GENOMICON

I used to work in a Nike warehouse as it happens. I used to do this:

and it was fucking crap. That was the last rubbish job I had before I got back into computers. I sold out… or more accurately, the rest of the world sold ME out, by not buying enough of my records.

I think we need to… take care. We need to automate the jobs that no one likes. We should take care of the ones people do like doing, because if we do manage to build an abundance-based economy (hey, you never know) then people are going to need something to do. We really, seriously need to do something to get rid of the Prozac industry. One in Five people currently suffer from clinical depression.

Anyway, here’s some more allegedly performing the Nutcracker Suite, although I’ve seen the Nutcracker Suite, and I don’t remember it being like this:

Scarier than a ghost in a machine is a machine without a ghost.

I don’t know what it is about artificial humanity that’s so creepy… it is though.

Anyway – this is one more thing down the Segway track [1][2]… There’s a couple of vids of them here at www.marathonrobotics.com from whence they spring. Reminds me of The Avengers off the telly for some reason.

This is quite a neat idea… that could go in about a million different directions given the chance.

Lastly and slightly differently, self-assembling water-borne robots

Aquatic bristlebots which are essentially simulating molecular behaviour at a macro level using brownian motion… using an energy supply technique borrowed from dodgems:

Which for some reason makes me think of the time when I was working for a major Blue-Chip in London… it was christmas so I went totally overboard and decked out the IT dept with a hell of a lot of tinsel… and every time anyone’s head brushed against it, they’d get million volts of static electricity going into their brains.

I don’t think it had a detrimental effect on their performance etc. There would be momentary disorientation, then they’d carry on with whatever it was they were doing. I think for some of them it probably did them some good.

Anyone who messes about with this truly remarkable online cellular-automata lab, who also collected seashells when they were a kid (like someone not a million miles away from here), will automatically recognise a lot of the patterns.

Cellular automata… I couldn’t find a definition that wasn’t ridiculously verbose… but if you get cells on a grid that exhibit certain colour-changing behaviours depending on what their neighbours colours are, then you get cool patterns.

This can be an analogue for life… if a cell has two neighbours, it breeds (ie: turns on), if it has 4 neighbours, its resources are used up so it dies (ie:turns off). Some of the patterns made by these things are quite beautiful – you really need to mess with the site above to get an idea… because they aren’t static – they move and grow and change etc.

Obviously the first thing you’ll want to do when you learn all this is to go off and make a cellular-automata tea-cosey

and luckily someone’s provided instructions at the link above.

Anyway, the reason I started thinking about these again, is that there’s an subculture of robot-making called swarm-bots, which are quite interesting… and these are basically mechanical cellular automata.

Hod Lipson has a talk about experimenting with them here

And as he says, replication is its own reward.

As ever, there are loads of examples on youtube

A way to go yet, but you get the idea… what these things are potentially, are memospheres where humans aren’t part of the loop.

Someone’s discovered that if you attach a vibrator to a sawn-off toothbrush, it scurries about the place:

So they put it up on Youtube… and now there are about 150 other versions, all evolving and morphing etc.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. There are a bunch of remote controlled ones…

And for some reason, the better the bot, the worse the music.

They evolve legs, wheels, lights, become petrol driven, learn to paint

I think what’s important (or at least interesting) about this isn’t the fact that you can make toothbrushes scurry about the place, it’s that people are taking a daft little bit of technology and exploring hundreds of different angles that probably wouldn’t be considered if people were working in isolation. It’s like having a combination lock and being able to try out hundreds of combinations at the same time… it massively increases the possibility that something truly remarkable will be unlocked.

And maybe something has been at a higher level… people are doing this rather than watching television.