day #7 November 9

(11/08/06) It turned to face me as I stopped, and I was able to get a better look at it in the light. Its skin was a transluscent, glistening gray, only partly obscuring an array of countless sensors and wires beneath the surface. Its face was covered in a similar film, but thinner, allowing more of the inner workings to show. Bare strands of metal lined the face in place of muscles, and its eyes were glass globes fitted with camera-like apertures in place of pupils. It looked at me, almost sadly, and asked, “am I no different from these creatures?” “No, you’re nothing like them. They’re beautiful works of art, but you’re alive. You can think.” “Am I?” “Well, yes. You’re self-sufficient. You can move around and act of your own accord, and respond to external stimuli.” “But I can’t reproduce. Isn’t that the most basic requirement of life?” “Certainly not. There exist a plenitude of sterile creatures in the world, either by accident or by design, that are definitely alive. Hybrids like donkeys will never reproduce, but they’re alive. Worker ants can’t reproduce, either, but they are alive as well.” “But they descended from other living things. I was created.” “Isn’t the fact that you’re asking me these questions proof enough? You’re not clockwork. You’re a completely self-contained, complex autonomous system no different from me. And you’re intelligent enough to question your own meaning.” “Is that enough?” “I don’t know. I think it is. But I think this is a conclusion you’re going to have to come to on your own. I can help, but it’s ultimately up to you.” When I awoke that day, I was almost disappointed with myself. I mean, seriously. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be human? These were some of the most basic questions of sci-fi. They were cliché. Why’d I have to go and waste my sleep time on such trivialities? Because it was important to me, obviously. These were important issues; just because they’ve been covered before in countless pulp stories doesn’t mean they’re not. And though I’ve pretty much made up my own mind about it, I am trying to create something that can think for itself. And if I do somehow succeed in creating a human-level intelligence, these questions are surely going to be important to it. And no amount of telling it, “oh, that’s been done before” is going to make it any less real.
That said, I didn’t have any solution. It would have to be a problem I faced when I came to it. I had no idea what form the question might take, and no sense of... the personality of the robot to take into account in dealing with it. I had the sense that the librarian at the library was getting sick of me, so I decided to head to the coffee shop after work instead. And, to be honest, it had been almost a week since I’d gone and I was curious what Joseph was up to. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I sat down and started jotting down pseudo-code for a brain. When my first cup of coffee was starting to get cold, he showed up. Looking a bit more haggard than usual, he said, “Hi, Cadmilus.” “Hey, Joe. Have you been getting enough sleep?” He laughed nervously, “Hardly any. Is it really that obvious?” “Yeah, it is. What’s up?” “I think I’ve hit on something. These guys, you know how their whole raison d’être is to achieve enlightenment or whatever by blotting out the conscious mind and allowing the dreaming mind to interact with the physical world, right? Sorta like sleepwalking.” “Yeah.” “Well, based on what I’ve read, I think that the inverse might be possible, too.” “The inverse?” “I think it’s possible for the physical body to enter the dream realm.” “Okay, yeah. You’re insane. You know I’m a staunch materialist. This is nonsense.” “No, no. That’s fine. You don’t have to think of it as literally entering another world. Think of it as... how can I put it? It’s like lucid dreaming, except on steroids. That’s just your conscious mind controlling your dreams. This, you’d retain full control of your physical body and all your senses.” “That sounds a little more sensible. But I’m still a bit confused. What exactly does that mean?” “Well, it’s similar to what they’re doing. Their perception of reality is altered by their subconscious, dreaming mind, and that’s what dictates their behavior. So they still go about their daily business, but like they’re in a dream. Because they /are/ dreaming. This would be the same, but you don’t have to submit to your subconscious. You’d be in complete control.” “Alright, maybe you’re not insane, but I still think you’re crazy. And this is still worrying. It sounds like it could be dangerous.” “I know, I know. I haven’t tried anything yet; don’t worry. If I do, I want to make sure I believe it’s safe before I attempt it. I want to make sure I can ‘turn it off,’ as it were. But anyways, enough about me. How’re you coming along?” “I don’t know... I’m still a little worried. You don’t look well. But alright. It’s coming along well. The design’s solid enough that I think I can start building prototypes soon. The main hurdle is still the central nervous system – especially the brain.” “Cool.” “And I had another dream about it, last night.” “I’m not surprised. Tell me about it.” So I told him about the garden, and the automatons that populated it. “And I saw the robot there, too. And I got a better look at it this time; I even got some ideas for the design from it. And it asked me if it was any different from the other creatures in the garden, and it asked me if it was alive.” “Ah, interesting. I don’t suppose there was a single large tree in the center of the garden, was there?” I couldn’t remember if I saw one or not. I replied, “I don’t know. There could have been. Why?” “The garden sounded like the garden of Eden. Which makes sense; the rulers you mentioned that had these sorts of gardens built often had them patterned after the garden of Eden. So what did you tell it?” “I said it was. Heh, I said that it should be enough that it was like me.” “In your own image, as it were.” “Not in so many words, but yeah.” “What’s the robot going to look like?” “Well, the design so far is purely functional, not aesthetic. Although I did think about what we were talking about before, and decided that it should be roughly human adult-sized. The skin is going to be slightly transparent, not opaque. That will make it a little easier to locate & rectify any subcutaneous problems that emerge.” “Male or female?” “Since it’s not going to need or have any reproductive organs, I’m going to stay away from any sex-specific anatomy. So pretty much androgynous.” “Makes sense. But sex (or perceived sex) is another thing that you shouldn’t write off so quickly. Whether people perceive it as being ‘male’ or ‘female’ will affect how they interact with it. It may well be that you don’t want to bias people’s interactions one way or the other, but an undefined gender introduces its own set of problems.” “Come on, as if I don’t have enough to worry about. But it is something I’ll think about. I doubt I’ll end up assigning it a sex, in the end, though it’s not something I should blindly ignore.” “Right. Especially because you have, not only other people’s perception of it to consider, but the fact that it will develop a self-image based partly on how people interact with it. Speaking of which, do you have any ideas on the design of the brain?” “Not a whole lot yet, to be honest. The literature on the subject is really dense, and still there’s a lot even the experts in the field don’t understand. Which makes my task of understanding what’s written on it all the more difficult. But I have decided I am most likely going to do most of the work in software.” “Probably a good idea. Do you think that’ll affect the performance at all?” “Maybe a little bit, but not enough to be a factor in the decision. The programming’s going to be done on embedded, special-purpose chips, so it amounts to as if I was doing it in hardware.” “Ahh, good. Well, it’s getting sorta late. ... Okay, maybe not so late but I haven’t slept much and I’m exhausted. Keep me updated on how things are going.” “Sure thing. And hey, be careful with what you’re doing, okay?” “I will.” Modeling an adult human brain was far too much for me. I began, then, looking into embryology for guidance. If I could somehow grow the brain from simpler parts, my task would be easier. And I didn’t want to replicate the anatomy of the brain itself, I wanted to replicate behavior. The closer I got to doing so, the closer the resultant anatomy should resemble human biology. Maybe. There was always the chance that I’d hit on something structurally very different, but similar in function. total 9092 words that's 1575 words for the day. Not bad for a full work-day. Of course, I should be at 13328. I should probably go back & "fix" the day #s. Since it's actually the 8th, now.

day #6 November 7

Or I could actually have an open circulatory system. The interstitial fluid could be mainly water with salts dissolved in it to increase the conductivity. This would help maintain a more stable body temperature, but oxidization of the contacts that would line the water-sac’s walls would be a serious problem. I could try and find a different conductive liquid, or use a conductive metal that resists oxidization for the contacts. Tin-coated copper wire seemed ideal for this. I’d probably also want something to actually, y’know, circulate the water.

The integumentary system was next. The skin would need to be a porous material, to allow the robot to sweat & thus regulate its temperature. There are plenty of manufacturing processes that produce porous latex, which would be ideal for “skin,” but latex deteriorates over time so that pretty much ruled out latex. And though rubber is generally considered to be waterproof, it seemed there were some methods of making rubber porous, so I might be able to use that. But I wasn’t finding much here, so I decided to leave that decision for later & ask around about what I might be able to use.

Optimally, I would be able to find a material that was both porous, but also one with pores that could be opened and closed via some mechanism. Failing that (which I probably would) I would need to craft centrally-located sweat glands that released water from the circulatory system, and then provide a means for the liquid to disperse underneath the skin. And underneath (or embedded in) the skin would need to be an elaborate system of sensors – touch and temperature.

So if I was going this route, the “digestive” system would in fact need to be extended. In addition to energy (certainly batteries, preferably rechargeable), the robot would also need to take in water. Still, though, it would be pretty simple. The battery issue would be something I’d have to return to later down the road, when I would have an idea of the robot’s normal power consumption levels. That could be tricky.

Since I was on the subject of fluids, I figured I’d move on to the urinary system. It would be useful in getting rid of excess water when sweating wasn’t desired, but also to clear the system of excess minerals from whatever. Trace minerals in the water it drank, or anything else that might, somehow, get into the system.

If necessary, I decided I could break the fluid-sac “circulatory system” into separate compartments and adjust the concentration of water and salts throughout the body with a series of valves that I suppose wouldn’t be too dissimilar to the lymphatic system. But that was stretching it, and I couldn’t yet see any use for that.

The next important system was the respiratory system. Not because my organism needed to breath, per se, but because it would need to talk. (11/07/06) Much like human lungs, the lungs of my creation would function like bellows, using muscles to expand them & thus draw in air from the outside, then expel air naturally while at rest. Since oxygen would not be necessary for biological functions, I could safely use simple air sacs instead of a spongy material like mammalian lungs. I sketched out structures corresponding to the wind pipe, the larynx and glottis (the space between the vocal cords), the epiglottis (the part that covers the wind pipe during swallowing) and all the other parts. The nose was also a really important part of this system, both for its function in the sense of smell and for the part it plays in speech.

I needed to start thinking about how to control these systems, so I got to work on designing the nervous system. I started with the autonomous NS because it was more important to have the creature’s base systems working and “alive” before I worried about central processing and consciousness.

The ENS (enteric) was first, since it was for the most part independent of the rest. It would be in charge of monitoring the system that would draw energy from the batter & maintain the proper level of charge in the circulatory system. For the most part, it would be possible to grossly simplify this part of the nervous system in relation to a biological human’s.

The next two, the sympathetic and parasympathetic NSs, would be far more complex. They would control control the two base automatic states of the robot: active or danger, and rest or relaxed. But what would trigger these states? Regardless of the answer to that question, I could still continue on & make diagrams of these closely tied networks. I knew what they would control; the question remaining was what the inputs would be.

The somatic NS’s design, on the other hand, was fairly straightforward, albeit quite extensive. Its base is in the central nervous system, specifically the precentral gyrus or primary motor cortex of the brain (I couldn’t tell if they were the same thing or one was part of the other, but it didn’t really matter as long as I understood what was going on in a general way). That root connects to every single skeletal muscle in the body. In addition, the somatic NS includes all the nerves that connect the sensory organs to the CNS.

And in-between all these afferent (sensory) neurons and efferent (motor) neurons, a network of interneurons (relay or association neurons) connecting the two. All the neurons in the central nervous system would be of this type.

And so the central nervous system. The spinal cord is more or less the “trunk” of the nervous system, the main pathway that information travels on between the brain and the peripheral nervous system. It is encased by and protected by the spine. The very large number of wires I would need both entering and exiting the spinal column would prove quite tricky. In theory I wouldn’t need to encase this in the spine itself, but for the meantime I would use that model. Best not to second-guess evolution. Damage to any part of the neurons that constitute the spinal column is very debilitating, and would probably be far more common if it wasn’t protected thusly.

To reduce the number of wires I would need, I decided that I could probably encode the information sent across the spinal column and place a small chip inside each vertebra that I would program to parse the data, encoding the signals from the sensory nerves and decoding the signals from the brain.

Exhausted, it was time to take a break. I’d been doing nothing but designing and researching for several days, now. I needed to rest and gather my strength before I tackled the brain. Even so, I figured I was on a roll so I started looking around for materials. I might change my mind on certain things still, but I could always use what I acquired for something else down the road.

The metal for the skeleton was the first thing I bought. It took the form of a couple old bike frames. I knew I could use the smithy down the street from where I lived to melt them down & fashion what I needed. Then I went to the electronics / hobby store where I got most of my components, and went on a shopping spree. I picked up anything I thought I might need, and then some. I asked around and even found a place that could manufacture the rubber balloons lined with diodes I was planning on using for the circulatory system. No luck on the skin, though. Still unsure of what I was going to use as a power source, I bought a couple types of batteries I could use for testing purposes.

I stopped by the smithy on my way home from the electronics store to see if anyone was still there (it was getting late), and let the owner know that I’d be wanting to use the facilities in the near future. The owner, Cassius, was a cheery fellow, with a small frame and long bushy beard. He looked more like an ancient philosopher than a blacksmith. But I’d seen his work and there was no questioning his skill. He knew me pretty well, and was always kind and helpful. And I was in luck; I caught him as he was finishing up for the night doing paperwork.

“Well hello, Cadmilus. Here’s a face I haven’t seen in a while. What can I do for you this evening?”

I bowed slightly as I entered the room, and replied, “I’d like to use the forge again. I have a new project I’m working on.”

“Come, come. Please sit. It’s been a long time. Or do you have to get going?”

“No, it’s alright,” I said, and took a seat opposite his desk.

“So tell me, what are you working on, now?”

“I’m designing a robot. Humanoid, so I guess that’d make it an android.”

Cassius leaned back and laughed. “Oh ho, so taking after the father of your namesake, I see?”

“My namesake?”

“Of course. Cadmilus was the son of Hephaestos, who built a man out of bronze.”

“Hah. I know the story, but I never knew He had any children.”

“So when will you be starting?”

“It’s still pretty early. I haven’t started building anything yet. I was just passing by, so I figured I’d stop in. So I probably won’t need anything for a while, yet.”

“Well it’s always good to see you. It’s been pretty quiet here the last couple months. You still have a key, right? So you’re free to start whenever you wish. No one’s working on anything big, so you won’t be getting in anybody’s way.”

“Alright, thanks. It’ll probably be sometime next week, but I might want to stop by a little earlier to try some things out. I should let you get back to your work, though. I’ll be seeing you soon.”

“Good night.”

So I went home, and again I dreamed. This time I found myself in a mechanical menagerie. I’d heard of places like these; ancient kings had them built to showcase their wealth. Tin tree-trunks with oxidized copper leaves to lend them a greenish color, and clockwork birds chirping and whirring on their branches. Delicately wrought golden flowers complete with bees, buzzing in perpetuity. Every species of flora imaginable, populated with automatons that gave the illusion of life, but felt... dead.

I walked through the garden, marveling at its beauty and craftsmanship, but I was filled with an immense sadness. As I walked by a brass and aluminum doe, it turned its head to and fro and pretended to nibble at the grass in front of it, but it did not respond at all to my presence. It was never programmed for that. It wasn’t programmed at all, in fact. It was purely mechanical. It had no information-processing facilities, no soul. It couldn’t react to the world around it.

All these animals were wind-up, though, which led me to wonder who had set them in motion. Before I had even finished asking myself the question, I knew who it must be. Sure enough, walking several meters ahead of me I saw the same robot from my previous dream.

7517 words and counting something like 1709 or 1435 words for the day, depending on how you're counting

gah! post!

7297 November 7

7297 words. I was at 5808 when I posted last night's segment, so that's 1489 for the day so far. And really, it's only 1212 if you count what I finished after I posted that. Not that great. Still an hour & a half before I have to officially count today's total, though.

6031 November 7

3961 words to go. As it's technically tomorrow, I guess that makes it 5631. I did fix the time zone (an ugly hack) on these posts, so the last one actually showed up as the 6th instead of the 6th. Since I started at 3853, I'm at 2178 words for the day. Which isn't bad, but goddamn. It's barely a third of what I'd need to catch up. I'm gonna have to get better if I want to reach the goal of 50K words in a month.

That said, why am I writing this? I should be writing a novel!

day #5 November 6

“Hi, I missed you yesterday,” he said as I sat down. “Sorry, I spent the whole day at the library. And then I had a peculiar dream last night.” “Robots?” “Naturally. But that wasn’t what was strange about it. It started with me walking through the city. Everybody except for me was asleep. And I started picking up bits and pieces of other people’s dreams. But I couldn’t make any sense of them.” “Neat. Some cultures had the concept of a ‘dream hunter’. In the mythology of the Khazars, a dream hunter was someone who would travel within others’ dreams in search of a quarry. Maybe that’s what you were doing.” “But I wasn’t inside anybody else’s dream. I just caught glimpses of them. Anyways, what did they hunt? More importantly, what would you suggest I was hunting?” “It would be different for each dream hunter. As for you..? I don’t know. I would assume it to be your robot. You saw it, yes, but did you catch it?” “No. I awoke before... Wait. I wasn’t trying to /catch/ it; I was... I was asking it if it dreamed.” “And wouldn’t an answer to that be akin to ‘catching’ it? Apprehending, as it were?” I thought about it for a bit, and decided that for my purposes, it was. “I suppose it would,” I said. “But let’s move on. How are things going for you? I’ll be honest, I’m a little concerned about where your research might be taking you. I know you want to understand what your friends have gotten into, but don’t you have that pretty much figured out? What’s your goal?” “Hmm. You know, to tell the truth I don’t know what my goal is. I started just because I was worried about them. And I wanted to know what happened. I don’t know if I thought I could ‘save’ them, or if some part of me wanted to join them. Be part of the group again, y’know. Now... Now it’s just interesting to chronicle the emergence of a new cult. I guess it is a cult. To follow new developments, and maybe if things get bad at least there will be one person on the outside who knows what’s happening.” “There’s no worry about getting too deeply involved?” “No. There might be if I was trying to get information from the inside, going to their meetings and whatnot. But there /are/ no meetings, and all my research is done from the outside.” “But they’re pretty secretive about what they’re doing, right? What if they find out about your inquiries?” “I’m, as a rule, pretty careful about covering my tracks. Yeah, if they caught on that someone was studying them, I’d probably be one of the first people on their list, but I don’t think it’s so much that they’re trying to hide anything. They just don’t talk about it. And again, nothing they’re doing yet seems particularly dangerous.” “Alright. I don’t want to press too hard. You certainly seem to know what you’re doing.” “No problem. Anyways, how’s the robot coming along?” “It’s alright. I’m trying to closely model it after human biology, at least as close as makes sense. So right now I’m just studying anatomy, because I never really payed much attention to the subject while I was in school.” “Have you looked into any of the things I recommended for you yet?” “Not yet. Still too early to worry about implementation details, but I’m sure they’ll come in handy. Fuzzy logic will probably be useful in a bunch of circumstances, and neural networks have the obvious application. What was the other one, again?” “Genetic algorithms.” “Ah, yes. That one I’m not sure about, yet. I might use it to solve some, as yet unforeseen, tricky problems down the road. But that one I really don’t know enough about it yet to say for sure.” “In theory, you could use it to evolve the entire control program for the robot. But it would take a really long time. I can’t really tell you a whole lot about it because I haven’t used it myself, but it seems very promising.” “How effective is it, do you know?” “From what I’ve read, its effectiveness entirely rests on how well you devise the fitness measure.” “Oh, so it’s all guided evolution? What about unguided?” “I think some people have done experiments with that, and it seems to work to a certain extent. But if you’re trying to use it to solve a particular problem, it’s only natural to include an explicit fitness function.” “I’ll keep it in mind. I mean, it only seems natural that I should use genetic algorithms & evolutionary processes to mimic a design that emerged because of evolution. I just don’t know where or how, yet.” “I know you’re still in the research phase, but do you have any ideas on the overall design yet?” “I’m not really sure. It’s going to be humanoid, but I do know I’m not going to try to create something that will pass as a human, like your canonical android. And since I’m an amateur, I expect it will be somewhat primitive. Behaviorally, at least. Though mechanically this will be pushing my skills far beyond what I’ve done before.” “You should keep in mind people’s emotional response to the thing you create. For example, if you make it smaller, people will be prone to treat it as a child. And if you make it look menacing, people will treat it as a threat.” “Oh, wow. I hadn’t even considered that, yet. I’m building this so I can learn how people work. And now you’re asking me to think about how people are going to respond emotionally to this?” “Heh. It’s not as hard as it seems. Just think about how you would respond to the design. That’s a good enough start.” “When did you learn so much about design all of a sudden?” “Not ‘all of a sudden.’ It’s one of the subjects I study. More industrial and interface design than graphic.” “Never would have guessed. No offense.” “None at all. It’s definitely not my strong point. Nor my main interest. But it’s an interesting subject.” “Well, it’s getting late. I need to get home & make dinner. And I foresee another long day tomorrow at the library. I’ll see you around.” “Yeah, I should probably get going soon, too. See ya.” And so the next day, after work, it was back to the library to research the heart of my robot, the nervous system. This system (in vertebrates, including humans) was itself subdivided into several branching subsystems. The two main systems are the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord. And it also can be broken down into constituent parts. I didn’t know how many parts I would need to replicate, but I had a feeling that since the behavior of the brain was by no means understood even today, I might be better off ignoring much of it and instead focusing on replicating behavior itself, rather than the anatomy. Nevertheless, I chose a few of the better books on the subject and took detailed notes. The peripheral nervous system can be divided into the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. The somatic nervous system is that which is responsible for coordinating movement via the muscles, and for receiving sensory input. It is in charge of all activities under conscious control. The autonomic nervous system, on the other hand, controls all “reflex” actions. For its part, it is divided into the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric nervous systems. The first is responsible for the body’s responses to danger or stress, including an accelerated heartbeat and the release of adrenaline. Its compliment, the parasympathetic nervous system, controls the subconscious activity one exhibits when relaxed, such as a reduced heartbeat and stimulation of the digestive, reproductive, and urinary systems. The final system functions almost completely independent of the rest of the nervous system. Though it is closely tied to the other two divisions of the autonomic nervous system, in certain vertebrates, when the connection between the CNS and the enteric nervous system is severed, the latter continues to function on its own. Thus, some even consider it a second brain. Anyways, it’s pretty much in charge of every aspect of the digestive process. Which made a good deal of sense. The subsystem that controls the processing of energy from its raw form into a usable form should be pretty much independent of the other systems, so that it would be able to continue functioning if something happened to one of the other systems. So that was it. Sure, there was a whole lot more to figure out, but that covered the basics of at least the internals of a human. I decided I would do the design in more or less the order I researched the systems – that is, start with the structure and work my way “up.” For the skeleton, optimally I could use a lightweight titanium alloy like they use in bicycle frames. But I didn’t know how easy titanium would be to work with. Aluminum was another option, or maybe even a titanium/aluminum alloy. I figured metal would be better than the plastic I was initially considering as an alternative because it would be easier to repair in the event of damage. Structurally, I tried out couple sketches modifying aspects here and there, but I kept going back to a basic copy of a human skeleton. None of my changes felt right. They all threw off the balance of the overall form. I tried various “ages” for the creation, but finally decided on more or less adult. I wasn’t creating a child, I was creating an equal. So I wanted the robot to be viewed as such. Or, at least, that was my hope. Who knew if I could pull it off. The major muscles would be replicated using pistons. I could use shape memory alloy wires for the smaller muscles & for parts that needed finer control (that is, the nickel-titanium alloys that constrict when supplied with electricity or heated). The SMAs posed a potential problem, though – they function by constricting when heated. So I’d almost certainly need a complex and reliable cooling system, or else the muscles would no longer work (they’d be locked in the active position) if the robot ever overheated. This is mainly achieved by the skin, by sweating in mammals to release heat when the water evaporates, but the circulatory system may also play a part. It seemed doable. The main difficulty would be the sheer number involved – the human body has about 650 or so skeletal muscles, and then there’s cardiac muscles and smooth muscles. Of course the muscles needed something to provide themselves with electricity, which is where the circulatory system would come into play. Since my robot wouldn’t need nutrients as such, as far as I could foresee, all the “veins” would need to carry would be electricity, so simple wires would work. I planned for some redundancy, such that a “severed vein” wouldn’t completely cut off energy to everything downstream of the lesion. word count: 1952 / 5808 words much better today. still 4190 words to go, but I'm not going straight to bed. I just wanted to post this before midnight.