Photos by Mink (above) and Lars Plougman (below)

The shuffling of man and machine continues. Driving alongside the track are camera trucks – flat beds with a person holding a camera – as well as cars operating the remote robot controls. I don’t think automating the jockeys would be as hard as automating the closeup camera work. Whenever something is automated, someone gets moved into the maintenance position though.

GRUMPY CUSTOMER: Adam Robertson, 24, has been left $900 out of pocket after a company he bought a tablet computer from shut down following the death of the owner. ANDREW GORRIE/Fairfax NZ

It strikes me that this is a very cyborg/robot kind of story. Our automated lives continue after death. Who has the power to turn off your systems? What impact will your proxies and extensions have on the lives of other people. There are a growing number of online executor businesses like legacy locker (tech crunch article about). The focus is largely on social sites, photos and emails, as described in the Time.com special “Tools for Managing Your Online Life after Death” . This doesn’t take into account the trend towards independent single operator online businesses or even small startups. How do you shut turn the shopping cart off? What other cloud based services don’t die?

Hundreds of Kiwis have been left out of pocket because an import company continued trading after the only man at its reins died.

Tech Brands Pacific’s sole shareholder and director, Brian Isaksson, died on November 4, leaving no-one in charge of the business.

The company continued to sell technology products such as iPhones and iPads on sites like pricespy.co.nz. People were buying through the shopping cart function on the website until a week ago.

via Tech Brands Pacific | Hundreds lose money after… | Stuff.co.nz.

artist/engineer Kezanti from Brugge (tbc)

The Bloggess isn’t my usual source for robotics writing, so I was overjoyed to read today’s yesterday’s post about Robot Tigers. It’s a sublime demonstration of all the contradictory and confusing human-robot relations that exist, in reality and in fantasy. Don’t make me spell it out. Enjoy.

Victor:  One day I’m going to finish my robot tigers and we will rule the world.

me: It’d be easier if you just took over the world with real tigers.

Victor:  Robot tigers are scarier than real tigers.

me:  No.  Real tigers are scarier because they’re unpredictable.

Victor: My robot tigers have a random setting.

me: Like a shuffle function on an iPod?

Victor: Exactly.

me:  That is way scarier.

Victor: Plus they could beat you at chess.

me: Well, not me specifically.  I’m pretty damn good at chess.

Victor:  Not as good as a robot tiger.

me:  Live tigers are still scarier because they’re real and you know they hate you. With a robot tiger you understand they’re just doing their job when they kill you.

Victor: My robot tiger would be a cold, calculating killing machine – set on random – that also has an emotion chip and laughs at your pain.

me: That actually sounds scary as shit.

…more….

FAKE GRIMLOCK is my new favorite reading (along with The Bloggess and xkcd), because what he says makes a lot of sense. It also drips with sarcasm, awesomeness and blood. Many technology luminaries (like Eric Ries, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and CNN) have noticed that FAKE GRIMLOCK carves through all the cream and gets straight to the coffee.

FAKE GRIMLOCK connects code and effect in a way reminiscent of Latour’s ‘Where are the Missing Masses, sociology of a few mundane objects’. Latour’s call has become a slogan for the need to reinsert the matter or ‘stuff’ of science and society back into a social constructivist STS or sociology [1]. Code is an object and objects shape us as much as we shape them.

We are changing society right here – punching code through the walls of the world. But all too often the vision is just personal or commercial success.

“STARTUP IS MAKE FIST OF CODE, PUT IT THROUGH THE WORLD. VISION IS PUT FIST IN RIGHT PLACE, BREAK WORLD IN HALF.”

Roadblocks of gender, race and class are still huge. Sometimes technological advancement is just making bigger roadblocks. Startup philosophy, which emphasizes the individual, is often powerless before huge areas of fail. We aren’t all giant robot dinosaurs and sometimes we don’t share the same visions. For example, feminism is a great conversation killer, because not a lot has changed in last 50 years. Seriously – this 1991 MIT report by Ellen Spertus is still accurate. That’s depressing. It’s great to celebrate awesome women engineers and ceos, but important to point out the systematic obstacles women face in the tech and startup worlds.

Fake Grimlock’s irresistible awesome is up against some pretty immoveable objects, but at least reading @fakegrimlock makes me feel like a raging fury in a good way.

1. Latour, Bruno 1992. Where are the missing masses, sociology of a few mundane artefacts In Shaping Technology-Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Wiebe Bijker and John Law (editors), MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. pp. 225-259, 1992 [new expanded and revised version of article (35). Republication in the reader Johnson, Deborah J., and Jameson M Wetmore, eds. Technology and Society, Building Our Sociotechnical Future. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008 pp. 151-180]

I say that a robot is whatever a roboticist is working on. But really, most robotics research is absorbed into other things, and what we call a robot has a lot to do with a vision. A dream of a robot that is personable and a slave to human needs. A robot has an animal or humanoid body that we can relate to socially.

We are on the verge of changes in robot technology and development that will revolutionize what a robot is. It starts as toys, hidden technologies and transparent interfaces. It started with the Kinect, the smart phone and the cloud.

Now, you might say I’m a dreamer…. but here are some really great recent examples of the increasing democratization of robotics technology that indicate the fundamental ways the ground is shifting as we move into SME and consumer robotics.

DragonBot from MIT’s Personal Robotics Group is powered by an Android smart phone. Kombusto, the DragonBot is blended reality, living on your phone as well as in the fur. Being a cloud based robot, Kombusto can learn from other robots/interactions. (Image from IEEE Spectrum article Wed Dec 14)

Parrot AR drones, Romotivs and Sphero, utilising smart phone controllers, also open the door to cloud based robotics and crowd sourced learning for devices. Another approach is Brainlink, using smartphones – or other interfaces – to hack existing infrared controlled devices, via a bluetooth ‘brainlink’ to imbue cheap toys with extra intelligence. Brainlink is only $125, open source and eminently hackable. They also won an educational award at Maker Faire earlier this year.

(image via Hiller Aviation Museum of Charles Zimmerman’s kinesthetically controlled flying platform)

Or is robotics multiple platforms? And when is it an infrastructure? Are platforms media and vice versa? This is what I think about late at night. Weird eh? In the computing world, a platform is a place to launch software – some sort of hardware architecture with a software framework or interface (from wikipedia). Or as O’Reilly put it, ‘A platform beats an application every time’.

So a platform is a structure on an infrastructure – this can become recursive. A good platform solves a problem so well that everyone else will use it for their own purposes rather than waste energy creating their own solution. A good platform is open to being used. It affords more applications.

While robotics is the most interesting post-computer platform (and also a media), it will change the definition of platform. Not for the first time. Computers followed cars. Cars were a pervasive technology that had a form and use for just about everyone. Cars (buses/trucks) all look pretty similar and work the same. They do the same thing for everyone. Transport them. But the car afforded such a range of individual uses that the world was completely changed.

Many argue that the computer is the first multipurpose media/platform but I think that a closer examination shows that automobiles made possible a huge range of applications that had never previously existed. Architectural and business changes are well known but I’m also considering social changes like recreational sport leagues, vacations, suburbs, etc.

Still, a car is a car and a computer is able to imitate many things in one box. What is a robot? A computer in a new box? Robotics is much more than that but it is neither as popular as a car nor as versatile as a computer. Yet.

In the future, I see robotics as a platform swarm. An assemblage of variously shaped platforms, none ubiquitous or multipurpose but all together, the most powerful new media/platform(s). So the nature of a robotics platform is that one platform is insufficient, many platforms working together are needed. The robot body is not single but multiple and distributed. The robotics platform is connected by communication, not cells or scaffolding or code.

Cultural & critical studies have recently been examining the nature of platforms – in Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s MIT series ‘Platform Studies’ which draws together the technical and aesthetic.

Platform Studies investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. (‘Platform Studies’)

What is a platform? was the subject of the May 2011 Platform Politics conference in Cambridge, which addressed the changing nature of platforms and how to theoretically address this. The conference included a range of platform discussions, including Chris Chesher’s paper on Robotics as a Platform.  Jussi Parikka’s opening address outlines the areas of  interest as;

• the politics of new network clusters, services and platforms
• the biopolitics of platforms, ie. the cognitive and affective capital (or links between work and free time, of play and labour, the circulation of affects, sociability, and so forth)
• the form of theoretical study, and the impact of technology on epistemology
• and finally, the question of politics of the imperceptible:

“what kinds of forms of politics there are out there that are not even recognized as politics? From artistic practices to the grey work of engineers, new arenas of expertise, skill and again, social action contribute to the way in which politics is fleeing from traditional institutions.” (from Jussi Parikka’s opening words)

Drones, like driverless cars and autonomous subs, have been in action the US, however use has been constrained to research purposes or ‘disaster relief’ assistance. The trickle of mooted local, state and federal law changes, required to legislate the use of new technologies, is becoming a flood. My question is who is driving the changes and how much does it cost to assess the use and ethics of a technology that is potentially capable of so much damage. Does tort law cover it? What will insurance impacts be?

And mostly, who can afford to have new technologies on their side? The drivers for legislative change appear to be agriculture and domestic law enforcement bodies.

US farm drama: Predator drone assists an arrest — RT.

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s website, the government has already been using drones domestically for several years, but mostly keeps mum on their missions, saying only that they are regularly used for “support of disaster relief efforts.”

But with missile-equipped drones causing thousands of deaths overseas, the introduction of a drone program Stateside could be detrimental to America as it would mean the government considered its own territory a war zone. 

“It’s going to happen,” Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Association, toldthe Times. “Now it’s about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace.”