Chapter 4: Thinking
74 - Artificial Behavior (Part Two)
Resnick boots up a program he calls StarLogo on his computer. By playing with StarLogo, he says, kids can learn about concepts like decentralization and swarm behavior, and about the importance of randomness in creating order. “Now, again,” he says, “high school students don’t necessarily talk in those terms, but they have learned that in an intuitive way. At a traffic jam, you see the jam, but the constituent parts are changing all the time—if you come a little later, it’s a different set of cars. A lot of biological things are that way, even our own bodies. Our cells die off and are replaced by other ones. We are still sort of the same person even though some of the particular parts are changing over time. So that’s an important idea.”
The number of robotic toys is growing rapidly, though not all of them arise from such mindful concerns. In a spread on the opening page of a section devoted to electronics, The New York Times once showed a photo of a small girl with her arms crossed, scowling down at a metallic robot pup. The headline read: “What Do You Mean, ‘It’s Just Like a Real Dog’?”
The subhead stated, “As Robot Pets and Dolls Multiply, Children React in New Ways to Things That Are ‘Almost Alive.’” In the article that followed, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was cited, and there were comments by Sherry Turkle, a psychoanalyst specializing in how people relate to their computers. The story concluded that since children at play can imagine virtually anything as being alive, it’s too soon to say how toys that are “almost alive” may affect them. One thing is clear, there will be no shortage of opportunities to find out.
If Lego Mindstorms was among the earliest and most thoughtful of the new biology toys to reach mass markets, it is hardly alone. Following on the success of Tamagotchis and the cuddly Furby came Sony Corporation’s Aibo—a $2,500 robodog that instantly sold out. In short order a pack of clones appeared: Puppy Magic, Tekno, i-Cybie, Me and My Shadow, Poo-Chi, and Rocket the Wonder Dog, as well as Big Scratch and Little Scratch, even a cat called FurReal. The technological mutts feature behaviors ranging from pet tricks to scratching, belching, wiggling, panting, and snuffling. One answers only to its master’s voice and looks hapless when it’s scolded. Another has magnetic fleas. In Japan now, there are robot aquarium fish.
With all that, could babies be far behind? Enter Mattel’s Miracle Moves Baby, a living doll with her Flex-Soft skin, naturalistic movements, twenty sensors, and “personality matrix” capable of expressions ranging from hunger to happiness to sleepiness. Cindy Smart, by Toy Quest, sees, tells time, can do simple math, and speaks in five languages. Not to be outdone, Hasbro has My Real Baby, designed at iRobot—a company cofounded by Rodney Brooks. My Real Baby can scrunch up her face, grumbles when her diaper needs changing, and has language skills that evolve over time. “The kind of software that we use offers a dramatic complexity because it has emergent behaviors,” says Helen Greiner, iRobot’s president. “We think that makes toys more interesting. They don’t entirely do the same thing each time you play with them.”
It’s ironic that a new generation of toys has been made possible by the military, which is a primary funding source for research in the new biology. From the development of parallel distributed processing to Brooks’ lab full of meandering creatures, DARPA dollars are at work. One of the fruits of that labor can be seen at the iRobot shop. DART is a robofish based on the work of Michael Triantafyllou and featuring sophisticated AI guidance for seagoing reconnaissance. Ariel is a waterproof robot that moves like a crab—the prototype for a class of military devices meant to be released in a swarm underwater before the invasion of a hostile shore. The Ariels’ mission is to crawl around detecting underwater mines, then detonate them before human personnel make a landing.
In a related development, Marc Raibert’s Boston Dynamics is working on a robotic mutt called Big Dog, meant to serve as a pack animal for soldiers in the field. These developments are only the start. The U.S. Congress has mandated that a third of all military deep-strike aircraft and ground vehicles must be robotic by 2010. And according to a 2005 news report, “The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat.” That effort is backed by the largest military contract in U.S. history—a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems.
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