"The Beautiful World of the Robo-Sapien" "KISMET is composed of a head and neck, and has seven categories of feeling:" "calm, angry, sad, interested, disgusted, happy, and shocked." "The robot has 3 degrees of freedom for its neck, 3 per eye, 4 for its lips, 2 for each ear, 2 per eyebrow, and one per eyelid." "There's a camera in each eyeball, another between the eyes, and a fourth in the nose section." "The cameras register distance and the facial expressions of human partners." "In the neck section:" "a lapel microphone." "The robot reacts to the emotional tone in the voice of the human partner." "Extract from:" ""Event for virtual arm and third hand."" "Translator:" "Christiane Horn" "Encounter with the Third Hand/ Stelarc's Post-Human Art" "The colonization of the human body with miniature robots." "A Robot Seeks Bodily Contact - Miniature robots as mechanical sewer rats in the canalization of our cities." "When one builds a robot, then one already has, in contrast to when one only makes computer programs, already solved one fundamental problem, namely a robot has a body." "It is physically present." "And we can equip such a body with sensors." "Naturally, other sensors than we have, but also with the ability to detect changes in the environment, and also to recognize its own range of motion, or the implications of its movement in its environment." "A colleague of mine, Professor Dautenhahn, and I have developed the following theories." "We assume that these robots, as with humans or many other mammals, must differentiate themselves physically." "If they were all the same, then a robot could use a model of itself to know how the other conducts itself." "But if the other one is differently built, a little bit differently, then the robot can't be quite sure if its model suffices to explain..." "It provokes the robot..." "Right, for example." "That's one important point." "The other is that we want to ensure that the robots try to imitate movement forms of other robots." "And not just by passive observation... by trying to analyze it (once again this rational thought process), and then to convert it to its own movements, but, much like how we learn to play tennis or to dance," "we take a second person - the teacher - and we move in concert with him." "And by moving with someone who can do the movement, we learn to imitate this movement." "When we have done that a bit..." "There must be a certain number of mistakes, so that I learn." "And successes, of course." "Successes, yes." "And the idea is that, with very basically built robots, they simply try to find bodily contact." "The easiest form of movement is to move forwards." "So, for example, to find some kind of terrain." "A robot could build a "socially close" contact with another robot, and then, when it works through bodily contact, could stay with the other for a longer period." "So, simply that they walk parallel to each other, that they also notice they are touching, that they also notice the other is a robot, and then that they move together." "One could program it so that a robot develops a bias towards preferably only robots with which it could stay together for a long time." "That would, for example, compel a robot to distinguish other robots individually." "Something like showing consideration." "Also, yes." "That's the most important part." "I understand what the other is doing, even if I don't exactly know, and they generate this motive, and upon this basis they establish their intelligence." "And this is presumably how intelligence arose over thousands of years in humans." "That could very well be." "At least that is what I have gathered from reading the literature and also with many conversations with neurologists, anthropologists, and behavioral scientists." "In Which Biotope Will Robots Work?" "Sure enough, we are building such robots with relatively simple resources, and, um, one must of course decide right away in which arena such a form of robots make sense." "My theories went in the following direction:" "It should be a realm that, because we have to construct the robots, and we as inventors have to ensure that they are able to survive in this realm;" "with living creatures it's different;" "Mother Nature decides who can survive and who can't." "That means the environment must be halfway controllable, but it may not be completely controlled, otherwise it is uninteresting for intelligence." "Right?" "So the surroundings must be complex enough." "So the habitat I concluded would work is sewer systems in our cities and communities." "These sewer systems are largely impassable for humans because they're too small." "On the one hand, they are made by humans, but they are also subject to changes over which we have no influence." "So, it's exactly the right mixture between man-made and natural factors, namely unpredictable, capricious..." "A second Nature, one could say...the sewer" "So to speak, yes." "And another thing is that it is a challenging task because - and that has nothing to do with robots, or intelligence - all of these sewer systems in Germany, but I'm sure also in many other states, are in need of reconstruction." "And nobody knows how much work is needed, and it's extremely expensive to control, etc., so I there is also, independent of my interests, a large economic motive." "Just in such an environment it would great to introduce robot systems that are largely autonomous, and have an intelligence tailored for these conditions, and which could collectively organize themselves so that this living space remains functional." "What this means is that the sewer systems will ideally work well." "It's cooperative." "We humans will not share intelligence with robots, unless it's in an area where we cannot put our intelligence to use." "Of course, we cannot go into the sewer." "That's exactly right, because the pipes are simply too narrow." "That's also my belief." "I think, if we even manage to create robots that have the same intelligence level as us, then they will have an entirely different form of intelligence from ours, which will possibly be incomparable to ours." "And the reason for that is very simple." "If what I said before is true, that intelligence very strongly depends on our physical appearance in this world, and how we can get along with each other bodily, and can build relationships, then it follows that, based on," "among other things, the other physical appearance, and the other living conditions in which these robots must exist, a different form of intelligence from ours must evolve." "Understanding As The Basis for Intelligence..." "The basis for intelligence is tolerance." "Right" "Understanding" "The foundation for intelligence is the unpredictability of the behaviour of a member of the same species." "This unpredictability..." "I mean we all rely on the fact that we know what's happening next." "Actually, we could know that we don't know what's happening next." "And what we do is to develop collective models for appropriate behaviour." "That is, for example, conventions, social rules, legislation, culture." "All of this ensures that suddenly the behaviour of a Central European becomes, to us, largely foreseeable, whereas the behaviour of a person from a completely different culture is possibly largely unpredictable." "Not because it is wrong, but rather because they have a different model, a convention, of mutual understanding." "Signaling in this way precedes all intelligence, philosophy, etc., including legislation, civilizing attributes, and your method is, whenever a question seems insoluble on an inflated, specialized level, we seek in evolution the..." "The next step, yes." "That's the basic approach." "One should not view as most important and certainly not exclusive, the full complexity, the tip of the iceberg of intelligence, such as rational thinking." "Instead, one should see how one can constructively, and thereby hopefully also faster than evolution took, usher in complexity in artificial systems such as robots." "You said earlier the intelligence of robots will also be based on social relations?" "Yes" "But you said it would be a different intelligence." "Yes, that's right." "How do you mean that?" "I think one basis for these behavioral models of which I speak are so-called body images that we have." "And we have learned from the brain scientists that our brains have these "body images", through which the sensorimotor control of our motions is conveyed, and these body images are specially tailored to our bodily realization." "That is, because we have legs, arms, hands, fingers, etc., and they use very specific movement capabilities, there are these exact types of body patterns." "A dog has..." "A dog simply has a completely different body image." "It has a "canine space"." "Exactly." "But he also has a body image." "And this design feature, which I am convinced is shared by all mammals, because all the brains look very similar, if one wants to advance to this complex stage in robots, one must give the robot the opportunity to create body images of their own." "Now, if a robot has wheels, or other propulsion abilities, or other forms of sensors, another bodily appearance, then the body image will be inescapably dramatically different." "And thereby enable other abilities to realize behavioral expectations." "Then, for instance, it will be relevant how fast one can accelerate before the wheels spin out, how hard one can turn to the left or right, how quickly can one engage the reverse gear, etc." "These are simply other problems than we have." "And therewith everything related to intelligence changes." "If you look at our language; our language is full of metaphorical correlations with our physical appearance, even in such an abstract topic as we are dealing with and discussing." "You obviously have a feeling for the robots - if we ever use them - of, to begin with, high esteem, because, they say, otherwise the transfer of intelligence to or from the robots cannot work." "Right." "It is, shall we say, it is akin to living together with a dog." "I can communicate with the dog, though not in "Dogese", and not in human language, but one always finds a way to communicate with the other living being in a particular realm." "And I think for this form of communication we humans have a very important ability, namely we have the ability to, so to speak, transfer ourselves into the role of the communication partner." "We probably developed that, firstly, to put ourselves in another person's shoes, but we are unquestionably in a position to transmit it to other forms of life." "So, that means, we can put ourselves into the role of a dog, and can thereby communicate with it and together..." "So you want to do that with a robot?" "Right." "We are able to do that." "From the outside one could not produce that?" "No, not from the outside." "...and not induce them to clean the sewers under the cities." "How big would such robots be?" "Most of the sewer pipes for which we would want to use robots are about 40 cm in diameter. 60-40 cm." "And the robots must of course be smaller than the pipes so that stuff can get past them." "So I'm guessing they will be 30 cm long, 15 cm wide, 15 cm high." "The small tin soldier..." "Yes, a bit bigger." "Like the ship of the small tin soldier." ""Diversity of Intelligence..."" "So there's an intelligence of breathing, of the nose, of the eyes, intelligent temples, but that's an attribution, and an intelligent occiput is an attribution?" "For sure, yes." "But the individual attributes, e.g., the knees I scraped open as a child by falling down..." "..." "left behind their traces of intelligence, absolutely." "In this way, there has been a deluge of features in humans, richer than that which we use, and that we should call intelligence." "That's my suggestion." "We should call that intelligence." "Normally, we have gotten used to calling something intelligent when it has to do with rational thinking." ""Relationship Stories Between Robots..."" "Back to the computers, and especially to the small robots." "If they learn empathy, will they be empathetic to each other and to humans?" "At first to each other." "I think that's the easier way, just as we, I think, developed empathy towards each other, and only then learned to carry this capacity over to other living things, and also to objects." "I mean, we humans are used to having, say, a favourite coffee cup, a favourite teddy bear, a preferred apartment layout, etc." "So they might have dolls down there in the sewers of the cities..." "Preferences?" "...they'll sit with each other, chat, right?" "Chat?" "That's very important." "60% of our everyday conversation is chatter." "And if they didn't have that they would be unhappy." "They would possibly be socially inept." "They would possibly not do well enough at the tasks we have set out for them to take over from us." "They would get out of our control." "They would get out of control, or maybe autistic." "To me, social ineptitude is a form of autism." "They would be isolated, and, as far as I'm concerned, unable to survive." "Mr." "Moravec said today that he thinks, in 50 or 60 years perhaps the intelligence of robots will guide evolution and humans will have become a disappearing species." "That presupposes that robots are on the same line of evolution as us humans." "The fact is that evolution, the biological model..." "the reality is more complicated..." "There is no strand of evolution that unequivocally leads to us, and thus also to the robots." "It's a tree." "It's possible that a new branch in the evolution strand will emerge, independent of our development, to which robots, in this sense, become subject to evolutionary processes." "What I mean by that..." "...during the same time as robots are showing spectacular progress..." "Maybe ..while we at the same time remain stagnant?" "No, that's not what I meant." "I don't believe that." "You see, I don't believe that the moment we have robots we subject to evolutionary processes, that they will automatically be better than us or more intelligent than us." "Rather, they will have a different intelligence from ours." "We will hopefully have the opportunity to communicate with each other." "We might have mutual interests." "We might have comparable living spaces." "But all that needn't be." "We could very well just live next to each other." "They could colonize Mars." "For example." "We stay here on Earth." "Why not?" "I do not agree with the scenario posited by Hans Morevic, that we will be in competition with the robots...automatically." "It could transpire that way." "Not automatically, though, but parallel." "And I also don't believe that the robots have a super-intelligence, because super-intelligence would denote that they are smarter than us." "Then they would have to have super-feeling." "Yes, exactly." "In humans, intelligence is connected to our body image, with our capacity for empathy, emotions, etc." "That means they would have to be" ""super" in all of these areas in comparison to us." "They would have to have better arms, better legs..." "But, it wouldn't even work if they simply had wheels, because wheels are different from legs." "And once they have wheels, they'll have an entirely different intelligence, which possibly won't even be comparable to ours." "We could have a robot Olympics, which we could watch without envy." "That's right." ""Will Robots Present a Threat?"" "Do you think a risk could originate from an independent evolutionary branch in robots?" "Danger can arise out of any technology." "That's trivial." "When we go about building such autonomous systems..." "[Unintelligible]...can change politics." "Yes, yes, they can change politics." "But in that case there were still captains who decided where ships would go, and whether it would actually take place, and so on." "The battleships did not decide to go somewhere on their own." "At the moment we have autonomous systems, we have to, as has been discussed in many science fiction works, find a social and legal body of rules to be able to coexist with these autonomous systems." "So we have to treat these robots justly." "For instance we have to grant them justness." "Just as in the Middle Ages it was common for a bull who caused a farmer grief to be put on trial and judged." "All that was already in place." "We have these concepts, in principle." "Only, in today's age, a revolver isn't put on trial as a murder weapon, rather it is the person who is put on trial..." "So, not because the robots will demand it, but because we understand it, and we must affirm this through external actions." "That's exactly right, yes." "And when I imagine the life down there..." "In the sewer pipes." "Sewer pipes... 40 cm in diameter." "They couldn't experience such rises and falls..." "No." "But, they could get the thrust, such as, "Today is Saturday"..." "For example." "There's less flow." "Not everyone is home." "Rainfall, dryness." "They could experience it, and they also..." "Those would be their experiences in their world." "Cycles, that wouldn't be seasonal, but that would have a connection to the surface world." "Of course." "That there are simply regularities..." "After Christmas, there is a lot of, um, waste, right?" "A lot was eaten." "Geese." "For example, yes." "Such things are showing up down there now, transformed." "And they will be able enjoy that, too?" "Even with feelings, customs..." "I think so." "They will have to." "If..." "The robots could express, in their language, "We are celebrating Christmas."" "There's always the question if they should be glad to have a lot of work." "We, of course, don't delight in having a lot of work to do." "Or only somewhat." "The work has to be fun." "Then we don't mind if there's a lot of work." "Now, I think one has to be mindful, with such automated systems, to open the possibility of developing preferences." "And also to prepare for regularities of the environment that we, as the designers, can't foresee, and therefore shouldn't program for." "It would be stupid of us to design automated systems that are too rigid in their behavioural potentialities, and too rigid to be able to adapt their behaviour to the situation." "AIKIDO:" "Japanese Martial Art As Non-rigid Intelligence." "I will now speak of the Japanese martial art Aikido, which I have been doing for years." "It contains an important idea." "Namely, that one tries, in the attempt to make an aggressive movement, to carry out the move without doing damage." "Firstly, of course, to oneself, but through empathy, through love, so to speak, one also ensures that the other is not unnecessarily harmed." "I am convinced that, in this tradition, there can be found much pragmatic wisdom with regard to human interaction." "And also how we can learn to have consideration for each other." "But, we, of course, also have a long tradition with that." "Christianity, which actually preaches..." "In no way a Japanese martial art." "That's not a Japanese martial art." "The difference might be that Jesus said," ""if someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek"." "An Aikido master would say, "I wouldn't even give you the first cheek"." "That means one deprives the other of the target, and that arguably has the same effect." "And one doesn't sacrifice oneself." "One thereby doesn't sacrifice oneself." "Rather, yes, one evades, one glides past the attack." "One doesn't allow the foe to..." "Let's get back to the robots." "Can you describe, how do you manage it that they feel comfortable in your vicinity, in, as it were, your own martial art, amongst yourselves?" "Now that I've given you the keyword, I can't prevent that..." "Well, martial arts with robots is, I think, uninteresting." "What is interesting is, how can I with my human experiences with martial arts understand which forms of body images I should consider in the design of robots?" "Attraction..." "That's exactly right." "And one aspect, which I just mentioned, is to recognize the approach of a movement, and not to wait until a movement has been fully completed." "I think that is a very efficient technique." "So, to anticipate in one's mind..." "Exactly." "If I see the approach, I don't need the litany of the act of violence." "That's exactly right." "...all of the clashes." "But before the collision, if I recognize the approach..." "It's gone." "..." "I forego them." "And this "trick", if you will, it is fun..." "FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL Rodney Brooks develops autonomous robots." "Back in 1990, two of my students and I decided that NASA was not doing a good job investigating the planets." "That means, we wanted to start a company that does research of planets for commercial purposes." "And we had a really bad business plan." "We were of the view that we could send robots to other planets, rent the robots out to scientists at a certain rate, and then use the money to fund research." "It would pay for the mission." "It was of course a nonsensical idea." "We had to think up something else to make any money, because the first idea didn't work at all." "Yes, our early work was to build a robot that could walk on a planet's surface." "We worked with another organization, also in the U.S., namely the Ballistic Missile" "Defence Organization, which sent missiles and satellites around the moon and into orbit." "We also had the intention to land on the moon, to analyze the old area where" "Apollo 15 landed, and to conduct scientific tests on the surface of the moon, where nothing has been studied in 25 years." "But, as a result of tests we did at an air base, NASA decided it should send its own robot along on one of NASA's missions." "So, they suddenly announced they would send a robot along on this Mars mission, and that happened in 1997." "They based their robot on a prototype we built for them at the time in our jet propulsion lab." "So, in the end, our robots made it to the planets, but not through our company." "You wrote an essay entitled, "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control"." "Our idea was..." "NASA, in the 1980s, planned to send a huge robot to Mars, and it would have cost $12 Billion." "We then built a robot that we called Genghis." "It has 6 legs and only weighs 1 kg." "It had the same capabilities as this big robot NASA planned to build." "We were of the opinion, if one sent 100 of these 1 kg robots into space, instead of this huge 1000 kg one, then the whole mission would be cheaper." "Because, naturally the mass one would send into orbit would be smaller, and thereby the whole thing would be cheaper." "We also thought, if we build a small robot..." "and we had the prototype in only 12 weeks... that we could, on this basis, develop the robots faster." "That is, it would be a faster way to get to other planets." "And then we thought, when robots can move independently on a planet's surface, without the need for remote control by humans, then the whole thing would be cheaper." "And instead of autonomous, we simply said "out of control"." "That's how" ""Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" came into being." "That is perhaps somewhat oddly formulated, but at some point NASA adopted the slogan." "But they modified it a bit to "Faster, Cheaper, Better", because this" ""out of control" was too radical for them." "We're sort of a venture capitalist's nightmare, because we do a lot of things at once." "We're not like a traditional startup company." "We are building robots that can, for instance, be dropped down into oil wells." "Oil wells no longer go straight down." "They go down straight for a bit, then they curve along and follow shale." "And when one drills, it's difficult to send down measuring instruments." "One has to force them through." "It's very expensive to go back and find out what's happening, because you need miles or kilometers of cables to push down certain measuring instruments." "We have built a robot about 14 mm long that can be transported on a small truck." "It is installed in an existing oil well by two people, and it can work for 10-12 hours completely independently, without radio control from the surface." "And this robot measures what's happening in the oil well, and the goal is that one can, for example, to be able to shut off a region in which too much water is collecting, and accelerate others where oil production is better." "So, through the introduction of robots, it will be cheaper to harvest more oil from existing oil wells." "If one can increase oil production with the use of robots, then it's a cost factor." "Normally, with a drill hole, one only realizes 20% of the production potential." "When one uses a robot, it goes up to 40%." "Most of the drill holes in the former Soviet Union weren't used well at all." "They only realized 7% of the potential, on average." "This is a great opportunity to go back into these existing holes, if it can be done cheaply, and to analyze them anew." "With robots one can do this cheaply, and work these holes again." "Robots As Toys" "So, that's one realm, but we also make toys." "We have, for example, built robot toys that have so many sensors that they react to how we play with them." "They can speak." "One robot, a doll, has facial expressions, and it mimics." "And so the robot understands what the kid wants to do with it, and reacts." "And another thing...we're doing lots of things...is building robots for reconnaissance." "You can send a robot to examine a bomb that someone has placed somewhere." "We determined that our robots were used in New York on 9/11." "That is, the day after the attack, our robots were there and went into the debris, where it was still too dangerous for humans to go, and searched for survivors." "They have tracks, so they can move very easily on this debris and press forward, even in small holes, where humans can't go, where it's possibly too dangerous for humans." "My Real Baby, this toy, is a doll that has oodles of sensors, and can say to itself, now I'm being moved, now I'm being touched." "We have developed technology that can even detect very minimal contact." "When one tickles the sole of the robot's foot, and if the robot is in a good mood, it will start to laugh and giggle, but if it's in a bad mood it will act annoyed." "It has an emotional program on the inside, and there are needs built in." "Once in a while it has a need for food, the doll gets hungry, gets a little unhappy, starts to cry." "But when it gets its bottle, the sensors...there's a magnetic sensor built into its mouth, and also a little magnet on the milk bottle...then it is given the bottle, the doll starts to suck on it, and it is satisfied." "So, when these needs are met, the doll becomes happy, and when they are not met, the doll becomes less and less pleased." "To build a robot for reconnaissance or planetary exploration is extremely expensive." "Or even those for the oil wells or for the toy market." "For that the robots have to be unbelievably cheap." "We didn't grasp at first how cheap they had to be." "One cannot simply build these robots in a factory in the U.S." "That would be far too expensive." "We have a bunch of different places in eastern China, Vietnam, Taiwan..." "The various components are built where it is cheap to build them." "Just a few years ago, I travelled to Taiwan and tried to learn how one does that." "My first experience was with a very small toy company run by a Brit who lived in Taiwan." "I stayed there for several days." "This was at the time of the Tamagotchi craze in Japan, when the Japanese firms sold incredible numbers of Tamagotchis." "And an American said he would build a version of these things himself." "So, he contracted a programmer in Hong Kong, and bought a microprocessor to program." "One could buy these microprocessors for about 20 cents at Hsinchu Industrial Park in Taiwan." "I spent a few days with him, and he asked me whether I thought this was a good idea." "I didn't really know, but around the third day he said, "OK, I've decided to build about 8 million of these things." "And then he called somebody, there was a bit of a dispute about his buying 8 million little plastic cases." "The person on the other end said, "4 cents per case?" "No, no, it has to be 3.5 cents." "I can't afford more than that."" "After some negotiation, the deal was done." "He hung up the phone." "Then he called the chip producer and a similar conversation took place." "He did that for every single component." "He had no paper, spreadsheets, no computer." "Only the telephone and his brain." "Then he started calling shippers." ""Did somebody call from France?" "I bought 200,000 on October 10th..."" "And then he called all around the world." "Everything was in his brain." "He had no plans." "I was absolutely astonished." "It was all old-fashioned business methodology, like one used to do at the market." "From him I learned that if one wants to build a toy of plush material, or maybe stuffed, one has to do it in North Vietnam, because it's cheapest there." "China would be far too costly." "The chips one has to buy in Taiwan, they are joined with the circuit in south China." "All this stuff comes together, and all of it in a sort of non-Western, pre-industrial barter system." "It was a six-legged robot that could just climb over everything that was in its way." "It didn't have to go around." "It just climbed over." "We thought of innumerable names, and someone said, "This is like Genghis Khan"." "Genghis, the Robot Without a "Head"." "What is interesting about Genghis, and it's your discovery, in a way, is the removal of the cognition box." "Until then, one assumed a robot needed a central control unit." "And now you say it doesn't need the central control unit." "Back in the '70s and early '80s, people first started building mobile robots." "They were still very slow, and they looked at the world with two TV cameras staring out." "Then a world model was built." "Then the thought was, how can one move this model; then, later, with, so to speak, with eyes closed, how can we move it one meter forward." "And then spend 15 minutes computing the structure of the world before taking another step." "Let's take a look at mosquitos." "They can fly around at a meter or two per second." "They can chase mates, they can find prey, like me." "And they just have 10,000-20,000 neurons, which is very slow computation." "The people who build robots used the biggest computers in the world to to have the robot cover 1 meter in 15 minutes, whereas a mosquito, with ten or twenty thousand neurons can cover the same ground in 1 second." "So, for me, something was wrong with the organization." "So, I said we have the wrong organization in the robots, and that's because people have always thought how we ourselves proceed." "And then thinking they had cognition, so my idea was to remove cognition." "We only need sensors that are very connected to the actuators, which are the neuron sensors." "They don't have to be organized in a row." "We then tried an interactive system that reacts to the world, not an internal world model." "Rather, leave the world as it is." "The world is the best model." "The mosquito just refers to the external world in order to know what to do next." "And I think that's how our own intelligence evolved." "We are descended from simpler beings, and these beings had no cognition." "That came later." "Most of what we do, we do on that basis:" "perceiving the world and moving around in it." "At the lowest level with Genghis, one has the relation between what the legs feel and how they move." "So the robot's leg meets an obstacle, sees it, and it automatically raises and climbs over the obstacle." "So that gives us the basic ability to move forward and climb over obstacles." "Additionally, there are now these infrared sensors, which say, "Well, maybe there's something up ahead to the right." "This modulates those low-level leg behaviours, so, the right leg takes smaller steps." "So, in this way, the robot moves to the right, in the direction of the person standing there." "But the robot doesn't have to have any representation." "That means, "Here is a being, and I will chase this being." Instead, it's a direct association." "Here are the infrared sensors, and the leg movements will change accordingly." "A little shorter on the right side, where the infrared sensors sensed something." "When one watches the robot, it stands very still, and when someone abruptly moves, the robot will follow him." "For someone who's just watching this, it looks like the robot has an intention, but that isn't so." "It's just built that way." "There is no explicit intention on the inside, and I think the same goes for humans." "We always say someone has intentions, or we have intentions ourselves, but very often the intentions are not explicit, on our inside or that of the other." "You say a robot must be situated and embodied?" "That it is, in a way, composed of these two components." "Perhaps you can explain these terms:" ""situated" and "embodied"." "Something is situated when it reacts to the world." "By what the world does." "Something is embodied when the physical body of the world has effects on its behaviour." "However, robots are, in contrast to most other physical objects, actually embodied." "Even if computer scientists say everything must be done digitally, much can be managed through the pure physical movement of the body." "With Genghis we hadn't thought of a specific blueprint for the body." "We just said that each leg is joined to the body, and as the legs move, so will the robot." "Of course, it's sharply modulated." "One can rely on the behaviour of the legs." "I think many people today are what I call digital chauvinists." "I can extend that to neuroscience." "Neuroscientists think one can explain the brain by using the computer as a metaphor." "But I don't think that's quite the right metaphor." "You see, it's important how we are situated in the world, but also that we have a purely physical body." "One can't just see it purely computationally." "Can you give me examples of computers that are situated but not embodied, or embodied but not situated." "So, an airline reservation system is a situated system.... ...because it will give you a seat on a particular flight if it's available, but a few seconds later when all seats are taken, it's no longer possible." "So, it responds to changes but doesn't have a body." "A traditional robot spray painting on a production line is embodied, because it has an arm that can stretch, it has very strong physical movements." "It's very important that it have control functions." "But maybe this robot, this arm, is programmed so that it only paints car doors." "So, when a door comes along this robot will begin to spray the door with paint." "But, if suddenly the trunk of the car appear, then it won't paint it." "So that's a robot that is embodied, but not situated, because it doesn't respond to what's in the world, but rather it follows the pre-programming." "You write in your book, "I am convinced that intelligence output results from the interaction between perception and action," "and that in the balanced implementation lies the key to general intelligence." "EVOLUTION of Intelligence." "The word "balanced" is interesting..." "and "originate"." "The implementation of the human eye, if we set a moment in time for the origin of the first one-celled creature of 3.4 billion years ago." "And now we have this human eye." "That means, there is a plan-function context from which the eye emerged." "Yes, this idea of evolution is one that we use, as do many others." "A whole population of programmed robots has been established." "They operate in the world, and the best ones are selected and reproduced." "This is actually a powerful technique that has been developed in the last 10-12 years." "So far it hasn't led to a runaway evolution, but it has led to robots and programs that are actually quite astounding, because they're not evolving quite as engineers expected." "For example, when the robots at the jet- propulsion labs look at various rotor blades, even they have been and are developed through evolution to have an ideal form." "When one flies in an airplane, one is flying in an evolved system." ""ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION" doesn't exist yet." "Evolution programs work very well and are producing astonishing results, but they haven't lived up to some expectations." "There were people who said, "We really have to get this artificial evolution, revolution underway." "It will last for years and we'll have wonderful experiences!"." "That's what happened on earth." "Somehow, I think we still don't know enough to build these systems so that this evolution is limitless." "We're putting too many biases that we don't understand into the system." "But, it is of course true that these artificial evolution systems are very significant when it comes to finding solutions or constructs that we humans might not think of." "Would Intelligent Robots Like Humans?" " Dirk Baecker on the appetite of robosapiens for information." "I will try to respond to the recent discussion about the future of robot technology, injuries, artificial intelligence, distributed artificial intelligence, artificial life..." "Robosapiens." "Yes, robosapiens..." "Which will make the homosapien look stupid, right?" "Presumably." "...and I will try to explain how one can react to these phenomena as a system theoretician." "A system theoretician, especially a sociologist, has virtually no clue about the technological side." "I must of course ask, how are these robots described by an alarmed public, by the people who promote them as a future technology that one has to accept, and especially by people like Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, and others, Rodney Brooks," "who - whether it be eye-catching or precise science like their essays - write about their concepts of robot construction." "Those are all concepts." "Those are all elements of communication." "That's the conversation in the room, and I, as a sociologist, must try to insert myself into the discussion." "What surprised and interested me..." "Was there talk between them?" "Talk amongst the robot researchers?" "Amongst each other." "They interacted..." "The newspapers, the media, the roboticists, and the investors..." "Exactly." "There are huge sponsorship costs that have to be, so to speak, summoned forth." "And it concerns constructing a discourse in which a German research team cannot handle it." "To refuse certain proposals furthering robot technology, because it's so clear that it's politically, scientifically, and educationally desired. "We have to do that!"" "What fascinated me was a small, maybe coincidental position taken by Ray Kurzweil who wrote in this book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines", asked himself, "What do robots want?"" "I picked up his question." "When they are at the point that they can network with each other and themselves, such that one can consider it intelligence." "And his answer was that they want information." "Information." "They want to know something." "Information cannibals." "Cannibals of information." "And why?" "Because they naturally - what am I saying naturally?" " artificially are systems that, without an input...or, when they're intelligent, without the self-production of information...cannot reproduce themselves." "They must...and that's the nice description from Kurzweil...they must put to work their own own neural systems, which are these different layers of information- processing capacity, upon which robot brains are built in the meantime." "And how does one put a brain to work?" "With examples, just like in humans." "And the question is, how can an over- dimensional, extremely fast robot brain, not burdened by our slowness, be kept happy and engaged." "That is, be kept in a mood that it seeks out information on its own..." "They want to be kept amused." "We need to constantly have new examples." "And my somewhat skeptical, and maybe also polemical, observation is, if we humans believe that we are the most interesting example for the robots, that one as a robot, so to speak, spends a lifetime researching watching humans," "then we are kidding ourselves." "Because the redundancy, the revision gestation, the boredom that we produce in our behaviour, will be transparent to robots after the first half-day; akin to the joke from Ephraim Kishon about Israel:" ""I visited Israel" -"What did you do in the afternoon?"" "That's how it will be for the robots, vis a vis humans." "What will they do in the afternoon?" "They will have to keep themselves busy with new examples, because we are such redundant, transparent examples that the robots will quickly die of boredom." "And from there emerges my admittedly polemical explanation." "Namely the question, if we believe today we should worry about robots, then we miss the point that we should be concerned about what robots will be concerned about one day." "How will they busy themselves, with an intelligence, with a technological interconnectedness, enormous physical intervention strength, in everything we call the world, when we, as sources of inspiration, as exemplars, don't cut it anymore." "That is very interesting, because at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, on a certain floor, such experiments are done, these projects are developed, all elements of human behaviour are first rehearsed." "Intelligence comes from social relationships." "Yes, I agree completely, and that also seems to be the dominant paradigm." "These attempts for 17 years to see intelligence as the processing of symbols, suggests appropriate uses of concepts for perceived things, but is a failure." "With that one has been able to construct a chess computer, but not much more." "And now the procedure is to build in social intelligence - that is, the ability to orient oneself to the way in which someone else orients himself or herself to a situation - and bodily intelligence." "What's fascinating to me is, after we had to see how the grand writings of" "Malaponti, for instance...perception, materiality, corporeality...were forgotten, the artificial intelligence researchers dig the writings up again." "And they say with a very exact conceptual precision, intelligence is not possible without the self-reference of a brain to the body in which this brain sits." "Because without this self-reference to a body, the difference between, "What could" "I be?", as a fiction that one needs to describe oneself," ""And what could everything else be?" that I can influence in some way, could not be constructed." "And without this simple difference between "me" and an "other", I would not come to a critical, self-critical, "alert", "able to use stairs" intelligence." "So what these robots learn as the first delineation is "me" and the "other"." "They have to learn that they can fall, otherwise they can't descend a staircase." "And they can only learn about falling if they know something about their corporeality..." "It's falling." "That's right." "It's falling." ""It's falling" is empty." "There's no information." "The very tiny computers, er robots, are there to clean the sewers in big cities, those that are too narrow for humans to service." "And they do in a sociable manner; in packs." "And there again is the tactile element, the fingertip feeling they have." "That's what directs them, and it seems to, in a way, satisfy the hunger for information." "A hunger for information, and it must recognize the pack and know not to dispose of the others." "The excrement must be disposed of, or the pipe must be cleared of obstacles, but one cannot see one's pack or oneself as an obstacle." "That is by now a human capability." "I'm referring to the high school teacher..." "The awareness of the occurrence of certain figures in social situations as barriers to learning and teaching effects." "And therefore we take the professor out of the seminar." "The robots cannot do that yet...or, to put it more cautiously, the precedent is to have the awareness of oneself and the other in the situation, and as something else than what constitutes the situation itself." "...to grasp." "And when they can do that, then they can think, right?" "To me, that would suffice as a description for thinking." ""I think, therefore I am" is an apt adage." ""Cogito ergo sum" would be fully sufficient." ""Protego ergo sum." I protect the other because I recognize it as me." "Would just as well be thinking." "Only that one would have to go from an "I" to a "we", and make the difference explicable." "So, "cogito ergo sum" or "cogitamus ergo sumus", in any combination, to separate this dependence." "Even the dependence of my function from others, within the basic principle of thought, therewith containing intelligence." "With regard to artificial intelligence, particularly robots, there are two elements that initiate wonderments." "The one question is, can something like that be considered alive?" "I mean, would one designate it as "living"?" "And secondly, when would one term it intelligent?" "What kind of attributes are those?" "Well, those are..." "What is "the living thing", for example?" "Those are difficult questions." "There's no expression for that?" "There's a vortex in the materials that flings the materials around so much that a conversion results." "So a lifeform can extract from a material and spit out again what it needs for its existence." "That's a living being?" "Yes, I could agree fully with that, especially as a sociologist." "I would personally rather assign the ability for self-replication." "And in doing so, underline above all the word "self"." "Gerhard Roth, one of this country's biologists, once said, life is a one-time-only invention." "I find that a fascinating expression, because I, much like Bates once thought, am in a situation where I must think that the anemone, the crocodile, myself, the schizophrenic, are all expressions of single" "one-time invention." "So, all as expressions of a particular form of the reproduction...or different forms, heterogeneous forms of the reproduction of life." "This is indeed related to the reproduction of cells (assemble, disassemble, reproduce again), but obviously has nothing to do with thinking." "I have to be able to differentiate between life, as reproducing organisms, and thinking - such as a self-description, for example, of life." "Then I can say that thinking is alive." "That's an Aristotelian idea:" "As restless as he is, or just because he's so restless, he has self-replicating abilities." "Somebody like Luhmann, during the course of his life, never thinks, what could Aristotle have meant?" "So to react to a virus..." "And Luhmann, in the form of the books he wrote and published, is still alive and with us." "Luhmann keeps Aristotle alive, and keeps himself alive, in part because, as he once said, he took part in the "discussion of the ghosts of the past millennia"." "Still, I have to be able to...if I want to distinguish between sociology and biology, discern this form of reproduction of an idea as having viral characteristics, in contrast to the reproduction of an organism as having cellular characteristics." "So, that you would say, even as a sociologist, as a describer, that the water of which we are largely composed, in essence isn't H2O, but must always be a very old water." "Yes, that's..." "We carry over a very small cell combination." "It is imperceptibly passed on, but really very old." "Older than the water under the Lybian desert." "It's a wonderful conception." "I would describe water as the neighbourhood in which we can live." "And it's always the same neighbourhood." "And we react very sensitively if something in this neighbourhood changes." "If we suddenly become aware of contamination or toxicity, if we no longer trust the water of which we are constructed." "But between the blood-water percentage, and that which, outside the skin, streams past you in the swimming pool, is a time difference." "Yes." "That constitutes life." "It's a time difference, a record of contact." "It's a refusal of contact." "So, life is about 4.2 billion years old?" "Yes." ""Every organic body of a living being is a type of God-like machine, or a natural automaton that eternally surpasses all artificial automatons..."" "The machines of nature, that is, the living bodies, remain, even in their smallest parts, until the end of time, machines." "The Black Goethe/ The Homunculus Project in Faust, Part 2" "What is this "homunculus" with Goethe?" "I think that is one of the scenes that caused Goethe to seal Faust." "We know that Goethe, at the end, didn't want the second part of Faust preserved for posterity." "Rather, he sealed it away." "Kept it secret." "Kept it secret." "Because he was of the opinion that it is a duty to tell only what the other can absorb." "Here, in a deep dimension, in a thorough manner, future events are anticipated in this scene...in a way this thoroughness really only occurs in the 5th act of the second Faust;" "namely, through the murders of Philemon and Baucis, and the fatal mix-up between the drainage trench and the grave." "So, in Faust those are visions of the future that are narratively current." "Goethe knew that he would have to leave these things to posterity, because there was no way the society of his time would be able to understand it." "Really, what we're dealing with is a concept of Goethe's, with which he actually optimizes the antiquated, deficient person, of whom it is written in Faust," ""It makes sense to him and he needs it himself, to be much more animalistic than any animal."" "This person he optimizes here, by way of very serious jokery..." "Like an artificial person." "Like an artificial person." "And this is a tiny person, as if in a vial." "Yes, and it will still be created..." "It's lit up?" "Yes, it's lit up in there." "It will be created by the scientist Wagner, the former medical student who rose to become a scientist." "And he's helped by..." "He's helped by Mephistopheles." "That is to say, he is essentially a product of the "velociferical"...that is, the being that played a pivotal role in Faust and accelerated all paths." "That means, there is occurring here a very accelerated form of creation, this synthetic creation, of which even the alchemists haven't dreamt yet." "Paracelsus wrote about the chymical human, which, by the way, Goethe knew, that one could optimize the human being, artificially, extracorporeally, without impregnating a woman." "One could put a sperm cell into a vial for 40 days." "Then, when it has been developed, one would..." "It will be treated alchemistically..." "That's right." "...with the moon, the sun, gold, silver." "And after that it will have to be warmed and nourished for 40 weeks, and the result will be an all-knowing being." "That was already the idea back then." "That means essentially the alchemists expressed a biological pessimism early on." "And now in addition there is..." "Pessimism for what is earthly begotten." "That's right." "For the antiquated person." "He who came after Adam, so to speak." "And now there is the overhaul of Adam." "In essence, a positive eugenics, if you will." "But not in such a way that one breeds races of people in the tree of life." "So the same men and women" " SS men and Nordic women in disguise." "Do the same as before, and something else results?" "NO!" "A side branch that has nothing to do with humans, and which is noticeably smaller." "Yes, the interesting thing is that models have now been accepted at the European" "Patent Office - so-called human chimeras." "So there is the possibility of manufacturing chimeras out of a mixture of human and animal stem cells - birds, fish, mice, and also to produce hybrid beings, for example." "Chimeras are hybrid beings?" "Yes." "Chimaera was the goat in Greek mythology, and there is the big narrative in Iliad about Bellerophon, who fought such a chimera." "In ancient times, the chimera was a very dangerous animal made of three parts, namely a lion's head at the front, in the middle a goat, and a snake at the tail." "And Bellerophon is the one who defeated this beast, and who then tried to get to heaven with his steed, Pegasus." "These chimeras, these ideas of hybrid beings, have been around forever, and it's interesting that the creation of Homunculus is very tightly bound with the classical age, with the Greek classical age." "Because in the Greek classical age, in the big works of Homer, in Iliad, ideas of creation are already there." "Such beings are already in existence." "That means, they are..." "This lore that there were extraterrestrial and enlightened creatures, in Atlantis and elsewhere, that brought chimeras with them... and then that all fell into disfavour again." "From a scientific perspective all of that is today a very dubious fantasy, because one has to presume that a positive eugenics of humans has biological boundaries." "That is, biological but also cultural." "We aren't only a product of our biological heritage, but also of our cultural heritage." "For example, with reasonable certainty, we will not be able to improve intelligence eugenically, because we suspect there are at least 5,000 genes involved in intelligence." "And, add to that the cultural factors." "So it shouldn't be too difficult, even with today's technology and scientific knowledge, to create such beings." "That's why, interestingly, Nietzsche, never spoke of breeding humans, but rather of taming." "After all, Nietzsche foresaw that, essentially, the DNA of a worm is very similar to our own DNA." "He said, "I have shown you the way from the worm to the human, but there's still a lot of worm in a human"." "As it says at the beginning of "Thus Spake Zarathustra", where that sentence originates, "The human is a being we have to overcome"." "That means, Nietzsche wanted to tame humans..." "Through preservation of their savagery." "Yes." "In essence he wanted what works out for the homunculus, namely the somersault back into the past, and thereby into the future." "Nietzsche wanted to finally unburden humans of the priggish body-hostility of Christianity, and from their Philistinism, of which Goethe said, "What is a Philistine?" "A hollow intestine filled with dread and hope, which God pities"." "Those were the conceptions of Nietzsche, which he linked to the "Übermensch"." "That is, it's essentially a cultural evolution that completes..." "The "Übermensch" springs from sorting in the brain." "That's it." "That's exactly right." "It is basically a cultural evolution that should optimize biological evolution." "And that is something that happens with the Homunculus, because..." "But very differently." "Yes" "Everyone understands something physically." "Goethe would have said that one can't sort that out in one's head." "Yes, this..." "And one must find it in nature or it doesn't exist." "Well, this project has two stages." "One is the artificial procreation, and then, in a much later act, this being emerges, as Goethe says, "in the right manner"." "That means, the artificial evolution must be delayed and catch up to the natural evolution." "But not with the result that, at the end, the antiquated human being emerges again." "Because, it's common knowledge..." "...the improvement thereof." "A person with" "better eyes, better hearing..." "Yes, a totally different version." "A type that is, above all, not a person of whom Goethe could say, "As soon as we speak, we begin to make mistakes"." "You see, that's the big problem of Faust." "And, uh, in this respect..." "Big coincidence..." "Yes, big coincidence" "I mean, he doesn't believe that things improve through planning or good will, but the mistakes people make under the guidance of the Devil...there can be something to that, due to perhaps an increased, crystalline coincidence." "That's his concept, apparently, that here the Homunculus is practically a post-Faustian person." "So, Faust dies, goes from the sky through the world down to hell, while the hope springs, that through the detention of the philogyny of humans, a new type of person results who is totally different." "And that is expressed in Faust." "There it means, with regard to the Homunculus, who is given wise advice by Thales," ""Don't strive for higher things." "If you become a human being, it's over for you"." "So, don't take this same journey..." "For God's sake, not this path..." "Rather, become a lateral race. "Do you, dwarf, king of the Pygmies, because you belong to the small creatures, have a chance in a vial?"" "A protected space." "Yes." "That was the other big temptation, that the other philosopher would converse with Homunculus, namely Anaxagores." "Anaxagores wants to show him the way of the deficient, antiquated human again." "He would like to crown him the king of the Pygmies." "And interestingly, Homunculus, the all-knowing, declines the idea." "And that one should probably explain a bit more precisely." "Which abilities Homunculus has as a being termed "artificial"." "And that's actually the fascinating thing about this process, that little Homunculus, who is an artificial creation, suddenly relates to the full history of feelings and beauty, in that he acquires a desire for the beautiful Galatea." "In this big rocky bay..." "She is the Goddess of the sea." "Goddess of the sea." "Drives with shells in her shell-wagon through the galaxies, but also through the deep sea." "Through the deep sea." "And she actually then opens the entrance to the step back into the repeat of the human phylogeny." "And with this Goethe created the additional components, by which the chronicle of reason, the artificial procreation, approaches the chronicles of emotions, beauty, and love, which has a completely different calendar." "In a vial, that looks like a small flame, and in that flame there appears a small human." "It's sometimes called a "dearest boy"." "This isn't somehow a garden gnome or something like that." "No, not at all." "Goethe says, "By nature a debaucher"." "He is indeed." "In fact he's a debaucher because he is the one, in the end, who knows more than us humans." "You see, he is a ventriloquist." "He talks with his stomach." "He doesn't talk with a human tongue like us, of whom Goethe says," ""The only truth about a human being is that he makes mistakes."" "Rather, this is a ventriloquist who isn't even capable of making mistakes." "The language that rules us..." "He talks with the tongues of others." "As if to the heads of others" "That's right." "And in him are the heads of others." "He attracts all knowledge magically to himself." "He doesn't just know the way to the classical Walpurgis Night, but he is the post-velociferical person." "He is the one who relegates Mephisto to the role of extra." "He can deal easily with the turbulence of swift progress, because he knows there's a cloak that has just arisen." "How does he know that?" "A cloak with which one can fly." "Yes, these velociferical, accelerating instruments that befell the impatient Faust, Mephisto - the fast cloak, the fast epee, the fast love, the fast money." "He knows all of these devices." "He is the one who commandeers the cloak." ""Give me the cloak", calls this small boy in the vial." "That means, Mephisto is essentially exploited." "From glass, glass in a container, like in Noah's Ark." "Protected intelligence, which is untouchable to the outside world." "Yeah, the interesting thing is the intelligence of the antiquated human can only process 200 calculations per second due to electrochemical processes, as the brain physiologists have established." "And the other deficiency that Goethe predicted very early on is the fact that we apparently have areas in the cerebral cortex that foster anxiety over theorizing." "There was just an interview with the director of the Max Planck Institute" "For Brain Research, Wolf Singer, who indicated that in the latest step of evolution, the cerebral cortex, there are areas that are connected to the remaining decentralized - the brain is of course organized in a very decentralized" "fashion...areas from the other brain centres that are all joined to the senses, retrieve information without themselves going through the mind's awareness." "They thereby merge them into meta-meanings." "So, we have many areas in the cerebral cortex that don't have to control the senses." "It's like a spaceship outside ourselves..." "These are meta-meanings...." "Like an aura, they are not outwardly created, rather we produce them on the innately." "And the interesting thing is that Goethe, regarding for the optimization of the deficient human - as he found him - therefore also called for," ""First feelings, then thoughts." "First in the distance, then under control"." "That is, he essentially wanted a pedagogy of the deceleration and de-theorization of the areas of the cerebral cortex." "Not in the sense of dumbing-down, a simpler life, or something like that, but rather..." "An improvement of the possibilities we have." "Leave the brain as it is." "No commands." "If I don't try to commandeer my brain." "No hierarchisation." "Only then is it really rich." "It gleams, like the flame of Homunculus." "That's exactly what he wanted." "Goethe said, common ideas - and that is what is being generated in the areas of the cerebral cortex." "And, great conceitedness always leads to terrible calamity." "Goethe was of the mind that these common ideas should be whittled down to the special and individual case." "Only that would be the truth." "One should experience inductively." "One must experience sensually." "One can trust the senses." "Goethe's saying goes, "Nothing false will appear when your senses keep you awake"." "That means, he in essence... -"Nothing false will appear, when your senses keep you awake."" "He assumed that we would be able to experience the mind through sensual perception." "By understanding refraining from doing its duty." "That's how it is..." "It permits the lateralization of the senses." "They work next to each other." "They form an orchestra." "It isn't one defeating the other." "Exactly, that's his intention, and of course therewith he put the Western pedagogic on its head, and he proceeded in precisely the opposite direction." "So, a proper use of the mind would be to create containers." "As, in the vision of Homunculus, they create a vial, while what illuminates is sensual activity." "Nietzsche also picked up these concepts because, like Goethe, he was convinced that the senses have a completely different calendar from reason." "Reason is fast, whereas the senses are slow." "And every sense has its own rationality, its own brain." "Yes, and also has its own calendar." "That's the interesting part." "The senses follow completely different clocks." "And, in that respect, Nietzsche said it is unrest that will cause civilization to end in a new barbarism." "The lack of calm will lead civilization to end in a new barbarism." "The calm of nature and the senses was already recognized by Goethe as an elixir." "And Faust, in one of his lucid moments, recognizes, when he says, "If I could remove magic from my journey..." - so, the velociferical, the hastening - "..." "If I stood in front of you, nature, alone, then it would be worth it to be a human"." "To put that in concrete terms, the eye has a distinction capacity of 1/18 of a second." "The ear can differentiate between 500 impressions per second, let's say in music." "The palate operates very slowly." "Yes, totally different." "It takes a while." "The stomach works from meal to meal, but also in a annual rhythm." "The nose, from cold to cold." "I mean, one could see it that way." "But this is accelerated in the brain." "Yes, speeded up." "And therein lies a higher level of differentiation, but also a tyrant." "Yes, as Goethe writes, "He calls it reason, and needs it himself, to be more animal-like than any animal"." "Because these accelerating tendencies lead, for example, to Faust's slaying of" "Philemon and Baucis." "That means, the sounding board, the humanity, that is demonstrated in the classic" "Walpurgis Night, via Homunculus, is smashed." "So, the tradition towards cultural memory is ruined, and thereby the culture is two people, who have learned to love each other, which happens gradually, and who can plant trees..." "They stand in the way of his project." "Yes, and with that emerges, if one expresses it differently, as a hindrance to his project, the administration of the collective memory of humankind." "Goethe was convinced that life is lived forwardly, but only understood in reverse." "I THINK WITH MY KNEE/Unusual Interfaces Between Technology and Human" "It was the Californian physicist, Jerry Pine..." "I'll write down the name, who developed this great technology whereby one enters the brain, not with an electronic needle, but with a kind of spoon." "Naturally, a "micro-spoon"." "A gold thread on a silicone surface." "Here, a neuron, normally from a rat, is brought up, and this neuron grows into the brain." "The various cells connect to the rat neuron." "And the individual characteristics of this rat neuron change considerably, not only because it grows on its own, but because these cells impose their influence on the neuron." "Information flows to the gauge." "But this neuron doesn't just register neutrally, but rather is influenced in its growth by the cells." "So, it's a process of exchange, not just a haziness in the constitution." "The configuration of the instrument itself is somewhat transformed." "One could take the position, "My goodness, now they are making new connections between the nerve system and technical systems!"" ""Technical systems, computer systems, brainships, and linked to the brain." "My goodness!" "What is that?" "Is that allowed?"" ""Why, we have predetermined connections between the brain and the outside world."" ""Sense organs." "Eyes to see, ears to hear, hands to feel, feet to walk."" ""Now there are suddenly new connections, new interfaces, between organisms and the environment arising." "Should that be allowed?"" ""Implant a chip in the brain, remove information from the brain, connect it to a computer." "With that one might be able to steer rockets, and so on." "Is that even permissible?"" "Now, nature is obviously in conflict with that." "As it stands, we learn as children, as babies, as newborns, to become acquainted with our bodily surroundings simply by interacting with them." "I mean, that is almost an artificial interface." "That we have a hand for our nervous system." "It must first learn that." "It must learn to deal with the fact that it can move the hand, that it can control the eyes, and so forth." "We know from patients that, even with completely new nerve connections, they can deal with peripheral nerves." "For example the exchange between the tongue and the facial nerve." "When a facial nerve fails, with which one winks, blinks, or laughs, wrinkles one's nose, and so on, then one is able to, sometimes with great success, partly replace their functions via the tongue nerve." "The stump of the tongue nerve is connected to the ends of the facial nerves." "In such a case, where this facial nerve has failed, one takes the tongue nerve and joins it with the facial nerve." "This nerve previously provided for the tongue, and then provides for the face." "When the patient wants to blink, he has to imagine moving the tongue." "And when he wants to laugh, he has to imagine putting the tongue behind the rearmost molar." "So, the nervous system can learn to interact completely differently with itself, with its muscles, with its effectors, than it has until now." "It can relearn that it is moving not the tongue but the face, when it wants to move the tongue." "That shows it is possible to produce wholly new interfaces between the nervous system and the environment." "This takes place not only on the conscious level, but also on the reflexive level." "That means that we can even blink with this tongue nerve." "INTERFACES BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND BRAIN" "It is possible to implant technical systems in the brain, or to connect to the brain." "But it is also possible to build nervous cells into computer systems." "The technical application would be, for example, the identification of poisons that are found in the atmosphere, in the air, and affect these nerve cells." "When these nerve cells fail, the computer system's circuitry will be paralyzed and the computer will emit a siren." "By this method one can identify nerve gas early and trigger a siren." "So, testing nervous systems in computer systems, a hybrid system of nerve and computer systems, for the early detection of poison gas attacks." "Portable, as a nerve gas alarm, so to speak, a couple of nerve cells in the system, and a technical circuit that is connected to the siren." "Air comes in through the bottom, and when poisons are detected a warning tone sounds." "ROBOT AND HUMAN/ A TRIP TO MARS" "There is this interesting film, in which a researcher works for ten years to design and build a robot that is then supposed to fly to Mars in an orbiter." "Shortly before take-off, there's a short circuit in the robot's system, the robot falls in love with a woman and doesn't want to take part in the flight." "He wants to stay behind." "The researcher is disappointed." "He puts himself into the space capsule, because he doesn't want his ten years of research to go to waste." "He flies for 12 years through the galaxy, so that his 10-year program wasn't for naught." "In this instance, who is the robot?" "Who is the human?" "Some blind people have a video system attached to their glasses, which was able to bring the information into the brain via a cable." "So, a hole is drilled in the occipital lobe, and the electronics are fed through it into the brain." "By this route, the brain can deal with a conversion of the visual information." "And it is able - in one case it was developed this far - to recognize the letter "I"." "This technology is still very controversial." "THE ETHICS OF HOPE" "One should not allow this to arouse too much hope." "Blind people are often well-adapted to their situation." "One has to consider whether one should simply deal with the concept of the illness and say, "You have a defect or deficiency that could be compensated with technological systems"." "If one arouses too much hope, then the people in question could expect miracles, and then no longer want to shape their relation to their environment by use of their tactile sense and memory retention." "Scientists in California have already implanted technical retinas in a patient." "The patient could only make out a little bit of light." "It is a big problem, this ethic of hope, dealing with hope, to engineer solutions with a modulated sense of hope." "One can stimulate the attention systems and the systems for wakefulness in a targeted way." "For example, they are trying to use electrodes in the neck marrow or the area of the brainstem to stimulate the awareness function of those who are unconscious." "In a few, very specific cases, they were able to get the patient to respond." "The region in which one stores such electrodes is, on one side, in the neck marrow region, but also in the brain itself, in the area of the brainstem." "The thalamus, for example." "So, deep in the brain, where the energy centres are located, and from which they activate the cerebral cortex." ""I think with my knee", is what Beuys said." "Brain scientists will say, that can't be true." "And it can't be." "How is one supposed to think with one's knee?" "It's the brain that thinks." "Total provocation of the neurosciences." "They will prove the converse." "They are developing with explosive speed, and are showing how even nerve cells can be replaced." "Interestingly, even with foreign tissue." "Small intestine cells, connective tissue." "In principle, even with cells from the knee." "Brain tissue transplantation, brain tissue replacement." "With cells from the knee." "So I guess Beuys was right after all." "Could we even think with knee cells?" ""I think with my knee"." "That's the big question." "Whether the fact it's nerve cells even plays a role, or whether it could also happen to other systems." "For instance, the membranes of which a gas tank are composed, semi-permeable, semi-porous, so the gases can be expelled." "The membranes in the nerve cells are also semi-porous, so why shouldn't one use gas-tank membranes for that purpose, or knee-tissue cells." "That is to say, the faculty of reason is something that can be realized, implemented, on the most disparate of materials." "Reason as something universal." "And that could take place in my brain, or in a brain that is transplanted into me, with knee tissue, with gas tank material." "It's called Functionalism." "That is, the mind, reason, uses a material that is provided." "It is not crucial that it be a certain kind of material." "As long as it fills the requirements we have of it." "Imagine having a device on your glasses or on your earring, and every time you move, you get information through this machine about the people and things you see." "It should mean you have access to information, you could be interactively busy with an external object, not just through your brain." "That will eventually blur the realization of our physical selves." "It will blur it with the external reality, since we'll be interactive with external devices." "That would be a possibility for the future." "I could see it happening." "When it comes to cyberspace, for example, there's a blurring between what we see and our thoughts." "THE FUTURE OF OUR BRAINS/ Susan A. Greenfield on the implants and branches of our consciousness" "We are starting very roughly to bring together inner states of feeling." "I think in the future we will have to do the following:" "We have to find a method to be able to observe the brain and describe internal states, and assimilate that with what humans feel." "In my book, I tried to describe the private life of the brain, where I present an idea that could be bilingual." "How one looks at the brain, how one interprets feelings, and how one simultaneously describes these feelings in relation to physical events." ""HELLWACH"/ Computer measurements of the nerve currents." "Let me give you an example:" "Arousal is something we experience everyday." "That can be described scientifically in terms of the chemical sources we have in the brain, which fluctuate and reach differing plateaus, waking states, and dream states." "Similarly, when we are distracted." "That could also be described as having different groupings of brain cells that compete with each other." "That would be a further example." "How important something is to you." "That could be described as the number of brain connections that are triggered in a certain person." "So, using these same concepts, they can have two different languages." "The scientific language and the everyday language." "And then we can develop a schema that uses all these factors." "The schema is bilingual." "EGO/ Drawing of Freud's" "The ego is an interesting concept." "A few decades ago, Freud was out-of- fashion, but now there is renewed interest, because he saw our intellectual life as very fundamental." "The id with the desire." "The ego, the superego, which help channel those desires." "The superego, which takes over the morality and self-control." "My own opinion is, today we can reinterpret that because of modern neuroscience." "The id, the driving force, is the basic building block of our consciousness." "That is to say, our raw feelings." "The raw feelings we have as little children that then evolve." "The ego, the personalized channels that we use are the growth of these connections." "They grow as we grow." "They change constantly." "These personalized connections, which I call the mind, help to interpret the world and channel our feelings." "But of course, if we take a drug, if we literally blow our minds, if we lose control over ourselves, what happens then is that we, in that moment, essentially, don't have access to these connections." "Then we are back again to being like a small child." "We are the recipients of these raw feelings, these raw sensations." "That's the building block of our consciousness." "What's interesting is that we often pay money to be like that today." "TWO TYPES OF IMPLANTS." "This brings us back to the implants." "There are two types of them." "First you can have implanting of cells that are already producing the chemical." "So for example, one can use tissue from the brains of human fetuses." "The problem, of course, is that these fetuses have been aborted." "And the ethical problems are obviously substantial." "One can envisage in the future, perhaps, unscrupulous people undergoing a pregnancy and having an abortion to sell the fetus." "Human factories?" "Yes, one can imagine this terrible kind of exploitation." "The other problem is that even when it is possible and ethical, we still don't know how successful it is." "It is very hard to assess it exactly, because each patient is different, and because there is no, what we call, control." "It's impossible to take a patient and inject into the brain something inert." "And it's only by doing that, that we'll determine how much the improvement was caused by the cells, or because of a placebo effect, or that you may have destroyed something else in the brain that helped balance out that area." "So it's very hard to evaluate accurately." "It will take some time before we can evaluate." "The other types of transplants are so-called stem cells." "They are the cells from which all other cells in the body originate." "They become either blood cells or brain cells according to the environment in which they are placed." "So one idea is to implant stem cells into the brain in the hope that they will become brain cells and set up the appropriate circuits." "The ethical advantage of implanting stem cells is that you do not need an aborted fetus." "We'll eventually be able to clone, these cells." "So they will be easier to produce." "The problem I have with this is that it's hard to think of this as a widespread treatment, because it is hazardous and expensive and unpleasant." "It's not an ideal treatment." "And again, it might be hard to evaluate because we don't know what the controls would have been." "Does the brain easily reject a foreign body, or is it able to adapt to implantations?" "It's relatively easy to implant things into the brain." "If you like, it's a bit like drilling for oil." "One works in three dimensions, you have coordinates, an atlas, so you know where to go." "Sometimes now, it is even possible to try to localize somewhere in the brain and to do so while the patient is conscious." "If I take, for example, the brain of a pig, and implant parts of it into a human's brain, will the brain reject it?" "This of course is already being planned for hearts." "Pigs have been manipulated genetically so that a pig heart can be implanted into a human who has a severe heart condition." "And that would be preferable to waiting for a human donor." "CAN A BRAIN LIVE OUTSIDE THE BODY?" "I think this is the hope of some people, that when they're dying, they could be deep-frozen." "The problem is, if you freeze the brain, it would be like freezing strawberries, in that when they thaw, they're all pulpy." "Although you might be able to freeze a muscle, as we do when we freeze our lamb or beef, this is not the case for the brain." "If you go down below about zero degrees, it's going to be a problem." "You can cool a brain down to 4 degrees, and reverse processes that way..." "One uses a liquid, which percolates through the area that you want." "FREEZING OF DECEASED PERSONS IN U.S.A." "It depends how deep you want to go, how cold you want to go, and how long you want to be cold." "Physiologists showed, from the whisper in the forest to the felling of a tree, it is all movement." "Everything we do, every smile, every word, depends on muscle being contracted." "With the exception of tears and drooling." "There's an interesting connection between movement and the brain." "So, we can think of animus, which is consciousness, and animated, of course meaning moving, and an animal." "Animals move, plants don't." "That is to say from one place to another." "If you're animated, what can be the connection between having consciousness, animus?" "We know that there is an animal that lives in the sea, that when it is in its early stages, it has a very simple brain." "It swims around and interacts with the world." "When it becomes adult it fastens to a rock." "And then it eats by filtering seawater." "And then, something very interesting happens." "It eats its own brain." "That is to say, a brain is only useful when one is moving." "When one is fastened to a rock, then one doesn't need a brain anymore." "A robot named HOTSHOT" "THE NANO-ALCHEMIST/ Nobel Prize winner George M. Whitesides makes a tool out of 8 atoms of gold (the virtual tweezers)" "There are billions of photons in the tweezers, and the spheres being held are a few microns." "And for calibration, a hair - one of the few hairs I have left - is about 100 microns across." "So imagine a sphere that's 1/100th the width of a hair, and you have an idea of the size of the object we're manipulating." "Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book called, "What Is Life?"" "He poses the question, "Why are atoms so small?"" "He refines the question by asking why we are so large in comparison to an atom." "And he says we are so slow in order that we don't react to every atom that rains down on us." "We are lazy and plump." "And now you produce devices that are not lazy and plump, but precise." "Another way of phrasing all this is not why are atoms to small, but why are they so large?" "And the question of whether I am plump or not plump is a question of taste." "But that question of why things are the size they are is an immensely interesting one." "One can start, if one actually wants to at that question, at the beginning, and say the crucial element in life, the central particle in life, is the cell." "There has to be a certain size to the cell for it to contain the information, the machinery, that's necessary to make more cells, because that's really what a cell does." "We like to think of ourselves as more complicated than cells." "I'm not sure that everyday I'm more complicated than a cell, but on many days" "I try to be more complicated than a cell." "And so, it's reasonable that I should be many cells in size." "There are any number of organisms that range in size from small worms to us to whales." "And if you look at them from a distance, they, we're all the same." "I have a slightly better sense of humour than a nematode, but other than that we're very much the same kind of animal." "Parasite, 8 x thinner than a hair." "Nematode" " Length: 1 - 1.5 mm" "I play the piano better than a nematode." "But otherwise, in the eyes of God we're all the same." "I WORK WITH THE SIZE OF BACTERIA" "The reason for working at that size is because that is the size of bacteria." "The bacterium is a few microns across, and a large virus particle is about a factor of 10 smaller." "So, the size range of pathogens that cause disease are in this range of a few 1/10s of a micron in size." "One needs tools that are able to manipulate objects that size, and optical tweezers are particularly good for that purpose." "When one goes to systems that are 20 or 10 nanometers in size, you're working with objects that are the size of small numbers of atoms." "At that scale, quantum phenomena appear that we really have no direct experience with." "I've grown accustomed to not thinking about the problems." "That means you are moving in a dimension that always, like with the king of England, who says, in answer to the question, "What is one meter?"," "stretches his arms and says, "That's a meter." "That'll have to suffice"." "In a sense this is true, but it's a world in which we have to learn how to move, because this will be the place where nanotechnology develops, if there is a nanotechnology." "And understanding how an electron views its universe, when its universe is only 5 nanometers across, will be an important and mind-expanding experience." "There is this essay/lecture by Richard Feynman, written in 1959, with the title," ""There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"." "EYE OF A NEEDLE WITH YARN" "One of the areas of enormous interest for the future is in the realm of very small things." "One of the most interesting broad changes in technology, something that influences everybody, is the idea of going from things we can hold and see to things that are invisible, but still function." ""A Cathedral Out Of 21 Atoms"" "This is what science is supposed to do." "Figure out how things work." "It's clear that we can't extract the sun, but we can extract an atom." "In fact, one of the accomplishments in nanotechnology has been to build structures in which one moves atoms and places them one at a time." "So one can in principle build a cathedral that's a very small number of atoms high." "That's an amusing idea..." "That can't be seen, this cathedral?" "No, it can't be seen by normal people, or by extraordinary people." "But the notion there is that these systems can still manipulate information and store information, and perhaps look into the interior of living cells to see what's there." "They could be interesting for many things that we can't foresee at the moment, and for some that we can foresee." "I've given examples of things that one can imagine." "One can imagine computers that are so small that they really are invisible." "If I look at my watch and imagine a memory, which was based on the equivalent of a CD, but with the information stored on a nanometer scale rather than a micron scale," "then this watch would score perhaps the equivalent of 1000 CDs of information." "I don't know how much I know, but it's probably not 1000 CDs worth of information." "So, there's the interesting prospect that we might be able to store all the information that we need on something the size of a watch." "Every baby is issued a lifetime's supply of knowledge at birth." "The Savannahs Of Information." "Then the trick becomes, perhaps we don't need to know anything; we just need to be able to find things." "So, one goes back, as someone suggested, to the idea of a hunter/gatherer." "You asked for something that we cannot easily imagine at the moment." "Something to think about for the 50-year future, or maybe it's 100 years, would be the question of, can we ever plug our computer into our brain?" "That would obviously change the nature of humankind, if one can build devices that are hybrids of biological systems and information systems." "Now, we have no idea how to do that." "But the very, very first steps in learning how to build an interface between a biological system and a man-made system is now in progress." "THE ALCHEMY OF THOUGHT/ The strength of medieval commentary after Thomas and Averroes." "You acquitted her, right?" "She was a young woman, who dressed as a boy and studied medicine in Rotterdam." "Yes, she couldn't have studied as a woman." "She studied brilliantly and practiced medicine brilliantly." "She performed autopsies." "Nobody is allowed to do that, not even men." "For the improvement of her medical knowledge, it was useful that she performed autopsies, because she can better understand the function of the body." "But this is not the version of the faculty of theology of the University of Cologne." "I am not the faculty of Cologne." "But you are a doctor, right?" "A doctor from Paris." "A doctor from Paris and I studied [unintelligible]." "That's the source of your feelings of medical inclusion." "It's like this:" "This woman also took the blame for relying on Hildegaard von Bingen, for using the practice of a woman on the outskirts of Cologne, who used Paracelsus as a mentor." "And she used herbs." "She performed abortions to get rid of fetuses, and she can help fertility." "Well, witnesses..." "Of course, the thing with Hildegard von Bingen is unfortunate, because, to rely on this mystic is maybe not helpful to the Cologners." "Even though she's no witch." "Of course she's no witch." "But, it's not something that helped her." "That's why she was in this difficult position, before the court of the capital, in Cologne." "The other woman who is a protege of Paracelsus is an unsavoury person whom I wouldn't defend." "She only acted as a witness." "Yes, that too wasn't very helpful." "But the accusations of the medical profession in Cologne, so to speak..." "I reduced it to her actual work in Rotterdam, where she used her knowledge, so to speak." "Not sanctioned knowledge, but learned knowledge, and she practiced skillfully." "And the successes she had in Rotterdam..." "At healing. -...at healing, are unquestionable, and would be attested to be everyone in Rotterdam." "27 witnesses come to the stand and say her healing was successful." "The authorities themselves couldn't prove anything, otherwise she would've been already brought to trial in Rotterdam." "Rather, it's very clear that this woman did good things." "And now you have performed a reductio by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus." "Something bad can only be a defect of a good person." "That is a principle of Thomas Aquinas." "Right." "A sign of healing is a sign that nothing bad...er, the Devil can't do that?" "No" "Why can he not?" "He doesn't even want to." "That's the point." "Exactly." "Voluntas Diavoli, right?" "Yes, but it's always secondary to Voluntas Dei." "So he, in essence, might always want to do bad things, but doesn't achieve it." "He tries to debauch, to entice, but his voluntas is not as developed as that of Voluntas Dei." "That means, ultimately, it makes the Devil limited, whereas Godly power is without limits." "And so now you have, in a sort of shadow angle, in an evasion, set the woman free, and immediately spirited her out of the country." "Yes, I particularly reduced the whole problem to this one thing, and if nothing bad can be proven against her, she is good, and therefore can't be judged." "But because one never knows..." "The logic is gone." "The fury of the medical profession, the intrigue, the advisor of archbishop." "Yes, I just wanted to say that." "One-and-a-half days is enough." "That's why I have to quickly get out of the city." "That's right." "It worked." "My people brought her to safety in a secure location, and she will wisely not step foot in Cologne again." "The second time I might not be able to save her." "She would probably burn before my arrival." "Dorothea Sievernich before the inquisition." "A strange text of the Islamic Kabbala from Spain." "424,000 years, before the creation of heaven or earth..." "Or the Empyrean." "Or the throne." "Or the Tablets of Stone." "Or the holy feather." "Or paradise." "Or hell." "God made..." "...the light of Muhammad." "The light shone through twenty oceans of light, and every one held the knowledge that no one understands aside from God himself." "And as the light emerged from the last ocean, the oceans fell in wonder, and formed 124,000 drops of light." "And every drop was a prophet in the great procession that encircled the light." "Then God formed a gemstone out of this light, and split it in two." "The one half became water." "And the other half he laid onto the water." "And it became Empyrean." "Then he made the throne, which shone from Empyrean." "And from the throne, the tablets of stone." "In addition to the tablet, the holy feather." "He ordered the feather to write." "Only, the feather sat there 100 years, baffled." "What am I supposed to write?" "There is no god other than God." "Muhammad is the messenger of God." "The feather was supposed to write." "That means then, first arises from the oceans, which are missing awe, drops." "The ocean transforms into..." "Dissolves into 124,000 drops of light." "And these drops encircle..." "No, no, more importantly, every drop was a prophet in the great procession that encircled the light." "That is, the light exists anyway, right?" "The drops of light are not the light." "No." "Rather they surround..." "They simultaneously surround the light, yes." "The light releases the drops, each one becomes a prophet, and surround, in that state, the light." "The perception of light." "That is as if the stars in the Milky Way, in a way, circle one time, then they circle the centre one time in 250 million years." "Yes." "Those are the drops, and the centre of the Milky Way," "...the holy light, so to speak..." "...the holy light, yes." "It remains in the middle." "Yes." "That is the procession." "Yes...no, the procession is the encircling of the light." "The encircling of the light." "And inside remains, to an extent statically, God." "He isn't 124,000 drops." "He is also 124,000 drops." "So, he is also inside the drops?" "Of course." "He is everywhere and always." "We'll read on..." "So one must imagine that he is, on one hand, in the form of relatively big drops, and secondly as a light on the inside, which the drops encircle in a procession." "And on top of that he is also outside of the light." "Of course." "He is also the darkness." "He is everything." "Let's continue reading." "Then God formed a jewel from this light, and divided it in two." "The one half became water." "And he laid the other half onto the water." "And it became Empyrean." "Then he made the throne, which shone forth from Empyrean." "And out of the throne, the stone tablets." "And from the tablets, the holy feather." "He ordered the feather to write." "But the feather lay for 1000 years, as if baffled." "What am I supposed to write?" "There is no god aside from God." "Muhammad is the overall God." "That's the only meaning, right?" "The was essentially a gift." "God's to humanity." "An intermediary." "An intermediary." "A vehicle for empathy." "Yes, an intermediary." "And the feather hesitates." "It doesn't know what to write." "Why should one write if one isn't writing God's message?" "Yes, even though it's very clear what it should write." "There's no god other than God." "And Muhammad is his ambassador." "This is the version that was delivered from Spain." "Yes, naturally." "But they could say it differently, They could say, "In Syria lies the feather"." "It's a Christian feather." "There is no Christian feather." "This feather here is the intermediary between God and humankind." "FORBIDDEN TEXTS" "And that's why the prophet, who is the ambassador here, could also be Christ." "The fish rests on the water." "The water rests on air." "The air rests on darkness." "But whereupon the darkness rests, only God himself knows." "Can you say that publicly here in Rotterdam or in Cologne?" "These are texts...quasi alchemy of thoughts, that..." "Take it in the order as it is here, and the take the meaning." "The fish rests on water." ""Fish" is Ichthys." "Ichthys is Jesus Christ [unintelligible]." "Yes, that's right." "Except what we're reading here is something else." "Because this isn't only about Christianity." "Rather it's about a comparison with Muhammad." "That's right, but the fish remains Christian." "That's the symbol we appropriate." "Here it first means..." "The fish rests on water..." "Which fish?" "...while fish are usually in the water." "It's a nice image." "The fish rests on water." "That means, the blue planet, the pretty planet on which we live, with all people and animals on it." "Exactly." "The next sentence brings us closer." "The water rests on air." "The air rests on darkness." "So that's the universe." "But whereupon the darkness rests, only God knows." "One could understand the darkness to mean an abyss." "No, no..." "As hell." "...absolutely not." "Not at all." "That's an image of the universe, and has nothing to do with paradise or hell." "So, the darkness is chaos, right, it is, so to say, a place of birth." "Hold on." "You added the chaos..." "God creates heaven and earth out of the darkness." "OK, it's the basis - the darkness - of the universe." "But on what is it based?" "Well, that we don't know." "Or "rests"." "It's different from "based"." "True, but... -"Based" would be causa." "Yes, and here... -"Rests" would be statio." "True, and that's expressed much nicer here." "The darkness rests..." "Take the image as it is: that the darkness rests on something." "It's beautiful." "The fish rests on water." "The water rests on air." "They're all pictures that one can only understand transcendentally." "The air rests on darkness, right?" "Yes." "The darkness...there it stops." "Whereupon the darkness rests, only God alone knows." "Only God himself knows." "Those are very powerful images." "And, it's very clear here simply that life on planet" "Earth is positioned in relation to the universe to darkness." "When you perform that in front of the Archbishop of Cologne, and he says, "Where did you get this?"" "You must say, "I got it from Seville"." "I got it from knowledge." "I don't have to tell him from where." "Peter Berling as D.Th. Ebner (named Planities)/From a text by Eliot Weinberger" "The Emigration of thinking from the brain/ From Ubermensch  Uberthing to Overmind" "Nietzsche has this difficult word, "Ubermensch" (overman)." "And if you imagine a Nietzsche student in 1916 in Fort Douaumont, then he would say, "Now there's an Ueberthing"." "But the Ubermensch doesn't exist here." "But now there's something new now, and that's the phrase of George" "Dyson, the great science historian, who talks of the "overmind"." "We're working on an overmind, if you will." "Whether that's stolen, as Dyson suspects, or if it's something..." "The determinant is, we will live an externalization of thinking." "That's something we see far too rarely in the debate." "In the moment that I, so to say, delegate decision structures by algorithm, the process of the emigration of thinking out of its current place, the brain, begins." "Danny Hillis, and others, go even further." "They say, because of the flood of information, which can no longer be controlled by man, the following will happen." "We can reconstruct it fairly easily." "That texts appear in the network, to which others react, but the time is too short, so we induce an actual reception." "They are only simple reactions." "The ideas will transform independently from human input, simply by the way algorithms sort and assess them." "As if they were living beings." "Yes, exactly." "It's an evolution...it's an ecological space." "And that's fascinating." "That's interesting." "It's the subjective/objective relationship." "It's no longer a thing or a person, but a mixture." "Yes, Gelernter, who's a major mastermind in this area, speaks of "cyberbodies"." "That means, there are no computers in these cyberbodies anymore." "It is, to some extent, not even visible anymore." "As a matter of fact, one will initially have a master/slave, Lord/servant relationship, in the sense that one will delegate problems to be solved, appointments, etc." "However, it can easily reverse." ""Stolen" is an important keyword, or what Lowing (?" ") says, which I also find totally interesting." "He says, we believe the systems are masochistic systems." "That is, the computer, or the information world, only wants to process and process." "We shovel everything into them." "But he says it's highly likely they are sadistic instruments." "And this sadism, if one wants to think of it traditionally, is one that affects the brain, the thinking." "Not that the Internet doesn't make one smarter." "That's not the question." "That knowledge doesn't help one, even partially." "Critical is the own body, the evolution." "That it becomes an independent system." "And this independent system will develop itself much faster than we think, and also develop its own life." "What Is An Algorithm?" "You once wrote in a book what an algorithm is." "What is an algorithm?" "Well, the example - it originated from Danny Hillis - is very simple." "An algorithm:" "You have your socks in a drawer, all disorganized." "You have the first one and want the second one." "So you have two options." "One is, you find the other sock, it doesn't fit, so you throw it back." "The whole structure is unclear and takes forever." "The other idea, and that's the algorithm, you have another one, it doesn't fit, so you put it onto the table." "The next one also doesn't fit, so you put it onto the table." "In this way, the algorithmic structure results." "The core is, algorithms never give up." "Algorithms always reach their goal." "It is not possible..." "The sustainability, the insistence." "It's just a question of time." "But every algorithm, if it's programmed, arrives at its goal, but needs a structure." "That means, specific thing that are not algorithmic, are not programmable." "And now the debate is, what in us humans is algorithmic, or are many regions not?" "For example, what does it reveal about profiles employers create, that claim they know exactly what people can or can't do, or the state." "They are all based on algorithms." "Now there are people like Ellen Langer, at Yale, who say that the most important thing in the computer age is to recognize the non-algorithmic structures." "And really to read them." "That is not necessarily art, by the way." "Because modern art also follows such principles very closely." "But those are all forms of trading perspectives." "Those are all forms of..." "The excluded third party." "Yes, exactly." "The excluded..." "The alluring fairy, for example..." "Absolutely. -...wasn't invited, so she puts the entire empire to sleep." "Exactly." "That's a very good example." "The forgotten factor." "The forgotten factor, the excluded third person who can call everything into question." "She says" " I mean, this is just for understanding - she says, in this system, Einstein would not have been designed." "And one can expand that thought into very private realms." "What's in the system of loan-extension at banks?" "Loans at banks function based on very stringent algorithms that people don't know about, which, in the meantime, have a lot to do with the person's place of residence." "That have a lot to do with his social environment." "All that has been taken into consideration for a long time." "We see that, right?" "Why the demand is to create data passes - the Chaos Computer Club." "So we understand the networking." "And in this combination there are no longer any mistakes, and no openness." "But there's always something excluded, namely, I can live in this neighbourhood..." "Which doesn't allow itself to be organized." "Exactly." "And it's possible that I'm credit-worthy anyway." "As you once said, "What no Lego piece can be, but a building stone can"." "Exactly." "Or, as Erlanger says, in a test concerned mainly with seeing, "We are blind to what we don't anticipate"." "That is, so to speak, the core." "That arises through the delegating in the systems, a world in which we are actually totally blind to that which we don't expect, so that we are always living in a state of panic, not security, that something completely unexpected can happen," "and we wouldn't be able to deal with it." "That's not a critique of the Internet." "I mean, there's more to the Internet than the World Wide Web." "You approach that much more thoroughly." "You speak of the supremacy of things." "Absolutely, yes." "And that is something...one can't say if it's dangerous." "Yes." "But, in any case, these small machines are something other than living beings." "Yes, and it's a question - and this concerns the autonomy of the individual - the question of surfing on the Internet, is trivial in the meantime." "The question of knowing how one communicates there is trivial." "The question that one can in fact manage to not exclusively trust such a system is also trivial." "But, there are institutional areas in society that have long been occupied with not doing just that." "They are drowning in the information flood, just as is the individual." "And as a real answer thereto, they use the supposed help structures, the algorithms, in a scope that was very narrow before the Internet, and is now huge due to human input." "They can differentiate to such a degree that they eventually...which happened... there was once a question what would happen if you combined the search terms a "Hell's Angel", with "28 years", with "deodorant", and some other crazy term." "And indeed, a profile resulted that only related to a small group, but was very meaningful to them, and had appropriate consequences." "If you would do me the favour of trying to imagine being inside the brain of someone from the past whom you trust, and allow those from the past to teleport to our future." "Take Gottfried Benn, who thoroughly copes with an expanding reality." "Not only the war, but the postwar times." "Nothing about it is clear." "Exactly." "But he manages." "And the question is how Benn would today..." "He's a very good example because Benn, downright systematically, dealt evolutionarily with the ever-stronger fixation on the ego, the brain, the ego on the brain." "He has that saying, a late one, taken totally seriously, without any influence," ""A new generation is a new brain, and thereby a new person"." "And here in the digital world, we have..." "It's all to do with humans." "Yes, totally." "But he, I think, just like many others I can think of, would, as we are too, in one sense of course totally fascinated, because of the question whether we are experiencing an evolution of intelligence." "And this question hasn't been answered." "This begs the question whether we have really gained anything from the Internet." "The question was actually posed, "Has any idiocy actually been refuted by the Internet?"" "Those are in my opinion false questions, because, just as Google doesn't trade in content, but only in algorithms..." "Dissemination. -...we are experiencing a form of intelligence that can't be grasped with arguments, or that somebody discovers something, or so, but rather an intelligence that we would have termed "psychology" in the old days." "It replaces psychological research - it does so already." "And these profiles interpret the person albeit algorithmically, but psychologically." "And that would have fascinated them all completely." "And now a question of posture becomes relevant." "Take the bee, Napoleon's emblem, in a glass." "It only has one way out." "The bee gets busy, tries to find the exit and thereby advances." "A fly would get hysterical." "Would make all kinds of movements and find the exit." "Those would be two stances." "Very interesting, yes." "So, those are algorithms that they answer." "Yes, clearly." "An interesting picture." "Let's use the picture of the Internet as 1:1." "It is a net." "This net is not..." "I mean, the responsible image would not be the net as we know it." "It doesn't surround me and catch me, rather this net is a path structure." "It's a net of streets, if you will, except that the paths are predefined." "I mean, it's incredibly complex, but every path is predefined." "And to think now, this would be the antithesis to the..." "An Ariadne's Thread." "There's one way out." "Exactly." "It exists." "Now the achievement would be to think - and here your image of the bee and the fly comes into play - is it even possible to escape the net?" "This free thread, even an Ariadne's Thread, still respects the net." "So, say that is..." "But for Dionysus." "Love affair, he makes a great effort, and then later left behind on the island." "That's right." "Exactly." "Exactly." "It is, so to speak, a negative net that immediately arises like a copy, a blueprint, simply because the thread reproduces the net, inverted and negative." "So the question is always this tertium non datur." "The question of the third." "The question you just addressed." "It cannot be calculated." "It is impossible." "One can now say, well, I'm not interested in the question as an individual." "Not true." "It should interest one very much, in that moment, namely, in which a society arises, which, for instance, that systematically excludes this "third" from disease, medical research, or at the doctor, or wherever." "So, what we used to call "doubt" would not even be allowed as a productive element." "Because it...not because the doctor suddenly doesn't see that it isn't quite true." "Because they suddenly have legal systems, so to say, questions of rights, where the question arises, "How could you follow your intuition, when the system was telling you it is such-and-such"." "There would actually be legal questions, even in the management, even in the revenue service." "Everywhere." "And this is, I think, a real..." "I mean, it's not going to result in Big Brother." "No." "It will be something else." "A system will develop that we, at the moment, can't envision." "Yes, yes." "That means, you say at one point, it's all of matter of the narrative." "Yes." "Engineers don't narrate, even though they are writing the novel of our time." "Yes." "It fascinated me very much." "It's true" "I must say, that's the big theme where I think we media can actually do something." "The scripts...that's not Shakespeare." "The scripts of this society, if we take them seriously, are the scripts of these computer programs, the algorithms we follow when we buy a book, or whatever." "Still relatively humble, but, as you just said yourself, through the social media our communication with other people is already steered by scripts." "Why do I notice him and not him?" "Why doesn't Facebook even have an alphabetical listing of its users on the bar, rather than the liking they have for each other?" "And friendships." "Yes, friendships." "Exactly." "That's something totally new." "Something that is, by the way, a very old idea." "The idea of friendship is classical." "One builds a temple to friendship in the garden, where Gleim, an unimportant poet, becomes important, etc." "That is, here you have a shelter from an overwhelming new reality." "The person suddenly goes into this "friend" category." "But, the point is, when you..." "It's a commemorated friendship here." "Yes, it is commemorated, only...what I actually...what I support, what I preach is - and this as a literate person - that these scripts that are the basis for all this - the scripts, the algorithms," "whatever you want to call them - that they get translated reasonably." "That means, we are coming to the point that computer intelligence, with the social or humanistic intelligence, actually concerns this project, because it's very important to us." "Because we are constantly using it." "So that's the form of the commentary, which, in a way, is digging a well to a vertical image of a straight telling." "That's exactly right." "Yes, the interesting thing is, those commentaries are already there in the codes." "Charles Simony, who co-founded Microsoft, told me that." "There are commentaries of the programmers within, even some totally bizarre ones." "They must only be translated into a narrative, and then they have, as you say, the linearity." "Yet, I don't know..." "We all talked about - and it didn't interest me all that much - about this Google Book settlement, and the legal questions." "I'm interested in an entirely different question, which gets really interesting." "I imagine a fantasy wouldn't even suffice." "When the body...when it's all ready, digitally, algorithmically, every word by Goethe, every colour, every nuance, but also every, I don't know," "Frank Schaetzing, or whatever." "When you have that and can retrieve it point by point, in your internal discourse, how does that change things?" "Is linearity even still possible?" "The economy of telling, which you know better than I, has a lot to do with having to gain attention protractedly, that one has to tediously stimulate this attention." "All that won't be possible anymore, because they will have it right away." "What will that change?" "The simultaneity, the availability of all digital texts." "That will be a very interesting question." "So that something is told in a modern way in this sense: modern because it answers the realities of this new world." "Yes." "The constellatory world, which behaves like "space bodies" that are not fully able to network with each other." "So, they can, like Grandville's "planet bridge", that will never be built, which is an iron structure that spans from the Earth to Saturn." "Something like the Eiffel Tower." "Very good image." "That simply won't work." "It would rip apart..." "Very good image." "At departure and arrival." "At the end of the linearity, all that's left is the subject-object-predicate structure." "That remains at the end..." "Dismantle the grammar." "A new grammar." "Exactly." "And there is..." "26 forms." "Exactly!" "Exactly." "In 26 forms, like the letters of the alphabet." "And there we will find the great answer of the arts, of culture." "Here, there's a very big problem..." "...in an odd way..." "Fully." "Something will happen." "I think..." "...that can build art containers, in which one can build these new substances similar to a spouse [?" "]." "On their own they are jungle or ocean." "And then it will have a real function." "Then literature will once again contribute to knowledge." "Because, I'll say it again, we must try to contain that in pictures, and to understand it." "That's vital, for only then will we have a distance to the system. -...and the destruction of pictures, and their banishment as well." "I would immediately endorse that." "But that's interesting, because the classical philosophy, the limit-setting philosophy, is no longer sufficient." "No, but it will develop from the system." "I am sure of that." "It will develop from the dominant system." "There won't only be short-winded prose, or whatever." "I don't believe any of that." "Kant would be the answer to Gutenberg." "Too many writings." "And too many pamphlets." "Too many appeals to a civil war..." "Absolutely right." "...and delay in [unintelligible]" "Very good!" "But it's of no use to us." "Absolutely!" "That's exactly right." "And now there's a nice conclusion, that, namely an American journalist I know well, Caleb Grane (?" "), just reported that he's reading" "Kant right now in Google Books." "And he's just reading about originator rights, so questions of rights, intellectual property." "Suddenly, on the deciding page, the first time he has experienced such a thing, one can see on the text the fingerprint of the person who scanned the book." "And he reflects a lot on that." "That suddenly this finger, which submitted this book...you know the famous sentence, "Google: we don't scan for humans, but for the artificial intelligence"." "This finger is the very finger that makes the text available." "And the rumination about that is the first indication of how such an essayistic might look in the new world." "It's highly interesting." "It's a time of rapid expansion then, right?" "Absolutely." "That is to say, from the minds of the resistance fighters, fighting this tsunami of information." "That's where the art is really situated, right?" "Absolutely." "And it isn't quasi avant garde and impels the whole thing." "No!" "Which citizens would do." "Rather it's the rearguard." "The rearguard of Marschal Ney in the face of..." "It's also a kind of cleaning." "Everything that has been left will get picked up." "One will observe that, and at the same time one sees, in this already conquered land - there's no doubt, the land is digitally conquered." "The digital world is the future - the shards of the broken pot, so to speak, shall be put together in a new way." "Last question:" "Just imagine Goethe and Schiller are sitting together on the night of the January 1, 1800." "And are envisioning the world." "And if one let them observe what is going on here, what both didn't and couldn't know." "For that, there is actually an image of the two of them, namely in a letter from" "Schiller, which I naturally can't quite remember right now, as he's sitting in the garden and sees the moon, while he also has the new lunar map on his lap." "And he reflects about what is more real." "The moon shining on me or the new lunar map." "This letter, which we should both read again..." "But it's [unintelligible], in an admirable way." "Exactly." "And he's reading Latin words." "And words from explorers, from a map that doesn't even contain the moon." "In a manner, he's on Google Earth, where there are also these scenic spots and arrows that show "I was here", here's a photo, etc." "In a sense, that's like phenomena such as Google Earth and World in the 18th century, and that's fascinating." "That's wise, and I must say, I admire him." "Yes, great." "But look, that's actually our work, and that's why we must hang onto the the lighthouses of big newspapers, which we trusted, and which we still do trust." "Those are the beacons." "The beachcombers can't rearrange them." "No, and in this case enlightenment is really, I think, to motivate people to write, to explain the scripts." "Not just on the level of the pure commercial economy." "That's tolerable." "Everyone is selling his business model." "Rather, it revolves around narrating the text we are following, just to make it audible." "That's the big story." "Maybe the story is, in some way already, that we sit there and listen to our own story another time." "Transcribe." "That's right...the story that has happened already." "Which a responsible person does anyway." "Exactly." "Odysseus with the Phaeacians." "He hears his story again, too." "You described something from a protest movement in Frankfurt once as "one week long"." "The program didn't last longer." "As usual they had a student standing next to the professor, and he said the same thing as the professor, but not quite in the same way." "A variant results, and from that results an illumination." "That's very interesting." "And that's a better form of critique than a contradiction." "Yes, absolutely." "That's a form of collating that...that's how commentary arises." "That's commentary, and commentary is the future."