Bob Beard

The Flea: Where Speculative Art and Rocket Science Meet

April 26, 2016 in Hieroglyph

The Flea (courtesy of Rik Allen)

Rik Allen is an artist and sculptor who works in glass and metal. We previously talked to Rik in this interview about creating a retrofuturist sculpture, and were thrilled to hear about his recent work at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

I caught up with Rik via phone to talk about his visit to NASA, the sculpture he created there, and his ideas about the intersection of art and engineering.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Beard, Project Hieroglyph: Welcome back. Was this your first time visiting NASA?

Rik Allen: It was! I was invited by the Chrysler Museum of Art to be visiting artist at their glass studio. While I was there, some friends in the aerospace industry got wind of my visit and suggested I go over to NASA for a tour. The Langley Research Center is about 40 minutes away from the Chrysler Museum; I visited the Advanced Concepts Lab, which was exciting as hell.

BB: Tell me about that.

RA: I met several researchers and engineers who are in charge of planning missions in space, including Pat Troutman, the Human Strategic Analysis Lead. What I like about talking with those guys is that it’s a lot like talking with other artists. They’re just fantastically interested and curious people with a desire to create. They’ll brainstorm a problem over coffee, sketch out their plans on a napkin, and eventually some of these designs end up becoming these incredible, functioning spacefaring vehicles.

BB: While you were there, you were shown a lot of space vehicle concepts – including the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle, which you translated into an original sculpture.

Concept Art for NASA’s Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MM-SEV)

RA: Yeah, it’s a weird looking vehicle on six legs, planned for a mission to Phobos. Phobos has a rocky terrain with very little gravity, so the idea is that it will land and move across the surface by leaping from place to place. I called it The Flea – you know, if Phobos was a dog, then this vehicle would be the flea on its back.

BB: Of all the concepts you saw at Langley, what was it about that vehicle that inspired you?

RA: It was just so strange looking, really unlike anything else I’d seen, with these six truss-like legs. I’ve been incorporating those types of structures into my own work lately, so I was excited to see it proposed as a functional craft. It’s a pretty difficult structure to realize technically, but definitely worth the challenge.

BB: It’s interesting to see art and engineering in dialogue with one another – especially as we imagine the machines that will venture deeper into space on our behalf. This vehicle, and especially your take on it, seems a little more organic, whereas spacecraft are typically these hermetically sealed and dispassionate machines. What do you make of that?

RA: I’m a guy who dreams up fake rockets and space ships with no responsibility to the laws of physics or aeronautics – I can just dream up whatever I want and not worry about materials science. If it looks cool and I’m interested in making it, it gets made.

While I was there talking to the engineers, I noticed little Star Wars vehicles around their desks. We’re all about the same age and we all have that same interest in fantasy vehicles. It’s just that their responsibility is different. They render their concepts as organically as they can get away with, then scale it back to make it practical. But I feel like we’re coming from the same place of making something exciting and inspiring.

The Flea (courtesy of Rik Allen)

BB: I think there’s something similar happening with Space X’s commitments to vertical takeoff and landing craft. Part of the reason that these particular functionalities and designs are being pursued is that those are the visions these engineers grew up with, and it’s an exciting challenge to make those a reality.

RA: Yeah, totally. I tend to put a lot of portholes into my pieces – I added a porthole that wasn’t in the original design to The Flea – and the engineers said, “Oh that’s great, the astronauts would love that. They’re always trying to get us to put portholes in, but we can’t because of structural concerns.”

People raised on these images definitely have the desire to make cool looking, beautiful spacecraft that are also functional. As designers and engineers they need to merge the two as much as they can.

The Flea (courtesy of Rik Allen)

BB: You’ve done work for Blue Origin, an actual rocket factory where smart people go to work each day to create real spacecraft. What do you think is your role in contributing to that collective imagination?

RA: A lot of my work, including the piece at Blue Origin, has this underlying theme of looking outward and being curious as to what lies ahead. The engineers are buried under tons of technical considerations to get a vehicle into space and back down again safely, and I think my work is a reminder of what we’re all excited about.

Going to NASA, I was obviously super thrilled to be there, but also nervous, because I didn’t want to be in their way. What I found though, with the people that I was talking to, is that they were equally excited about what I was doing. Some of the engineers came out with their families and sat for six and a half hours, asking questions and watching me put the sculpture together. When you make this stuff all the time, you can lose sight of what it means to people – and it was exciting to hear that it was important to them.

There seems to be more and more crossover between science and art, which I think is important in addressing the challenge of increasing scientific awareness in the general public. The more people out there telling these stories, the better. So hopefully that’s part of the role I play: getting people to feel excited and curious about science and exploration.

Author

Bob Beard

Bob Beard is a fan of fandom. From Browncoats to Bronies, SCA members, Trekkers, Steampunks and more, Bob is passionate about understanding the performance and identity practices within various fandoms as well as creation of experiences for members of these groups to publicly advocate for themselves and their ideas. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran and double alumnus of Arizona State University, with a master's degree in Communication Studies and a bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a humanities emphasis.

Tags: Art, Blue Origin, Chrysler Museum, concept art, Langley Research Center, NASA, Phobos, Rik Allen, Science Fiction, sculpture, Space X Comments Off on The Flea: Where Speculative Art and Rocket Science Meet

Imagining An Alternate History Space Program

March 3, 2016 in Hieroglyph

tumblr_nec2h2L3ff1u0vd4co1_1280 “Imagine a world where the Space Race has not ended. Where space agencies were funded a lot better than military. Where private space companies emerged and accelerated development of space industry. Where people never stopped dreaming big and aiming high.”

-The Space That Never Was

Mac Rebisz is a Polish concept designer and illustrator working in the gaming and film industries for studios all over the world. In 2014 he embarked on a personal project, The Space That Never Was, combining his training as an architectural engineer with his lifelong enthusiasm for space. His work, like the Kronos Project, which envisions a manned trip to outer planets, is a unique alternate history with research-based visions for spacecraft that are both speculative and scientifically grounded. I chatted with Mac about this work, his universe, and the importance of getting the science right.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Beard, Project Hieroglyph: Tell me about your process for creating these images.

Mac Rebisz: First, I always try to capture the scientific data of the project – to get the details technically correct. I visit the NASA archives to get technical documents, and I use astronautix.com for basic information about space hardware. Reading through these sites, I’ll make some initial inferences, and from there I usually correct myself after studying books on the topic – but I do research everywhere I can.

BB: How long do you spend on this part of the work?

MR: For one picture, I spend a week doing research and then a day or two just doing the image. Some of my images are hand painted in Photoshop and some are made in 3D. After doing my research, I’ll make a detailed 3D model, then render it in Photoshop and overpaint the details, establish the mood and background…all of the artistic considerations.

BB: How much of what you do is a careful reproduction of the designs in the NASA archives, and how much is speculative?

tumblr_nkan0llr0h1u0vd4co1_1280

MR: It depends on my mood – but when I find an interesting idea from reality, I think of how I’d like to depict it, then I do the study and research. When I had the idea for the Kronos spacecraft, I started reading NASA studies and documents about large, interplanetary expeditions and it just evolved from there.

BB: The Kronos Project is interesting too – because you’ve taken it a step further. This isn’t just another cool looking spaceship on the Internet: it’s designed to house a crew and a laboratory in an alternate history. Do your drawings also fulfill the technical requirements of these imaginary missions?

MR: I first started thinking about Kronos in 2014 as a large interplanetary ship for exploration, conducting science research around Jupiter and Saturn. My first design wasn’t as big as it is now, because it started from the feasibility studies done by NASA back in the 60s and 70s, when they were actively planning missions like this. That’s why it looks like an Apollo spacecraft attached to a habitat module. But since then I’ve plotted what I wanted my spacecraft to do, and have sketched and planned and added for what’s actually possible. 20151231_kronos_3months_comp_by_macrebisz-d9m39z9

BB: It’s an interesting mash-up of speculation and real science. In your day job working on video games and movies, I imagine you get to take some artistic liberties. How important is it for you to pursue concepts like these and still get the science right?

MR: For this project it’s very important – maybe more so for me than for the audience – because I want to know how things work, and I’m gratified to know that these creations, as I imagine them, could work.

BB: Do you plan to eventually unite these images into a narrative?

MR: Yes, I’d like to make an art book from all the pictures with some background and a narrative throughout. Maybe with technical papers and some incredible cross-sections – to show how the modules would work and how people would live in them.

I’m also in pre-production for a short movie set in the Space That Never Was universe, about a Polish astronaut who goes on a mission to Phobos.

BB: How would you describe your vision for space – both The Space That Never Was as well how you’d like to see humans actually interact with space in the future?

MR: Space has always been very political, but I hope that it will be more humanistic and focused on international collaboration. The Space That Never Was is primarily scientific, of course – but I think it’s also optimistic. I want people to see that space exploration is cool and worthwhile. As an artist though, I just hope that people like my art.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: Art, design, NASA, space Comments Off on Imagining An Alternate History Space Program

Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders on writing science fiction in the 21st century

February 2, 2016 in Hieroglyph

Last week, our friend and Hieroglyph contributor Charlie Jane Anders published her new novel All The Birds in the Sky. Reflecting on her experiences as a science fiction author, critic, and community member, she penned a fantastically thought-provoking essay for io9 that echoes the work we try to accomplish here at Project Hieroglyph. Some choice excerpts:

On optimism

“There is just a famished, intense desire for optimism out there…but just being willing to believe in a decent future is a massively important act in the early 21st century.”

On the impact of science fiction stories

“…we have a lot of fears, as a society, that science fiction has an opportunity to address. The very fact that we’ve spent so much time lately debating whether science fiction should include ‘message fic’ about real-world issues proves that, yes, science fiction does have an opportunity to talk about real-world issues.”

On science communication

“…scientists know that we’re confused and overwhelmed, and they are sincerely interested in communicating science to ordinary people. And they absolutely see science fiction books and stories as a vehicle for talking about, and hopefully even educating about, actual science in the middle of so much misrepresentation and misunderstanding.”

The entire essay is truly a great read (no surprise there) and we look forward to diving into the new book. (And don’t miss the Hieroglyph shout-out in the section “Also, optimism!”)

Congratulations, Charlie Jane!

Author

Bob Beard

2 Comments »

Hard Science Fiction is Mapping our Future – But Are We Ready to Go?

December 23, 2015 in Hieroglyph

Here at Hieroglyph, we do our best to abide by Neal Stephenson’s 3H rule: no holocausts, no hackers, and no hyperspace.

It’s a good guideline for the work that goes on here. After all, how can we learn to make a better future when we’re burdened with hopeless dystopias, magical-but-unrealizable dream technologies, and only ad hoc improvements to our existing systems and machines?

Hieroglyph is about not just dreaming big, but also dreaming plausibly, a sentiment that was recently championed on NPR’s All Things Considered. In his piece, Steve Paulson details the recent popularity of “hard science fiction” by authors like Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Andy Weir (The Martian). Paulson argues that these “hard” stories aren’t even imaginary: the science is sound, and with a few (okay, a few hundred) billion dollars in the coffers, we’re an interplanetary species.

But not so fast. Kim Stanley Robinson posits at the end of the article:

“This idea of a utopia happening on another planet is a story space you go into. I mean, I love Mars and I’m interested in Mars. But we don’t need to go anywhere, because this planet is our one and only home.”

Frankly, this is a surprising to hear. We enjoy science fiction because it provides a speculative and exciting escape, but books by Robinson and his contemporaries also do more. With its adherence to scientific accuracy and rigorous details, hard science fiction does the heavy lifting of dreaming about the future, establishing a steady foundation on which our ideas about humanity can be imagined and built upon. To many, these aren’t just entertaining stories, but also explicit nudges toward any number of possible outcomes for our species.

Home is wherever humanity goes next, and yes, we might stay Earth bound for the rest of our existence. However, if we’re dreaming big, the technology is near, Congress keeps feeling generous toward the space program, and popular fiction continues to prime the wills of would-be space travelers, we might need to add another ‘H’ to the Hieroglyph ruleset:

No homesickness.

Author

Bob Beard

3 Comments »

Interview: Talking Atompunk and retrofuturism with Hieroglyph Community Member John Maly

December 14, 2015 in Hieroglyph

John Maly is a Hieroglyph community member who works in patent law and enjoys exploring the atompunk scene through art and visits to mid-century landmarks like Atomic City, Idaho and the Dymaxion House in Detroit. I caught up with John over the phone about his travels, John Steinbeck, and the Fallout video game series.

A nuclear jet engine in Atomic City, Idaho.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Beard, Project Hieroglyph: Tell me about your experience with Hieroglyph and your interest in atompunk.

John Maly: I’ve been participating in the Hieroglyph forums for a couple of years now and I think atompunk is getting at a lot of the same aspects of Hieroglyph – this idea that we have an unlimited view of the future that has gotten largely lost in a lot of modern fiction. The atompunk scene espouses a retrofuturism that’s interesting because it comes from an earnest and limitless view of the world that’s exciting – even though a lot of the things predicted in that era never really came to pass.

BB: Why do you think that is?

JM: That’s a tough question. I think a lot of it is systemic. You’ve got the companies that used to build great, ambitious projects, and they have stopped doing that because they’re are publicly held and their main obligation is to shareholder value. And so you no longer have some giant flagship retail store that’s supposed to be a kind of a wonder to anyone who goes near it.

I used to work on a microprocessor design team and we used to have these alternating cycles where one cycle you’d come up with a new architecture entirely that would introduce a lot of new features and functionality.

Then you’d have a couple cycles that were not very ambitious in terms of increasing functionality; it was just kind of streamlining and making small iterations toward achievable goals. It’s why it’s boring to walk to the end of your driveway and get the mail because you know you can do it, whereas if you’ve never run a marathon before, that kind of ignites a human passion.

I don’t know where that ambition started to get lost in society, but it’s certainly reflected in a lot of ways in fiction, in the educational system, in Corporate America, in fear of litigation that, I think, has really stacked the deck against it now.

BB: So, is atompunk fueled by that same sort of that boundless aspiration?

JM: Yeah, but I think when you take a step back and look at the world when this stuff was new and not cited in an ironic way, we were coming out of the Victorian era with World’s Fairs where people would go to see these technologies that were so far in advance of what was currently productized that they almost seemed like magic.

Then suddenly you had Ford making jet turbine-powered experimental cars. Companies were designing atomic engines to use in spy planes. All of these things were very credibly put forth back in the 50s as, “Hey, this is the next step. This is where things are going to be in another 30 years,” and none of that really materialized. Of course, a lot of that didn’t materialize because the ideas became obsolete. When you have satellites, you don’t need planes that can sit up in the air for two years.

Interior of the Dymaxion House, designed by Buckminster Fuller.

But other things like housing designs, all those things have just slowed down a lot. I think in a lot of ways, atompunk represents the last hurrah of the non-skeptical and unironic view of a magical future that America had back then.

For example, have you read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley?

BB: I haven’t. Can you tell me about it?

JM: There’s a section in there, set back in the late 40s I believe, where Steinbeck stops in what is essentially a trailer park. At the time, trailer parks were this vision of the future. If you want to read a non-ironic tribute to how trailer homes are just the best thing since sliced bread, it’s in Travels with Charley because he interviewed these people and he discovered this whole phenomenon. Back then, every mobile home in one of these parks was brand new. So it’s deluxe and shiny with woodwork and fairly expensive things inside. They were this idea of how humans would live in the future, where we would all have these mobile homes and if the breadwinner lost his job, well, they’d just put the wheels back on it and move it to the new city and protect their investment. It’s a product of the era, where someone applied technology to a problem and tried to see how far they can go with it.

BB: So much of the “punk” culture – steampunk, cyberpunk, what have you – seems to prioritize the individual. But in this there seems to be an underlying nostalgia for “better living through corporations.” Is that fair?

JM: I think if we rewind to the time when all of this stuff was happening, the interests of the individual and the interests of corporations weren’t as mutually exclusive as they are now. People now are much more skeptical of the corporations than they were before. During the era we’re talking about, it was thought that if you went out and became incredibly successful then you would start your own corporation and be the next Ford, or Disney, or GE.

Nowadays the average person’s interaction with a corporation is they dial into some 1-800 number and get abysmal customer service. So regardless of what’s going on inside these corporations and what their interests and motives are, the average person is already jaded toward their relationship with the company.

BB: So, is there a privileged superiority at play in atompunk and retrofuturism – a sort of “look how quaint and simple things were” outlook – or is it a legitimate love for and tribute to that time?

JM: I think it’s love and tribute. There are lots of people out there who are missile silo geeks or people who are interested in prototype cars or people who are interested in retrofuturism, but I don’t think it has been unified yet. But what you see is that certain media have had a crystallizing effect on a larger scale. For example, are you familiar with the Fallout games?

BB: Sure. Absolutely.

JM: The product literature and packaging for Fallout has grown to have this very kind of late 50s, early 60s graphical way of rendering characters. There are these stylized people who are living the Eisenhower Era ideal – the sun is shining, everybody’s got nice, bright pastel clothes, and they’re just happy as hell for some reason.

It’s just one of the aspects of Fallout, which you might think is sort of inconsequential, right, because the original game’s graphics themselves did not have that kind of art. So, there wasn’t any real reason for that art to take off like it has, but you can see its influences everywhere, and especially with the Vault Boy character on t-shirts and in online jokes and fan art. I think deep down it strikes that same sort of chord – it’s kind of its own time capsule. I don’t people necessarily have nostalgia for the Cold War or needing to be ready to hide under desks when a siren goes off, but I think that all of this represents the no holds barred, swing for the fences outlook that we no longer really seem to have universally now.

Images courtesy of John Maly.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: atompunk, Fallout, John Maly, John Steinbeck, retrofuturism, Travels with Charley 2 Comments »

Announcing The Tomorrow Project’s Journeys through Time and Space anthology

October 8, 2015 in Hieroglyph

“Your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it.”
-Doctor Emmett L. Brown, Back to the Future Part III

I was nearing my thirteenth birthday when I heard that line — a call to action from a character that embodied scientific curiosity, exploration, and DIY. Unfortunately for me, the year was 1989, so rather than take to the Internet to find a community of thinkers and makers to help workshop my ideas, I contented myself by reading about other people’s imagined futures. Thankfully, for those of us who pined for access to a hackerspace or the fellowship of like-minded enthusiasts, these dreams are realized for a new generation courtesy of The Tomorrow Project.

For the past five years, The Tomorrow Project has empowered today’s youth to visualize and collaborate on the future they want to live in through both storytelling and prototyping. Using grounded science as a starting point, Tomorrow Project participants are encouraged to tease out ideas, designs, implications, and worst-case scenarios to envision the world that they’ll soon inherit. Hundreds of these exercises from fifteen countries and thirty-six U.S. states were submitted as short stories to the project’s The Future – Powered By Fiction contest and have been published in quarterly anthologies throughout the past year.

As a partner in this effort, we are excited to announce the publication of the fourth and final collection of tales from the competition, Journeys through Time and Space.

In this volume, eleven young people from Nepal, Singapore, and the U.S. share their dispatches from the future, expressing the primal human desire for exploration powered by the technologies of tomorrow. Their stories are fresh, exciting, and brimming with possibility. We invite you to read them all here and share the Tomorrow Project with the students and educators in your life. The anthology is free to read, download, and share.

Visit the Tomorrow Project website to read and share Journeys through Time and Space and the other three “Future – Powered by Fiction” anthologies, along with a bunch of other volumes of science fiction and fact.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: back to the future, jim bell, Science Fiction, space, space exploration, time, tomorrow project Comments Off on Announcing The Tomorrow Project’s Journeys through Time and Space anthology

Hieroglyph Contributors Featured in New Climate Fiction Anthology

October 8, 2015 in Hieroglyph

Climate fiction is a burgeoning genre in the crowded literary landscape – but it has been making waves lately. Think pieces on the growth of this particular flavor of storytelling abound, films like Snowpiercer use “cli-fi” as a backdrop for action and adventure, and earlier this summer the award-winning digital magazine Matter featured a series of essays and short fiction exploring futures shaped by climate change, including a lengthy contribution from Margaret Atwood.

Now, a definitive collection of short climate fiction can be found in the new anthology Loosed Upon the World, edited by John Joseph Adams. Featuring stories from new voices and luminaries in the field, including Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, and several Hieroglyph contributors, the book provides provocative, sometimes-startling images not so far removed from today’s reality.

In his introduction to the anthology, Paolo Bacigalupi posits that overly sunny techno-optimism is too easy a position to take in the face of a looming crisis. Dreaming of a futuristic innovative solution is easier than mindfully confronting the social, cultural, and political challenges that bedevil us right now — several of which are examined by the authors included in the collection.

Stories featured in Loosed Upon the World include “The Precedent,” in which author Sean McMullen offers a vision of future eco-justice that rivals 17th century Salem; Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Rainy Season” considers one particularly strange side-effect of bioengineering a species to deal with human pollution; and Charlie Jane Anders’ “The Day It All Ended” (originally published in the Hieroglyph anthology) provides a satirical view of rampant consumerism.

While none of the twenty-six tales here provide a turnkey solution to the problem of climate change, the collected works offer a human perspective on a topic that is so often saddled with divisive rhetoric. While it’s all too easy to ignore policy briefs on climate change, narratives about the struggles of our fellow humans have power to move and unite us. Storytelling might well change the future – but it requires an engaged audience to turn imagination into action. Loosed Upon the World and its writers have taken the first step in publishing this collection. The stories within remind us that what happens next is up to all of us.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: Charlie Jane Anders, climate change, climate fiction, john joseph adams, Kim Stanley Robinson, margaret atwood, paolo bacigalupi, sean mcmullen, tobias buckell Comments Off on Hieroglyph Contributors Featured in New Climate Fiction Anthology

Interview: Author and Hieroglyph Community Member John C. Havens

September 23, 2015 in Hieroglyph

John C. Havens is a Hieroglyph community member, a contributor to Mashable and The Guardian and the author of the book Hacking Happiness. I had a chance to read John’s new book, Heartifical Intelligence (to be published February 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin) and chat with him about his work studying the intersection of emerging technology and personal well-being.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Beard, Project Hieroglyph: How did you find Project Hieroglyph, and what are your expectations for the project?

John C. Havens: I’m a huge science fiction fan – which, if you have any self-respect, means that you’re a huge Neal Stephenson fan. Snow Crash is a seminal piece of any nerd’s Bible. When I encountered Hieroglyph I thought, what a fantastic idea to harness the power of storytelling to imagine utopian future visions and then create a pragmatic roadmap to which people can contribute. So instead of just wistfully talking in an esoteric, albeit well-meaning way about how the future could look, why not build stories with the people that are equipped to help make that future a reality? I found that extremely exciting.

BB: What are your expectations for this community, and what would you like to see grow out of it?

JCH: What I’m enjoying is thinking through how stories lead to pragmatic change. So I hope that it continues to be not just amazing stories by Neal Stephenson and other writers of his caliber, but also an exploration of how we can create real pathways to positive futures in the minds of readers.

BB: I think you’re doing that yourself in Heartificial Intelligence; I appreciated one of your descriptors for the book, saying it’s not so much about science fiction as it is about science inflection – essentially using storytelling as a collaborative act in designing the future.

JCH: Thank you very much. I hate calling myself a futurist, although I appreciate the term. I call myself a geeky presentist because of what I know about technologies that already exist, but just aren’t ubiquitous yet. For example, you have Google working on self-driving cars and robots that are entering our homes and advances in AI – these are three separate things – but if you think on the level of mass production and of the embeddedness of technology and culture, those three things are naturally going to come together at some point. Telling stories about possible futures is a way of making connections and saying, “hey, do you see these patterns that I see?”

BB: You frame the book in two different ways. There are certainly some positive vignettes about living with technology, but you have also written some very dark futures that could come to pass if we don’t make conscious, thoughtful choices today. Do you see the future as inescapably apocalyptic if we don’t make these changes? Is that the default?

I’m not anti-tech, but what I am emphatic about telling people is that it is ignorant – and I don’t mean stupid – to ignore the research that shows that when we interact with a device, we lose human qualities that cannot be regained. So if we choose to only spend time with robots, then our human empathy will erode. Our relationship with technology is changing how we interact with other humans; as a result, some of our human qualities are atrophying.

And what we cannot ignore is the underlying fact of how our personal data is analyzed, shared, tracked, mined, and used. A standard terms and conditions agreement for companion robots like Buddy and Pepper is likely not enough to inform buyers about the hardware used to analyze and affect their emotions. In a very real sense, the manufacturers can control how we respond to the robots, effectively manipulating our emotions based on their biases. That’s a pivotal part of the conversation. It’s not privacy; it’s about controlling your identity. It’s not just about money and people manipulating you to buy something. It’s about regaining a space where I don’t have fifty different algorithms telling me what I want.

BB: So where is that space?

JCH: Well there’s a technical answer and an aspirational answer.

Technically, a person could have what’s known as a personal cloud. This has been around for years; it’s a concept called privacy by design, and it simply means that instead of one’s data being fragmented in two or three hundred different places, we have a locus of identity where we can define ourselves. Technologically, a personal cloud structure is pretty doable. There are companies like Personal.com and others in Europe where you’re able to take all your data and set up a dashboard of permissions, specifying who can access it and when. The main reason that’s so hard is that it’s not in Facebook or Google or IBM or LinkedIn’s interest to have you do that, because right now your personal data is a commodity that they use to generate revenue.

Aspirationally, a lot of Heartificial Intelligence is about what I think is a real positive force right now in the AI world: the field of ethics. I didn’t study it in college, so at first it seemed very general and vague to me – I pictured Socrates wearing a robe or Monty Python sketches about philosophers playing soccer. But what I’ve realized is that applied ethics means asking tough questions about people’s values and about their individual choices. A lot of these personalization algorithms are trying to discover what individuals say will make their lives better, so in one sense it hinges on the values. AI manufacturers currently use sensors to observe human behavior and that’s the tracking methodology online and off, and that’s great. There’s a massive wealth of information being generated about our lives, but it doesn’t involve the individual subjectively saying what they feel or think. It only involves the external objective side of things.

The computer scientist Stuart Russell uses a methodology called inverse reinforcement learning. What he does that most AI manufacturers don’t is when a device or sensors observe a human doing something for a while, the pattern recognition comes back and says, “here’s the pattern,” but then that’s examined further to say, “what human value does this pattern reflect?” I talk about this in the book [Editor’s note – check out an excerpt here]: if a kitchen robot was being created for Cuisinart and it could cook 10,000 recipes, that would be great. But if the robot was trained to have chicken in a recipe and it couldn’t find it, then you have to make sure to program the robot not to make a substitution and cook a pet cat. That’s the kind of substitution that doesn’t align with human values, but the robot needs to be taught that explicitly.

So the practice of applied ethics requires that you take a step back and say, “As we create this product using this algorithm, we cannot ignore the values of the end-user, because those values will define the efficacy and success of what we’re creating.” An increased focus on applied ethics will also help engineers and manufacturers who are often demonized, because they’re not trained to be ethicists.

BB: You write in the book that our “future happiness is dependent on teaching our machines what we value the most.”

JCH: The central question of the book is, “How will machines know what we value if we don’t know ourselves?” Near the end of the book there is a values tracking assessment that I created with a friend, who’s a PhD in positive psychology. We examined different psychological studies that have been done over the years and found that there are twelve values that are common all around the world, across multiple cultures, to both men and women. These are concepts like family, art, education, etc. It’s not that you and I will see those things the same way, but that’s the point.

What I’m encouraging people to do is identify and codify the values that animate their lives, because positive psychology research is showing that if you don’t live according to your values every day, your happiness decreases. And the relationship to AI is – news flash – that a kajillion iterative things are all measuring our values right now, based solely on our externalized behaviors, which are aggregated and analyzed without our input. Without humans in the mix to determine what values mean in a human context, the algorithms will assign us “values” of their own. My position is that we owe it to ourselves to catch up.

BB: So is the values tracking exercise an information audit? An attempt to be more mindful about the elements of our digital personas that we share with the machines?

JCH: Yes, and before the tech there’s a self-help aspect to it. However, if I can get my values codified, and that data was protected, and I felt comfortable sharing it in the privacy by design format we discussed earlier, then I end up with values by design, whereby any digital object in the virtual or real world would know to respond to my values in ways that are granular and utterly relevant to me.

There’s a great engineer and philosopher named Jason Millar who wrote about this idea of moral proxies. In the same way medical proxies dictate treatment methods based on someone’s ethical preferences, a moral proxy might enable devices to act on your behalf based on your values. A self-driving car that drives to my house in ten years is the same hardware and structure that’s going to go in front of your house. But through geo-fencing or whatever technology, as I walk towards the car, the car will read through protocols of my values. So it will know, for instance, how it should perform based on my values – and within in the legal framework of what it can do in that particular city or country. For example, people might be prioritized based on their religious preferences – perhaps an Orthodox Jewish family would be allowed to use the fast lane to beat the clock before the Sabbath begins….

My hope is that large brands and organizations will encourage values by design, not only because they can sell more effectively or build more trust with individual consumers, but also to avoid legal culpability. However, my whole point is that individuals should be given clarity and assurance around their data and how it’s being used. They should be encouraged to track their values so that they have a subjective way of saying “this is who I am” before they are so objectified to the point where preferential algorithms will become redundant because we won’t have any preferences that we’ve created on our own.

John’s book Heartificial Intelligence is excerpted here and will be published in February 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin. You can find John in the Hieroglyph forums at @johnchavens.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, ethics, interview, john c. havens, morality Comments Off on Interview: Author and Hieroglyph Community Member John C. Havens

Spotlight on the Community: April Davis

September 3, 2015 in Hieroglyph

April Davis is a new member of the Hieroglyph community. She is studying geophysics and astronomy at Cal Poly Pomona and can be found doing field work in the Arctic, Hawaii, and at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.

I caught up with April over email to talk about her latest adventures and how science fiction inspired her passion for science.

Bob Beard, Project Hieroglyph: What are you working on right now?

April Davis: My team is currently analyzing impact ejecta, secondary craters, and slope distribution of Martian terrain in support of the future Mars InSight lander mission. Basically, I’m projecting and layering various data types (visual, digital elevation, thermal emission) to make maps that will allow us to determine the safest place to land. I’m at JPL as part of the Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, but will continue working here as a part-time intern through at least the fall quarter. So, I should get to do the same type of stuff for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission!!! 😀 (I am obviously very excited.)

My last internship (last summer I was in the High Arctic testing the IceBreaker-3 drill) was actually a competitor to the project I’m working on now. It’s been really interesting to have the experience of working on a couple of different missions – especially seeing how different NASA centers operate. It’s also renewed my interest in engineering.

I miss designing and building stuff. A few years ago, I designed an optical head-mounted display that could be used to help geologists wearing spacesuits – because so much of what we do is impossible to do in a spacesuit. The design was accepted for a talk at the International Astronautical Conference in Beijing that year, but I couldn’t fund myself to attend. I never actually built my prototype, and regret that pretty often. I need someone to help me with coding, but eventually I will get around to it.

BB: What does the future look like to you, and what are you most excited about?

AD: I’m really excited about the possibility of human spaceflight, space tourism, and Moon bases. As a self-described tree-hugger, it took me a long time to come to terms with my desire to explore other planets due to the waste of valuable resources here on Earth; the likelihood that we would just exploit other planets for materials; and the possibility that we could stunt evolving life on another planet. These are all real concerns, and the last is something that we should take very seriously. There are planetary protection laws in place to mitigate the damage we do, but those laws might not be enough in the face of the aggressive lobbying that would almost certainly happen if a profit could be turned.

I’m all for colonization of Mars as well. I’ve done a couple of rotations out at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, simulating a Mars habitat environment. I’ve also done research at Mars analog sites in the High Arctic and Death Valley.

BB: So you’re ready to go?

AD: Definitely! Many organizations, including JPL, have plans to get people to Mars by the 2030s. Some of those plans include staying for a couple weeks, and some include staying until death. Private organizations like SpaceX are also planning missions. Elon Musk has said that he would like to retire on Mars, and he seems like the kind of man who works hard to make things happen. However, SpaceX hasn’t yet managed a successful spacecraft landing on a planet other than Earth (and that was in the water). So they have a long road ahead of them. I’m hopeful that they will make some headway sooner rather than later, because I would love to sign up for the SpaceX Mars retirement plan.

In the meantime, I would be happy just to have samples brought back to Earth. Mars 2020 is supposed to collect samples that will be brought back as part of a different mission – it was too expensive to incorporate sample return into Mars 2020. The thought of waiting all those years for samples breaks my heart.

BB: What are your biggest challenges, and how do you deal with them?

AD: Planetary science research is extremely competitive. During my first few internships, I encountered so many people who were discouraging students from pursuing planetary science unless they wanted to devote their lives to it and were okay with not making much money. I am okay with both of those things, but it still worried me. Fortunately, I was lucky to have a mentor who not only encouraged me, but pretty much convinced me not to turn my back on Mars research. It meant a lot to me. I have really bad impostor syndrome, but she made me feel like I belong.

I hope I can have that type of impact on the life of a student one day. I would especially like to mentor young women. There are a number of reasons why women drop out of STEM, but I believe that too often it’s because of the way they are treated by people in the field.

BB: What is your favorite science fiction story or vision for the future?

AD: Tough question. When I was young, I was lucky enough to have an uncle that was really into sci-fi. I would often stay with him and my aunt, and he would let me watch ANYTHING I wanted. So I probably knew all the words to the Evil Dead script by the time I was five years old. We also watched an episode of The X-Files every week; I think that really taught me to be skeptical. Scully was my favorite. I didn’t have any role models when I was young; I really admired her. In later years, Colonel Carter from Stargate SG-1 would have a huge impact on my life. Her character made me realize that women could be good at math – as a kid I wasn’t good at math and was discouraged from trying because “girls just aren’t good at math.” I already had the desire to explore (or maybe just to run), but I hadn’t thought about exploring other planets yet.

Also, one of my exes is doing Mars research because he read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and it gave him the desire to colonize Mars. He took me to the Mars Society Convention back in 2012, and that’s how I got hooked up with the Mars Desert Research Station. In a way, part of what I’m doing today is also because of him (and KSR by proxy). Without sci-fi, I have no idea what I would be doing with my life, but I very seriously doubt it would be working for NASA.

After writing all of this, I really have to go with Stargate SG-1 as my favorite – even though it doesn’t really take place in the future. The protagonists are very into the science, but they’re also compassionate and ethical. If we ever make contact with sentient beings from outside of our solar system, I’d hope the leadership of Earth could be so elegant.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: april davis, Mars, space Comments Off on Spotlight on the Community: April Davis

Hieroglyph Anthology Recognized by Association of Professional Futurists

August 3, 2015 in Hieroglyph

We were surprised and honored earlier this week with the announcement that our anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future was honored with an award for Most Significant Futures Work (MSFW) by the Association of Professional Futurists.

Established in 2007, the MSFW Awards honors works that advance the work of foresight and futures studies, contribute to the understanding of the future of a significant area of human endeavor or of the natural world, or present new images of the future through visual arts, films, poetry, or fiction.

This year’s judges concluded that Hieroglyph demonstrated “an interesting blend of futures purposes with fiction…with potential for broad dissemination.” We share this year’s award for presenting new images of the future with the outstanding transmedia project Byologyc and The Museum of Future Government Services. Both are certainly worth your attention at some point today.

We’d like to thank the Association of Professional Futurists, the nominating committee, and the judges for this honor, and to wish a hearty congratulations to all of our fellow winners and nominees. We’re also incredibly grateful to our Hieroglyph contributors and community members: your insight, energy, and imagination fuels this project.

Author

Bob Beard

Tags: APF, award, awards, futurism, MSFW Awards 1 Comment »