[Synapse elist] humanlike

[Leonel Moura]

Considering Kirsty's question: how do we want our robots to look and act?




I see robots as a non-biological life form. Hence, the more 
independent they are from us the better.

In the same way that bio-inspired art shouldn't be reduced to 
vitalism, robotics, applied to art or any other activity, cannot be 
seen just in the context of anthropomorphism. Autonomy, evolution, 
reproduction cannot be achieved by machines (probably biomachines) if 
we follow a top-down process stemmed from human features. Like in 
nature we must look for the edge of chaos.

The other point is that natural beings are not just the product of 
their genes and body, but also of their interaction with the 
environment. Building robots as an assemblage of machinery and 
software to mimic human behavior is less interesting than to generate 
stochastically the basic conditions for a non-biological entity to 
survive by its own means. Situatedness, one of Brooks concepts, is 
for example essential when considering true autonomous robots. We 
cannot do that with control.

In short, to build a bacterialike robot seems to me much more 
exciting than to build a humanlike robot.

And as an artist my question is less how it looks like, but will it work?