On Robot Pigeons
Last month I expressed some skepticism that you can learn much about humans by building robot copies of them.
I still think this, but that doesn’t mean that robots can’t teach us anything about biology. A case in point: Pigeonbot, a device that combined some drone parts with some bird parts (feathers, notably). By flying the robot in wind tunnels, the robot’s makers, David Lentink of Stanford and his colleagues, discovered how pigeons use their wrist bones to control their flight. The robot’s flights in wind tunnels also confirmed their explanation of how an anatomical feature of feathers prevents them from fluttering apart in flight.
Human minds aren’t wings, and anyway, those insights into flight weren’t gained by building imitation feathers. (Instead, the researchers used actual pigeon feathers, attached to the robotic parts of their machine.) The equivalent for the study of the human mind would, I guess, be a ghastly B-movie creature that had human brain regions grafted onto a robot body (not something any lab can legally do). So, no, Pigeonbot doesn’t suggest that building imitation humans will lead to insights into real ones. But it does show that robots that simulate real creatures can produce insights into how the creatures work.
Robot gods and robot monsters
In that same July post about humanoid robots, I also speculated that it might be good for such robots to play up their eerie sort-of-human-but-not-really quality, rather than trying to hide it. I didn’t know when I wrote that there is a lively vein of research into just this sort of device.
Virtually attending this week’s 2021 IEEE Conference on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN), I came upon this workshop (which, dammit, I wasn’t able to watch for schedule-conflict reasons). The organizers propose that engineers can create eerie robots to serve today the role played in the past by the fabulous creatures of traditional religion — to be a hinge between the world of daily life and the Beyond. “If robots can play the role of “others” in traditional religion,” the organizers write, a lost connection the other world might be restored. (In fact, “theomorphic” robots are already doing religious work around the world, as Sigal Samuel documented last year at Vox. And, in fact, they’re often a blend of very human and very not-human traits.
One proof-of-concept the workshop organizers cite is a strange part-humanlike, part-not-at-all-human robot that, as it happens, I have seen for myself: The robotic incarnation of the merciful divinity Kannon, at Kyoto’s Ko-daiji Temple. That robot is indeed beautifully strange. I was fascinated to watch it and its effect on believers. It was for sure more engaging to watch than a robot desk clerk.
More on RO-MAN coming soon. It’s still going on, and I’m trying to take in as much of it as I can.
Did they record the session on robots and folklore etc? I'd love to watch that.
OK I wanna see the robot demons and fairies.