Jason Wells

Day 1 of my adventures took me up to LA to visit Sharon. Turns out by coincidence she had a party that evening, so I caught up with a bunch of other friends in LA, and made a few new ones, which was great. But the plan was never to go no further than LA, so the following morning I needed to decide where to next. Sharon suggested: why not Big Sur? She’d done a ton of research on the area for a trip she’d taken earlier and knew where I could get a little cabin with no advance reservation. I made a few phone calls that morning, and voila. All set. I’m here till the 17th.

The Big Sur drive from LA would be over 6 hours factoring traffic, according to the Google, so I needed to get moving if I wanted to get there at a reasonable time that night. I quickly reloaded the van and after goodbyes, headed up the 101.

The rain was torrential, as expected. Traffic existed but wasn’t as bad as it could have been. As I got distance from LA, the scenery got better and better. I happened to time driving through Pismo Beach just as the clouds broke briefly and a gorgeous sunset emerged.

Darkness came on fast thereafter, and the rain got heavier and the road windier. There had been many little rockslides and rocks ranging from golf ball to beach ball sizes were on the northbound lane of the US 1, sometimes in both lanes. In the dark rain they came on fast, and I dodged. I hit one with a wheel. It was about the size of a tennis ball and when the van hit, it made an impressive WHAM. Rocks, not mud. Got it.

Weaving and meandering, and rediscovering the value of high beams, which are really awesome on the van now with the new composite beam headlamps, I got to the cabin. I was running on about 4 hours of sleep, so I basically conked out once I took possession.

And onto today. It’s really pretty out here and the cabin is just what I wanted, primarily: quiet. I’ve been incredibly productive writing all day; the words are just flowing out of me and I feel more confident about the success of this project than ever before. I made particular progress on the chapters applying semiotics to computer science and on the Antikythera mechanism. I’ve got a very good start on the outline of the book, so the overall structure and flow is coming along too.

I’ve been having trouble communicating out here; phone service is mostly nonexistent–I get a feeble bar of 2G once in a while–and WiFi is only in the cafe, closes at 2pm. I found a restaurant nearby that has WiFi now, which is cool. At the moment I’m eating dinner at the Fernwood.

Been missing Heather though. Being alone is just what I wanted and neededfor this phase of the trip, but I still do.

This robot, built by Boston Dynamics and funded by DARPA, is called BigDog. This is eye-popping:

I am not a roboticist, but I am in part an engineer, and I have an eye for excellence in design and construction. I’d say this is most impressive. BigDog is about a meter long and can carry over 300lbs. That buzzing sound in the video is its ordinary little gasoline engine. That’s all that powers this extraordinary four-legged metal beast of burden through forest and snow.

Just making an autonomous robot that can manage in the real world at all is a true challenge. Most efforts I’ve seen have the lamest limitations, like being unable to climb stairs or becoming as helpless as a flipped-over turtle if knocked over or if it just stumbled. Walking is hard. Even on all fours.

But this is an entirely different order of robot from the classic image of the clumsy, hobbling, tippy-toppy robots of–well–a couple years ago, or even today. Just look at how gracefully it recovers from that sudden, brutal shove! I would have fallen myself. And it goes plowing through the dirt and ice just fine, if a touch gingerly, as if tentative about its judgments of its environment. Of course there is much uncertainty and chaos in an environment of ice, dirt, rock, hills and trees. But this is just a research model, and I’m sure as its design is refined, so will its body language become more confident. But it seems to work pretty damn well already.

Its applications are as clear as the technical revolution it signals. Just as the robotic drones that now rain death from the sky, this sort of ‘heavy load-carrying over very rough terrain’ machine offers profound new capabilities to the military. Ask any soldier trudging through the wilderness with a backpack that weighs one third as much. Military funding is a mixed blessing, but such is how advanced technology is often originated (and incidentally, the work I do in computer science is a response to similar pressures). But having a machine that can carry heavy stuff pretty much anywhere you care to go (or direct it to) has countless death-free possibilities as well. Even quite the opposite. Consider what a few hundred of these things could have done in Fargo recently. The prospect of fully automated sandbagging supply lines is easily a game changer for any flooding emergency. Imagine it replacing a wheelchair. Or hell, why not an ATV?

I have to admit, despite the obvious coolness factor, the thing comes across a little creepy. It buzzes like a hornet and looks like some kind of huge headless beetle. And I think anyone would find a large, heavy, powerful robot operating autonomously in their vicinity disquieting at least. Perhaps roboticists themselves would be most cautious. Eric Gradman has more than a few hilarious stories about robots going amok, exploding in his face or driving headlong into a crowd of bystanders. That is symptomatic of the current infantile state of robotics. But the baby is learning to walk. You can watch it yourself.

Tomorrow Heather and I head up to LA for a very full weekend. Saturday evening we’re going to Shoghi and Lily’s wedding work party, just to give them a hand. They’re such a great couple, and their wedding will be a very happy day.

But what dominates the weekend is the BIL conference. The conference runs all day Saturday and Sunday. We’re driving up to Long Beach early morning tomorrow, and I’m psyched about it. If you don’t know about it, it’s a counterpoint to the more famous TED conference, which is happening at the same time–right now–and is similar, save the choosy attitude about speakers and the $6000 attendance fee. It’s about sharing cool ideas.

BIL is free to attend, volunteer-driven, very DIY; anyone with something to say can volunteer to speak. Not to mention the calls for the more quotidian, things like drinks and snacks, folding chairs, etc. They use a wiki to track things, which (of course) anyone can edit. The participatory flavor reminds me of Burning Man.

I just printed out the schedule and there are plenty of interesting talks. But the best part for me is that I know so many people there! At least seven speakers and one of the organizers are friends of mine, and I know I’ll see other familiar faces in the crowd. It’s practically a reunion, and interestingly, most of these folks I have encountered on the playa. Anyway I’m looking forward to reconnecting and hearing out some interesting ideas.

It’s a new era… The enhanced human.

In a nutshell, he’s not allowed to compete in the Olympics because he’s got an unfair edge. If that’s true, the prosthetics should be considered improvements over what biology provides. I wonder how long before non-disabled people start seeking this kind of improvement? My guess is: not long at all.

Lately I’ve been reading a book I was assigned for an undergraduate class I took long ago, but never actually read. It’s called “Cyberspace: First Steps,” and it’s an edited collection of stores and essays about cyberspace first published in 1991. It’s a very silly book; It’s filled with very silly words like “socioepistemic” and “cyborg envy,” and it tries very hard to put 10 lbs. of pseudo-intellectual shit in a 5 lb. bag.

The general idea of cyberspace had only been articulated by William Gibson in the sci-fi novel “Neuromancer” just a few years earlier and in the early ’90s, it really was basically just an interesting idea, just as it still is. No one I know of is ‘jacking’ into a ‘consensual hallucination’ of ‘databanks’ and artificial intelligences. But there sure were a bunch of folks then who felt like they had something useful to say about it anyway, from a position of almost pure ignorance.

And yet this book, as silly and generally wrong it is on all counts, manages to provoke real thoughts now and then. For example, in an essay written by Allucquere Rosanne Stone, called “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” I found this passage:

[There is the] production. . .of the illegible body, the “boundary-subject” that theorist Gloria Anzaldúa calls the Mestiza, one who lives in the borderlands and is only partially recognized by each abutting society.

The idea struck a chord with me. Not in any ‘cyber’ sense, but socially. I see in my own life that border. One one side of the border, I am a professional, a husband, a son. I work in an office, I drive a car, own a house. I create technology, go to company BBQs, and send out cards at Christmas. This is essentially the side for my family and coworkers, and there’s a certain set of cultural and social mores that are generally understood and accepted. There is no comprehension of what exists on the ‘other side’ of the boundary, though they do know that it exists. They have a lot of bad ideas about it.

On the other side of the border, I am a burner. With lots of friends I share parties and big events, usually in rough environments, in line with a very different set of social mores that are understood and accepted by all. There is a similar incomprehension of the other side that ordinarily manifests as contempt. Burners may be familiar with the existence of what they term ‘default’ world, but they consider it inferior to their social fabric and view those within it in dim terms.

I recognize I exist on both sides of the boundary, a legitimate player in both orchestras. I realize I am a Mestizo.

The Mestizo (here I use the male ending, as is linguistically appropriate) is ‘illegible’–that is, not fully comprehensible–from either side of the boundary. In other words, from any one perspective. I think everyone who knows me from one side knows I exist on the other side as well, although they likely have only the dimmest idea of what I’m about on the other side. No one can have a frame of reference that lies beyond, somehow independent. Although as it turns out, there is an exceptional perspective that is available. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Anyway, what’s striking to me is that I got to be this way without intending to. I wouldn’t be a Mestizo if the two social domains were one, and I sought no split. It was a result of the choice I made to inhabit two inconsistent societies. I did not like the constraints of either, though both had something important to offer that the other couldn’t. So it was.

This was something Heather and I intentionally made permeable for the wedding. We brought the ‘default’ and ‘burner’ worlds together in a single place and time, a single shared experience, a temporary unification of two social fabrics. It was dicey. It did work, but it takes careful planning and a lot of building understanding on both sides for it to go smoothly.

I suppose I may resolve this conflicted state at some point down the road. On the other hand, I like the idea that I’m not fully recognizable by anyone, even in principle–except by Heather, who, by virtue of sharing this experience with me on both sides of the divide, has a unique ‘dual’ perspective that even I don’t have of myself.