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I Wore A Descriptive Robot Ethical Onion On My Belt

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Via the fortuitously broken RSS feed of Intimate Machines, a short academic overview of Robot Ethics / RoboEthics. Intimate Machines is Glenda Shaw-Garlock’s blog, currently in hibernation, possibly thesis-related. While the overview itself is pretty smooth, the major ethical documents in this nascent field seem to be jolly tedious for a subject that lets us answer questions about the morality of electroshock robot camel jockeys.

It’s not the latest output, but the Euron Roboethic Roadmap (PDF) will serve well enough as an example. Firstly, it’s not really a roadmap, which implies some sort of high level direction: it’s more an exhaustive bullet-pointed list of every permutation in which ethics and robotics might intersect, with the more interestingly science fictional ones glossed over in order to seem serious. The project is almost entirely descriptive, and there are no ethical guidelines here of the type a researcher might use to get their project past a roboethics committee. The first proposed national prescriptive guidelines, due to come out of Korea in 2009, seem to have been abandoned with a change of government. (In the meantime, Jamais Cascio has useful early stab.)

Its not clear if this descriptive tediousness, which is hardly inherent to academic writing, is unintended or deliberate policy. Supporting the unconscious side, the prose does have some of the word-counting desperation of an engineering student essay on Othello. Contrariwise, writing is produced with an audience in mind. Rather than researchers – for whom ethical guidelines might include some sort of moral stance – the institutions of public policy seem more clearly in mind. In the case of the Euron roadmap, one’s reminded of the bureaucratic house style of the likely regulator, the EU. Perhaps robot ethics has coloured itself in grey as a kind of self-defense mechanism: robotics researchers want to show they’ve done their homework, thought long and hard about if they are doing the right thing, and are safe and somewhat dull custodians of the world’s mechanized retarded geniuses and flying killing machines. Think of it as the Abraham Simpson school of rhetoric: win by boring your opponents to death.

I don’t think that will quite be adequate.

X.18 When his lord gave him a gift of a live animal, he invariably reared it

/ Adam / 3 Comments

君赐食,必正席先尝之。君赐腥，必熟而荐之。君赐生，必畜之侍食于君。君祭，先饭。– 论语,十:十八

When his lord gave a gift of cooked food, the first thing he invariably did was to taste it after having adjusted his mat. When his lord gave him a gift of uncooked food, he invariably cooked it and offered it to the ancestors. When his lord gave him a gift of a live animal, he invariably reared it. At the table of his lord, when his lord had made an offering before the meal he invariably started with the rice first. — Analects X.18 (Lau)

We must respect working systems. Working systems are living systems and have a life that should be respected. In these early years of software, being handed a living system is often being handed a legacy system. And legacy systems are off-putting to some of the technical senses. They offend our inner fashion designer with their unfashionableness. They offend our inner engineer with their inelegance, or our inner scientist with their reliance on a dead paradigm.

Or they might simply offend our inner creator, because an adopted system is not our system: we have fallen for the greenfield myth. There is no true greenfield in contemporary software, and that is a mark of our success. In Java: you started a new eclipse project for this; it depends on fifty other libraries. You wrote your own library set; they depend on Java standard libraries and the virtual machine. You wrote your own compiler or interpreter: they depend on the operating system. You wrote your own operating system: it depends on the hardware. (But you didn’t really write your own operating system, did you? Even Linus Torvalds needed the GNU toolset.)

And even if you doublethink the greenfield in your mind into existence, you make shiny new eclipse project a tabula rasa, you will leave your desk at the end of that first day. And on the second day, when you unlock the screen and return to your code, you will be doing software maintenance.

When your client, or your corporate lord gives you the gift of a live system, what is your response? The ceremony exists because the logic of the organisation brought it into being, and this is to be respected (恕). It will probably need to change, because to live is to change. Perhaps it needs to merge with some other system, or needs to do its function immediately instead of overnight. This is to the good. When your lord gives you a gift of a live animal, you invariably rear it.

The First Derivatives of Jane Jacobs

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What do these people have in common: a physicist with an interest in anatomy, a pair of libertarian metrophiles, a building architect who inspired a software movement, and a sculptor and writer whose critical model centres around Star Wars?

Pursuing a topic as a layman has its own pleasures. One, fairly widely commented on, is the pleasure of wandering at whim, without a set course or destination. Another, perhaps less noted, or perhaps part of all study, is that you can discover great thinkers by accident, just because everyone you read seems to be talking about them. It is like walking through a dense forest and suddenly realising the rises you have been skirting around are actually the foothills of some great mountain, obscured by the foilage.

I found such a thinker recently, the American writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs. A post by Cam on the physicist above, Geoffrey West, who also modelled metropolitan growth, let the pieces fall into place. (It’s also a great NYT article. This seems to be the key city paper.)

Chris Alexander – the architect – has been an interest for a while, and though he doesn’t reference Jacobs in A Pattern Language, their names now get mentioned together in the same breath. They form part of a humane, localist school of design, which celebrates the dynamism of the city. She was explicitly referenced in Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies, which I read some years ago now, without getting that particular hint. The chirpy economic libertarian thread then takes us to Market Urbanism, and the design thread takes us to the wonderful (and anti-corporate) Star Wars Modern.

If you haven’t so far had the pleasure, this Reason interview gives a decent introduction, and the wiki article isn’t bad either.

Interviewer: What should a city be like?
Jane Jacobs: It should be like itself. Every city has differences, from its history, from its site, and so on. These are important. One of the most dismal things is when you go to a city and it’s like 12 others you’ve seen. That’s not interesting, and it’s not really truthful.

I haven’t read any of her books yet. Time to go climb the mountain.

2010: A Zed Odyssey

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Community radio station and Brisbane institution 4ZZZ celebrates thirty-five years of existence this year. To celebrate, or maybe just for the heck of it, they painted their offices with a three storey high mural. In keeping with the general idealism and radicalism that emanates from the place, the 4ZZZ offices are also the former HQ of the Australian Communist Party.

4ZZZ was originally a student station, started at UQ under a liberalization made possible by the Whitlam government (though National Peter Nixon amusingly ended up signing the paper). It moved to the current office in the valley after a formative struggle which has an almost mythological status. A change of power at the UQ student union put the Young Nationals in power. Under president Victoria Brazil, they cut costs, including kicking 4ZZZ off campus. The National Party had been in power in the state of Queensland for several decades straight, leaning well over the line towards a thuggish police state at the end, rigging the electoral system and intertwined with corrupt police. Though in retrospect it seems obvious the Nationals were on their last legs, at the time occupying the radio station in protest must have seemed proportional resistance to a semi-fascist regime disturbingly willing to use illegal or paramilitary force. By John Birmingham’s 90’s account in the UQ student newspaper, Semper – he rather gleefully described punching Young Nationals in the face – the station occupation wasn’t exactly a model of Gandhian non-violence either. (Semper archives are still dead-tree based, unfortunately.)

It may appall every other subscriber, but I think kicking 4ZZZ out of the uni has been good for it. Certainly it was a Thatcherite kill-or-cure solution, and probably intended with more kill than cure. The content is still flavoured by a student aesthetic. The title of this post comes from the anniversary booklet of the same name, and it’s very reminiscent of Semper, the UQ paper. It’s not a bad paper, but the programming itself looks beyond the somewhat self-absorbed venue of the campus. The result of eviction, even if unintentional, was creating an independent pillar of civic society, that stood on its own terms, not beholden to any parent organisation. You could call it an institutional expression of anarcho-syndicalism at the centre of a modern corporate city, or you could just say it’s like the local cricket team. Not too large. Fit to purpose.

4ZZZ programming mostly displays the glorious, fractious diversity of the left, but it’s also a distinctly local voice. It doesn’t have playlists, and though there is a kind of consensus 4ZZZ reality, its shows become windows into the Brisbane community, and communities within that community, in a way other stations cannot, simply because of their central corporate or national organisation. Triple J, for instance, the national youth broadcaster, and not a bad one, if you’re going to have such a thing, simply can’t give as many local bands a break as ZZZ, because of its size. And because of its no playlist policy, you get a delirious skittering around during the week, from Nothing But The Blues, to Zed Games, to the New Zealand Show, to Dykes on Mykes. It has an amateurish charm. It resists a mere demographic averaging in a way that anticipated the internet, and is as old as free speech and songs without words. It’s a week late, but happy birthday.