Ghost(s) in the Machine(s)

I think I've lost count of the number of times I've told people I'm just waiting for the day that I can download my mind into a giant robot & run around wrecking stuff up (or more lately, that we could upload ourselves into a world where we can all be giant robots, or anything else for that matter), but this has always been a "one day" dream; something I might live to see, with luck. Now, however, we may find ourselves on the brink of seeing a whole new form of intelligent life emerge under our noses (and above our heads), combining many aspects of these ideas within a handful of years. The thing is, are we ready for it yet?

Even with a direct brain hookup, it's still Pong for one.
- Image: Danshope.com / Wired.com

Last week I read about yet another experiment in which somebody controlled a piece of technology using their mind. Impressive? Yes. New? Not really. Hell, a monkey could do it. No, what was new (for me) was the use of the term "embodying", as the person controlling the robot was able, through cameras & microphones, to see and hear "as the robot". Using this equipment, volunteers were able to use the robot as a proxy, or surrogate, to move about and do things in a room on the other side of the world. With all senses coming from the surrogate, some even reported quickly feeling that it was them doing the moving and doing (When suddenly confronted with a mirror, one reported "Oh look, I have blue eyes!"). This again is nothing particularly new; "telepresence" has been experimenting (albeit badly) with people using robot avatars (in meetings etc.) for decades.

This is what the boardroom at Dalek HQ looks like.
- Images: New York Times

The catch in this experiment however is that, in order to gain the needed precision, volunteers had to be strapped into an MRI machine for the duration, so that the tiny electrical activations within their brains could be monitored in real-time, and in detail. With its noise, close confinement & expense, such a system is something that would seem only to hold any attraction or use for day-players and tourists. Even with a computer body somewhere else to call your own, the sense of confinement would soon have people racing back to their real body and the real world.

But that's only if they have a real world to return to.

Around the world millions of people are paralysed, permanently bedridden or even "locked in", with little or no possible communication with the outside world; they have no "real world" to speak of. Many face the stark reality of living simply as the alternative to being dead, and some would rather choose the latter, when the former may sometimes only differ from it in brain-state and pulse rate. In recent years technology has offered the "locked-in" a chance to communicate with the outside world through sensors that read brain activity or tiny physical movements and allow a computer program to generate text or speech. Indeed, such a system has been on public display for many years through the "voice" of Stephen Hawking (who has, incidentally, repeatedly refused to upgrade his voice to a more realistic tone; having come to accept his distinctive tinny vocalisations as a part of who he is).

What if "surrogate" technologies such as the experiment mentioned above could allow the "locked in" a third choice, beyond death or survival? What if they could get outside, get a job and rejoin the wider world... as a robot?

"Bite my shiny telepresent ass."
- Image: Matt Groening / Fox

Of course at first the idea seems absurd. The person in question wouldn't be a robot any more than a person playing a computer game or driving a remote controlled toy "is" their character or vehicle; the thing is, by many definitions they're not currently living the life of a person either. For a healthy person the idea of spending whole days, let alone every waking hour, lying on a slab, hooked up to machines, is something most would not want to consider. But for those already so confined, this might represent a previously impossible escape into a wider world.

Who says your new body has to have legs?
- Image: Coolrobots.net

For the last few decades (arguably back as far as WW2 research teams have been working on remote-controlled robots (generally known as Waldo units) to undertake specialised jobs too dangerous or even not physically possible for a human body to perform. These range from firefighting, medical applications, logistics, search & rescue, working in radioactive environments and mapping, to exploration and even warfare. To date these have always been operated by guys with joysticks (or occasionally a neural hook-up): "day players", who log off and go home at the end of their shift. So what of the potential for "residential" robot jockeys?

What if your "mini-me" became your actual you?
- Image: Coolrobots.net

Trapped in their own minds at present, here are people often desperate to interact with the world but with little hope of ever doing so. Given access to a remote body, and with no body of their own, as far as physical action is concerned, they could take up permanent residence. All at once they would not so much be locked into their body, as voluntarily locked out of it. An instant WALDO generation.

With little technological progress from where we are today, we could find ourselves sharing our streets with human minds in robot bodies, long before the innovations or surgical techniques required to do so physically are even on the horizon. In 1987 Robocop (and later its dubious sequels) asked about the psychological and societal effects of trying to make a man into a robot. Now I'm left with an interesting thought: what if ED 209 was a person? What if the giant (or small) robots roaming our streets were the eyes, ears, hands and feet (and antennae) of real people, far away? If ED 209 was just Ed, with a wife, two kids and a mortgage; and your roomba used to play jazz guitar?

"I'm looking for volunteers for the company 5-a-side football team. You have 20 seconds to comply... Nah, I'm just pulling your leg... Which isn't easy with guns for hands! I don't know, sometimes I crack myself up... Did you see your faces? Priceless."

- Image: Orion Pictures

Legally, the way is already clear, even if it might require a little polishing. Crimes committed by a surrogate (under direct control, of course) would be attributed to the "pilot"; if possibly via conditions concerning vehicles, objects or weapons. Crimes committed against surrogates would currently only constitute property damage as, psychological trauma aside, the "pilot" would not be physically hurt (developments in haptic technology notwithstanding). But how would the world react to the first crimes committed by embodied surrogates? When the first killing spree is carried out not by a madman with a gun but by the mind within a warplane or a tank?

This one, at least, is friendly.
- Image: La Machine

The main issues I can foresee are societal. How quickly would/could we adjust to the idea that the robots around us aren't just smart but are actually people - ghosts in a machine? Could we get used to people changing bodies the way we currently change jobs? Would this effect be beneficial for the development and adoption of Artificial Intelligence, or shove it back into a small niche for those developing uses for which full autonomy is required, or wireless link-ups are not practical?

Far from being a a nebulous "what-if" for sci-authors to speculate on, our robotic future may be waiting patiently in the (hospital) wings. You may not be able to download your mind into a giant robot just yet...

Image: Spectrum.ieee.org

But you'll be able to stream it.

SLR - Simple Language Recognition

For all my love of technology I have come to the realisation that I  spend an awful lot of time swearing at it, in its many shapes & forms. But what recently surprised me is quite how much of that swearing is done at my camera.

Yeah, that's right, focus on the gravel. I'm sure it contains some rare  and fascinating aggregate.

I love my digital camera. For too long, since some grit destroyed my last-camera-but-one and a combination of a go-kart-related injury and me losing it in a bar did for the last one (OK, so on balance losing it turned out to be more fatal than my mate running it over), I had no camera other than the one hiding behind the screen-lock and loading time of my phone; so to regain the familiar presence of a point-and-shoot snapper at my hip was a feeling of freedom and reassurance that the world was once again mine to capture (in a presently non-giant-robot-related sense). Although there's no beating a huge, expensive SLR for quality of shots or the simple beauty of the composure, I don't want to have to do the agonising maths entailed in deciding whether to bring something like that along with me whenever I step out of the front door. Am I likely to want it? Can I carry it around all day? Will it be safe? Will I lose it? Will (as happened to a devastated friend of mine) I put it down a little too close to a candle and melt my £300 telephoto lens? Nope, I wanted something I could just tuck into my jeans pocket every day and go from opportunity to shot in less than 10 seconds. And that's exactly what I got. So why does it frustrate me so much?

Because it's bloody stupid, that's why.

I bet she's taking a good picture. Damn her eyes.

Don't get me wrong here. This camera represents the most I've ever spent on a piece of photographic equipment and it has the bells and whistles to show it. It's shock-proof, dust-proof, waterproof (to 5 metres), has a telescopic internal optical zoom (that means no projecting lens to get grit stuck in it), a touch-screen and a switch-on-to-shot time that means I rarely miss a thing. Yet when, in the run-up to buying it, I noticed a photographer friend of mine scowling at his (he'd bought the same model for much the same reason as me, although to supplement his existing SLR) and asked him if he'd recommend it, I was baffled by his reply: "This camera has almost everything I wanted. And I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy." Well of course I ignored him, didn't I?

I'm a sucker for a special feature.

You see, apart from an "intelligent" (woeful) "touch-to-focus" system, my camera (as with many more recent models) boasts a "superior auto" facility, in which on-board software cunningly identifies what it thinks I'm trying to take a photo of and automatically adjusts its settings accordingly. In fractions of a second it will adjust the settings to take into account light levels, colour saturation and even more complex things such as the presence of faces, horizons or moving objects at different depths of field (although it has such an adorably loose definition of what constitutes a face that it brings to mind the various infant face-recognition experiments of the 1970s & 80s - and has taught me a new word: pareidolia).  The problem is, it's just good enough to be infuriating. Sure, it's fantastic if you want to focus on your friends for a quick snap, or catch an opportunity-shot of some vandals running away from smashing up some bus the other day (see picture), but if you want to try something more ambitious you're back into the realms of chance. Because, for all its "intelligence" (or even "superior"ity), it's all just software looking at what's in front of it and taking a punt at what it thinks you might want.

That's the last time you'll smash up a 57 on a Friday afternoon.

Right now, well into the second century of photography, the best way to take a photo is still to spend half your life savings on a box of mirrors and glass, go on a photography course and learn how to tweak your apertures and focal lengths yourself by turning physical dials. Sure, for art exhibitions and weddings I completely understand this, but what you should be appreciating is the photographer's eye for composition, lighting and focus, rather than their ability to phycially tweak their dials in the right way at the right time. The thing is, SLRs are no longer the only cameras capable of taking such shots, when nowadays even mobile phones are packing high-resolution cameras; the problem is getting out of the realms of chance and into getting the shot you want rather than what you end up with after you press the button and your camera guesses what you meant.

We'll never know what this was meant to be.

Modern digital cameras have tried to overcome the technical difficulties of photography by introducing a baffling array of "scene selections" that pre-configure settings such as lighting, colour-saturation, shot speed and aperture, or even by including a manual focus option, but often the action of finding and configuring these takes long enough that the moment is lost, even if you can find the appropriate one and aren't forced to work it out through trial and error. I found, with an old camera, that I could take excellent "motion-streak" photos by setting it to "night mode" with a slow flash and a long exposure. My new camera, of course, has a much better "night mode", which uses advanced software to carefully remove this effect, thus improving actual night shots and ruining my burgeoning artistic endeavour. What if I wanted it blurry, dammit? 

No, no, no. Look, the light's got all smeared...

There, that's better. This is a Night Shot. Party time.

You shouldn't need to schlep around a digital SLR the size (and value) of a small child in order to take the snaps that your compact has the ability, just not the inclination, to take. The problem is not that digital compact cameras don't have the settings or features required to take the photographs that we want, it's just that they're too buried in software to be accessible (or, if accessible, user-friendly). 

Aha! When I focus on the leaf, lock the focus, then very carefully move the camera over whilst maintaining the same relative distance I can... This is ridiculous.

But that's only a hop and a step away from where the technology needs to be.

Last year the iWorld (and nearly the rest of the world) went iMad for Siri, the sinister in-phone butler that does pretty well at turning "natural language" commands into instructions that it can follow (with some exceptions). So "What's the weather like?" brings up a weather map and "What am I doing on Tuesday, my life is hollow?" returns a non-judgmental look at your agenda. Rather less fanfare greeted Google Goggles, which does its best at recognising objects that the phone camera is pointing at and trying to identify and find links to them.  If somebody were to put the two of these things together we're not a million miles away from a "virtual photographer" that can take simple requests about what to photograph and how to do so. How many times have we cursed aloud at our digital cameras over their choice of lighting or focus, when we could be using pretty much the same strings of words (barring the odd profanity) as instructions just as we line up our shot?

"I want to take the picture just as the foot touches the [blue] ball."

"I want to take the picture just as the first person crosses the [white] line."

"I want a picture of the [red] bug with the background defocused [not the side of that bloody leaf again]."

"I want a picture of their faces as they cross the line [not a blur in front of a perfectly-focused tree in the middle-distance]."

"No, I wanted the Sun reflecting on that puddle, not the random arrangement of sticks at the side that looks like an emoticon smiley. Even though that is quite cool."

"Just for once I want a picture of the moon."

OK, so perhaps in the short term we might not be able to engage in such artistic discourse with our little photographic friend, but the software is certainly there to interpret simple instructions regarding colour and even shape, as well as key words such as "horizon" and "person", which would certainly help in several of the situations above. Of course I would fully expect to find myself swearing at my poor, hapless camera as it found itself misinterpreting my words for the n-th time, but at least it would be able to triangulate what I'm saying with what it's seeing, rather than just taking a punt based on the latter.

No, you're right. The distorted reflection of that overhanging hedge does hold more artistic interest than this spider walking on the frikkin' water.

Can you see this baby frog poking its head out of the water to take its first breath of air? No, me neither. But the limescale on the side of the tank came out beautifully.

Yes I do appreciate the almost fractal-like branching of the leaf lobes, but I wouldn't have minded a better look at the  robin chewing on that live wasp.

Ooh, look! You can actually see the bubbles in the plastic of that bench!

Typical. There you are, carefully lining up your shot of some leaves when a bunch of deer wander in and ruin it. Joke's on them though - still got my leaf shot.

Neither rain nor snow nor performing slug will stay this camera from  the swift completion  of its appointed duty to accurately document the wood-grains on this floor.

And who knows, maybe someday not too far down the line we'll be able to wirelessly think our photographic criteria to our digital photographic assistants, or DPAs (to mint a term), rather than leaving all the mind-machine interfacing to fighter pilots and the terminally locked-in. And eventually, once we've finally got the things hooked directly into our optic nerves, we'll have nobody to blame for our botched shots but ourselves, our short attention spans and the fact that all our eyes ever really see is the inside of a bio-storage pod. 

"This time I'm going to get that jumping shot just as their feet leave the ground."
Via  http://hookup-articles.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/mind-reading-machine.html

Right, I'm going out to the garden to take a photo of that spider web that some inconsiderate arachnid has built right next to a feature that looks like Chris Packham. Wish me luck.

Wherever there is an animal doing a thing, there you will find him.

Dammit.

Jeeves 2.0 - Your Personal Cloud Awaits

OK, I'm going to go right ahead and say it: Owls are a pretty-much hopeless base on which to build a communications infrastructure. In J.K. Rowling's ludicrously popular Harry Potter books these secretly intelligent and loyal predators are an ever-present mail system that underpins much of the magical world, but let's face it, they're rubbish, aren't they? They spend half their time getting lost, killed or just being grumpy about whether or not they've been kept in fresh mice (which one hopes aren't secretly magical or sentient too) and by the time the world (seemingly represented by England) is in crisis everyone resorts to jury-rigging their magical projections into mouthpieces anyway.

There is really nothing stopping wizards from using a phone.

So why even bother to have them in the books? Because they're mysterious, they're cute and, whether we've actually seen one of the razor-brained killers for ourselves or not, they're something personal that follows the protagonists through life and causes them great personal pain when they're lost or stop functioning.

Sounds like an iPhone to me.

Of course, by future/magical standards, phones are currently at least as rubbish as owls; not least because we are at least as much at their beck and call as they are at ours. They may not be hungry for fresh-dead rodents, but who hasn't had their smartphone whinge at them about being hungry until it finally decides to turn its metaphorical back on us and refuse to communicate with us until we feed it?

There is really nothing stopping you from hiring a PA.

A few months ago, with great fanfare, Apple announced the launch of Siri to accompany the new iPhone 4S.  As a voice-activated personal assistant it was pretty likely to change everybody's lives by being able to tell people what the weather was likely to be like soon or get confused about who you wanted to call and, indeed, has proved to be about as useful to enthusiastic adopters as Android 4.0's face-unlock and the Xbox Kinect's Minority-Report-esque hand-swiping interface. It's a nice party-trick to show your friends but at the end of the day you'll just push the buttons and get it done in half the time and far more reliably.

But I've now got so far off the point that I've nearly got lost. Here's the point:

What we need is our own personal robots.

Wait.

I'm going to take a deep breath and say something I never thought I'd let myself think:

Maybe we don't all need our own personal robots.

Let's face it: the little ones are annoying & the big ones want to kill you.
Image: Blade Runner. Copyright: Warner Bros.

With all the advances in robots that can walk, fly, run, jump, unscrew lids from things and maintain pleasant conversation, there isn't really much short-term prospect that they'll be able to do all of this, unobtrusively follow us all of us around (all of us) and quietly run our lives without constantly just getting in our/each other's/their own way or running out of juice and falling over. And what exactly are they going to be getting done as they walk/crawl/fly/slither along? Opening doors for us as they remember our friends birthdays? I've already outsourced my memory to my phone and the doors already open themselves. On the human planetary colony of Solaria envisaged in Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun, the tiny human population all have dozens of personal robots to assist them with every facet of their lives but I get the feeling that even one would would start to become a hindrance as much as a benefit, until they're good enough to replace us anyway.

I think what we really need (at least to tide us over until we all retreat inside a superpowered personal future, at least) is a personalised infrastructure. My music and photos and videos don't live at home, or even on my phone or MP3 player any more, they're somewhere out "in the Cloud" and can simply be summoned to wherever I need them, whenever I want. Last weekend (Sunday evening to be precise) I thought of a film that my brother had recommended, looked it up on my IMDB app, ordered it using my Amazon app and it was on my desk at work before lunchtime the next day. But we don't even need to rely on people to recommend things for us or even deliver them any more. My new Virgin Media TiVo box arrived last week and after a few days of training it's already pretty good at predicting and automatically recording shows it thinks I'll like (and even has the decency to tell me why). I sold my car last year because I couldn't justify the running costs or afford the insurance any more, but increasing numbers of my friends are turning to ZipCar or similar car clubs, which let them track down a compatible car using GPS on their phone, hop in, drive it wherever they need to, then drop it off somewhere else later. Who needs a car any more when you can have them stashed all over the place just waiting for you?

Of course these systems still leave a lot to be desired. Who hasn't waited days for a parcel that hasn't arrived or had to spend their Saturday morning queuing at the Post Office for something that that couldn't quite be smashed in through the letter box? Who hasn't waited weeks for the one movie they actually wanted from LoveFilm whilst patiently sitting through the dross they don't even remember ordering? And I'm wearily informed by my ZipCar-using friends that picking up (or dropping off) a car isn't quite as easy as radioing KITT and asking him to meet you around the corner in 30 seconds.

Bloody Entropy.

But it's pretty good though, isn't it? Of course we may never (need to) get to the 1950s vision of a vacuum-tube based future, much parodied by Futurama et al,  in which goods and even people are whizzed effortlessly around the metropolis through an innumerable series of interconnected tunnels that connect pretty much everything to pretty much everything else. Sadly after a brief high-water mark the tubes have been relegated to shunting small change around supermarkets. For now our only communication tubes are digital and the physical goods still tend to require some dude in a van to deliver them. For now*.

Imagine the tailbacks around IKEA.

So perhaps a future of personal robotic servants isn't one we need to be aiming towards. Perhaps we'll be happier and more efficient with a PA in our pocket (or wired directly into our brains) and an infrastructure intelligent and integrated enough to get on with organising the rest for us without a power-hungry butler occupying the seat next to us (I can't get a seat on the bus half the time anyway). When I was at university (way back in the mists of time) I was briefly fascinated when the campus got a live webcam streaming a view of the piazza outside the Student Union so that you could see what was going on before you bothered leaving your room to join in (or just get hammered back in halls).  Last November I went laser-shooting at Bunker 51, somewhere under the derelict factories of East London and found myself staring at the prototype of a remotely operated, webcam-targeted paintball turret that armchair warriors can use to punish real people in real woods from the safety of home using a Playstation 3 app. And who wants the robots calling those kinds of shots?

Still can't make my tea though.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Matrix

You know those maths/logic problems you used to get involving farmers, foxes, chickens, grain & rivers? You know, the kind they don’t do any more because such reasoning tasks are regarded as too taxing & hard to assess in SATs (and because modern kids don’t know what farmers, foxes, chickens, grain or rivers are)? Yeah, well that was how I spent my Sunday. My maths problem involved tomato plants, bikes, troughs, garden waste, cars, Homebase, B&Q, two houses, a pub, and a rubbish dump. It took half a day to resolve.

Of course by the time I'd done all this the chicken was long gone. Crafty fox.

Last weekend I missed a friend's birthday and next week I'm passing on a different one. Is it because I'm ill or indifferent? No. It's because they happen to be at the same time as two other friends' birthdays, but at opposite ends of London.  Right now I'm typing this on a train to Edinburgh. The ticket cost nearly £100, yet I'm writing this in the last half hour of the journey, having just got my seat back from the elderly couple who I lent it to because they'd missed their train and ours was standing-room only.

So what's my point? Do I hate travel? Do I resent going to see people or do stuff? No. It's just that I resent having to travel and I resent it necessarily taking time. I want to enjoy it.

Poor Anansi paid the price of trying to be in too many places at once
Image & Story: http://www.africa.mrdonn.org/anansi.html

On Sunday, as I wheezed up yet another hill on my bike, or sat breathing fumes in another traffic jam, I bemoaned being born in a century that promised me jet-packs and hoverboards but delivered me congestion charging and fuel that costs more than mermaids' tears. "In Star Trek they can bloody teleport," I huffed. I recalled a dream I had long ago in which people climbed into "Stuff Sacks" that enabled them to climb out of an identical sack at a destination of their choice. In Harry Potter kids jump into and out of far-flung fireplaces with glee (or urgency, depending on the state of evil-wizard-ascendancy at the time). "Why can't any of that be real?" I mused.  And then something occurred to me:

Why can't reality, instead, be more like that?

Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Image: Back to the Future 2 (via: Alamy)

What if there was a way to see both friends at both parties, to get to Edinburgh without having to stand up for four hours or squeeze past three hundred other irritable sods crammed into the aisles just to hang on to a handle for dear life while I tried to do a wee on what felt like the piss-swept deck of a pirate ship in a storm. What if I could go to my mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong next year rather than putting it off so that I can afford to eat in the meantime. The solution is surprisingly simple: I could just stay at home. We could all just stay at home!

Bear with me.

Last week I was trying to explain telepresence to my mum. I was trying to explain about sending a robot or a hologram to represent you in the real world that you couldn't (or couldn't be bothered to) get to.

"What? Like Second Life?" she asked. 

"No," I replied, "That's different because in Second Life and stuff like that nobody's there. In fact the world isn't real either."

"But, don't people make Second Life seem like the real world? I've heard about people having jobs and organising rock concerts and music festivals in there [my mum's cool]. Mind you, they're all still sat in front of their computers in the dark, aren't they?"

We don't want to end up like this. Gross.
Image: South Park (via Otakugoddess.com)

For now, maybe. But as I went on to ramble into her patient ears about increasing graphical power, video feeds that jack into your visual cortex and thought-controlled computers, I found that I was gradually talking myself around to arguing that most of the world's problems could be solved by everyone plugging themselves into computers en masse. The virtual world need not be your Second Life - it could be your Actual Life.

Yeah, that's more like it!
Image: The Matrix (via: Hidden Lighthouse)

Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A virtual world would render all travel instantaneous (barring a bit of loading-judder) and entirely optional. Want to go to your mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong? Now? You're there. Want to fly there (plane optional)? Go for it. But there's more than that. A sufficiently advanced virtual world would be indistinguishable from the real world, but could, at a stroke, solve most of its problems:

Well that's the morning taken care of. Now lunch in Paris & dinner on Mars.
Image: Michael Dunning / Getty (via The Guardian)

Poverty, unemployment, disability and discrimination (of most kinds) could become things of the past once money, geography and even body shape become largely a matter of choice. Hunger could be largely eliminated as soon as most of the world was fed on efficient soy protein piped directly into our gullets while we chowed down on virtual steaks the size of our own heads (which, of course, would be scalable). The natural world, with its collapsing ecosystems, would begin to recover and tourism could flourish once again in places currently ravaged by it. The conquest of space, a pipe dream for some and a pointless waste of time to others, would become something that we could all do in an afternoon, with realistic details provided by the robots & satellites that are likely to be our only way of exploring anywhere in the foreseeable future. Even the global population should begin to level out as people who didn't want or couldn't look after real kids could opt for virtual kids that could, Simpsons-like, remain the same age forever (or for as long as their parents wanted them to).

Looking pretty good for a 33 year-old
Image: Matt Groening (via: Simpsons Wiki)

Sound like a nightmare? To be fair, it sounds a little nightmarish to me too, but that's a generational thing. A few thousand years ago the idea that everyone might leave their family farms to live in huge, faceless cities, reliant on complex economic & governmental systems for support at the same time as their bonds with family, tribe, the seasons and nature in general steadily broke down would have seemed equally distasteful and ultimately far-fetched. Yet cities arose, grew and spread and it is now a minority (and a small one at that in most "developed" nations) who still tend the earth in the increasingly empty open spaces in between. So perhaps it's more civilisational than generational, but the point is that we can, and perhaps must, get there.

In his short story The Defenders, Philip K. Dick imagined a world abandoned by humans as they fled below the surface, leaving robots to autonomously fight a supposedly never-ending nuclear war. After many years a group of humans, eager to see how the war is progressing, sneak up to the surface against the protestations of their robot soldiers, only to find a world restored to a paradise by machines that didn't see the point of fighting. Trapped on the surface to prevent them going back down to start the war anew, the humans ultimately decide to make the best of things and settle down to start up a farm with those of their "enemies" who have taken the same one-way trip.

They'd look after it better than us anyway.
Image:  Matt Brown

Would everyone in my brave new world embrace their new largely-virtual existence? Of course not. For them the earth would remain, if perhaps one in which the majority of their peers would be robots farming soya. In the film The Matrix, evil robots have enslaved humanity and trapped them all in little pods to use as living batteries (I know; don't ask), with a virtual world indistinguishable from reality piped into their brains to stop them from rebelling (despite brain-death being a lot easier to engineer). Laurence Fishburn's character tells a confused Keanu Reeves "The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

But who wants the truth anyway? Sure, most of us are happy enough living in a world in which we commute for hours every day, pass up on our dreams, or even seeing our friends & family, because we're too broke, too busy or too damned tired, and go to bed each night trying not to think about war, famine and the other horsemen of our modern apocalypse that we can't or won't do anything about. And at the moment we don't have much of a choice anyway. But you know what? When the Matrix comes along I won't be the only one thinking about pulling on that blindfold myself.

I'll take the blue pill thanks.
Image: The Matrix (via: Nassim Teleb)

The trouble with Daleks

No wonder they're pissed off all the time

The other night, caught betwixt sleep and wake, an image and a realisation drifted into my head and back out again seconds later: Daleks can't knit.

A report in the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges summarises recent research, which has found that regular knitting can convey a number of health benefits, including:

• Reducing high blood pressure
• Relieving stress
• Developing hand-eye coordination in children
• Keeping arthritic hand joints limber
• Reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease
• Increasing self-esteem
• Aiding in recovery from surgery or illness by keeping the patient relaxed and restful

No wonder that Daleks, condemned by their historically warlike behaviour (and 1960s BBC budgets) to have an array of kitchen utensils for limbs, show little or no aptitude for it.  There can be little doubt that low self-esteem lies behind much of their seemingly unprovoked aggression towards the universe in general; perhaps being able to take out some of their frustration through more creative outlets would enable to them to come to terms with the loss of Davros (he did all the fiddly work) and their constant unsuccessful confrontations with their many-faced time-travelling nemesis.

The poor things would need an adaptor just to use that screwdriver
Image: BBC

If the Daleks are being given a rest for the foreseeable future (although we know the future to be changeable and far from linear), perhaps they'll have time on their hands (claws? suckers? manipulators?) with which to find a new way to express themselves. I for one plan to pick up some sticks and learn the ropes (threads? yarns?) one of these days; both in order to stave off some of the ravages of old age and to be able to produce one of these little cuties:

EXTERMIKNIT!
Image & pattern from Entropy House

In the meantime our time-hopping tin-tyrants might be better off starting with murals.

Self and public image could be improved no end through helping in community projects
Original images:  Thai Tourist Info, Starstore

The claw is a useful tool for threatening puny humans, or for holding a paint-roller to help liven up the local neighbourhood with cryptic messages

Lack To The Future

Last weekend I went with my family to the London Science Museum. In some ways I wish I hadn’t.

Don’t get me wrong; the museum district in London is one of the greatest assets the city has, and time and again throughout my life I have wandered through their various halls and exhibits and marvelled at the profusion of STUFF looted from distant places and times. I still feel this way when I step through the arched magnificence of the Natural History Museum and even on the rare occasions that I’ve ventured into the V&A, but on this visit I felt something was missing.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sciencemuseum/3751098099/in/photostream

Walking through the entrance (and another of modern life’s now-ubiquitous bag-searches), I found myself once more surrounded by the comforting grandeur of our mechanical past. Huge flywheels that tower over the milling crowds, and engines big enough to walk through speak of lofty dreams and the subjugation of nature by sheer wrought iron and willpower.  Past these to the Space exhibit, where rockets litter the rafters and shining lunar-landers stand frozen in the act of disgorging recreated history onto the virgin surface of a faux moon.  Here were the captive dreams of a million youths; preserved in amber for the inspiration and betterment of mankind. “Behold these wonders and dream of those to come! Then seize those dreams and build them of silicon and perspex and probably tyvek or something!” they called to me and to countless others as we gazed upon them through our hope-filled 1980s eyes.

But what of that future? In the late 80s my world was rocked when interactive computer simulations appeared at the museum. “What? I get to specify the size, fuel-weight and payload of a rocket, then watch it plough into the earth in stick-form? In only several dozen button-clicks and a moderately short loading sequence? The future is now!” Word spread, attendances boomed and interactivity became the order of the day. Walk into nearly any large museum now and you will find yourself surrounded by screens and buttons and things that go beep or whoosh or flash. The small child of my youth marvels at the magic cameras that project your thermal image onto a screen or displays that let you view a small patch of cityscape in 360 degrees by turning the screen around.

The small child of today though? They couldn’t give a toss.

The problem is that technology caught up again. What self-respecting nine year-old is going to get excited about mashing a barely-responsive touch-screen that tells you a series of facts about plastics when they spend their week at schools with digital projectors and interactive whiteboards and have now, in their free time, had to put away their Wii or Kinect in order to do so? It’s like dragging a ninja across town to see a display of Woolworths disguises and Nerf weaponry.

Not even trying. – it’s the little things that take the shine off

When my family went to the Science Museum last weekend, do you know what held my nine year-old sister’s attention longer than anything else and elicited her only “Wow!”s? The displays of gradually-decaying waxworks in the near-deserted rooms upstairs, charting the gradual evolution of medical technology. Computers and touch-screens she sees every day, but slightly unnerving papier maché surgeons hovering over Victorian dentists’ chairs are a genuine novelty. “You mean someone actually made these? But there are loads of them! That would have taken ages!” For the children of today, the technology of the past is the real wizardry.

All well and good, you might say. But what, again, of the future?

Feeling a creeping sense of despair rising through me, I consulted the museum map on a quest to restore my faith and to inspire in my sister some of the watery-eyed optimism that I had felt so long ago.  But where was it? Where was the look forward to what might be? Was it altogether absent; replaced by another gift-shop or corporate installation? No, wait! There! Far off in the corner of the map, right at the back of the top floor, was an apologetic-looking little room marked “In Future”. Leaving my sister & step-sister behind with my dad to queue for the Red Arrows 360 Degree Flight Experience machine (£9 a ticket and a half-hour queue for a 3-minute ride that they later described as “Alright.”), I set off at a literal run in search of the future I had feared lost in the rush to the present.

Image: sciencemuseum.org.uk

Off past the Red Arrows I flew, then through the History of Flight (the suspended planes of which still have the power to awe me) and… oh.

 The future's out there, somewhere...

  

Um, up a small ramp, around a corner, up another short ramp, through an inconspicuous door, around the IMAX, along a dark, notably-deserted, corridor and finally around one more corner to what must be the most remote part of the Science Museum; only ventured into by the most intrepid, the most determined and those who’ve got lost after going to the toilet at the IMAX. Still, the starry-eyed child in me was guessing the whole way at the sorts of futuristic delights that would await us when I at last reached my destination. “I wonder how they’ve managed to fit all the giant robots and space-TVs into such a small room? Probably with a teleporter or a shrink-ray or something,” it babbled…

This is what greeted my eye. This.

Stolen from the set of Doctor Who or Red Dwarf in the 1980s

From what I could gather it was a machine for entering personal messages; possibly to be displayed on that funky ring that hangs over the main hall displaying rapidly moving text that nobody can read. I couldn’t gather much from it, however, because it was broken. Apart from that, and another the same at the other end of the room, “In Future” was largely an empty room. There was nothing interesting on the walls, floors or ceiling; no partitions or cases; just three large, tilted, circular tables onto which had been projected some sort of Wheel of Fortune game (the same at all three tables) in which participants spin a wheel to find out when they’ll die depending on various randomly-assigned socio-economic and lifestyle factors. Rather like a flattened-out table-top fruit-machine at which several people can stand, simultaneously being bored without any hope of cash at the end of their mindless virtual button-bashing.

The future is a big empty room. We'll probably have to sell the furniture to pay for the projecty-tables.

But perhaps this is what the future holds.

Perhaps when museum’s curators and planners went to the greatest minds available and asked how best to represent the future that may someday greet us, they were met with the response: “Well, we’re all probably going end up in artificially-lit, windowless rooms, bashing buttons on tables while we wait to find out which aspect of our lifestyle is likely to kill us first. Oh, and you’ll probably be able to send short messages to be displayed on a big hoop or something.”

Do you feel lucky? Or just horribly, horribly sad...

It’s a cop-out though, isn’t it; no matter how apt. It’s like when zoos have a sign pointing to a room containing “The Most Dangerous Animal On The Planet” and you walk in to find out that all it contains is a mirror. “Ah, yes I see. It’s funny because it’s true." Lazy, cheap and depressing, but true.

When I trudged back to meet up with my family a short time later they asked me to show them the pictures that I have now posted above. “What’s that?” remarked my distinctly underwhelmed step-sister, “A game show?” I was suddenly reminded of Don’t Scare The Hare: a gameshow that recently raised a ripple of rubber-necking interest when it appeared like a floating car in the river of TV, before disappearing with barely more than a few apologetic bubbles.

  

In the show Jason Bradbury (off the Gadget Show), with narration from Sue Perkins (off lots of nice things), guides families through a number of vermin-themed variety gameshow tasks in order to avoid traumatising the eponymous 4-foot tall remote-controlled robotic hare. Does it need to be robotic? Does this add anything to the show other than the ability of the co-host to rotate its ears? No. It’s like Twiki from Buck Rodgers: theoretically a nod (and a cheekily raised eyebrow) to the everpresence of technology but in practice simply superfluous and irritating.

Image: mirror.co.uk

It's all fun and games until someone turns out to be really, really irritating.

Image: http://www.imglego.co.cc

So what do we take from this? That, once again, and in the week that the USA officially pulls out of manned space-flight, it is clear that ours is a generation that can’t be bothered with the future any more? That, like the vaguely-interactive table-top games I found at In Future, we’re jaded enough to know that most of us are doomed to spend our lives standing around repeatedly jabbing the same buttons until the future arrives anyway, according to whatever pre-programmed course or chaotically-assigned sequence it’s running down? Or does it just mean that it’s only fair for a museum, even a Science Museum, to be largely devoted to the past? Perhaps what I was really looking for all along was some kind of Future-House, in which eyes and minds might be dazzled by the wonders of human ingenuity.

Image: Getty Images

Where were you when I needed you?

Poor Science Museum; it’s not your fault the future overtook you. You're a brilliant museum and I love you. But for now it looks like if I want to see the future and hold it in my hands I know what I need to do: I’m going to get a copy of New Scientist and read it in a mobile phone shop.

So it goes.