Robotic Visions in Parliament

I've blogged before about the excellent Robotic Visions project and - yes I admit it - I have a soft spot for Visions: its where public engagement gets political. Yesterday that happened quite literally as Robotic Visions went to Parliament. Representatives from 3 of the schools who were involved in Visions conferences in Newcastle, Oxford and Bristol came, with their teachers, to the Houses of Parliament to present their visions to roboticists, industrialists and of course parliamentarians.

Here's what I said.

"Imagine personal robot instead of personal computer. Imagine in old age you could have a robot nurse. Your grandchildren a robot teddy, that talks to them, reads them a story, and keeps an eye on them at the same time. Right now these things are possibilities but would we - should we - want them?

Intelligent Robotics is a technology likely to impact every aspect of future life and society. Intelligent robots will - for example - change the way we treat illness and look after the elderly, how we run our homes and workplaces, how we manage our waste, harvest our crops or mine for resources and - I’m sorry to say - how we fight our wars. But as we build smarter robots the boundaries between robots as mere machines, and robots as friends or companions, will become blurred - raising new and challenging ethical questions. This may seem to be a statement of the obvious, but robotics technology will have a much greater impact on our children’s generation than on my generation.

So what is it that makes intelligent robots different to other technologies in a way that means we need to have special concerns about their future impact? It is - I suggest - two factors in combination. Firstly, agency - the ability to make decisions without human intervention. And secondly, the ability to draw an emotional response from humans. Right now we have plenty of machines with agency, within limits, like airline autopilots or room thermostats. We also have machines that generate emotional responses: Ferraris or iPods, for example. Intelligent robots are different because they bring these two elements together in a potent new combination that - frankly - we don’t yet fully understand.

It is, therefore, very important that our children should have the opportunity to understand what robots can and can’t do right now, and where intelligent robotics research is taking us. It is important that our children understand and debate the implications of robotics technology, and make their own minds up about how robots should, or should not, be used in society. And it is important that those views should be heard - and taken seriously – by robotics researchers, funders and policy makers.

I have been immensely impressed by the enthusiasm with which teenagers have engaged in the Robotic Visions Conferences. The views that they have expressed are articulate, serious and insightful, and - on behalf of the Robotics Visions project team - I invite you to consider those views and quotes in the summary paper and on the posters in this room, and to meet with their representatives here today."

The Ethical Roboticist

I strongly believe that researchers in intelligent robotics, autonomous systems and AI can no longer undertake their research in a moral vacuum, regard their work as somehow ethically neutral, or as someone else's ethical problem.

Researchers, we, need to be much more concerned about both how our work affects society and how interactions with this technology affect individuals.

Right now researchers in intelligent robots, or AI, do not need to seek ethical approval for their projects (unless of course they involve clinical or human subject trials), so most robotics/AI projects in engineering and computer science fall outside any kind of ethical scrutiny. While I'm not advocating that this should change now, I do believe – especially if some of the more adventurous current projects come anywhere close to achieving their goals – that ethical approval for intelligent robotics/AI research might be a wise course of action within five years.
Let me now try and explain why, by defining four ethical problems.

1. The ethical problem of artificial emotions, or robots that are designed to solicit an emotional response from humans

Right now, in our lab in Bristol, is a robot that can look you in the eye and, when you smile, the robot smiles back. Of course there's nothing 'behind' this smile, it's just a set of motors pulling and pushing the artificial skin of the robot's face. But does the inauthenticity of the robot's artificial emotions abnegate the designer of any responsibility for a human's response to that robot? I believe it does not, especially if those humans are children or unsophisticated users.

Young people at a recent Robotic Visions conference concluded that “robots shouldn't have emotions but they should recognise them”.

A question I'm frequently asked when giving talks is “could robots have feelings?”. My answer is “no, but we can make robots that behave as if they have feelings”. I'm now increasingly of the view that it won't matter whether a future robot really has feelings or not.

On the horizon is robots with artificial theory of mind, a development that will only serve to deepen this ethical problem.

2. The problem of engineering ethical machines

Clearly for all sorts of applications intelligent robots will need to be programmed with rules of safe/acceptable behaviour (c.f. Asimov 'laws' of robotics). This is not so far fetched: Ron Arkin, roboticist at Georgia Tech has proposed the development of an artificial conscience for military robots.

Such systems are no longer just an engineering problem. In short it is no longer good enough to build an intelligent robot, we need to be able to build an ethical robot. And, I would strongly argue, if it is a robot with artificial emotions, or designed to provoke human emotional responses, that robot must also have artificial ethics.

3. The societal problem of correct ethical behaviour toward robot companions or robot pets

Right now many people think of robots as slaves: that's what the word means. But in many near term applications it will – I argue - be more appropriate to think of robots as companions. Especially if those robots - say in healthcare – even in a limited sense 'get to know' their human charges over a period of time.

Our society rightly abhors cruelty to animals. Is it possible to be cruel to a robot? Right now not really, but as soon as we have robot companions or pets, on which humans come to depend – and that's in the very near future – then those human dependents will certainly expect their robots to be treated with respect and dignity [perhaps even to be accorded (animal) rights]. Would they be wrong to expect this?

4. The ethical problem of engineering sentient machines

A contemporary German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, has asserted that all research in intelligent systems should be stopped. His argument is that in trying to engineer artificial consciousness we will, unwittingly, create machines that are in effect disabled (simply because we can't go from insect to human level intelligence in one go). In effect – he argues - we could create AI that can experience suffering. Now his position is extreme, but it does I think illustrate the difficulty. In moving from simple automata that in no sense could be thought of as sentient to intelligent machines that simulate sentience we need to be mindful of the ethical minefield of engineering sentience.

In summary:

What is it that makes intelligent autonomous systems different to other technologies in a way that means we need to have special concerns about ethical and societal impacts? It is, I suggest two factors in combination. Firstly, agency. Secondly, the ability to elicit an emotional response or in extremis dependency from humans. Right now we have plenty of systems with agency, within proscribed limits, like airline autopilots or room thermostats. We also have machines that generate emotional responses: Ferraris or iPods. Intelligent robots are different because they bring these two elements together in a potent new combination.

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This post is the text of the statement I prepared for the EPSRC Societal Impact Panel in November 2009.

Mimetic Factors in Health and Well-being

On Monday I gave a talk at an amazingly interesting workshop in Warwick. Part of a project called Mimetic Factors in Health and Well-being, the workshop brought together a very diverse range of disciplines: sociology, medicine, systems science and robotics (and I may have missed a few).

Project lead, Steve Fuller, gave a great talk which reflected on both memetics (pre-Dawkins), and mimesis in advertising and PR. I found myself being introduced first to French sociologist Gabriel Tarde who, who - according to Steve Fuller - first articulated the pivotal role of imitation in society. Then to contemporary French social and cognitive scientist, and by the looks of it all round genius, Dan Sperber. I can see that I have to add Sperber to my reading list!

Can I have a robot for Christmas?

I was delighted to be asked to give the annual Christmas lecture to the Nottingham Medico Chirurgical society last night, in the medical school of the famous Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham. Founded in 1828 Nottingham Med-Chi, as they like to call themselves, is one of the oldest such societies in the UK. It was a great audience, with a healthy mix of children and very eminent medics who together kept me on my toes when it came to questions and answers.

In my talk I focus on the current strong convergence of biology and robotics, but in reflecting and speaking with the medics afterwards I was struck that the next big convergence in robotics (perhaps the next wave after biology) will be with medicine. As our understanding of the human body and its astonishingly complex processes and mechanisms deepens, then - in a sense - medicine becomes more like ultra precision engineering. And as robotics moves toward artificial life, then engineering robots becomes far removed from mechanical and electrical engineering and more like bio-medical engineering. For a good example look at the BRL's Ecobot III, with all of its plumbing and bio-chemistry. Hence the convergence I predict.

Postscript: the Notts Med-Chi society is very firmly in the 21st C: I discovered my Christmas lecture can be downloaded as a podcast on iTunes.

Robot ethics at the EPSRC societal issues panel

Tough afternoon yesterday. Why? I'll come to that. Along with the other senior media fellows, I attended EPSRC's Societal Issues Panel, chaired by Robert Winston. Before getting the invitation I didn't know about this group, but came away very impressed with just how deeply serious EPSRC is about engaging with public attitudes and concerns about science research and the potential societal impact of its funded research programmes.

As the new boy there wasn't much I could contribute to the main session, when the panel wanted to hear from the senior media fellows about their experiences and what more, or differently, the panel could do in its work. But listening to the SMFs experiences was for me incredibly useful. It was like getting a master class from not one but a whole group of virtuosi, concentrated into two hours.

But the tough bit was to follow. Noel Sharkey and I had been asked to stay for another agenda item on the potential ethical and societal impact of intelligent robots, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Noel and I each gave short introductions to what we thought were the main issues and I focussed on the ethical questions raised by research in intelligent robotics - i.e. the ethical roboticist.

postscript: The Ethical Roboticist

e-pucks in Osaka

Gave some Walking with Robots talks at an elementary school today, in Ikeda Japan (near Osaka). The e-pucks were a great success with the children, and were joined by some amazing Japanese robots, like Paro - the robot seal. Pictures to follow...

The robots are coming (to Manchester)

If you're in or around Manchester Saturday 24th - Tuesday 27th October, do come and see us at the Walking with Robots festival of robotics - part of the Manchester Science Festival.

Here are links to the events:

• Footballing robots
• A pub guide to robots
• Robot scenes
• Robotics networking event
• Robots in the home: Coming soon or urban myth?
• Walking with Robots: What are the questions?
• Robo-mania at the Museum of Science and Industry

Surrogates: not a review

Surrogates. Not a great movie* but thought provoking in a possible-robot-futures kind of way. The first thing that made it interesting was that the imagined robotic technology doesn't rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI), unlike most robot sci-fi. In that sense, therefore, its fictional future is rather more plausible than most robot movies, although still very challenging. In the Surrogates future humans put on some kind of headset that enables them to see through their robot's cameras, hear through its microphones and (presumably) smell through its olfactory sensors. This is a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI); there are two kinds of BCI, non-invasive - as in this movie, or invasive (the Matrix).

For me, however, the most interesting question raised by the movie is this. If you had the opportunity to live your life through a beautiful robot proxy, so that you see, hear and touch the world not directly but through its senses, and you interact with (most) other people even more indirectly, via their surrogates, would you..? Not just occasionally, for fun, but 24-7 - work and play. Would the experience be so compelling, so addictive, that it justifies spending your days lying prone on a couch jacked into an immersive real-reality, emerging only to pee and eat pizza (delivered presumable by surrogates)? Would social pressures or fashion compel you to surrogate-up, otherwise as a real human - lumpy and unattractive (not you dear reader) - you find yourself in a world of super-model surrogates?

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*Although I thoroughly enjoyed it. The plot is thin and predictable but Bruce Willis and his wife (played by Rosamund Pike) are excellent. And the makeup of the human-actors-playing-surrogates provoked in me a not-quite-out-of-the Uncanny Valley response, that really held my attention.

Now I can really focus on Research and Public Engagement

1st October today and a new job within UWE. I'm seconded out of my associate dean role(s) within environment and technology so that I can start my senior media fellowship. At the same time I take on the new role of director of UWE's science communication unit. For the next three years I'll be able to focus all my energy on two things I'm really passionate about: research and public engagement. I feel very privileged to be in this position: I'm very grateful to the EPSRC, to colleagues at UWE for making the space for me to be able to do this, and looking forward to working with the amazing team in the SCU.

Artificial Culture in Warwick

Yesterday we had a full artificial culture project team meeting in Warwick, following on from the EmergeNet meeting on Thursday (see my previous blog post). An excellent meeting, significant because we are now exactly half way through the project. Having spent much of the first two years of the project building the artificial culture lab, the project is now moving into the experimental phase. Having built our microscope we can now start looking through it.

The experimental phase of the project brings new challenges and we spent much of yesterday's meeting discussing and crystallising the detailed research questions that our experiments must address. Of course project team members each have questions and ideas that we want to address within our respective disciplines, but there must be overarching project-wide questions. Alistair led this discussion, wisely warning against the 'so what' problem ("Hey we've discovered x. Hmm interesting, but so what"). Taking a theory motivated approach, Alistair proposes four research questions addressing some key problems with the memetic theory of cultural evolution:

1. What is the effect of fidelity of imitation on meme transmission?
2. What is the effect of selection?
3. What is the effect of size/granularity (of the meme)?
4. What is the effect of complexity within the meme?

Encyclopaedias and Emergence in Warwick

Here at the University of Warwick this week for the European Conference on Complex Systems.

Unexpectedly, Springer also used the conference to launch their excellent new Encyclopaedia of Complexity and Systems Science. As an author of one of the articles in the encyclopaedia - on Foraging Robots - it was great to see all 11 volumes and my article, in print, for the first time. Editor in chief Bob Meyers did the formal launch last night and (perhaps not suprisingly) there were four or five contributors here in Warwick. Bob called a couple of us out of the audience to say a few words, which was great. I made the points that complexity science is a wonderful unifier of multiple disciplines - everything from cell biology to economics - and that the grand challenge is to find unifying principles of emergence and self-organisation.

Today is the EmergeNET3 workshop. James Crutchfield gave a terrific invited talk about emergence, which he defines as a change in a system's causal architecture. He outlined his computational mechanics framework for analysing emerging patterns, and gave examples from cellular automata. Very interesting, but I was left wondering if Jim's framework would transfer well from the ideal grid-world of cellular automata, to the continuous time and space of swarm robotics, with rather more complex agent behaviours, real-world physics and noise. I suspect not.

Killer robots in the news again

I was interviewed by John Arlidge on Saturday, researching for a piece on the American Association for Artificial Intelligence meeting, earlier reported in the New Scientist with the title Smart machines: what's the worst that could happen.

John's article in the Sunday Times was, in my view, a more-or-less reasonable account of what's actually a rather dull story: a group of senior researchers in AI getting together to discuss setting up ethical and design guidelines for future AI-based systems. Well good. That's what we should expect to happen and, indeed the AAAI group are probably a bit late off the mark. An EU initiative in Roboethics has been underway since 2004/05: here is a recent draft of the EURON Roboethics Roadmap; the South Korean government have been reported to be working on a robot ethics charter, and the venerable International Standards Organisation (ISO) have had a group working for a couple of years now on a new ISO standard for intelligent robots.


Unfortunately a sub-editor (I guess) chose to give the piece the lurid title: Scientists fear a revolt by killer robots. Sorry guys. I know it doesn't make for good headlines but we scientists do not fear a revolt by killer robots.







Yes, autonomous robots will demand some new - possibly radical - approaches to safety, reliability and ethics and, yes, a good deal of effort needs to go into this, but the fact that these efforts are going on is not because of some secret fears of killer robots taking over. Just good engineering practice.

Installing Player/Stage on OS X with MacPorts

Back in 2006 I wrote about installing the excellent Player/Stage robot simulator under Linux, and the problems caused by dependencies (i.e. other packages that need to be installed first, before you can then install Player/Stage). Wouldn't it be great, I wrote, if there were a universal installer programme that would sort out all of these dependencies.

I should explain that since that post I've switched from Linux to OS X, running on a MacBook Pro, and have only just got round to installing Player/Stage. I was very pleased to discover that my plea for a universal installer has been answered by the (almost) excellent MacPorts.

I say almost excellent because installation wasn't completely glitch free.

Here's what I had to do to install to Mac OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard)

1. Download and install XCode (MacPorts depends on it)

2. Download and install MacPorts, install details here

3. In a terminal window run MacPorts with
$ sudo port install playerstage-stage playerstage-player

And wait an hour or so - it takes awhile. However, compilation of playerstage-player fails library not found for -ljpeg. To fix this as detailed here:

4. sudo port install python_select && sudo python_select python25

then re-run step 3.

5. But before you can run Player/Stage there's another fix needed, as detailed here.

sudo ln -s /usr/X11/share/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt

And that's it. Player/Stage installed.

Letter to the Times Higher

Here is the full text of my letter in this week's THE:

Sir,

I am dismayed by the poor quality of journalism shown in the article Sandpits bring out worst in infantilised researchers. Of the two academics quoted the first, Professor Docherty, hasn't been to a sandpit; a second, unnamed, researcher apparently hadn't either, instead reporting what some bloke had said to him at a conference. Come on THE, you can do better than this. It can't be that hard to find one or two participants prepared to offer opinions on the record, from the 25 sandpits so far. The piece is depressing also in its use of the pejorative trope 'reality-TV' without justifying it. I recall nothing even vaguely reality-TV-like about the sandpit I attended. And micromanaged? Yes the the week was skilfully managed – but how else can you go from 30 more or less complete strangers to coherent project teams and amazing proposals in 5 days? In fact there was a significant level of self-organisation going on within the sandpit framework. And what on earth is wrong with the word sandpit? The key to creativity is working with people outside your own discipline, outside your intellectual comfort zone; the analogy with play and exploration is apt. To be brought together with 30 very, very smart people and asked to think about big research questions is exhilarating, not infantilising.

Yours faithfully

Robotic Visions at At-Bristol

The first Robotic Visions conference has started here in the Science Learning Centre of At-Bristol! We have around 25 students from 4 schools. As the day progresses I'll be posting updates, and some pictures, here:

2.00pm The five groups have come up with their big issues:

1. Robots looking after us
2. Robots Venturing into Space
3. Robot Family and Friends (companions)
4. Robot Teachers and Trainers
5. Equal access to Robot Technology for rich and poor

What a great set of issues. Especially the last one.

5.00pm We just finished the celebration session in which the five groups presented their findings and recommendations to the invited VIPs. Four of the groups elected to have show and tell presentations with posters and written material - all of which were brilliant. The 'equal access' group, instead read out a powerful and moving statement that was both critical of technology for technology's sake, when set against real issues such as poverty, while at the same time calling for a strong ethical approach to robotics. Hopefully I can get hold of a copy of that statement and post it here.

Scratchbot in the news

Check our this Youtube video of the amazing Scratchbot built my my colleagues at the Bristol Robotics Lab:



This robot not only has artificial whiskers, that 'whisk' just like real rodents' whiskers, but even more amazingly it processes the sense data from the whiskers with a high-fidelity electronic model of the barrel cortex - the small part of the rat's brain that processes sensory input from its whisker's. If you look carefully you can see the micro-vibrissae - the small extra-sensitive non-whisking whiskers at the robot's snout.

Here's the full story on the EU Cordis news service.

Chimpanzee culture on Material World

There was a great piece on this afternoon's Material World - an interview with Andrew Whiten about cultural traditions in chimpanzees. Andrew Whiten makes the very interesting observation that while many animals appear to have 'traditions' (i.e. separate groups of the same bird species with different birdsong), chimpanzee have dozens of traditions. Does this mean that chimps have culture? I think so, yes.

Chimp culture appears, however, to have remained relatively static - Whiten observes that archeological investigation has shown traditions to have persisted for hundreds if not thousands of years. Longer, I would suspect, given that anatomically modern chimps have been around for over six million years. In other words, the big bang of human cultural evolution has never happened for chimps. What cognitive deficit in chimps might account for this..?

Artificial Culture web pages now up

Check out our new Artificial Culture project web pages:



These have been built using Google Sites. A remarkably straightforward way to create both the structure and content for a set of web pages, without HTML coding (actually I did have to tweak the code a couple of times). Integration with other Google applications means, for instance, that creating a slide show of images needs you only to upload the images to a Picasa album, then insert the slideshow gadget and point to the Picasa URL. Add another image to the album and it automatically appears in your web site slide show.

There is one limitation: while invited collaborators can sign-in and add comments - in blog fashion - to existing posts (as well as create and edit new pages), ordinary visitors to the web site cannot. Given that blog functionality is clearly built into the sites technology, it ought to be straightforward to provide an option to allow comments to be submitted, to selected pages, by non signed-in visitors. Or a blog gadget. Google..?

Autonomous robots with guns are a bad idea

Check out Noel Sharkey's excellent piece describing the depressingly relentless 'advance' of offensive robots, in today's Daily Telegraph: March of the Killer Robots.

Like Noel I am profoundly worried by the weaponisation of robots.

Robotics a key future industry

Great to see an independent report listing robotics as one of the key future industry sectors for the UK in today's Guardian: uk industry set to put its best robotic foot forward. (Notice also the brilliant photograph of the amazing hand on the BRL/Elumotion robot BERTI.)

There's clearly something in the air because just a couple of days ago blogs were discussing the launch of a US National Robotics Technology roadmap. Here's an interesting quote from the briefing paper "robotech represents one of the few technologies capable in the near term of building new companies and creating new jobs and in the long run of addressing issues of critical national importance".

Artificial Culture in Prague

I'm here at the brilliant European Union conference Science beyond Fiction, and yesterday gave my talk in the session on Collective Robotics: adaptivity, co-evolution, robot societies. I was pretty nervous because (a) this is my first talk on the Artificial Culture project to a international audience of senior researchers and (b) the project is still in its early development stages so we don't yet have any results. However, I'm pleased to say the talk went down well and I had some great questions - followed by conversations late into the evening.

Here is a movie of my presentation slides:


One of the questions was about robot imitation: are the robots learning to imitate, or have we pre-programmed them with imitation? My answer was that we have hand-coded imitation, in other words, our robots are endowed with an imitation instinct. You have to start somewhere, I argued, and this seems a good place to start and will initially allow us to study meme-evolution in our robot society in isolation from robot adaptation. While my questioners agreed, they also suggested that the evolution of imitation would also be really interesting, and encouraged us to - in effect - turn the evolutionary clock a little further back in our robot model of the emergence of culture.

Here are all of my blog posts on this project so far.

Robotic Visions goes nationwide

Really great news. We learned today that our EPSRC bid to take Robotic Visions nationwide has been granted.

Let me explain what Robotic Visions is. About a year and a half ago we (that is Walking with Robots) ran an event in London called the Young Person's Visions conference, co-organised with the excellent London Engineering Project and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE). We brought about 20 young people - aged between 16-18 - to the grand setting of the RAE for 2 days and asked them to think and talk about what kind of robotics technology they would like in their future. They met with and took evidence from roboticists, in much the same way that a parliamentary select committee does, and at the end formed and agreed a set of recommendations. Those recommendations have now been published by the RAE to inform senior members of the academy and other policy-makers: click here to see that report.

See my blog post on that event here: the future doesn't just happen - we must own it. The new grant will now allow us to run the same kind of event in other venues across the UK: Bristol, Newcastle, Aberystwyth, Glasgow and Oxford.

Emergence in Glasgow

Just returned from the excellent 2nd EmergeNet meeting, in Glasgow. EmergeNet is an EPSRC funded network of projects and people linked by an interest in emergence. As the Wikipedia article states, the phenomenon of emergence has been known about for a long time, but it still defies a proper scientific definition. In other words a definition that allows you to look at some complex phenomena and say yes, this is true emergence, but that isn't, and to measure the strength of the emergence (if indeed that is possible).

The reason a rigourous definition of emergence is important is that we can now contemplate designing complex systems that exploit emergence. A swarm robotics system is, for instance, a designed system which relies on emergence but - within the framework of complexity science - many other systems, from molecular to economic, would benefit from a deep understanding of emergence.

There were some truly excellent talks at EmergeNet2 - I'll add a link here when the presentations are online. But from one of those talks here is a link to an astonishing YouTube video from EmergeNet leader Lee Cronin and his team, showing (if I understand it correctly) controlled inorganic crystalline growth of molecular tubes - which looks remarkably organic.

Symbrion debates @Stuttgart

In Stuttgart, at the University, for a Symbrion project meeting. Its been a really tough meeting - which is hardly surprising given that we're one year in and - next month - have the big end-of-first-year review meeting in Prague. So a major part of the meeting has been a dress rehearsal for the review.

However, spending a day and a half with a group of very smart people is always a pleasure, and there were some really interesting issues to debate. One concerns the fundamental question of how much of the Symbrion system should be designed and how much evolved (using evolutionary computing techniques). One could take a purist view and aim to evolve every aspect. My own view is more pragmatic. I think that achieving the aims of the Symbrion project is going to be so difficult that we should resort to artificial evolution only for the parts of the system that we can't design, because we don't know how.

Also, I think there's a 'biological plausibility' argument for taking the pragmatic view. The Symbrion system will be both a swarm of individual robots, behaving like a swarm, and - following self-assembly - a multi-cellular organism, behaving as a single organism. Swarm and organism have, I think, radically different control paradigms; the former fully decentralised and dependent on mechanisms of emergence and self-organisation, the latter centralised and coordinated (by a central nervous system). Of course ant genes must both contain the instructions to build multi-cellular animals (the ants with CNSs and coordinated control, e.g. for walking), and their behaviours which give rise to the colony's collective swarm intelligence. However, Symbrion goes beyond anything seen in nature. We want the Symbrion robots to sometimes behave like complicated ant-like creatures, and sometimes behave like complicated cells in a complex body (that can perform useful coordinated functions). I think if such a thing were possible to be evolved it would have been (except for the fascinating but much-simpler-than-Symbrion case of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum sometimes self-assembling into multicellular structures).

This is why I think engineering a single evolutionary process that can evolve both swarm intelligent control and centralised coordinated control is asking too much.

E-puck imitation

Last week we made a significant breakthrough in the Artificial Culture project. My student Mehmet Erbas demonstrated robot robot imitation for the first time. To be more precise: one e-puck robot first watching another e-puck perform a sequence of movements, then (attempting to) imitate the same sequence of movements. This sounds much easier than it is. It's difficult for two reasons. Firstly, because the e-puck can't see very well. It only has one eye - so no stereo vision and no depth information. Thus we make it easier for the robots to see each other by fitting coloured skirts in primary colours. Secondly, the robot has to translate what it has seen (which amounts to a coloured blob moving left to right and/or getting larger or smaller within its field of vision) into a set of motor commands so it can copy those movements. This transformation is what researchers in imitation in humans and animals call the correspondence problem.

Mehmet has solved these problems with some very neat coding, and the demonstration shows the the imitated dance is - on most runs - a remarkably good copy of the original. We're now figuring out how to measure the quality of imitation Qi so we can get some results and understand the average Qi, and its variance.

WWR @ Disneyland in January

Just gave a Walking with Robots talk for about 450 school children, at Disneyland, Paris. The Gaumont cinema to be precise, on the Disneyland complex. This was the first time I've given a talk in a cinema - with my slides projected onto the giant sized cinema screen behind me!

My audience, who I discovered had been bussed from various schools across the UK, were attending a Royal Institution Study Experience - a kind of science winter camp. Even allowing for the cold and grey January weather - what a great way to spend a few days of intensive hands-on science.

Robots for Risky Interventions

Returning on the Eurostar from a really interesting workshop in Brussels, on Robots for Risky Interventions and Environmental Surveillance (RISE 09). The focus of the workshop was a number of EU funded projects aimed at developing multi-robot systems in safety-critical applications. One project called GUARDIANS, led by Jacques Penders at Sheffield-Hallam, is aimed at providing firefighters with robot outriders, providing sensing and navigation that - in effect - give the firefighter extended super-senses. I learned that one of the most dangerous situations they have to deal with is large warehouse fires which quickly fill with smoke, making it very easy for firefighters to become lost and disoriented in the labyrinth of aisles between storage racks. But the flat smooth warehouse floor and grid like layout is of course ideal for mobile robots, making this a really good application for robots to prove themselves useful in a serious and worthwhile real-world task.

I gave a talk setting out the potential of using a swarm robotics approach to safety-critical applications. The swarm approach differs from the conventional multi-robot systems approach in its control paradigm. A multi-robot system will typically use a centralised command and control system to both direct the actions of individual robots and coordinate the whole group. In contrast a swarm uses a completely decentralised, distributed approach, in which each robot decides how to act autonomously - using local sensing and communication with neighbouring robots - so that the swarm self-organises to achieve the overall task or mission. Although the robots may look the same in both cases, the swarm approach is radically different from a systems control point of view. But the swarm approach offers the potential of much higher resilience to failure (of individual robots, for instance).

Swarm Tolerance to Failure

Jan Dyre Bjerknes has made a terrific breakthrough with his PhD research that I'm very excited about: see the YouTube video (courtesy of Jan Dyre) below.

Let me explain what's going on here, and why I'm so excited about it. The swarm of 10 e-puck robots, starting on the left of the arena, are attracted to the beacon (the black box) on the right of the arena. Crucially the swarm's movement toward the beacon is not directly programmed into the robots, it is what we call an emergent property of the swarm. I won't explain how it works here, except to say that the robots need to - in a sense - cooperate. One robot can't make it to the beacon on its own, nor two, nor three or four. Five is about the fewest number that can get to the beacon.



If you watch the movie clip carefully you will see that a few seconds into the experiment Jan Dyre has arranged that two of the robots fail: you can see them stop moving. In fact they fail in a really bad way. Their electronics and software still works, only the motors have failed. But because the swarm works cooperatively, the failed robots have the effect of anchoring the swarm and impeding its movement toward the beacon. However, what the clip also shows is that 'force' of the swarm movement (of the 8 robots still working) is, after a while, enough to overcome the 'anchoring force' of the two failed robots. Bearing in mind that partial failures are the worst kind, 20% is a massive failure rate, so this experiment demonstrates the very high level of fault tolerance in a robot swarm.

E-pucks with spiky hats

Here are some pictures of e-pucks sporting their new spiky hats (click to enlarge). The purpose of these hats is to allow us to mark each e-puck with 3 reflective spheres, as shown on the left e-puck in the pictures. The reflective spheres allow the e-pucks to be tracked by our Vicon tracking system, and the grid of spikes means that we can provide each e-puck with its own unique pattern of 3 reflective spheres. Jan Dyre (who took these photos) tells me that there are 92 ways of uniquely arranging 3 spheres on this 6x4 grid. The Vicon system will, I'm advised, be able to track each robot in the swarm by recognising its unique pattern of 3 spheres. The Vicon system is due to be set up by their engineers this coming Thursday: it will be great to see it working.

Richard Vaughan and Marco Dorigo visit the lab

Terrific to have visits today of both Richard Vaughan at his team from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Marco Dorigo from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Both Richard and Marco are luminaries in the field of Swarm Robotics: Richard for his part in developing the Player/Stage simulation tools and Marco for more or less pioneering the field of Swarm Intelligence and subsequent leading swarm robotics projects such as SWARM-BOT.

Heart Robot and BSc Robotics

It has been brilliant to see the amazing coverage of the Heart Robot project during the last two days. Check out this piece on BBC news online, or Google Heart Robot. Heart robot was jointly conceived by my colleagues Matthew Studley (lecturer in Robotics), Claire Rocks (research fellow) and BSc robotics student David McGoran. Matt and Claire wrote the bid for funding from the EPSRC partnerships for public engagement scheme, with David as a named researcher. I don't need to describe Heart Robot because you can see the whole story on the excellent project web pages here http://www.heartrobot.org.uk/.

The reason for this post is to say Way to go Team, and to anybody out there who might be thinking of studying robotics at university: this is what can happen when you come and do robotics at UWE!.

How to make a fool of yourself on national radio

Being interviewed live on national radio is an interesting experience.

It's not so bad when you're in a studio face to face with the interviewer. Then there's a proper sense of occasion, of being there for a purpose, something to rise to.

But being interviewed by telephone is an altogether different and more risky proposition. Why risky? Let me set the scene. You've agreed to be interviewed by a national radio station that has, hitherto, never blipped onto your cultural radar. The producer called and asked if you would be able to comment, in the science slot of the breakfast show, about a recent newspaper article listing the top 10 reasons that mankind could be wiped out this century. In particular the one that predicts mankind will, within 40 years, build super-intelligent robots who promptly (and ungratefully) enslave their creators. Quickly passing over your observation that said producer seems surprisingly laid back, you say to yourself - can't be so bad - they have a science slot. And of course you would be grateful for the opportunity to explain why this particular prediction is laughably absurd.

You rise early the following morning, after checking the news piece and giving some thought to how you can counter this particular piece of futurology. (Which turns out to be based on the mistaken assumption that because processing power is doubling roughly every 2 years, then robot intelligence is doing the same.)

With 20 minutes to spare you find the radio station on the Interweb and click the listen now button. The presenter starts to talk about robots-taking-over-the-world and invites a phone in. He wants listeners to phone with mad robot inventions and introduce them with a robot voice. Hmmm. At this point you begin to realise that the science slot doesn't have quite the level of gravitas that you might have hoped for.

Then the phone rings. Butterflies. Ok, normal. It's the laid back producer again. After a few minutes listening to the radio on the phone you hear yourself being introduced and you're on. This bit is always weird. You're on the phone with a few hundred thousand people on the other end. Just focus. It's only a conversation with some guy. Nevermind that he's called Xane. Or the fact that he just egregiously misquoted the article by inserting the words 'taking-over-the-world' between 'probability of super-intelligent robots' and 'high'.

The first couple of questions are kind of ok. More or less what you expected. You carefully explain that no, in your opinion it's extremely unlikely that we will build robots with super-human intelligence in the next 40 years and, even if we did, why should they be evil and take over the world (or more to the point why would we make them evil). Then some relatively innocuous questions: What is the most powerful robot in the world - is it Asimo? Er no, Asimo is actually remotely controlled by a team of 6. What about that freaky monkey robot with the robot arm? Well, that's not so much a robot as work to improve neural electronic interfaces to help people with smart prostheses.

Then just when you think it's all over you get the inevitable mad-question-at-the-end.

Q. But if robots did take over the world, what would we call them?

A. I really don't think robots are going to take over the world. 

Q. (More insistently this time) Yes, but if they did. What would we call them?

A. No, they really aren't going to take over the world.

Q. (Even more insistently) But what if they did? What would we call them?

Then you make a fool of yourself on the radio by wearily saying 'evil robot master' or somesuch nonsense, thus eliciting the triumphal response from Xane and his co-presenter: Aha! See, the professor says so. Robots really are going to take over the world.

Linux e-puck

I'm very excited because my colleague Wenguo Liu has completed testing of a Linux plug-in board for the e-puck robot. This board very significantly enhances the e-puck - making it into a fully grown-up Linux robot. Here it is with its USB Wifi stick.

e-Puck hearing experiment

Here's a video clip, by Davide Laneri, of one e-puck sounding a tone on its loudspeaker, and the other hearing the tone and turning toward it. In order to make this work we've had to (1) turn the loudspeaker of the e-puck on the right so that it's facing directly forward (like a mouth) and (2) add 'ears' to the e-puck so that it has directional hearing. We've not done extensive tests because we've now decided to focus our effort, here in Bristol, on imitation of movement instead of sound.

Just returned from the Symbrion Kick-off meeting

I just returned from an amazing meeting in Stuttgart with an amazing group of people: the project kick-off meeting for the Symbrion project. So what is Symbrion and what are we trying to achieve? Well, the idea is to build a swarm of mobile robots that can autonomously self-assemble into an artificial organism in which each individual robot becomes - in effect - a cell in a kind of artificial multi-cellular organism. The idea of self-assembling robots is not new, but in Symbrion the robots will be able to function as a swarm but then, if the situation demands, self-assemble into a 3 dimensional organism; then if required disassemble and form into a different kind of 3D organism. Imagine the swarm coming to a barrier too high to cross then autonomously forming an 'organism' to climb over the wall, then disassembling and reassembling into a different morphology to, for instance, collectively transport an object too large for a single robot to carry. In this way the Symbrion organism will be able to morph between different 3D forms as required by the situation.

No surprisingly, Symbrion is an extremely challenging project with very tough technical milestones. Our first task is to design and build the Symbrion robots - each robot will need to operate autonomously and have its own power, computation, sensing and motors for mobility but - in addition - have the ability to physically dock with other Symbrion robots on several sides. Furthermore the docking mechanism will need to be motorised so that once attached several robots will be able to bend in 3D. Thus a 2D swarm will be able to self-assemble into a 2D planar structure but then, once assembled, lift itself into a 3D shape - for instance from a X shape into a 4 legged walker.

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Postscript: following the London press launch ITN posted the TV interview onto YouTube, see Robots with a mind of their own.

Some really interesting Big Questions

As reported in my previous two blog entries How and Why do we have Culture?, and What do Aliens look like?, I've become involved in National Science Week, a major part of which has been structured around Big Questions. I've had some fun the last few days responding to some of the big questions - which are really good. Here are the questions and responses I've made so far:

When will people invent robots to fight in wars?

Could you create a robot with a mind of its own?

Can we invent a robot that will do everything for you?

Will the human brain ever be capable of understanding itself?

What actually is Intelligence? Do we understand it?

Is it possible that AI technology may get out of control?

How and Why do we have Culture?

In the run up to Science Week (7-16 March) the BA have been asking both the public and scientists for their big questions (see my previous blog What do Aliens look like). When I was asked for my Big Question I didn't have to think too hard, because I'm part of just about the most exciting research project of my life. That project is called The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies, and sets out to answer the question "how can culture emerge as a novel property of social animals?" or to put it another way "how and why do we (humans) have culture?".

Of course you may be wondering what business a robot guy (me) has to do with a question of - essentially - evolutionary anthropology, which on the face of it has nothing to do with robotics. Well, firstly I've spent the last ten years working on Swarm Robotics - basically building robot swarms to try and understand how swarm intelligence works, and a robot swarm is a kind of primitive society of robots. Secondly, that work has opened my eyes to the extraordinary power of emergence, or self-organisation*. And thirdly, I'm passionate about trying to work on research problems that completely cross discipline boundaries, ideally across the arts/humanities, social- and natural-science boundaries. The question "how and why do we have culture" is just such a question.

I won't explain now how we intend to address this research question in detail. Suffice it to say that we are going to use a radical approach - which is to build a society of real robots, program them with (what we believe to be) a necessary and sufficient set of social behaviours, then observe them free running. Of course the big question then is will anything happen at all that is capable of being robustly interpreted as evidence of emerging proto-cultural behaviours and - if it does - would we even recognise it (since this will be an emerging robot- not human- culture; an exo-culture if you will).

I'm privileged to be part of a team that includes a computer scientist, theoretical biologist, philosopher, social scientist and art historian/cultural theorist. For more detail here is the announcement on EPSRC grants on the web. Not least in order to mitigate the risk that we fail to recognise anything interesting that might emerge, but also because we strongly believe in Open Science, the whole project will be on the web - live robots, data and all - as soon as we're up and running.

And here's a picture of 2 of the robots we plan to use (called e-pucks). We've added some 'ears' so that they can chirp at each other; the artificial culture lab will have around 50-60 of these robots.

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*Emergence is - in my view - both ubiquitious (everywhere from physics, to life, intelligence and culture, to galaxies) and for more important than I think we realise. I would go so far as to say that I believe natural selection (although beautiful and powerful) is on its own insufficent to explain the astonishing complexity of many biological and societal systems. I think you need natural selection + emergence.

What do Aliens look like?

Amazing meeting yesterday afternoon at the Science Museum. Here's the story: the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) has been asking for science questions via their web pages for awhile, in advance of Science Week, which is 7-16 March. A question that keeps coming up is "what do aliens look like?" so, to address that question, the BA pulled together a small panel which met yesterday. Our brief was to come up with some plausible alien life forms that can be visually presented during Science Week. The keyword here is plausible. It would be easy to pluck super-exotic aliens from the rich fauna of SF but then very difficult to explain the science. Of course, the fictional evolutionary science, or biochemistry, or ecosystems of even plausible aliens is going to have gaping holes, but we were tasked with trying to minimise those.

So, what did we come up with..? I can't say now but all will, I hope, be revealed during Science Week (and in this blog, then). ...and here is the press release describing our life forms.


Visualisation by Julian Hume, Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum/University of Portsmouth.

Blogging the Robot Bloggers

Here at @Bristol Walking with Robots is running a 3-day workshop for students and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence and animatronics. It's a kind of masterclass whose objective is to train those students and researchers in science communication, with the hope that they'll be motivated to get involved in public engagement. I'm not going to talk about the training workshop here because it's described elsewhere in both a recent UWE press release Making Science Fun for Everyone and on EPSRC grants on the web here.

What I want to blog about here are the robot bloggers on wwrobots.wordpress.com.

The workshop has four streams with about a quarter of the students signing up for each. One of those streams is New Media, which is training its group in online reporting. Here is picture of the online newsroom.

These students have been tasked with publishing stories from the other three groups. Remarkably, the blog was up and running by mid-morning Monday and has provided a more-or-less real-time record of the workshop since then. The newsroom has been busy the whole time, but never more so than right now. This afternoon the whole workshop has had an amazing opportunity to put their activities to the test on the floor of @Bristol, and since this is the half-term holidays it's pretty busy out there (to put it mildly). Our robot bloggers have been out on the floor too, recording with still photos, video and text, the extraordinary excitement of the interaction between our students, their robotics, AI and animatronics activities, and the children and families. Scroll down wwrobots and you'll quickly get a sense of that excitement.

Of course I'm focussing on just one aspect of the workshop but it was, for me, perhaps the most surprising. Firstly, by opening my eyes to the potential for Web 2.0 media to provide - in effect - real time interactive reporting; a kind of worldwide outside broadcast. It seems to me that, with this approach, there is remarkable potential to enhance and extend the reach of many kinds of public engagement or science communication.

But secondly and even more significantly here, our robot bloggers bound together the whole workshop in an altogether unexpected and enriching way.

Light-speed, Gravitation and Quantum Instantaneity

Or, Pope's Dangerous Idea.

One of the most important principles of science is attributed to 13th century philosopher William of Ockham and known as Ockham’s Razor. It is the methodological principle of ontological parsimony: when presented with alternative explanations always opt for the simplest, the one with the fewest possible causes, assumptions or variables.

This book is an appeal to Ockham’s Razor, for it offers a much more economical account of special and general relativity than is present in the traditional development of relativity theory. In fact, the extent of the simplification of relativity offered by Anthony Osborne and N. Vivian Pope is such that a theory which could hitherto be fully appreciated only by those with advanced university-level mathematical training, can now be understood with little more than high school maths. But, in this book, simplification is not the same as dumbing down. Osborne and Pope present a rigorous, scholarly and philosophically coherent re-appraisal of the fundamental tenets of both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics and some of the consequences of that physics to both quantum physics and cosmology.

That re-appraisal has consequences that go far beyond an incremental re-working or adjustment of existing results. If the theory presented in this book turns out to be correct it would presage a paradigm shift in physics that would not only challenge the academic establishment but also change the way that ordinary people think about the material world. Let me give an example. Newton's first law of motion states that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. In other words, that the 'natural' state of motion is in a straight line. Osborne and Pope propose an alternative first law of motion: the natural (force less) state of motion is orbital. I.e. that bodies continue to orbit unless an external force is applied. Now the Universe is full of orbital motion. From the micro-scale - electrons in orbit around nuclei, to the macro-scale - moons around planets, planets around stars, rotating galaxies etc. If this alternative first law is true, it would mean that we don't need to propose a force of gravitational attraction to account for orbital motion. This is compelling not least because it leads to a simpler and more elegant explanation. It would also explain why - despite vast effort and millions of dollars worth of research - no empirical evidence (gravity waves or gravity particles) has yet been found for how gravity propagates or acts at-a-distance. A common-sense objection to this idea is "well if there's no such thing as gravity what is it that sticks us to the surface of the earth - why don't we just float off?". The answer, according to Osborne and Pope, is that the natural (force less) orbital radius for you (given the mass of your body), is quite a long way towards the centre of the earth from where you now sit. So there is a force that means that you weigh something, it's just not a mysterious force of gravity but the real force exerted by the thing that restrains you from orbiting freely, i.e. the ground under your feet.

The world is, of course, full of alternative theories. One reason that this one deserves to be taken seriously is that it is experimentally testable. That experiment is conceptually simple: take a spinning mass; spinning one way it should weigh a little more than when at rest, spinning in the opposite direction it should weigh a little less. The problem is not conceptual but practical: the weight change predicted by Osborne and Pope is small (about one hundredth of a milligram for a 175 gram disk spinning at 18,000 revolutions per minute), thus the experimental apparatus would need to be both very strong to cope with the energy of the spinning disk and very sensitive to be able to accurately measure the weight change. The experiment is certainly difficult, but not impossible with today’s technology. What is important here is that Osborne and Pope are not asking for the ideas presented in this book to be taken on faith. The Pope Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis can be proven, one way or the other.

This book deserves to be read and it deserves to provoke controversy. This work is not popular science. It is the culmination of a 20 year collaboration between Osborne and Pope, and a 50 year intellectual journey by N Vivian Pope (quite literally, a life’s work). To anyone who cares about the truth in physics, I commend this book.

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This is my foreword to this book, launched today at Borders bookshop, Swansea. The ideas in this book are significant and heretical; to paraphrase Daniel Dennett, these are Dangerous Ideas.

Ecobots at the Dana

Great evening at the Dana Centre Tuesday. A public debate/discussion called Techno Bodies - Hybrid Life? "What counts as a hybrid life form and how it affects you."

My contribution was to lead a discussion about the lab's Ecobots - starting with the Slugbot, then Ecobots I and II (famously fly eating robots powered by Microbial Fuel Cells), a little about what's next - Ecobot III - and to speculate about possible future applications for these hybrid-life robots. Hybrid life..? I'd never thought of these robots as hybrid life before but I guess the marrying of bio-chemical processes with plastic, metal and silicon does blur the boundaries.

Here's a picture of the Ecobot II, built by colleagues Ioannis Ieropoulos, Ian Horsfield, Chris Melhuish and John Greenman. Remarkably this robot runs for about 12 days on just 8 dead flies.

I was going to blog here about the various interesting questions that came up in discussion, but I don't need to because SciencePunk has done it already, so go here for a great summary.

What I've changed my mind about and Why

Every New Year the Edge poses a question and publishes the responses from among the world's intelligentsia. It's fun to read the responses but, even more fun to write your own.

This year's question is What have you changed your mind about? Why? With the rather important sub-text science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific arguments or findings changed your mind?

The sub-text makes all the difference. Without that we can all think of things we've changed our minds about. But how often are we faced with major paradigm shifts from one set of views to a completely different set, based on scientific evidence, and quite possibly in the face of our own prior beliefs or prejudices. Rarely, I'll bet. Most scientists tend to be educated within a particular tradition and then remain within its established dogma throughout their working lives.

Without doubt the most profound scientific change of mind I have experienced (which took many years) is in relation to Newton's first law of motion, which I now believe to be wrong. However, I discussed this two years ago, in response to the Edge 2006 New Year question, so I won't repeat it here.

So, what else have I changed my mind about?

Well, in November 2007 I was lucky enough to be invited to a University of Bristol workshop on Mathematical Models of Cognitive Behaviour. The assembled speakers covered a broad spectrum of topics, but one in particular really caught my imagination. Dennis Bray's brilliant and illuminating talk introduced the computational processes going on inside the single cell, e-coli. I learned, to my astonishment, that single-celled micro-organisms have a complex repertoire of behaviours including memory and adaptation (in addition to finding food and reproduction). Behaviours that one normally associates with far more complex multi-celled organisms with nervous systems.Yet these are creatures with no nervous system. But, as I learned, an exquisitely complex set of molecular computational processes are present within the dense chemical soup (cytoplasm) encapsulated within the cell. Dennis explained that for e-coli, for instance, we now have a kind of circuit diagram of the complete set of computational processes. But it's far from simple!

Before Dennis' talk I was fond of saying that the robots in our lab are simpler than the simplest animals. As a result of what I learned from his talk, I've now seriously downgraded my assessment:

Our robots are simpler than the simplest single-celled micro-organisms.

Human consciousness could be immortal

Our subjective experience of the 'continuity' of consciousness is surely an illusion. But what makes that illusion and why is it so compelling? That's a deep question but here are I think two fundamental reasons:

1. Embodiment. You are an embodied intelligence. It is a mistake to think of mind and body as somehow separate. Our conscious experience and its awakening as a developing child is surely deeply rooted in our physical experience of the world as mediated through our senses.

2. Environmental continuity. Our experience of the world changes 'relatively' slowly. The word relative is important here since I mean relative to the rate at which our conscious experience updates itself. Of course we do experience the discontinuity of going to sleep then waking to the changed world of a new sunrise, but this is both deeply familiar and predictable.

A word that encompasses both of these is situatedness. Our intelligence, and hence also conscious experience is inextricably situated in our bodies and in the world. Let me illustrate what this might mean with a thought experiment.

Imagine a brain transplant. Your brain complete with its memories and life's experience, together with as much of your central nervous system as might be needed for it to function properly were to be transplanted into a different body. You would wake from the procedure into this new body. I strongly suspect that you would experience a profound and traumatic discontinuity of consciousness and, well, go mad. Indeed it's entirely possible that you simply couldn't (and perhaps mercifully) regain or experience any sort of consciousness at all. Why? Because the conditions for the emergence of consciousness and the illusion of its continuity have been irreversibly broken.

However, if what I have said above is true, there's a flip side to the story that could have extraordinary consequences.

If the continuity of consciousness is an illusion then, in principle at least, it might be possible to artificially perpetuate that illusion.

Imagine that at some future time we have a sufficiently deep understanding of the human brain that we can scan its internal structures for memories, acquired skills, and all of those (at present dimly understood) attributes that make you you. It's surely safe to assume that if we're able to decode a brain in this way, then we would also be able to scan the body structures (dynamics, musculature and deep wiring of the nervous system). It would then be a simple matter to scan, at or just before the point of death, and transfer those structures into a virtual avatar within a virtual world. The simulated brain structures would be 'wired' to the avatar's virtual body in exactly the same way as the real brain was wired to its real body, thus satisfying the requirement for embodiment. If the virtual world is also a high fidelity replica of the real world then we would also satisfy the second requirement, environmental continuity.

I would argue that, under these circumstances, the illusion of the continuity of consciousness could be maintained. Thus, on dying you would awake (in e-heaven), almost as if nothing had happened. Except, of course, that you could be greeted by the avatars of your dead relatives. Even better, because e-heaven is just a virtual environment in the real-world, then you could just as easily be visited by your living friends and relatives. Could this be the retirement home of the far future?

In this way human consciousness could, I believe, be immortal.

My love hate relationship with an Xbox 360

Ok, I admit it. I have an Xbox 360.

Of course I'm hopeless at playing video games, which is perhaps just as well because it means that I don't spend long playing (or wasting time, depending on your point of view). Just as long as it takes for me to get frustrated by how useless I am and give up. (But it's ok because my eldest son levels me up when he comes to stay;-).

However, as a piece of hardware it's awesome. Liquid cooled, 3 processors plus graphics processing unit. As someone who worked with the very first 8-bit microprocessors over 30 years ago (see my post By, you were lucky...) and with pretty much every generation since, I ought to be inured to the now expected doubling of performance roughly every two years (Moore's Law). But I'm not. I still easily get awestruck by next generation hardware and its capability. I'm equally impressed by the Xbox 360's operating system, its so called 'blade' interface is intuitive and a pleasure to use.

Of course this blog is really just an excuse for me to post a screen capture from the stunning Project Gotham Racing 4 of me driving (in my dreams) an Enzo Ferrari down The Mall, in the rain.

The future doesn't just happen, we must own it

Had a remarkable couple of days last week. Walking with Robots (WWR), the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) and the London Engineering Project jointly ran a pilot Young Peoples' Visions Conference. The aim of the 2 day event was to give an opportunity for around 20 young adults (age 16-18) to "explore visions of their future and the part robots will play" in that future.

For me the event was important because it takes Walking with Robots into a new form of dialogue. At WWR events and activities I have been privileged to engage with many children, teenagers and adults, over the past year and I increasingly have a sense that our children, in particular, believe that the future is nothing to do with them. That technology is something that happens, or is imposed from outside and that they are merely passive consumers or targets for that technology. In this conference we really tried to change that view. It was wonderful to see the group change from - at the beginning - seeing this as 2 days out of college to - in the end - all being deeply engaged in the dialogue. I got a real sense of them feeling empowered and that their considered opinions are important - not least because those opinions will be published by the RAE and send to policymakers. In other words that they do have a say in their own technological futures.