the house without dogs to accompany them - even though many of their dogs had been killed by his traps.

And, when federal officials finally decided to crack down on this "Rambo" figure by sending out six specialists to get him, he wounded two with some of his arsenal before setting a swath of the forest aflame and somehow circling around behind the officers, and preparing to fight them to a man. As one of the officers put it, "It was pure chance the sniper suddenly saw his figure in the trees and pulled the trigger. He shot him right in the head and he died in a flash."

This dude is impressive. I am in awe. I think it's a damn shame they killed him, because I'd love to have heard his stories from in prison, or better yet, to have heard of his legend haunting the Russian forests for years to come.

Not exactly on topic, but impressive as all get-out, and I wanted to share.