"The Truth about Psych Camp" is now on Audible!

Just in time for summer vacation, and perfect for your approximately 40-minute commute. My short story, "The Truth about Psych Camp," is now on Audible. With fabulous narrator Luci Christian.

Jumping up and down on the fantasy bandwagon

In the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter says that literary authors are "jump[ing] on the fantasy bandwagon" this summer. All manner of highbrows are now writing about werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and robots, and evidently raking in the cash. Some of us have in fact been riding this very bandwagon for years, hopping up and down and waving our arms; but if this "new" trend means that novels about domed cities, crackpot marketing schemes, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and kind-of-magical babies are now hip--and lucrative--then I am all for it. Have I mentioned that my novel is about a domed city, a crackpot marketing scheme, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and a kind-of-magical baby? And celebrities? OK, just checking.

Apart from yapping after the accelerating Audi of mainstream success, I suspect these literary authors are also taking post-post modernism in another, logical direction. Those who are congenitally suspicious of "realism" may be getting tired of self-consciously playing around with figurative language--with clouding the lens, as it were. (Though not me, God knows.) Entering the imagined worlds normally reserved for science fiction and fantasy is another way of saying, "What do you mean, 'represent reality'? No, really, what do you mean?" Probably more readers will enjoy this second way of asking the question.

World's most horrifying robot

This is way beyond--way beyond--Japanese robo-toddlers.

On having a reborn robot servant

So last week we thought the Roomba died. We heard it whirring away in the other room, when we heard its musical "help me" beep. Trev went in to find it spinning in a circle. He restarted it, same thing. The female voice, which may or may not be Roomba's own, eventually said "Please inspect and clean Roomba's wheels." One wheel was pretty much stuck, but we couldn't find anything wedged in there or any other reason for the problem. On the third restart, we watched in misery as the thing spun, stopped, tried to shake its wheel loose, and kept spinning. Finally we decided we had to send it back, and Trev filled out an online form for that purpose. As he carried the disabled bot into the other room, both cats gave off a distinct "our work here is done" vibe. Their tails went up and they swanned around the living room. It was hard to tell what, exactly, they had done; but if wishing could make it so, they're responsible.

Anyway, a few days later, Trev got an email advising him to flip the Roomba over and bash the wheel repeatedly with the heel of his hand (I paraphrase). He did, and after a few tries--it worked! The Roomba shot across the carpet and cleaned steadily for longer than it ever had before. It didn't even want its brushes cleaned.

On having a robot servant

Trev and I have always avoided vacuuming because of allergies and because of the noise, which makes any concurrent activity impossible in our small condo. Also it scares the cats; it takes hours for them to recover from the trauma. But of course it's the cats who make the need to vacuum all the more urgent. With two white cats, it takes approximately two days for a clean room to become coated in what looks like an early morning frost. Yet the more hair there is, the less we want to vacuum, and the terrible spiral continues.

So we recently bought a Roomba. I hate buying anything (except Moo Shoes and food), and as I've said, I hate the very idea that a product could "change my life." But with the Roomba, resistance is futile. It really makes a difference. Now we can actually be doing other things while vacuuming--frantically doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom, for instance, in anticipation of company, or simply talking (about the Roomba). Best of all, it does not scare the cats. They watch it warily when it first starts up and back away if it charges at them (which it does once in a while, randomly of course); but then they go about their business. No recovery time necessary.

The troubling thing about [the] Roomba (it refers to itself as "Roomba" with no definite article) is its servant status. When we're done with it we take it to the spare room, put it on its charger, and close the door. It feels very Upstairs Downstairs. Maybe if the Roomba weren't so cheerful, with its blooping noises and pleasant requests for assistance ("Please remove and clean Roomba's brushes!") it would be easier. I could do with a little class resentment, a touch of sullenness. Better yet, I'd like it to speak in the voice of George W. Bush. That way I could make it work all day long and not feel the least bit guilty. As it stands I still feel, after a half hour or so, that it really deserves a break.

Cat, by robot

Here is a picture of Bella, taken by Trev's new SRV-1 Blackfin Robot, the Open Source Wireless Mobile Robot with Video for Telepresence, Autonomous and Swarm Operation.

As you can see, Bella is somewhere in the middle on the "impressed with robot" scale.

That's me in the background, not working on my novel.

Robot patient

If Sherry Turkle is right, that we attach to what we nurture, how do the nursing students feel about this? Also in the works: the first robot birth.

h/t Natalie.

Robot wedding

A robot performs the ceremony in South Korea.
h/t Seth.

The CB2 child robot

This strangely large toddler robot is less cute and more creepy than Paro.
h/t Amy H.

Last day of class

Yesterday was the last day of my Imitation of Life class. The students gave me a card and a stuffed harp seal to represent Paro (company site here, Sherry Turkle's analysis here), whom we talked about as a particularly successful--or creepily unsuccessful--imitation. It was sweet. I was stressed about this class at the beginning, because I only had six students, and my first-day attempt to anaylze the Macaca video fell flat. But they were six truly fantastic students, and the quarter, as I've said before, flew by. I wonder if the next time I teach this it will go as well.

Paro

Here is Paro, the robotic harp seal, about which (whom?) Sherry Turkle writes in "A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship." And here he (why always he?) is, at work as a therapy robot. And finally here he is as a patient.

Turkle, and several of my students, found Paro creepy; more precisely, they found creepy the ease with which people decided to nurture Paro and treat him as a real, living being. In some studies people seemed to prefer Paro to human interaction, and that might be a slippery slope to people becoming totally isolated.

However, I can't resist this thing, even in the pictures. I wouldn't have a chance.

Do you care that the turtle is alive?

In her lecture "A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship," Sherry Turkle of MIT writes about visiting the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History with her daughter. Outside the exhibit area was a live Galapagos tortoise in a cage. Turkle's daughter said "they could have used a robot" instead, because the tortoise wasn't doing anything--so why bother with a live one?

I begin to talk with others at the exhibit, parents and children... The line is long, the crowd frozen in place. My question, “Do you care that the turtle is alive?” is welcome diversion[.... ] A twelve-year-old girl opines: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looks at her, uncomprehending: “But the point is that they are real, that’s the whole point.”

I find the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. “If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?” I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on “aliveness” can be shared on a “need to know” basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?

Mars rovers

This month's meeting of the San Mateo County Astronomical Society featured Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary geologist and SETI researcher at NASA Ames. NASA Ames is full of people with unbelievably interesting jobs. Why isn't the government doing something about this? Do they know? Anyway Cabrol is part of the team that designed and now controls the Spirit rover on Mars. There's a little rivalry between the Spirit and Opportunity teams. Opportunity is known as "Miss Perfect" because she (they are female, though I always thought of them as boys) hit her landing site exactly after bouncing off a rock that turned out to be an important geological find. Spirit landed hard and nearly disastrously, gets dirty and had to drive backward a good part of the time because of a gimpy wheel. It turns out the rovers were designed to provide a human-eye view of Mars: the cameras are set the same distance apart as human eyes to provide stereoscopic vision like ours, and they're set at an average human's height. Maybe that's one reason the researchers are so attached to them. Cabrol said she doesn't go to work every day; she goes to Mars. They must have a strong sense of really being there, not only because of the eye-level photos but because the rovers' tools (like the RAT, or Rock Abrasion Tool) function similarly to human hands.

Poul Anderson's story "Call Me Joe" (from 1957) describes a remote exploration of Titan in which a human operates a lizard-like artifical life form on the surface through mind-to-mind transmissions. The operator is a quadraplegic; Joe is a fighter who swigs liquid methane. Eventually the operator's consciousness gets sucked down into Joe, swapping white-collar emasculation for macho, scaly freedom. Spirit and Opportunity are female and (perhaps not coincidentally) they're servants, cute and plucky. But their operators and observers on earth clearly endow them with life. In exchange for being our eyes, hands, and feet on Mars, the rovers get to borrow human consciousness--even if they're not aware of it.