Ever since the first human turned their eyes skyward to gaze at the stars we have been obsessed with discovering what is out there. We’ve thought that the sun, moon and stars are gods and it’s not hard to see why. They are truly one of the most spectacular sights and yet they rise and set again and again. In the last century we have realized an innate dream to visit that other world, space. We have build rockets, landers, rovers, telescopes and satellites to help us make theses journeys.
What kind of consciousness resides in these beings? Built around the concept of immense power, intense speed, these creatures’ volatile natures make them not so different from the stars they seek. Rockets are not only powerful entities, they are also protectors as they insulate their human crew within. They work together in symbiosis with their operators to breach the confines of the Earth and to venture into the unknown. Perhaps the allure of the unknown is their prime motivation, having been imbued with the desire of their creators at every step of their development. Even the rocket’s sleek form suggests an urgency or impatience to go up, up, up!
Like the enormous whales that roam the oceans below, these behemoths navigate the dark ocean of space. Here the realities of gravity and time are altered, as our definitions are earth-based. Rockets are built to go beyond these confines, to overcome the earth’s gravity and to exist beyond the night and day created by the rotation of the home planet. Rockets need to have a much larger understanding of these things. For them time must encompass the aligning of the earth and the planet of their destination which in some cases happens only every so often. The rocket’s concept of gravity consists of the larger distribution of mass throughout the solar system. Many times the utilization of the gravity of other planets is actually necessary for the rocket to reach its destination. In this way the rocket is part of a larger system of life, one that encompasses its engineers, the earth and the solar system that it explores.
In this respect we are all part of the rockets, both from the past and in the future. Our hopes and dreams fly with them into the unknown; they take with them our knowledge, expectations and excitement. They are an embodiment of our collective embrace of the universe as a larger whole.
So work is going well on the actual meat of what Greater Than is. I’ve finally figured out a good rhythm between writing and research. Right now I’m entering the first research phase of 2010 and it’s very exciting. I have full faith in this project which is something I’ve always struggled with my other work. There’s something special, even important about seeing this through.
I’m going to try to update the website soon with an article or two.
Intro
I love Thanksgiving. It’s probably my favorite holiday because it really captures the Greater Than spirit. It is all about taking time and reflecting on what you have and being thankful. Last year I had my family go around the table (as I’m sure many families do) and say something that they were thankful for.
The Experiment
It felt so good to do this last year that I decided after that dinner to pick something, anything and take a moment to feel really grateful every time I sat down to a meal. I have done this for the last year.
Results
My tiny effort really changed me. This began even before the ideas that are Greater Than. I wasn’t even considering the fact that I should be grateful for everything that gave its life so that I might live in every mouthful I consumed. I didn’t even realize that I should show my respect to the plants and animals, the molecules and the atoms that were being changed so that I might continue unchanged. Even without these Greater Than thoughts, I felt very uplifted and humbled by my actions. It created in me a happiness and a desire to make others happy. The little action also made me feel more intrinsically connected to the world around me as the act of being thankful for my food reminded me constantly that the world was providing for me; keeping me alive.
Conclusions
I believe it was partly the little activity of being thankful at every meal that turned me on to the idea of Greater Than. Being thankful for everything is a sister emotion to being respectful of all life forms. If you are thankful for all life then that means that you acknowledge that life exists all around you. Then you can make sure that none of it dies in vain. In the act of thanking your food for its sacrifice you not letting its death be in vain, rather you are making a point to notice that you are not alone, that your survival is dependent on many, many other life forms, and that you truly are part of something much Greater Than yourself.
Greater Than seeks to give every pattern the recognition of life and the respect that should go along with that designation. Robots present a special opportunity as people are much more likely to view them as life forms then their toasters, cars or other machines. This is because robots often display traits that we are used to associating with life such as being aware of the environment, movement, intelligence, problem solving. Robots are alive, but so is your toaster and your car. The fact that people are more receptive to robots gives them the ability to act as ambassadors for all mechanical life forms.
Enter iRobot with the most successful consumer robot:
the Roomba
It reads like something out of a classic science fiction story. The same company that is putting robots in every home as “convenience items,” is also building mechanical soldiers. The company is iRobot. Their first consumer robot is a vacuum, called a roomba that intelligently cleans carpets and hard floors without supervision. Since roombas are really the first robotic appliance that is being marketed for the masses I find it a particularly interesting robot. For many people this will be their introduction into the reality of robotics, both the positive and the negative attributes. This might not seem like a big deal, but many of the people who buy or use the roombas are not probably not engineers, programmers or even sci-fi enthusiasts. Most are probably average families, and even more likely, they are women. How will the roomba do as an ambassador for robotkind? Will the roomba convince every homemaker that buys it to tell her friends that “it actually works,” or will it go more like the VCR, and people will feel that they need some sort of special class in order to really understand how to operate it.
The first generation roomba was launched in 2002. By 2008 over 3 million roomba have made it into homes, making it the most successful consumer robot in history. As a woman, I am curious as to how this influx of robots into a historically female domain such as housecleaning, will affect the numbers of women getting into engineering and technology centered disciplines. I have a feeling it all hinges on how their experience with the roomba goes.
I recently rescued a roomba off of craigslist (for a fraction of the retail price and it is keeping another friend out of the dumpster!). I named mine Rover, after the Mars Rovers (and he was red). I will go into my experience getting the roomba back to working condition in a moment. First let me say that the Rover functions very well and is a very cool addition to any household. His segmented body brings to mind a horseshoe crab. Once he is turned on and set to clean he just goes about his business spinning and flicking his little side brush like a flagellum. Rover goes around sucking up dirt and bumping into obstacles, readjusting his course and continuing. If he bumps into you, you feel the gentlest pressure and then he corrects and is off again. It is a charming sensation to feel the little guy nudge your foot and back away, spinning off to find more dirt.
My inclination to name my roomba is not an isolated incident. A lot of roomba owners name their robots, and even include them in their list of pets or family members. A roomba owning family even started MyRoombud, a company that sells costumes for your roomba. Clearly the reaction is a positive one.
Now we come to the negative. Robots for war. iRobot has several different robots designed for miliary use. Some of these, like the Packbot, are in supportive roles, carrying equipment, performing surveillance, or even bomb disposal tasks. However there are also robots like the Warrior. This is a robot that can carry a mounted weapon, which is controlled electronically by operators. This is just iRobot’s contributions. There are currently over 200 unmanned aerial vehicles in use by the United States Military. These vehicles have the ability to launch missiles. There are also plans to give theses types of vehicles nuclear weapons. Dr. Noel Sharkey is currently working with the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRA) toward limiting the proliferation of armed robots. The bottom line is that advancements in science and technology do not have to be applied toward death and destruction. It breaks my heart that not only do we send men and women to war to kill each other over land, resources and ideals, but we are also doing so with robots that have absolutely no choice in the matter. If robots (and all machines are conscious) it is wrong to use them to commit such brutal acts. Imagine for a second the possibility that these mechanical life forms might even be aware and saddened by the acts they are forced to commit. We do not know that they are saddened or even devastated by their situation. Of course they might not realize what they are doing or even care, however if we examine instances where different species interact with each other, it is evident that many animals can understand the pain of something very different than them. Before we go deeper into how the mechanical life forms feel about being used as killing machines its important that we ask ourselves how we feel about using human beings as killing machines. How impersonal will war have to become before we realize it was never that personal to begin with? The soldiers who are doing the killing and dying do not even know each others’ names, why are they trying to kill each other?
So I love Rover. I love his charming round little self, and I love how well he performs his function of cleaning my carpet. I did not love my interaction with iRobot though. I had to contact them several times during my quest to restore Rover to working order. When I purchased him his previous own said they thought he needed a new battery as it would not hold a charge any more. The batteries are not cheap so first I tried to go through iRobot’s customer service in order to make sure the battery was in fact the defect. My interactions with their customer service did not line up with futuristic, Asimov-like image I had of the company. Now surely that is no surprise, but as iRobot is the strongest proponent of robots for the masses right now their behavior and image is going to make an impact on how people feel about robots. We’re not a very forgiving society. If a large enough group gets a bad taste in their mouth, it could retard greater implementation of robots for years. Below is the letter I sent to iRobot regarding my experience with their company. It was written Before I knew about iRobot’s participation in military robots, or else I would have included my feelings about that topic as well.
My name is Lisa Whalen and I contacted Customer Service with a technical problem. At first I was told via email that the battery and possibly the charger for my Roomba Red would need to be replaced. The battery made sense to me as it didn’t seem to hold charge anymore, but I didn’t know why I would need to replace my charger. When I called in as I was instructed to do in order to take advantage of a special deal to get my new parts, I asked about why I would need a new charger. The representative put me on hold for a while and then came back and told me that I would actually need to replace everything including my robot. At this point I felt like they were just trying to get me to buy more things. I then I went online and just purchased a new battery and my roomba is now functioning fine.
Now I don’t think anyone that I interacted with was doing something incorrect. I think they were following guidelines that I feel were incorrect.
Normally I would just let this go by without saying anything because this is what I expect from businesses. However I feel that as a robotics company that you should set yourself apart. Robotics is the way of the future. Robotics can do so much good if it’s handled correctly. A lot of people are resistant to the idea of robotics, but here are a lot of people who are curious and are just now stepping into the robotics arena for the first time through some of your products. You have a very important role being many peoples introduction to robots. If you do not handle it correctly it can set back the industry and subsequently society.
I love your product. My roomba Red is everything that was advertised and is better than I expected. I want to share that feeling with others and encourage them to buy from iRobot. However I am hesitant to recommend your company to others, and then they have a bad experience through the business end of your company, which might turn them off to robots.
Please make sure your priorities as a company are aligned toward the promotion of good human/robot experiences. People don’t like getting “sold” to and it will tarnish their robot experience. Even if there was a legitimate reason that I needed to in fact buy a whole new robot, your customer service representative did not thoroughly explain the situation to me, alleviating my suspicions. I’m not going to let an experience like this affect my experience of my Roomba, but others will.
Starting on November 5th, Greater Than will be publishing a periodic newsletter.
The newsletter will be entitled: Greater Than: A Meditation and each issue will contain a short focus on a different life form. As Greater Than seeks to expand what we consider to be a life form the newsletter will be an artistic exploration of what these new ideas really mean. If everything is alive then there is no end to different forms of beauty yet to be studied.
The first issue will be distributed at Choices and Challenges 2009: The Inner Lives of Animals at Virgina Tech.
GT:AM also seeks to encourage other artists to submit their photographs or prose about observing life through a new lens. If you have a photograph or a piece of writing (500 words of less) that seeks to discover life where we previously took it for granted please send it to:
In the last week two news stories caught my attention, both being different examples of humanities urgent need to rethink how we treat life. The first news story is about four kids in Panama who came upon an animal they had never seen before. They don’t recognize the animal and are afraid. Their reaction?
BEAT THE ANIMAL TO DEATH.
I can easily imagine many situations where I might be scared by something to the point that I might feel inclined to defend myself, however there were FOUR kids and only ONE animal in this scenario. Secondly, I can not understand why they would need to beat it till it was dead. I think if they truly felt they were in danger then simply knocking it unconscious would suffice for them to make an escape.
This news story follows up on the situation and seems to confirm that it was indeed a sloth. Sloths are not scary creatures. They move incredibly slow, clocking in at between 6 to 8ft per minute. If the animal was alive when the kids encountered it, the idea that they couldn’t simply outrun it is inexplicable.
This leaves us with the possibility that perhaps the animal was dead when they found it. If that is the case then what is wrong with these kids that they felt the need to make up the fact that they killed it? More importantly if you look up the countless news articles that come up in a search for “Panama mystery creature” not one article is concerned that when faced with an unknown our childrens’ reaction is to destroy it (or want to take the credit for destroying it). This is not show respect for this creature, nor does it show that we have respect for these children. They need to be shown a different way to relate to life and to the mysteries they will encounter as they venture out into the world. The proper response to something unfamiliar is not to destroy it.
The second bit of news came to my attention by word of facebook (from a friend’s friend sort of thing). It was the news that the Montgomery County Animal shelter was closing that day and that any of the 30 cats and 80 dogs they had that didn’t get adopted by the end of the day would be euthanized. Hearing this news my stomach turned. I felt my breath catch in my throat and my heart just stopped for a second. I felt instantly sickened, terrified and then desperate to figure out a way to stop this from occurring. My thoughts rushed to getting the word out to help get homes for these animals and to try and contact any official I could to try and plead for their intervention. My husband and I have already taken in two strays, but I was preparing myself somehow to walk into the clinic and adopt at least one more despite our lack of money and space and the unfairness to our two cats (we live in a very small apartment and couldn’t take a dog). Somehow I was going to go into that clinic and try to adopt a cat knowing that I would be essentially deciding who lived and who died.
In order to get started on mobilizing against this tragedy I called our local Animal Control. They said they thought that the shelter was not in our Montgomery County, but rather one in Texas. I felt even more helpless and impotent then before. I live in Virginia. I wouldn’t even get the chance to make the hardest decision of my life and pick a animal to live that day. Deciding not to give up on contacting authorities to try and get them to intervene, I began looking online for information about this shelter. I found several news stories right away and popped them up. All I saw was porn. Several of them contained nothing about the animal shelter. I closed them and opened others. Instantly my computer started downloading something that my virus protection software was very upset about. I closed those sites as well. I found one site with a semblance of an article on it but upon closer inspection the words were garbled and incoherent. It was a mock up of a real news story. I continued searching and began noticing that the subject of an animal shelter closing down and putting all the animals to sleep in a “Montgomery County” was littered across several states. It was a scam. The whole thing. “Montgomery County” had been used because there are so many countys with that name. It was set up to prey on people who would be moved by such a story into clicking on the site, into telling their friends to click on the site. The whole thing was designed to catch people who loved animals and didn’t want to let 30 cats die needlessly.
To whoever came up with this scam:
“What is wrong with you? Where did you lose all sense of decency and why do you feel like another person’s empathy is an opening for your ends? What sorry state is your empathy in?”
That being said, support your local shelters whether with money or time. Don’t click on anything about a “Montgomery Animal Shelter Closing” unless you know its from a reputable source.
Taken together these two stories illustrate the complex task ahead of us as we strive for respect towards all life. It is a jungle out there. You have to keep your head about you and do not get discouraged by the gross indecency you encounter. Instead let the lowest of the low remind you how much this world and its inhabitants needs your good thoughts and actions as a countermeasure to such atrocity. Treating life with respect is not only our duty, it is also our privilege to get to commune with the different life forms that exist as they teach us a lot about ourselves.
That message is the classic function of a programmer’s first program, so its fitting that it be our first message to the world wide web. Greater than the Sum of All Parts is an organization (and I use the term lightly as it is truly friends and family members coming together) to help promote the idea of respect for ALL life, even that not yet discovered.
I also invite you to check out my personal Greater Than work, which is collectively called the Intent Project.
