Lupine Publishers| Journal of Robotics and Mechanical Engineering
Abstract
Why do roboticists not
content themselves with constructing useful machines, rather than also trying
to endow them with anthropomorphic forms, even at the risk of compromising
their functionality? What drives them to cover their machines with a latex coating
to simulate human skin? The utopia of the creation of a double appears also in
the world of art, the history of which shows, above all, an outcome that
coincides with the abandonment of the naturalistic imperative, and the
inauguration of various periods of exploration and innovation. That is why a
possible Roboaesthetics – i.e., robotics and aesthetics combined – could give
rise to a new scenario which, acknowledging the radical novelty of the species
introduced, would induce the adoption of a new observation level, constructed
on the basis of a common project.
The Utopia of The Double
With the construction of automata, mankind creates a projection of his own nature, generating artificial objects crowned, at times, with remarkable success, but often also with inevitable failure. For example, the use of wax – a malleable material par excellence¬– has been proposed as an expressive modality in the art world since the 13th century and they made impression even to Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, 1963:230) who saw them in the shop of Andrea Verrocchio. Butthey got rather limited success, presumably owing to its ambivalent effort to surpass the limits of symbolic representation only to reach or remain on the level of the most uncompromising realism. Subsequently, the unnerving wax – which, while capable of fooling the eye, also celebrated death – was replaced by ever-morerefined materials and technologies, enabling the construction of automata that seemed to give the illusion of transcending the very limits of man’s physical existence. Indeed, the step from wax statues to automata is shorter than one might think. Julius Schlosserin the fourth chapter of his Histoire du portrait en cire, notes a clear similarity in the motivations underlying both types of production [1]. They share, indeed, the same fault: a naïve realism and power of illusion that are impressive rather than expressive, thus inevitably sealing their fate (Figure 1). The literary world has always provided great support for such ventures, on the one hand descriptively anticipating the physical configuration that automata could have assumed, but, on the other, almost always emphasizing the indisputable superiority of their creator over them, because man, unlike any automaton, possesses a soul. Being soulless renders the automaton a total slave to human desiderata, to the extent that it is man who is the undisputed arbiter of the machine’s destiny, and who can freely decide to inflict upon it a paradoxically tragic and violent ‘human’ end. The three-century-old legend of the Golem of Prague, wrought from clay and supernaturally brought to life, has taken on an extraordinary current-day relevance; and technology not only seems fearless of ethical judgments, but also aims to produce robots (our modern-day automata) that put themselves forward as human doubles, perhaps to respond to the latent desire for perfection to which man has always aspired. However, if the written word continues to sustain the idea of man’s superiority over his ‘creatures’, technology goes beyond this idea, intuitively sensing that, thanks to man’s automata, it is perhaps becoming possible to appease the ancestral call for immortality and perfection. If, in the world of fiction, man is redeemed thanks to an undeniable chance series of events, technology remains untouched by problems of a metaphysical nature. Such issues as self-awareness and free will are irrelevant: automata are a truly favorable opportunity, not least because death and disease cannot touch them, because their inability to procreate keeps them, in some way, distant from either life or death.
There is one thing,
however, that literature and technological reality have in common: they share
the conviction that it is worth our while to attempt to repeat the history of
the world, at an accelerated rate, trying not to omit anything essential. The
risk of failing in the enterprise is evidently not a sufficient obstacle or
deterrent to induce surrender. Whereas, in the 18th century, in addition to the
disconcerting wax statues, there were artificial or ‘humanoid’ beings whose
souls remained firmly in the hands of their creators, today’s roboticists
design and construct robots that come very close to resembling human beings, in
the attempt to endow them not with souls but with the greatest possible
autonomy of thought. In fact, current-day anthropomorphism is becoming ever
more demanding and ambitious in its production: it has now succeeded in
creating not only movement, but also the morphing of limbs and facial features
– both of which performances have made the eighteenth-century works of Jacques
de Vaucanson and the Jacquet-Droz brothers pale into insignificance - and are
strongly reminiscent of the golden maidens forged by the ancient Greek god
Hephaestus (later identified with the Roman god Vulcan), whose creative
abilities induced him, not to exceed nature by creating unprecedented forms,
but to imitate its existing forms as closely as possible. Man, even with regard
to his quest for a self-replica, gives evidence of having attained a certain
evolutionary stability. He returns, from time to time, to the same old
projects, applying, for their realization, procedures that are ever more
sophisticated yet typical and recurrent; he takes into account his failures,
yet is ready to run headlong into them again. He does not content himself with
the robot-slave, with the machine-as-tool; but rather, infringing cultural
limits and taboos, he once again sets out to realize his dream, which
envisages, in the role of protagonist, a robot endowed with cognitive autonomy,
and capable of feeling emotions.
Robotics Between Misconception and Market Requirements
One could argue that the
roboticists’ insistence upon attempting to give their creations the likeness of
human beings is perhaps intended as a sort of amusing pursuit dating from man’s
ancestral origins, in which illusion and power are intermingled. It is also rea
reasonable, however, to ask oneself what effects the interaction with
anthropomorphic robots might have upon the average person, generally lacking
coherent systems of representation regarding the principles of science and
technology. Contemporary Western culture is guided largely by positivistic and
pragmatic premises as opposed to theological and metaphysical issues.
Nevertheless, it still shows great difficulty in assimilating rational and
methodological criteria as a means of attaining well-balanced forms of public
acceptance of scientific knowledge and technological products. The ease with
which designers take for granted that an anthropomorphic robot should be more
readily accepted is testimony to the widespread diffusion of the idea that
mankind always needs to, and is always able to, reduce to the known, the
familiar, the natural, even the most counter-intuitive scientific knowledge and
the most complex technological innovations. In reality, we are dealing with
processes that are often resolved with the reinstatement of myths intended as
solutions to mysteries – such as entities with which, ultimately, we can
interact by natural means, without running the risk of plunging into the abyss
of ignorance or of the ‘radical other’. In other words, the technological
double, thanks to its ‘natural’ form, represents a sort of unconditional
surrender, on the part of technology, to a man who defines himself as a user,
and who, continuing to take for granted the world and its objects, appears to
have no intention of calling into question his own body of knowledge. If his
acquired objects continue to work as expected, and their use continues to
produce the results he expects, he has no need to ask further questions.
The natural look of
robots – so it is thought – should further facilitate their acceptance. This
explains, at least in part, the propensity of certain technologists to predict
that robots, within twenty years, will inevitably be beautiful, gracious and
polite. For example, according to Hirochika Inoue, who has been working on
anthropomorphic robots for the past four decades, we shall, in the
not-too-distant future, be aided by robots in all sorts of activities, and
their size and appearance will certainly be a winning bet. This is the basis of
his conviction that the reproduction of every human physical characteristic
should be strictly functional for reaching the desired objective. The face
should have eyes to see and ears to hear. There should be arms and hands to
grasp and manipulate objects, and two legs (more versatile than wheels) to
allow the robot to move around easily and avoid obstacles. The anthropomorphism
of robots ultimately demonstrates that the designers themselves are perhaps
channeling their efforts on the basis of an assumption that is overly
simplistic, convinced that the physical feasibility of the technological device
requires avoiding, at all costs, that which is in fact inevitable: the
acceptance of its belonging to a constitutionally different ‘species’. The
effort to assign human features to the machine, resorting to all sorts of
materials, is therefore nothing other than the umpteenth miserable attempt to create
an interlocutor that is not too distant, in terms of complexity, functionality
and demands, from our own species.
Body and Soul
Undoubtedly, robots that
behave intelligently, reproducing human sensorimotor abilities in response to a
variable environment, and demonstrating the capacity to represent the world,
just as we do, thanks to the processing of information filtered by
heteroceptive sensory organs (of sight, hearing, touch and smell) and
proprioceptive sensory organs (of position, movement and balance), are already
a great achievement in their own right. Nevertheless, the desire for
replication pushes us even further, inducing us, for example, to cover the
mechanism with a warm, pink epidermis. All of this triggers reflection that
abruptly carry us back to the thirteenth century – that is, back to the time of
the waxen statues. However, in the case of modern-day robots, artificial skin
is not only an added dimension, a simple integument, a sort of whole-body
glove; it helps us to understand the most recent trends in anthropomorphism.
Edmund Husserl – to whom we are indebted for some of his fundamental intuitions
regarding matters of the body – distinguishes between Körper,the physical body,
the somatic body for which we can provide an anatomical and physiological
description, and Leib, the living body, the body in its entirety and not in its
individual parts. Unlike the body intended as object or thing, the Leibis
characterized by intentionality, thanks to which human beings establish a
relationship with the world. While the Körperis bounded by the outermost layer
of skin – a limit that encloses it as if in a sack – the Leib transcends this
limit and opens itself to a world of meanings: a world endowed with sense [2].
While, on the one hand, the Cartesian distinction between body and soul –
considering them as two metaphysically distinct realities – no longer holds
sway as it once did, on the other hand, a conception of ‘living body’
incarnating the consciousness seems to be gaining ground. This conception would
locate the robot, in the event of it exhibiting abilities to process sense and
intentionality, in a dimension that is no longer only physical. The decision to
cover the body of the robot with latex should not, however, be understood
exclusively as a stratagem aimed, above all, at concealing its artificial
otherness. Rather, such a choice indicates just how much the ‘being there’ of
the robot is an event that engages it entirely, opening it ‘bodily’ to the
world. Therefore, just as for the human being, whose skin constitutes the basis
for his every psychological development – from the moment when separation from
the mother is experienced by the newborn baby as a brusque laceration of a
common skin – for the robot, too, the skin would function as a narcissistic
shell, allowing it to represent itself as an ‘I’, able to assure its own
equilibrium by relying on its own mental contents. It is obvious that if this
were the case, we would be facing a sort of ‘hyper physics’ of mimesis, because
the robot would be a nonmetaphysical double: a double that is not satisfied
with a mere form and appearance, but which goes well beyond – in short, a body
that presents itself to the world as a subject, an individuus.
Why the need for a Roboaesthetics?
The invisible sensors
that simulate the natural sense of touch underline, in reality, the complexity
of the human machine with respect to an artificial one. Notwithstanding the
marvelous intricacy of each of the two systems – both natural and artificial – unbridgeable
differences persist that should lead us to assume a critical position about the
often-facile analogies between man and robot. In other words, the technology of
‘naturoids’ moves and operates within a natural environment, reproducing its
processes (Negrotti 2012:3). For this reason, it is complementary to nature but
does not substitute it in full: and at times it can enrich or complement nature
only by attributing, to natural objects, properties and capacities that they do
not in fact possess. Therefore, assuming that the ambition of modern-day
engineers to construct a robot similar to a human being will one day be
realized, it should be remembered that the original, the exemplar, will remain
unchanged, and that even if the copy seems perfect, the man-mimicking robot
will not be able to present all of man’s characteristics. In short,
disappointment is just around the corner, and the destiny of Pygmalion is ready
to repeat itself. An incredible paradox lies at the heart of all this. A statue
that is no longer a statue, that is no longer cold and immobile is destined,
like all human beings, to age, thus losing the only unique privilege it might
have had. That of Pygmalion is one only among the many instances. All history
of the art, starting from the fascinating Greek fables, develops around the
replication myth and the ambiguity always present between the represented
object and its natural exemplar. Therefore, we can maintain that the art is the
only knowledge strategy able to provide to robotics an alternative to its
replication ambition. This is due to two fundamental reasons. The first is the
fact that the art has been the absolute domain of reflection on the imitation
of nature. The second one is that it ended giving it up.
In other terms, the art
shows the existence of limits for the replication that cannot be exceeded. The
artist, by now, has freed himself from the obligation to confront to the object
he wants to reproduce. The model he refers to is, so to say, exhaustive because
the artist must not deceive anyone, he must not explain anything but his own
poetics. This is a matter of a historical outcome that should not be neglected
by the roboticians. Actually, they seem to perceive the discrepancies between
the properties of the natural object and the ones of the robot, as a sign of a
discouraging failure of a project. The following graphics clearly synthesizes
this point. The continuum of positions on the time axis spans from the most
rigorous representational conception to one more open to assign to the art an
innovative, constructive and fantastic role, that is to say, characterized by
the ability of the artist to go beyond the original object or even regardless
of it. It is interesting to remark that the same axis can indicate the various
options available to robotics. In fact, since the replication ambition of the
anthropomorphic robotics is perfectly analogous to the representational efforts
of the art, it makes sense to ask if robotics could get a useful lesson from
the development of the art and its abandonment of the replication utopia. In
fact, giving up the replica obsession “the design space opens without limits”
[3]. In short, then, in the light of the intuitively insurmountable limits of
artificial production, we may ask: is a ‘figurative’ robotics really worth
pursuing, or might an ‘abstract’ robotics – or at least one freed from the
obsession for replication that has so long afflicted the world of art – be just
as seductive? We can deduce that the answers to these questions are not to be
found in the suggestions advanced by this or that expert on aesthetics nor,
least of all, in the ideas of the latest up-and-coming guru from the fashion
world, nor in the often rather gloomy fantasies of the mass-media nor, for the
moment, in the sinuous humanizing forms promoted by the Ars Robotica. On the
contrary, robotics and art in association could potentially open up a new
scenario which, considering the radical novelty of the new ‘species’, could
attain a level of observation based on a common project. If, on the one hand,
the unification of several levels of observation of reality – in this case,
that of robotics and art – entails a depletion of the original levels, on the
other hand, it has the power to produce an enhancement of the new level because,
during the process of synthesis, the levels are invariably transformed into a
totally new perceptive and attributive configuration. It is obvious, indeed,
that a robot with extrinsic ornamentations exhibits a makeshift embellishment,
based on a propensity for Utopian or merely didactic imitation, without any
attempt to grasp and interpret the new reality that the robot heralds – a
reality that is, in other ways, insistently but generically propagandized as
revolutionary and unprecedented. Endowing robots with human features certainly
does not appear to depend ultimately on a concept that considers non-human
constraints, but above all the added extras of the technology available, as
novel elements worthy of exploration and development. For example, what does
the fact that a robotic wrist that might easily be permitted to turn through
360 degrees, as opposed to our mere 180 degrees, entail with regard to the
aesthetic correspondence between natural movement and artificial movement? It
is obvious that an accentuated anthropomorphism cannot but lead to a
shrivelled, non-flowering branch of robotics: a new, more spectacular phase,
but one which is essentially identical to the automata tradition of past
centuries. With regard to both the potential performance and the aesthetic
appearance of a robot, the determination to make it a surrogate of man would
actually end up limiting its potentialities. A robot with an extendable neck,
for example, would prove rather more strategic, in many practical circumstances,
than would a mere simulacrum of the human body, complete with its inherent
limits of movement. From an aesthetic point of view, on the other hand, it
cannot but be conceived of in wholly different terms from those of the ordinary
man, thus creating, in this case, amongst other things, an interesting parallel
with the poetic art of Amedeo Modigliani or of Picasso in, for example, the
portrait of Marie Thérèse, in which he cuts the face in two, bringing out the
nose and one of the eyes, thus forming a face that seems to appear
simultaneously face-on and in profile.
Why should the hands
necessarily respect the human form? The depiction of the fingers of Christ in
Lorenzo Lotto’s fresco The Legend of Saint Barbara opens fascinating prospects
of an uncommon prehensility, revealing the artist’s extraordinary creative and
expressive power. Suggestive vistas could open up for art and anthropomorphic
robotics together, based upon their common dependence on the desire to imitate.
Just as in figurative art, in which the comparison between art and nature has
long conditioned the expressivity, so, in anthropomorphic robotics, the attempt
to surpass the confines between artifact and nature is proving, from both
conceptual and factual points of view, to be a highly conditioning limit.
Designers of anthropomorphic robotics must bear in mind, first of all, that the
truly decisive changes in art have always occurred in relation to corresponding
changes in conceptions regarding the relationship between art and nature: the
less interest there is in replicating the natural exemplar, the greater is the
degree of transfiguration. Therefore, if it is true, as we believe, that the
faithfulness to nature in art has impeded, for a certain period of time, new
trans figurative and creative possibilities, then the beautiful and elegant
robots, pursuing the illusory presumption of making robots into true doubles of
man could, in the end, reawaken the same type of disappointment that drove
artists to abandon every obstinate project of replication [4]. Finally, how
could we not fear repeating the error that Jacob Burchkardt made in dismissing
the proportions of the figure of the Parmigianino’s long-necked Madonna as an
unbearable affectation? The idea that art should be respectful of nature’s forms
prevented Burchkardt from grasping the novel character presented by the work,
and from appreciating, as a consequence, the creative power of its author, who
knew how to renounce the idea of faithfulness to the natural figure in the name
of a transfiguration of high poetic content. There seem to be good arguments,
therefore, to justify the proposal for the introduction of Roboaesthetics: on
the one hand, the recovery of the reflections and reassessments that have
occurred, if only occasionally, in the history of art; and on the other, the
study of the genuine ‘nature’ and genuine evolutive aptitudes that robots may
realistically achieve.
Read More Lupine Publishers Robotics Journal Articles: https://robotics-engineering-lupine-journal.blogspot.com/
