Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  Japanese robot innovations, on the other hand, are so much more about mimicking the human form. They invented the Qrio (Quest for cuRIOsity) that walks about on two legs. It’s two feet tall and looks humanoid with a head and a face. In fact, it looks like it walked right out of a sci-fi movie. Its mission, in the usual poorly translated instruction lingo: “Makes life fun, makes you happy.” You’ll never read even a superbly translated slogan like that on an American robot.

  Japan also produced Murata Boy, who can ride bicycles, and Honda’s Asimo, the robot that looks like somebody decked out for a moon trip with a backpack and space helmet (not to mention five fingers that articulate). It can run across a room in perfect biped fashion.

  Then there was the Aibo, the yapping, flipping robot dog. The word means “pal” in Japanese. By contrast, Boston Dynamics in the United States invented Big Dog, definitely not your pal. The promotional videos on YouTube are haunting. A headless pack animal, the robot looks like a coffin with four legs (each bent at the knee). It ambulates very fast, with the frantic, desperate gait of two guys in a horse suit trying to run without falling over. This robot can walk over most terrain and can get up from falling. When I first saw Big Dog walking, it spooked me in some primal way that I can’t describe.

  But theorists of robotics can describe it. In fact, there has been a lot of research about how we humans react to artificial-life machines as their appearance or motions get closer on some existential level to real life—to us. We are intrigued by robots for a while. Then, there is a plunge in acceptability as we become repulsed. As the robot more closely approximates lifelikeness, it becomes attractive again.

  In robotics circles, this dip of disgust in the spectrum of like-ability is called bukimi no tani—the “uncanny valley.” The various stages down into it and back out have been analyzed and named from the most harmless, “industrial robot,” on to “android” and “moving corpse,” to “prosthetic hand,” then “handicapped person,” “bunraku puppet” (life-sized, very lifelike theater puppets manipulated in a creepy way on stage, proving that the Japanese were exploring this valley long before Karel Capek wrote his 1921 play coining the word “robot”), and then on to “unhealthy persons” and, finally, “healthy persons.” Maybe it’s no surprise, since all humans have a zombie fascination, that the moment robots begin to resemble “moving corpses,” we humans get the willies.

  Americans seem to avoid it assiduously in our creations. The Japanese imagination, on the other hand, luxuriates in the uncanny valley and has practically colonized the place. One Japanese roboticist, Hiroshi Ishiguro, took it as his challenge to build an exact replica of himself so that it would be difficult to tell him apart from his robot. Staring at pictures of Ishiguro with his arm slung around the shoulder of Geminoid HI-1 definitely triggers a Rod Serling–esque creep-out. You’ve just crossed over into … the Uncanny Valley.

  As a result, a lot of robot research in Japan involves skin texture, eye blinking, and the slight fidgets and twitchy movements that define the human physical existence.

  An enormous number of robots invented in Japan are young girls around the barely legal age. This is creepy in a different way. At the 2005 World Expo in Tokyo one encountered the Repliee Q1, a pretty girl robot who’d made breakthroughs in blinking, gesturing, and even breathing. Also that year: Cute J-Girl, who looked like an airline stewardess from 1975. The following year, Japan gave us Actroid robot girl, dressed sometimes in black form-fitting vinyl or the Hello Kitty look—although she donned a formal kimono for her press conference when she traveled to Washington, DC. In 2009, cybernetic human HRP-4C appeared at a Tokyo fashion show. With a cute Manga-style face above a robot body with unnecessarily perfect form-fitted breasts, she pouted and flirted with reporters. Given her $2 million price tag, she’s not yet a major threat to the blow-up plastic doll market.

  That same year, the “perfect woman” robot appeared as the creation of a company out of Kobe, Japan. The robot cleans the house and has other talents. According to the website: “You can talk to her about news, traveling, culture and music. Lisa has an IQ of 130. She is even able to satisfy your desires in the bedroom. For this we have cooperated with a renowned sexologist whose expertise has been integrated into Lisa’s configuration.” Of course Lisa is a hoax, but a revealing one. In the promotional video on the website, Lisa is a human made up in plastic sheen with a stylized hair bob so that she appears extremely “robotlike.” In other words, she’s entering the uncanny valley from the other slope.

  Meanwhile, the Europeans are exploring an entirely different terrain from the Americans or the Japanese. They appear to be culturally drawn to investigating emotional bonds and robots. Their robots hang out in your house and talk to you. European robots are far more likely to venture into the uncanny valley of emotional intelligence; far more likely to cross the fool-a-human threshold known as the Turing Test. As a result, Europeans have become obsessed with robot law. They hold conferences on it regularly, issue manifestos, and seem (perhaps rightly?) absolutely terrified of robot consciousness. Lead paragraphs such as this one appear all the time: “Top robotics expert Professor Noel Sharkey, of the University of Sheffield, has called for international guidelines to be set for the ethical and safe application of robots before it is too late.”

  The Japanese and the Americans read Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics—“A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”—as cool sci-fi writing. Europeans think of Asimov as the future’s William Blackstone. If you are worried about “robot rights” and questions of who is culpable when a robot kills a human, then the civil servants of the Old World have a code of law all worked out for you.

  The same culture that brought you the 1,700-year-old bureaucracy known as the Vatican, that filled Madrid’s Escorial in the sixteenth century with so many reports they are still being studied, that set up the modern bureaucratic labyrinth in Brussels known as the European Union, and that gave the adjective “Byzantine” its meaning—that mind-set has now turned its attention to robots. If you are wondering about inter-human/AI marriage, then a professor at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands has already written a long thesis on the subject. “My forecast is that around 2050,” he announced in 2008, “the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots.”

  Massachusetts? Really? My money’s on Japan.

  Maybe the great singularity predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil—the coming together of man and machine—will occur when the three robot cultures build a robot hottie who can fix your car and then sit down to dinner to kvetch about your lack of commitment.

  Robot and synbio cultures are amateur pursuits at different points on the development curve. Robot culture is well on its way to maturing, which is to say that the work performed by amateurs now is somewhat marginal (as it is with the once thriving amateur efforts of radio, computers, remote-control airplanes, and rocketry).

  Robotics is sort of at the stage that computer hobbyists found themselves at in the late 1980s. That weekend club originally blazed the trail for the desktop computer at a time when many didn’t think it was necessary. (“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” said Ken Olsen, the CEO of Digital Equipment in 1977.) Now, of course, those weekenders long ago vanished into the world that amateur computer hobbyists helped invent.

  The weekend club, whether a mature robotics one or the embryonic club Bobe and Cowell are forming, is a perennial manifestation of the American amateur culture, arguably dating back to Ben Franklin’s early club of men seeking self-improvement. Also known as the Leather Apron Club, this group was comprised of mostly men like Franklin, amateur inventors and idea men. It was out of the gatherings of the Leather Apron Club that came many of the ideas credited to Franklin: the public hospital, the lending library, the first night watchman, and the volunteer firefighter.

  Before computers, weekend clubs obsessed on
radio-controlled model planes and boats, and before that the combustion engine (go-carts, mostly). And long before that, amateur radio was entirely created by garage broadcasters, before large business interests took over that world. The suits bullied Congress into writing laws that ran the amateurs underground, where you can still find a few remnants today.

  Hanging out with these groups—both the roboticists and the synthetic biologists—upended for me one of the great myths of amateurism. Americans envision the amateur impulse as another version of the great rugged individual, the lone ranger. And of course, the Rockwellian image that stirs in our brain when we say the phrase “garage inventor” is the eccentric genius (or lunatic) wearing his workshop apron (Franklin’s inheritance) and banging away at some contraption typically described by the neglected spouse or curious neighbor as “cockamamie.”

  But while the image endures, it’s merely a kind of interpretation, a form of art. The truth is that amateurs have always flourished in the kind of brainstorming, open-sourced, shared debate that Franklin describes in his original writings about the junta. All those weekend club groups are punctuated regularly by various kinds of routine meet-ups, contests, and conventions.

  Franklin corresponded with his friends by handwritten letter, but that medium gave way to the published proceedings of the various “associations” that exploded in the nineteenth century, and those gave way to the club newsletters of the twentieth century. Now we are engulfed in an amateurism on steroids: open-source wiki-ism. If the mid-nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century enjoyed two great cycles of amateur proliferation, then we are arguably well into the third.

  VI. Heuristic Performance Art

  The killer app that might launch the Boston DIYbio, Bobe told me, is this idea he’s been obsessing on for a while, a bioweather map. By enlisting volunteers to regularly sample the same doorknobs or traffic light buttons, he hopes to identify the different bacteria and see precisely where and how they move.

  “Is it a cyanobacterium, a proteobacterium, a firmicute?” he asked at the public meeting. He intends to tap into the same kind of enthusiasm that once had people all over a region setting out rain gauges and then calling in the results to create a map.

  Bobe’s bioweather map is an old form of collaboration, and the hope is that with their volunteer collaborations and collegiate competitions the synbio crowd will soon look about as familiar as the 4H club. The most famous competition is known as iGem, the International Genetic Engineered Machine competition. Not unlike the Fire Fighting Robot Contest, iGem invites college student teams from all over the world to strut their DNA at MIT to win the big award. It’s folksily known by its retro Boys’ Life shorthand: the iGem Jamboree.

  Those who imagine that college students might come up with attention-grabbing ideas aren’t disappointed. One recent competition had a group from Rice University in Texas reacting to all the positive press one hears about red wine. The chemical in wine that reduces cancer in certain studies is called resveratrol. So the Rice students genetically modified some yeast so that it also produced resveratrol. The idea was to brew some ale from it so that college students, like their parents, could drink and be healthy at the same time. They call it BioBeer.

  Another group, in an earlier competition, solved the problem of growing E. coli. (Although it shares the same name as the pathological kind that causes disease, this bacterium is very safe and typically serves as the chassis in synthetic construction, so you need a lot of it.) Typically when it’s growing, E. coli releases an odor that has been described by connoisseurs as resembling, in every respect, shit. So the team inserted two genes. One changed the growth odor to mint. The other gene didn’t kick in until the bacterium sent out certain signals that it had stopped growing. When that happened, the lab techs knew because the E. coli quit smelling like mint and started to scent the room with banana. Naturally, the MIT bioengineers call it Eau d’ecoli.

  Another team invented a new bacterium that should send the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy theorists into a tailspin. Since tooth decay is caused when Streptococcus mutans attaches itself to the sides of our teeth, why not create a bacterium that generates the protein that causes attachment failure in streptococcus? So they did. Brew it up in yogurt, and you’ve got toothpaste you can eat. At last.

  Numerous teams have invented different kinds of biosensors, altering bacteria to alert us to the presence of something, say arsenic, by glowing or sending out a detectable electrical impulse (bactricity, they call it).

  According to Edward Deci, this kind of group dynamic is also crucial—the group effort of both the specific teams and the larger iGem convocation. Studies conducted by Deci show that the highest rates of productivity require that three basic human needs be met—group relatedness, a sense of autonomy or that lone ranger spirit that you’re doing it on your own, and the satisfaction of competence, which includes that feeling of flow or a sense of play at the task. Subtract any one and the creativity and productivity levels drop.

  What’s most noticeably missing from all those requirements is money. As with the children’s drawing study, test after test reveals that what Deci calls “extrinsic motivation” repeatedly drives down levels of both creativity and productivity. Business theorists have spent much of the last thirty years trying to figure out how to translate these lessons into the workplace. Obviously, it’s fantastic that amateur passion is such a great motivator, but you can’t run an economy on love.

  Or, can you, sort of? The key feature of these tests, according to Deci, is to understand what is lost when you introduce money into a relationship that previously had been built on a kind of affection. If you are a person who is doing something out of love or fondness for a friend or a sense of patriotic duty, and suddenly it all changes into an assembly line of expected outputs, what is lost? Let’s call it by its very old-fashioned name: freedom.

  Given that you can’t re-create amateur passion on the job, Deci does draw a distinction between those who encourage self-motivation in the workplace and those who are severely controlling. The latter always drive down not only production rates but also creativity (“creativity” is known in self-determination theory by the painfully not-so-creative term “heuristic performance”).

  “Effective performance in subordinates and particularly of the heuristic kinds of performance occur when managers are autonomous and supportive instead of controlling,” Deci has jargonized. The subtle kind of autonomy Deci talks about—playfulness, freedom—often gets exaggerated and distorted in our pop culture into the image of lone-ranger, cowboy individualism, a can-do, doesn’t-suffer-fools-gladly kind of swaggering.

  “It can be a little confusing because people think autonomy means separate and independent of others,” Deci said, “but we use it to mean self-motivating, to experience a sense of volition and self-initiation.”

  Deci took me right back to college, where most of us experience this distinction intensely. It’s the difference, he said, “between taking a class because you love the subject and taking it because it’s required.”

  The group dynamic often gets crunched into the cliché of the team or collective action. But it’s not that labored. It’s looser than that. “Human beings need to feel some sense of includedness, relative intimacy, and belonging,” Deci said. And, when you integrate into a single effect these three factors—a casual affiliation with a group, a sense of competence at what you’re doing, and the sheer joy that you’re doing it yourself just ’cause—you enter the magical realm of “intrinsic motivation,” the jargon for what’s always been called, un-heuristically, amateurism.

  VII. Marlboro Time

  Around midnight in San Francisco, Patterson and I are on the floor with our fortieth or fiftieth attempt at configuring the 2500-volt transformer so that we can Taser the lactobacillus, get the glow gene in there, and proceed to make Glo-gurt with it. Even here, in this most isolated lab, the group is all around us. Patterson regularly consults old e-mails for
advice, downloads one more schematic from another site, consults with a wiki or two. Late in the evening, she calls “Brian,” who’s a whiz at electrical issues, and they confer for forty-five minutes.

  “So, Brian’s advice was to turn these around”—she points at two connectors with wires—“and put the load between the power supply and the collector.” So we make our adjustments and continue to find problems with the connections. Work like this is mostly just the tedium of getting things right or attempting to, and for long stretches, the only sound is Patterson cheerfully muttering to herself:

  “Something lights up, well, hello.”

  “That’s a 15k resister. Again, didn’t work.”

  “I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood which pin is which. If I did, that would be stupid.”

  “Things that do not make sense include … what the fuck, yo?”

  “Where the hell are you coming from?”

  “What the damn hell?”

  “Unplug!” she calls out to me, and then stares at the schematic for twenty minutes.

  “I would be astonished if they had the wrong drawing.”

  “Fuck, this shit doesn’t even say.”

  “Plug us in.”

  “Again, we’re not getting dick.”

  “That’s heating up. Unplug that!”

  “So we’re definitely not going to try that.”

  We both stare at the tiny board one more time.

  “We want red to go here and black to go here, and somebody needs to touch this wire to the base. So if you want to just hold these, I can plug it in. First, make sure you are not touching the lead. Good.”