Seth Goldstein

Automata evolved from acting like us to acting on behalf of us.  What if it was possible for an automaton to do the work of a human?   Would the stuff of Aristotle’s ruminations come to pass, eliminating the need for servants and slaves?  To realize that fantasy – as Albertus Magnus supposedly did in the 13 th century, with the construction of a life-size human domestic servant automaton – is to eliminate the need for humans to pay Attention to certain aspects of work in the home.  These automata promised to give owners a surplus of energy and attention, but at a cost.

Scientists have long recognized, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson argued in his 1960 "The Mind of Mechanical Man", that aside from the mind, “both animal and human bodies were nothing more than a collection of pumps, reservoirs, bellows, fires, cooling and heating systems, tubes, conduits, kitchens, girders, levers, pulleys and ropes.”   (Clearly, as John Stewart points out, little has changed since)

In this model, automata do not have minds, hearts, or souls.  This was all the better, since those human aspects might have forced the automata into unnecessary error.  These perfect machines began to gain power over the very humans who operated them, a power which became even more threatening when humans wrestled with the possibility that their creations might actually come to life.  What, then, would these exploited classes do?   Embedded in their very name are the seeds of revolutionary threat: robot (as human-shaped automata are widely referred to) comes from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor, and it is a term that was first used in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, or R.U.R. 

The questions raised by this term in Čapek’s play are central questions in the discourse of modernity – questions of the nature of man and machine and of the boundaries between the two.   Human-like machines threaten to come to life and overpower the control of their former masters; machine-like humans threaten to destroy life, overpowering any sense of humanity and the body of humanity itself.   

(Picture: Georg Grosz. Republican Automatons.)

From the faceless figures in Georg Grosz’s Republican Automata (above) with hooks for hands and gears for souls, to the orphaned machine of Francis Picabia’s The Child Carburetor (born of the work of man but devoid of his agency) the machine-like human and the human-like machine confuse our sense of where us stops and the machine we created to stand for us begins.

(Picture: Francis Picabia. The Child Carburetor.)

In 1950, Norbert Wiener wrote in his 1950 work on cybernetics "The Human Use
of Human Beings":

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.  What is used as an element in a machine, is an element in the machine.  Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we asks the right questions.

Let us bear this careful warning in mind, as we evaluate the visions being articulated now by our most noble leaders of the Internet.  Take for example the recent speech by Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft to an audience of financial analysts:

But beyond infrastructure services, what’s most unique and valuable about a very large-scale services platform is what I’ll refer to as optimization. By optimization I mean the monitoring and utilization of both collective end-user behavior and individual behavior to rank content for the user. That ranked content might be the order of advertisements in a search or e-mail window, or the order of relevant news items or playlists or video clips or items in a marketplace that are presented to the user…Optimization always respectful of a user’s privacy will be increasingly key to delivering great user experiences, and it’s already a key factor in the area of profitability, because the larger the number of users that are connected to any services platform, the more behavioral the data that can be generated. The larger the number of PCs and other devices that are connected to that platform, the more behavioral data that’s available; the larger the number of applications connected to the platform, both Web apps and desktop apps, the better our optimizations will be and the more profitable it will be for us and for our partners.

It is remarkable the extent to which Ozzie seems to ignore the fundamental Web 2.0 premise that users are in control, and that just because behavioral data may be generated automatically, that does not mean that the companies enabling such data (ie Microsoft) have necessary dibs on it.

Over history, automata were at once objects calling for our attention – objects meant to enrapture us in spectacle – as well as objects that offered to do our work without requiring our Attention.   This represented the threat of triumph over human mastery: that these automata might take on lives of their own, rendering humans obsolete and placing us at the mercy of the machine which always acts without emotion, error or thought.  The power of choice manifests itself in one’s ability to ask, in Weiner’s words, "the right questions."  Right questions might be those queries specifically which elude their engine’s best attempts at matching them to willing advertisers.

 

If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.  If the shuttle could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, nor masters slaves.

So wrote Aristotle of the possibilities of the automaton: an object acting of itself, something bearing the power of spontaneous motion.  The advent of such a mechanism not only promised to change labor – eliminating the need for servants and slaves – but also had the potential to change media production and publication. 

In tracing the development of the automaton from its roots in ritual articulated objects to its contemporary versions, (particularly in the context of robots and models of cellular automata in computability theory and theoretical biology), it is useful to keep Aristotle’s commentary from the fourth century B.C. in mind. 

The history of automata begins with “creation” itself.  Genealogies of these self-replicating objects extend back to the creation myths of every religion and culture – from the story of God’s creation of Adam to the story of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman on earth from clay, which he animated with the fire he stole from heaven.  Moreover, the earliest articulated objects from prehistory of early historic times probably served both artistic and religious purposes: used by shamans, priests, and entertainers, these simple clay or wooden dolls with turning heads, arms, legs and hands could provide the illusion of movement as it occurs in nature, thus adding emotional impact to plays and fables.   

This baker kneading dough is an articulated Egyptian toy, one which was
probably found in the tomb from the time of the XII dynasty onwards.
By being deposited in the tomb, the baker became forever bound to his
master, accompanying him into the Beyond to continue to perform his
duties through the rest of time.

The purposes of automata were not strictly in the realm of morality and spirituality.  Hero of Alexandria (who is credited with the invention of the crank, the cam-shaft and a system of rotations and counterweights, as well as with having demonstrated the principles of the vacuum and the incompressibility of water) used automata to illustrate scientific principles.  In his Treatise on Pneumatics from A.D. 62, he laid out applications of science in the forms of singing birds, sounding trumpets, animals that could drink and coin-operated machines.  Hero’s most famous automaton, though, is the steam eolipile, which, in showing the expansion of gas when heated and the force of reaction in its escape, is regarded as an ancestor of the steam engine:



Above all, automata were sources of delight and entertainment: mechanical orchestras, living snuff boxes and cuckoo-clocks.   From King-shu Tse’s 500 B.C. flying magpie of wood and bamboo to Jacques de Vaucanson’s A.D. 1738 duck, which could eat, drink, splash around the water and digest its food like a real duck, inventors imitated nature for the delight of man:



Over time, the makers of automata moved from simply trying to recreate the motion of creatures in the natural world to trying to use these motions to accomplish the work of those very creatures.  This is not to say that entertainment automata disappeared – after all, fake talking human heads like Roger Bacon’s from the 13th century still capture the wonder (and horror) of onlookers at circus fairs and carnivals, as do automaton scribes, dancers and singers in the tradition of those seen below (and in the tradition of “It’s a Small World”). 

Picture: The Jaquet-Droz Writer, 1774.  Artifact courtesy of the Neuchâtel Museum.

technorati tags:automata, mediafutures, root.net, attention, media, attentiontrust

Automatic Motion and the Gestures of Social Media

The Attention Economy is based on human behavior, behavior which includes the full range of physical gestures that we use to express our inner intentions.  These gestures could be saying something,  stretching our arms, walking past a group of people, or reading a book.

Many gestures end in themselves, as discrete actions.  Other gestures trigger subsequent gestures: for the person who performs the gesture (such as throwing a ball into the air and then catching it on the way down) or for the one that receives the gesture (such as calling somebody on the phone who then picks up their phone).  Since its introduction as mass consumer platform over ten years ago, the Internet has attracted an increasing amount of the latter: electronic gestures that use keyboards and mice (and increasing voice and video) to trigger subsequent gestures from others across the Internet.  It is not simply that more human behavior is being expressed through the Internet; entirely new kinds of human behavior are being created by virtue of the medium.  Many of these gestures are able to authenticate intentions with great subtlety so as to increase the ratio of signal to noise.

These are the gestures of social media, where influence is measured by the amount of Attention one gets relative to the amount of information one gives  The most influential online individuals combine a high pagerank that lands them above the Google fold (ie their unique algorithm) and a rich personal stream of syndicatable "what makes me me"-ness:  ie their natural API. 

The Turing test measures whether a computational response is mistakable for an actual human being.  George Dyson’s recent essay Turing’s Cathedral imagined this test to be central to Brin and Page’s agenda for Google.  They are trying to build an artificial intelligence whose automatic responses to queries seem natural and humanistic.  In order to experience the rich social media of a post-Web 2.0 landscape, however, we need to venture beyond the shadow of the Google page-rank Golem.  How can we trust an electronic reality based solely on the single perspective of pagerank (ie the link model), when our actual behavior seems more like, in the words of William James, a “blooming, buzzing confusion” of human electronic gestures.

"Egosystems, not Ecosystems"

Stallman, Torvalds, Doc Searls, R0ml and many others have established the underlying value of an Open Source ecosystem.  At the first public meeting of AttentionTrust.org in October 2005, Tim O’Reilly suggested that the next generation of the Web (3.0?) was going to be about "Data Inside".  And so if you apply the discipline of a truly Open system to all of the behavioral data that is expressed by these electronic gestures, you end up with a new organizing framework- a framework of egosystems which, for the first time, bind human behavior to the transport policies of Open Source ecosystems.  My wife Tina Sharkey came up with this brilliant expression, "egosystems, not ecosystems." in which the notion of an egosystem can be used to express the rich variety of our interactions across the Internet:  email, search, browsing, buying, tagging, chatting, and other electronic activities.  One egosystem may interact with other egosystems in infinitely different ways.  And so even at maximum resolution, this social media fabric appears richly woven and densely textured:  tiny threads of gestribution bundled transparently around eachother.

Enter the worms (which happen to be the subject of the last section of the last chapter on Arbitrage).  These little creatures that both consume and produce in equal measures provide the best model for understanding the physics of the Attention Economy.

Hamlet explains that:

We fat all creatures else to fat us, 
and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is
but variable service- two dishes, but to one table.

So Hamlet 2.0 might say:

We encourage others to participate so that we may consume them
and we make ourselves interesting for the blogosphere.  Your Internet CEO and your Joe Blogger are just different algorithms- two APIs, but to one network.

What distinguishes social media from other forms of media is this worm-like behavior, where production and consumption occur simultaneously.  You can look at it as a form of therapy, where individual data is constantly being reorganized (quantitatively) to generate richer (qualititative) meaning.  This is the  Gillmor moment, when the naval-gazing gesture of an individual’s Attention feeds back, anonymously, into crystal-clear affinity pools of metadata.  Inference and influence reverberate off of eachother, turning a mess of discrete gestures into a continuous Gesture stream.

Attention Science

Attention has forever been described as an absence in terms of distractions, deficits and obligations.  Media Futures is a model for talking about Attention as something more; as an active substance that we create, express, share and remember.  This Attention substance- let’s call them attentrons- operates at a size and frequency that makes it invisible to our naked eye.  Fortunately, none of us need travel very far to reach the Attention super collider, where we can test for traces of these attentrons.  The mashups that emerge on Digg are powerful reactions of data and people.  From the new dance clubs in Second Life ripple new patterns of social networks.  How can we analyze these seemingly spontaneous phenomena so as to make visible the elements and interactions that drive their behavior?

This is the project of Media Futures: to come up with a conceptual
schema that synthesizes the  constructivist aspects of social media
and the analytical rigor of the Attention Economy.  It is a
language game:  as complex as Chess, and as fleeting as Chutes and
Ladders.  Computer scientists in the 1950’s gave us the building blocks of Input, Store, View and Output;  MS-DOS gave us operations like copy, file, print and run; Unix gave us root access.  In the Attention OS, it’s the 5 A’s: Automata, Algorithm, API, Alchemy and Arbitrage.

Maggie Dillon has done a great job aggregating brief histories of each topic, both to establish its historical credibility and to expose the subtleties of its use over time.  This syntax of Media Futures is valuable, however, only in so far as it is applied to real social media use cases.  These new services require active minds, creative imaginations and lots of quality code.  What’s missing is the sense of continuity between early computing history and the widget design for next week’s release.  And that is what we are working on here.  Enjoy.

Next: History of Automata