Technocreep

by Thomas P. Keenan

  If Furbies could be demanding and petulant, bleating out “Ah-May Koh Koh—Pet Me More!” at the most inopportune times, the other virtual pet craze, Tamagotchis, was known to interrupt business meetings in Japan and cause people to miss their turn on a golf course.

  With their built-in digital meters, these pocket-sized creatures demanded regular care, feeding, and even bathroom breaks. The programming inside the Tama-Go has been reverse-engineered by Natalie Silvanovich, who posted some of her findings online.317

  She shares Tamagotchi secrets like “from code inspection we learn that it is equally likely a girl will be Belltchi and Hositchi, and equally likely a boy will be Mattaritchi or Ahirkutchi.”

  These glorified digital watches, and our reaction to them, actually provides some great insights into human nature. From the hatching of the egg, the Tamagotchi’s life is a series of suspenseful, if somewhat pre-programmed moments. Will it be a boy or a girl? Which kind of baby personality will it have? What factors determine the variety of Toddler or Teen it will grow into? The randomness and apparent unpredictability is evidently an appealing feature of the device.

  Digging into the chip inside Tama-Go’s programming, Silvanovich found that initial breed and gender are determined randomly, based on the precise clock setting at the moment the device is activated.

  From that point on, Tamagotchi child-rearing imitates real life. Ignore your baby and you are going to get one of the nastier toddlers. Also, Silvanovich found, “if you care for your toddler poorly, you need to make up for this in discipline in the teen years or else you will get a ‘bad’ character.” By pretending to be alive, yet clearly not being truly alive, the Tamagotchi falls into the “Uncanny Valley” that is both the bane and the delight of robotics researchers.

  If you think the era of virtual pets has passed, you don’t watch a lot of late-night TV. A fake parrot is now making the rounds with the Sham-Wows and home gym machines. Perfect Polly doesn’t need food, or a cage, and never smells up the room

  The infomercial for Perfect Polly implies that this motion-activated mechanical bird, which does have an on/off switch, will be the perfect companion for Grandpa since it will react to his every twitch with a tremor of its own. In the commercial, children who appear old enough to know better, accept this plastic pet as a bona fide and welcome addition to the family. And, thanks to an amazing feat of avian mind reading, we’re even assured that a real parakeet can’t tell the difference between a potential mate and this plastic imitation.

  The Furby and Tamagotchi crazes of the 1990s saw people adopting robotic pets and treating them as real living things, and Perfect Polly is merely the newest iteration of this phenomenon. Our longing for companionship, even of the mechanical variety, appears to be growing ever more pervasive and complex.

  Robot Creep

  If the word “robot” conjurs up Issac Asimov–style humanoids made of sheet metal, or the toy you got for your fifth birthday, it is time for some updating. The vast majority of robots today are either computer-controlled arms that weld car parts together or goofy-looking contraptions that defuse bombs or roam around Mars. Even that image is about to change.

  In the near future, some robots will look like insects. Swarms of insects. Researchers at North Carolina State University are thinking of using sensor-equipped cockroaches to explore dangerous sites like collapsed buildings. The plan is to have them “signal researchers via radio waves whenever biobots got close to each other.” In a press release from the University, Dr. Edgar Lobaton says, “One characteristic of biobots is that their movement can be somewhat random. We’re exploiting that random movement to work in our favor.”318 They’ve been working with Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

  Like many technologies that move from the lab to the consumer world, you can now buy the technology to make your own iPhone-controlled living being. After a successful Kickstarter campaign ($150 with “a dozen well behaved roaches”; $100 if you already have all the roaches you need), Backyard Brains of Ann Arbor, MI, offers a kit that allows you to hack the nervous system of a cockroach.319 An ethical furor around animal cruelty has arisen, though the comment “let he who has never squashed a bug throw the first stone” seems to have calmed that somewhat.

  The military has long been interested in using bugs for surveillance and as weapons. In a 2009 book called Six-Legged Soldiers: Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffery A. Lockwood examines the ­insect-created 1343 pandemic in Kaffa which helped Janiberg, the last Mogul khan. Napoleon’s 1799 and 1812 defeats were caused by plague-bearing fleas. The book also describes the use of insects as instruments of torture, even on young children.320 The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has experimented with weaponized flying insects.321

  The Japanese-originated concept of the Uncanny Valley provides clues to our reaction to robots that are just a bit too human. A great example can be found in a YouTube video called “Invertuality: Jules says Goodbye.”322 Jules is “a conversational character robot” built by scientist-artist David Hanson. Like BINA48, Jules has a human-like face made of a foam-rubber composite called Frubber. It’s designed for statistically perfect androgyny. He looks from person looks from person to person, and remembers where people are so he can look at them.

  In other videos, Jules expresses fear about traveling to England and curiosity about his own sexuality. In addition to having realistic facial expressions, Hanson’s robots, which also include a pretty good Albert Einstein, carry on rather convincing conversations.

  Artists are not the only ones making robots. At a robotics demonstration at Fort Benning in Georgia, Scott Hartley of 5D Robotics reportedly said that “ten years from now, there will probably be one soldier for every ten robots. Each soldier could have one or five robots flanking him, looking for enemies, scanning for land mines.”323

  Critics of this trend argue that the psychological threshold for going to war may be reduced if we are using disposable robots. Drones already allow us to fly missions without risking human life; robots might make soldiers virtually invincible, especially against adversaries who are not similarly equipped.

  We might even get to the stage anticipated by science fiction writers where countries in conflict simply duke it out in cyberspace to see who would win, based on mathematical models, and then the proper number of citizens on each side are executed in the settling up. It would be an efficient if chilling way to handle disputes with our neighbors.

  Will robots also minister to a soldier’s need for companionship? Throughout the ages, where there have been (human) soldiers there have been prostitutes. Now there is serious talk about Android brothels in the future. The world’s oldest profession may be ripe for some very creative automation.

  New Zealand researchers have “predicted that robot sex workers will replace human prostitutes by 2050.”324 Calling it the next logical step in the billion dollar sex toy industry, a YouTube video promises lifelike sex robots with sanitary features that will eliminate sexually transmitted diseases.

  In a real academic paper, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the Victoria Management School in Wellington give us a provocative, if creepy, peek into a fictitious future establishment, the Yub-Yum, located near a canal in Amsterdam:

  The Yub-Yum offers a range of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features. The club is often rated highly by punters on www.punternet.com and for the fifth year in a row, in 2049 was voted the world’s best massage parlour by the UN World Tourism Organisation.325

  Would humans actually jump species to have sex with robots?

  The website YouGov and The Huffington Post commissioned a survey on robosex and found that 18% of us believe that robots will have sex with humans by 2030, and 9% would go for it if they could.

  In answer to the question “if it were possible for humans to have sex with robots, do you think that a person in an exclusive relationship who had sex with a robot would be cheating?” 42 percent said y
es, 31% no, and 26% probably gave the most honest answer, “not sure.”326

  There are some deep definitional and philosophical questions at play here. What is a robot? RealTouch Interactive is a device that connects to a USB port and to a certain part of the male anatomy. It can then be controlled remotely over the Internet. Is this robot sex? Is it infidelity or just high quality porn viewing?

  The RealTouch is said to bring “porn into the 4th dimension.” Gizmag reviewer Loz Blain admitted that he has “been using this USB-controlled pleasure machine to have amazingly realistic long-distance sex with girls on three different continents.”327

  The female side of this market is also being addressed. In an article on Wired.com, writer Regina Lynn documented the day a UPS truck delivered her high tech Internet-enabled sex toy for women called a Sinulator. Both Sinulator and RealTouch appear to have ceased selling their products, but others are filling the void, including some that include smartphones apps.328

  Teledildonics moved into virtual reality with the November 2013 introduction of VR Tenga, a robotic sex toy from Japan that coordinates its ministrations with the Oculus Virtual Reality headset. According to people who have tried it, the effect is more than adequate.329

  Users of this device may be showing us the way of the future—the rise of human/computer hybrids. The VR Tenga is more than just a communication channel: it adds input of its own into the experience, but there is a human on the other end.

  In Japan, “Doll No Mori” (”Forest of Dolls”) charges the equivalent of about $110 for a 70-minute “doll escort service.” In a book on robot ethics, this example is discussed with the appropriate degree of gravitas. While concluding that the dolls are not fundamentally different from vibrators, the authors do raise thorny issues about whether spending an hour enjoying the pleasures of Doll No Mori constitutes marital infidelity.330

  Considering the extreme “robots have rights too” viewpoint, this book also suggests that “natural law mitigates in favor of an artificial consciousness having intrinsic rights, and therefore, simply by virtue of having an artificial consciousness, a robot should be ascribed legal rights.” So much for the idea that robosex will be cheap, simple, and uncomplicated.

  For decades, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has stretched our minds about interacting with technology. In her Plenary Lecture to the 2013 AAAS conference in Boston, she described her experiences watching people interact with Kismet, a big-eyed humanoid robot that lives in a lab at MIT. Even highly intelligent people seem to enjoy conversing with Kismet.

  This is not about the robot deceiving anybody. But because of that eye contact, those facial expressions, the voice that responds to the cadences of your own, there is what I call ‘a moment of more.’ Talking to Kismet you have that pleasurable experience of being understood, even though you know that you are not really understood.331

  Turkle suggests that we all crave attention, which explains the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, social outlets that provide us with “so many ­automatic listeners.” She claims that our interaction with sociable robots will change us, causing us to rethink the meaning of words like “caring,” “friend,” “companionship,” and “conversation.” Anyone who has ever delivered a longish soliloquy to a dog or cat will probably ­empathize.

  What limits should be placed on robotic access to our lives? Gmail got us used to the idea that robots should read our mail to sort spam and to advertise to us. If we agreed that Google can robotically read our messages to give us free email, how can we argue on principle that it’s wrong for a government agency to read our traffic to keep us safe? Of course, “informed consent” is a key difference here. Yet how many Gmail users are well enough informed to really give that consent? As General Keith Alexander suggested in his speech to the 2013 Black Hat conference, many people might actually approve of the NSA's data collection techniques if they thought about alternative security measures that might be even more draconian.

  Another robot that we all use on a daily basis is some sort of a search engine. Even toddlers now understand the concept behind Google or Bing or Yahoo Search. The actual workings are extraordinarily complex, involving spiders that traverse the net, indexing files and mathematical ranking algorithms. But the end results seem like magic.

  The demand for this functionality is so great that it has even been implemented in places where the Internet has yet to go. MIT Media Lab co-creator Nicholas Negroponte once proudly showed me the work that his students did in rural Cambodia. Every day, someone would ride a motorcycle with a wireless access point along a road, letting it communicate with systems in schools and other buildings in order to provide once a day email and search access.

  These MIT students quickly figured out that certain queries, like how to grow rice or avoid HIV/AIDS, showed up with some regularity. They “cached” those answers in the offline computers, meaning that if you asked the right question, you got an uncanny instant answer, even without connectivity.

  There is little question that the existence and convenience of search engines has fundamentally changed our way of thinking and learning. In a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose, Google chairman Eric Schmidt noted that his company’s signature product has made it unnecessary for today’s students to do the kind of rote “education” that he was apparently subjected to.

  When I was 13, and I grew up in Virginia, I was required to memorize the 52 cities that were the capital cities of each county of the state of Virginia, which I mastered after a lot of work. Today, of course, there is a nice table in Google that tells me all that. I don’t know why I’d have to memorize that.332

  In fact, the regular use of search engines appears to actually “rewire our brains.” Like any change, it undoubtedly has both positive and negative aspects. Researchers at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior put people inside fMRI brain imaging machines and found that “for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.”

  Compared to people reading a book, Internet searchers showed increased activity in the dorosolateral prefrontal cortex area of the brain. The researchers also managed to locate, back in the late 2000s, some people who were not experienced with Internet search and observed that, after five days of searching for one hour per day, “the subjects had already rewired their brains.”333 One of the researchers, Dr. Gary Small, has expanded on these findings in a book called iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.334

  The advent of visual search engines, such as TinEye and Google Image search, have also changed the way we think and search for information. Having an unlimited ability to search for anything can lead to mischief. There are actually some searches, such as for numbers in the format of credit cards, that can get you banned by Google for a period of time.

  Of course, Google is not the only search engine in the world. Another, called Earthcam, specializes in helping you find webcameras that are available, and sometimes even controllable, from the Internet. Some are put there deliberately by tourist attractions like ski resorts. Others are available because they have been poorly configured or improperly secured.

  Programmer John Matherly built a tool called Shodan, paying homage to a character in the System Shock video game series. When pointed in the right direction, it robotically traverses the Internet, looking not only for cameras but also for power plants, industrial sites with weak passwords, and just about anything in the big wide “Internet of Things” that is available to the public.

  Shodan looks in places that Google doesn’t go for things that people don’t want you to see. One of its strongest abilities is finding systems that monitor industrial processes, and in some cases, allowing a user to control them remotely. According to a media report, Shodan users have discovered “control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and
control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron.”335

  Imagine an unseen hand from the other side of the world suddenly taking charge of a nuclear facility or a city’s transit system. Still recovering from the impact of natural disasters like the Fukushima tragedy, some worry that a fiddling hacker pushing buttons in the wrong sequence just might take us all back to the Stone Age.

  Creep Theory

  Things were both brutal and creepy in the Paleolithic era as our ­ancestors struggled to survive. Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Homo neanderthalensis all had the technologies appropriate to their time: stone tools, clothing, and most especially fire. Recent plant ash and charred bone evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa show that, even a million years ago, early hominids harnessed the power of fire on a routine basis.336

  We can only imagine how bizarre the astounding transformation of matter by fire would have appeared to these people. They would have been as unsettled by this mystery as we are when we walk by a billboard and it displays something we just mentioned in a tweet. They figured it out, and so will we, but not without some burned fingers.

  In their article on the Wonderwerk cave discovery, anthropologist Michael Chazan and colleagues call the ability to control fire “a crucial turning point in human evolution.” In a very real way, we have reached a similar juncture. Information, and the technologies that handle it, are transforming our lives in ways as fundamental as the changes brought by fire.

  Since we’ve had information processing for over 60 years, one might think we’ve moved beyond the “Ugh. Look. Fire!” stage. Actually, and I can say this with confidence because I’ve been involved with computers since 1965, the first four or five decades of information technology, for all but the most advanced thinkers among us, were spent just rubbing the sticks together:

  First we automated things that we understood, like payroll processing, airline reservation systems, and searching for stuff in the library. A few bright lights like Joseph Weizenbaum and Ray Kurzweil pushed us to think about using technology to do things differently, instead of just billions of times faster and more efficiently.