Here are my notes from Natalie Jeremijenko's Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Natalie is a genuine cyberpunk heroine, whose hacks include hacking robot toy dogs into feral volatile organic compound sensors; setting up voicemail boxes you can call when you want to record your interactions with Homeland Security coppers, and surreptitiously filming jumpers off the Golden Gate bridge.
Feral Robotic Dogs: It's a website. Everything reduces to a website. A couple years old, dates back to the launch of the Sony Aibo. One in a series of interactive toys that express behaviors programmed in our labs — they're fun and interesting and sci-fi-ey. But what do you learn from them? You learn construction from construction toys, monopolization from Monopoly. What do you learn from interactive toys? Interaction?
These toy dogs out of the box beg for bones or sing the national anthem.
I became interested in this when someone said to me that a robot dog would make a good pet for me — what does that say about my capacity to care for living things? What might we learn from these things? What do we need to learn from these things.
Here's the website (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots) with instructions for upgrading the raison d'être of your robot dogs.
Warning label: OUT THERE IN HAPPY FAMILY HOMES IN THE OFFICE OF CORPORATE EXECS, IN TOY STORES THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE IS AN ARMY OF ROBOTIC DOGS. THESE REMI-AUTONOMOUS ROBOT CREATURES, THOUGH CURRENTLY PROGRAMMED TO PERFORM INANE OR ENTERTAINING TASKS, ARE ACTUALLY FULLY MOTILE AND AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
