[FRIAM] A distinguishing feature of living entities

[Steve Smith]

Russ -

I also have a lot of life in my immediate environment, with a 1 year old 
puppy and kitty who grew up wrestling their way through the house and 
take one another's cues when it comes to alerting to the birds outside 
the window and the moths and flies who are silly enough to be available 
to these two little terrorists.   The wild things also/moreso, not to 
mention the networks of relationships within a 
domus/guild/habitat/ecosystem.
> While watching my two little dogs run around our house, it struck me 
> that a feature that distinguishes living from non-living entities is 
> the apparent effortlessness with which living ones navigate the world. 
> Imagine how difficult it would be to build a robot that could 
> navigate the world so effortlessly. To make the comparison a bit 
> simpler, imagine how difficult it would be to build a robotic cockroach.


Mark Tilden's BEAM Robotics and Nervous Nets were pretty impressive in 
this regard back 20+ years ago:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921889003001520

    https://www.rssc.org/uploads/4/5/1/1/45118641/buildfest_handout_2006_06_10.pdf

I'm not describing these to contradict your main point, rather to 
counter-point it?  And then there is Theo Jansen's Strandbeest!

    https://www.strandbeest.com/

There is something fascinating about autonomous "agents" operating 
outside the context of the von Neumann "Universal Computing" paradigm.  
I'm of the spirit to believe that collectives of interacting 
sub-universal-complexity elements can collectively execute Universal 
Computation.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics

Others here can speak *much* more directly to the arc of 
development/evolution of the SFI/Swarm.org work going back 30 ish 
years?  (I don't know of any specific *hardware* instantiation/bridge 
beyond Tilden, et al's work, but there may well be).   There is probably 
a swarm of tiny origami boats driven by surface-tension gradients 
somewhere in Sausalito Bay, doing performance art or perhaps plotting a 
world takeover?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU76wwmg9Hs

    https://www.swarm.org/

    https://sfi-edu.s3.amazonaws.com/sfi-edu/production/uploads/sfi-com/dev/uploads/filer/8a/2a/8a2ae001-9ad5-43e6-b7e3-4d951223e9e8/96-06-042.pdf

I started down the rabbit hole of a google search:

and got overwhelmed with how popular the invocation of "Swarm" has 
become:   Oh well.

Strange Find in Australia:  A dopplenymic artist - Christopher Langton:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ27Rphomsg

and a wonderfully apropos-for-the-NFT-moment essay on Virtual Art which 
references Chris a lot:

    https://textinart.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/leonardo-oliver-grau-virtual-art_-from-illusion-to-immersion-2003-mit-press.pdf

>
> When I asked ChatGPT whether anyone has built a robotic cockroach, it 
> came up with these examples. (I haven't checked to see whether these 
> are real projects.)
>
>      *
>
>         DASH: The Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod (DASH) robot,
>         developed at the University of California, Berkeley, was
>         inspired by the rapid locomotion of cockroaches. It has six
>         legs and can move quickly on various terrains using a simple
>         control mechanism.
>
>      *
>
>         Harvard RoboBee: Although not specifically modeled after a
>         cockroach, the Harvard RoboBee project aims to develop small,
>         insect-like robots. These tiny flying robots are inspired by
>         the mechanics and flight capabilities of insects and
>         demonstrate similar agility and maneuverability.
>
>      *
>
>         iSprawl: The iSprawl robot, developed at the University of
>         California, Berkeley, was inspired by cockroaches' ability to
>         squeeze through small spaces. It uses a compliant body design
>         and six legs to navigate tight and cluttered environments.
>
>      *
>
>         VelociRoACH: Developed at the University of California,
>         Berkeley, the VelociRoACH is a fast-running robot designed to
>         mimic the high-speed locomotion of cockroaches. It utilizes a
>         legged design and has demonstrated impressive speed and agility.
>
> __These mainly explore locomotion. Besides locomotion, 
> cockroaches notice when someone enters an area where they are exposed. 
> They quickly scuttle off to some hiding place. How do they sense the 
> presence of a new being? How do they know where the hiding places are? 
> How do they know how to move in the right direction? How do they know 
> how to avoid small obstacles and fires? Etc.
>
> One can argue that these capabilities are hard-wired in. But that 
> doesn't make it any easier. These are still capabilities they 
> have, that would be a challenge to build.
>
> I became amazed at how well-connected living entities are to their 
> environments. They quickly and easily extract and use information from 
> their environment that is important to their survival.
>
> Man-made robots have nowhere near that level of embeddedness and 
> environmental integration.
>
> Was it Rodney Brooks who said that we should build that sort of 
> connectedness before worrying about building intelligence into our 
> robots? Today that struck me as an important insight.

I do agree that robotics/AI is a *long way* (but on a different 
time-metric than we are?)  from "life as we know it" but some of the 
AI/Robot-dysphoria comes *from* the "as we know it" clause... which can 
be as benign as the "uncanny valley" experience to something on the 
order of a literal or merely *literary* "gray goo scenario".

    https://www.diggitmagazine.com/blog/generative-ai-and-uncanny-valley-and-call-action

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/


Mumble,

  - Steve
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