Here’s a glimpse of the future: Ubiquitous cheap sensors. Perpetual freelance surveillance. Relentless sunlight, directed by shoals of shadowy interest groups.

It has been a bounteous season for panoptiswarm-related news (previously: 1, 2, 3). Sea Shepherd has drones now. They are using them to track the Japanese whaling fleet. Occupy has a drone. It is called the occucopter. There is a thing called the Drone Journalism Lab. They just unboxed their first drone.

photo credit: elbflorenz

As they document their first experiments with flying the thing and with hacking around the controls and adding better camera gear, they are in good company. The DIY Drones community will no doubt be of great use.

It’s worth sticking with the Lab for a bit.

Journalists are increasingly faced with two problems: a growing appetite for unique online video in an environment of decreased budgets; and restricted or obstructed access to stories ranging from disaster coverage to Occupy Wall Street protests. The technology behind autonomous and remotely piloted vehicles is rapidly moving from military applications to the point where private citizens can own and operate their own drone. At the same time, high definition and 3D video cameras are getting smaller, cheaper and lighter. Paired with global position devices, they make ideal additions to an airborne platform.

In short, drones are an ideal platform for journalism.

Drone Journalism Lab About the Lab

It’s an interesting solution to the panoptiswarm problem (when everyone is a journalist, everyone is a disposable sensor node) that nicely mirrors the rise of drones in warfare. Drone war is the perfect antidote to an enemy willing to send suicide bombers at your forces. By splitting the identity that used to link soldier and combatant, you eliminate the tactical advantage of the other side having the terrible resolve to blow themselves up. Their bodies are on the line, but yours are not.

Similarly, with drone journalism, journalist’s bodies need no longer be on the line. They may be barred from safe access to the site of the beatings, but they can still put eyes on it. This neatly negates the tactical advantage that police held over journalists in a battle of wills. No longer can the police say “leave the area or you will be tear gassed and beaten like the rest of them,” leaving journalists with the stark choice between ignorance and physical peril. Now they can say “we will leave, but our drones will be watching”.

photo credit: KAPturer

At first glance, this seems to restore the journalist/police/activist triumvirate. A new class of privileged observers, perhaps operating from the Las Vegas desert, can log in and cver the story as neutral observers while police and protestors go about the business of beating and being beaten. Journalism will be literally above the fray.

Too late for that. Everyone can afford a drone now. It is cheaper to buy a drone than a smartphone. And if you can’t afford a drone, maybe a camera grenade is more to your taste. Or perhaps you will hack together your own Streetview trike enabling constant passive recording, 360º.

Everyone gets a drone now. The paparazzi get a drone. Iran gets a drone. Survivalists, the Westboro Baptist Church, al-Qaeda, your local scout troop, whoever. Put a drone on it.

When the time came to rebuild Jenin, “Hamas representatives on the popular committee asked that these walls be built just under average eye level so that passers-by could look into the courts and make sure that Islamic codes of modesty were not relaxed.” No need for that. Just put a drone on the job.

We’re still trying to come to grips with the impact of cameraphones.

Perhaps future police actions will be announced by an EMP blast, to clear the twittering airspace. Rogue journalists load film cameras as occupiers brace for the assault. The policeman’s mic declares the assembly unlawful. The burst is ineffective. The net interprets a gap in coverage as censorship and rushes to fill it. New drones buzz into position and an enterprising trike journalist, sensing a chance for a payday careens through the police line in the hopes of catching something good.

This is another installment in an ongoing meditation on Matt Jones’ admonition that robots should BASAAP.

photo credit: Andreas Kristensson

It was my term for a bunch of things that encompass some 3^rd rail issues for UI designers like proactive personalisation and interaction, examined in the work of Byron and Nass, exemplified by (and forever-after-vilified-as) Microsoft’s Bob and Clippy (RIP). A bunch of things about bots and daemons, conversational interface.

And lately, a bunch of things about machine learning – and for want of a better term, consumer-grade artificial intelligence.

BASAAP is my way of thinking about avoiding the ‘uncanny valley’ in such things.

Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies.

Matt Jones B.A.S.A.A.P. BERG

Two things transitted my node (“crossed my desk” is so antique, don’t you think?) this week that served to illustrate how BASAAP could fail to avoid the 3^rd rail.

First, this line from a review of the Mint Cleaning Robot posted on Amazon.

The personality of the bot is OK. It’s more like a clinical, efficient nurse doing its job. It isn’t quite as chipper as other cleaning bots but it gets the job done.

Ryan Mckenney Fantastic cleaning robot! customer review on Amazon.com

The Mint is a self-driving swiffer. It’s the least personable thing and yet it has a personality. Of course if has a personality. Everything has a personality. A broom has a personality, one supposes. With the robot, you end up in situations where a perfectly functional machine loses marks because it rubs the user the wrong way.

photo credit: ramseymohsen

And when a BASAAP machine rubs users the wrong way, it can rub them in the really wrong way. Consider Siri’s unfortunate inability to offer information about abortion, birth control, help after rape and help with domestic violence.

As Danny Sullivan notes, “Welcome to search scandals, Apple.” Omissions or failures of the database reflect on the company providing the database, even though they aren’t providing the content. Google learned this the hard way with the results for “Jew” (as opposed to “jewish”, or “Judaism”). Apple is learning it through women’s issues.

Siri is a BASAAP machine. When Apple launched the service, I wrote about this for The Atlantic, arguing that her robotic voice and clever responses to confuding input would help her win her heart. At the time, people were enamoured with this aspect of her, cataloguing all the funny responses she gave.

This is all well and good if she’s making jokes about the meaning of life. It’s much, much less good if she’s covering up a bad search result with a snarky aside when the search result is about a rape crisis. Her charming personality stops being charming the minute she starts making inappropriate jokes.

photo credit: timoni

There’s your BASAAP 3^rd rail right there.

1.

The first thing I think about when I think about the rights of the unborn is the odious fight against a woman’s right to choose. To whit, Mississippi’s recently failed Initiative 26 which tried to grant full rights to a fertilized egg. Let’s call that the sledgehammer approach.

Then there is the scalpel approach, such as Canada’s proposed Unborn Victims of Crime Act or the US’s (enacted) Unborn Victims of Violence Act. These and other acts that try to restrict access to abortion pick at grey areas and blurry lines. The Unborn Victims acts in particular attempt to codify the intuition that harming a pregnant woman is worse than harming a regular person.

In all cases, the arguments against tend to centre around the (perhaps) unintended far-reaching consequences of the bill.

photo credit: Michael Connell

2.

A different class of the unborn in often invoked in envrionmentalist ethics. This is all the rhetoric of the “we didn’t inherit the earth, we are borrowing it from our grandchildren” variety. This is at the heart of sustainability. Practices which increase the amount of future we have are sustainable. Practices which reduce it are not. But what should I care about the future? I won’t be around to see most of it. Ah yes, but we owe it to future generations. How much do we owe them?

This is a very real and practical problem. How much should we discount or value the future? Economists are grappling with it as we speak. Deciding on the answer guides how hard we must work to prevent bringing future generations to harm.

3.

The sustainable health of the planet and the suffering of post-born animals are two big reasons to be a vegetarian or vegan. One of the strange consequences of choosing a diet that reduces your consumption of meat is that it reduces the demand for meat which implies that it should reduce the number of certain kinds of animal being born. A completely vegan society would wipe out whole species of domesticated animal. There would be no reason to breed them, so they would stop being born.

To what extent is this an issue for ethics? Bear in mind that some segments of society invest a great deal of effort into ensuring that there are future generations of other animals, such as pandas.

4.

Ducks Unlimited seeks to preserve wetlands and waterfowl population, primarily so that their membership has something to shoot at.

5.

Another strategy for reducing the suffering of post-born animals is to grow meat without animals at an industrial scale. The In Vitro Meat Consortium makes an explicit argument on this point.

photo credit: James Nash (aka Cirrus)

6.

Now we have a third class of unborn. The vat-grown. The cloned.

Human cloning, (non-bindingly banned by the UN) has proven especially troubling, ethically. The bans are fascinating, because they are effectively saying “we don’t know how to unravel the ethics of human cloning, so please don’t confront us with the problem”.

7.

Some fertility treatments have a tendency to fertilize too many eggs, resulting in too many conceptions. In a lot of cases these extra fetuses are aborted. The grassroots group Parents Against MS 26 who helped bring down Initiative 26 was started by a woman who had benefitted from such a treatment and who feared that declaring fertilized eggs as persons would make it impossible for other women to benefit from similar treatments.

photo credit: Jenn and Tony Bot

8.

One of the most frustrating narrative tropes in science fiction is the singular artificial intelligence. When they have AI in the story, there’s only ever one, and it’s always precious, and so can be stopped by shutting down the mainframe or whatever (2001 gets a pass on this because the were out in the middle of spac e and it’s implied that there are more HALs back on earth).

The thing that computers do better than anything else is copy things. As soon as you get one AI, you get as many as you want. More than you want, probably. As soon as you shut one down, it’s just a matter of booting from the backup. How would you even tell the edges of each personality?

Maybe the first AIs will look like this most recent hypothesis of what The Last Unique Common Ancestor

Researchers at the University of Illinois, believe the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA, was actually a single organism that lived about three billion years ago. This organism was unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and was basically an amorphous conglomeration of cells.

Instead of competing for resources and developing into separate lifeforms, cells spent hundreds of millions of years freely exchanging genetic material with each other, which allowed species to obtain the tools to survive without ever having to compete for anything. That’s maybe not an organism as we would comprehend it today, but that’s the closest term we have for this cooperative arrangement.

Alasdair Wilkins The ancestor of all life on Earth might have been a gigantic planetary super-organism on io9

9.

AI are our fourth class of unborn.

While full blown human-like AI isn’t in the near future, AI with various other levels of intelligence and personality certainly is. How smart or how animal-like does an AI system have to get before we start according it rights?

photo credit: Ѕolo

10.

I enjoyed Kyle Munkittrick’s article arguing that Pixar is paving the road for cohabitation between sentient humans and non-humans.

The relationship between humans and the non-human characters is critical to understanding Pixar’s movies. There are certain rules in Pixar movies that make things far more interesting than the average Disney fairy tale. The first is that there is no magic. No problems are caused or fixed by the wave of a wand. Second, every Pixar film happens in the world of human beings (see why I excluded Cars? It’s ridiculous and out of character for Pixar). Even in films like a A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, in which humans only exist as backdrops for the action, humanity’s presence in the story is essential. The first two rules are pretty direct: the universe Pixar’s characters inhabit is non-magical and co-inhabited by humans.

The third rule is that at least one main character is an intelligent being that isn’t a human. This rule is a bit complex, so let’s flesh it out. There are two types human roles in Pixar films. The first is Human as Villain. In films like the Toy Story 1, 2, & 3, A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo, the protagonists are all non-human. Ancillary characters like Sid, the Collector, and Darla are not main characters. A more accurate description would be that they are pieces of the environment and, on occasion, playing the role of supporting antagonist. The second type of Pixar film is Human as Partner. In these films, the main character befriends a human being as part of the hero’s journey: Remy, Colette, and Linguini; WALL-E, EVE, Mary and John; Sully, Mike, and Boo; Russell, Carl, Kevin and Dug. These are the heroic teams of their respective films.

In each Pixar film, at least one member of the team is human and at least one member is not human but possesses human levels of intelligence.

You can see where I’m going here. Particularly in WALL•E, Ratatouille and Up! there is no ambiguity about the reality of intelligence in the non-human characters. Each Pixar film asks us to accept one deviation from our reality. While it seems like the deviation is different in every case (e.g. monsters are real, robots can fall in love, fish have a sense of family, Kevin is a girl, a rat can cook), the simple fact is that Pixar only asks us to accept one idea over and over and over again:

Non-humans are sentient beings. That is the central difference between Pixar’s universe and our current reality.

That idea alone would suffice to show that Pixar films are all but propaganda for the concept of non-human personhood. But that is where the hidden message begins.

Kyle Munkittrick The Hidden Message in Pixar’s Films for Discover

11.

I think it’s interesting that, rhetorically, right of centre politics seems to prefer to emphasize the rights of the individual unborn while acting against the interests of unborn generations while the left of centre tends act in favour of the interests of unborn generations while resisting the rights of unborn individuals.

So far, no one has a coherent stance on robots and clones.

photo credit: Alan / Falcon

1.

Friend of Quiet Babylon, Quinn Norton was in New York when the police evicted Occupy Wall Street from from Zuccotti park. In an effort to give her some protection from the baton and pepper spray happy NYPD, Wired tried to get her press credentials. It didn’t go well.

Wired has been trying to get NYPD press credentials for freelancer Quinn Norton, who is on special assignment to cover the Occupy movement. Even before this week’s arrests, the NYPD made it clear they would not issue her credentials, as she first had to comply with Kafka-esque rules, such as proving she’d already covered six on-the-spot events in New York City — events that you would actually need a press pass to cover.

Ryan Singel Media Can Avoid NYPD Arrest By Getting Press Pass They Can’t Get for Wired

photo credit: Brennan Cavanaugh

2.

Josh Stearns is tracking the arrest of journalists covering the Occupy sites and evictions on Storify. So far, he’s counted 26.

Stearns’ post is a simple recitation of facts, so it largely side-steps the ontological problem of what and who constitutes a journalist.

3.

In this video, a RoboKopter flies over the Warsaw riots. A drone journalist!

Here’s what it looks like:

4.

Andy Baio made a video of the UC Davis pepper-spray incident that consists of 4 other videos synched.

Note his description.

I was stunned and appalled by the UC Davis Police spraying protestors, but struck by how many brave, curious people recorded the events. I took the four clearest videos and synchronized them.

Andy Baio Viewing the UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles