Miranda Mossis an artist, roboticist, and eco-geek from Cape Town. Focuses its practice on various
Daniel Brownell— programmer, bio-artist, works with screens, is involved in solving problems in the field of oncology and the environment.
The robot seeing through the egg
Daniel: My grandfather was a chicken breeder: he was adept at separating chickens by gender.Oddly enough, this issue is stillthere were many problems. We managed to solve one of them, directly related to sex determination, in the last three years with the help of the Gallus Gallus Roboticus project.
Miranda: We're trying to create a sensitive robot to keep an eye on the chickens.Our goal is for him to understand“girl” in front of him or “boy” while the chicken is still in the egg state. From a commercial point of view this is very important. While working on the project, I certainly took my artistic background into account. Specifically exploring the question of what happens when a niche group has premium access to technology. The interaction between robots and people raises a lot of questions: for example, the military sphere or what happens when we give the opportunity to groups, sometimes even as absurd as chickens, to interact with robots.
How to program and build a robot if human activity may look like a threat to it.How to actually create and develop it. One thought: To avoid disturbing the robot, we could just wear chicken costumes, but we're not sure about that yet.
How to combine science and art: two opinions
Combining art and science is something of a holistic idea.There are too many differences between them, although theyseem pretty stupid. I'm interested in project engineering, but it's pretty crazy defining these disciplines together. Although we already know the existing working schemes and what art and science are, of course, or STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics - “High-Tech”) in general.
I grew up in South Africa, so I had the opportunity to observe art.This is actually how I grew up, becamebeing an artist and how I create art. I also have a bachelor's degree in art. But I didn't have access to a science education. When I was about 20 years old, I thought it would be cool to get into science and create my own research. For a long time I was without any background or technical skills. Where I came from, the study of art, only included the study of philosophy and other areas related to it. As a rule, these are the areas in which people develop their soft skills. At the same time, there has traditionally been some separation between soft skills and technological skills.
D: Environmental, political issues and any technology must have a life cycle and consequences.I am studying computer science. Three days a week I work on my development. I also work at a cancer center. As for my business, it focuses more on the environment.
Computer science serves a great purpose.This is the science of problem solving.Computers always appealed to me because I thought computer language was universal, and most programs inside a computer seemed to have no connection to the outside world.
M: But technology is increasingly connected with the lives of people outside.And since computing language is universal,I decided that I needed to do something good for the world. Despite the fact that everything good has already been done, not everyone reaches the stage where they are able to use their skills to actually produce something good. It seems that I have reached this stage.
A few years ago I decided to break the scientific canon because everyone was saying: “Oh, girls don’t make robots.”I thought, “What do you mean?I will of course make robots! " And I also wanted to understand the extent to which our bodies can act as predictors of the ideas we want to project. And Daniel and I have long and long thought in one direction: in matters of robots and artificial intelligence. For the most part, in the problems with which we are working, we agree and see that no one is ready to deal with many issues that are associated with modern robotics, and with ethical problems. Therefore, we are working on an art project: we can explore specific ideals and specific ideas.
D: Artistic practice allows you to get out of the rhetoric of the industry.Because the industry wants to solve specificproblems, while art is less focused on solving specific problems and art allows you to come up with something or just have fun.
The first step towards robotic chicks
M: For our project, creating a robot is only the first step.And there are already many questions about the next steps.For example, what will happen after several generations? If we already have robot chickens, how will imprinting be done by the chickens in relation to them?
D: If we can make a robot that can interact with a chicken, that would be amazing.I think I just want to appeara robot that acts intelligently and does something. And as the project develops, maybe we will be able to do something more complicated and add opportunities for the robot to interact with the environment.
M: For us, the question is just assimilation: how to fit robots into the environment.But there is a "magic part" that I'm overI really want to do some work next year - working with chickens. There's a basic question here: Why do we think we know what chickens want? And how can we program a robot that understands chickens? How can we impose the idea of a sad or happy chicken on our robot so that it can then recognize it? On what basis will this decision be made? I want to see if we can create a system that will help us figure out how to get us as a human species out of this same system. Can we train artificial intelligence to speak chicken, so that the intelligence recognizes that a chicken is planning to lay an egg at the moment when it actually plans to lay an egg. And finally, can we get to the stage where the AI looks at an egg and realizes, “Yeah, that’s going to be a rooster!” or “It will be chicken.”
D: I am more interested in the basic questions of computer vision: what keys the intellect can identify in interaction.But I'm interested, of course, in a deeperside of this issue: the data we receive can be used to transform it, create a new simulation and train the algorithm in the cloud, that is, the data that the robot receives from interactions in the real world can become, in general, the dream universe of this a robot in which it will interact again and again, and test other solutions.
M:Working with engineers, technologists and programmers, I can more or less speak a technological language, but I struggle to maintain an open mind and a willingness to share what intuition gives.It's hard to achieve, but Dan and I can do itimplement in our interactions. Jokes helped us with this: we watch stupid videos on YouTube together. These moments are very important because when we watch strange videos, we brainstorm. When we brainstorm, we generate strange thoughts, and this is the idea.
See also:
Hear NASA's Perseverance rover move across Mars
Physicists have created an analogue of a black hole and confirmed Hawking's theory. Where it leads?
Humans can withstand very low temperatures even without heat sources