The Thing about Robots

Last week Mark Meadows came over to our class to give a lively lecture about robots and artificial intelligence. He’s a cute artist and new media author and brought a book (Pause & Effect) that was hysterical visual in a good way that I must have. He’s also designs digital humans, builds virtual worlds, and engineers emotional interfaces. Robots, he argues, are systems that replaces humans. He gave us several examples, starting out with talking cars and TomTom, all telling us what to do, sometimes in an aggressive way. Sometimes these messages can be very confusing and leading to akward situations. Meadows asks himself and addresses to us if this is a way we want to go? Also computers are telling us what to do, like downloading updates or saying we need a certain plug-in. Robots can notice things, like medical robots and tell us what to do. An example of these is the TMSUK (security, health or defense) robot. Then we talked about avatars and how we become something else if we spent more than 8 hours a day as an avatar, not just a visual avatar but also our persona on Facebook or Hyves. (Meadows didn’t want us to think he just spends his life as an avatar because he told us a story about his boat too.)

If robots replace humans, then a cardboard cop could be a robot too, and the mechanism that closes a door could also be a robot. But what about traffic signs? Robots are semiotic systems, but are signs and symbols robots? So robots are semiotic devices about to influence us by replacing other humans argues Meadows. But robots are made by us so we basically we influence ourselves then. I wonder here how far we can stretch this definition, what’s a robot and what’s just a tool or a sign. I’ll get back on this.