uncanny valley

Manchester, Moscow & Gagarin

Little flurry of interest in the forthcoming novel following the BBC's tv/radio/online features on Yuri Gagarin's visit to Manchester in 1961 and my recent trip to the Star City cosmonaut training centre. If you're new to this blog and want to read about the Star City visit, then click here and scroll down for the Moscow diary entries.

The whole story about Gagarin coming to Manchester came to my attention because of a mural of Yuri by a wonderful artist called Walter Kershaw, which he was commissioned to paint to cover up shattered store fronts after the 1996 Manchester bomb. Sometimes when you write a book, you scratch the surface to discover all sorts of unexpected things underneath.

There will be more later this year and into next, on the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight.

Kosmonaut Zero itself is coming along well and will see the light of day in 2011.

Patenting Lifeforms

 'Some of my associates take the view that the android is - how do I put this - 'a patented lifeform'. And these associates would like a share of the Far Eastern market.'

This is a line from my novel Exilium (2008) uttered by Delphine Moreau, a character who considered that as the android was a 'patented lifeform' - it was therefore subject to the demands of the company that had created it.

The story centred around the dilemma between the company's goals and the desire of the android to no longer be considered merchandise.

Today's headlines about the creation of synthetic life by Dr Craig Venter focus on the issue of whether such advances should be considered open source for the good of all or the intellectual property of their creators. 

There are many ethical considerations in emergent technologies such as biochips, genomic therapies, relational artefacts, synthetic lifeforms - and no doubt there will be increasingly emotive arguments to come, especially when matters of life and death are involved.

The issues here are framed entirely by what synthetic lifeforms can do for us, not yet by our responsibility towards that which we create. So far, robots and artificial lifeforms are not near sentience or self-awareness, but progress is relentless. There may come a day when headlines are made by synthetic lifeforms asking not to serve us any more.

Moscow Diary #5

It's been an exceptional trip to Moscow. Barely scratched the surface of this monumental city. Whether it's the recent Metro bombings, or the impending 65th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, the city seems to have an edge - police and soldiers are everywhere.

One gets a sense of a nation discovering itself and flexing its muscles - only yesterday, Prime Minister Putin quipped on TV about eating Ukrainian politicians. Brave words, considering the ongoing fall out between the two countries over whether a famine inflicted by Russia could be considered genocide...

One also gets the sense of a country looking backwards and forwards at the same time - I surf the internet a few hundred yards from Moscow's first McDonald's. And yet the spirit of the May Day parades persists. Later on, the young men and women of the Red Army will rehearse for the upcoming celebrations of the country's victory over Nazism.

So the old Soviet Union is still here. In Red Square, in the metro, at Star City and at Lubyanka, where the FSB has announced this week that citizens who are 'uncooperative' will in future face fines and imprisonment. In this kind of city, it's not hard to envisage the world in which a young KGB officer called Marina Mernova might have existed.

Moscow Diary #4

This is Yuri Gagarin's office at Star City, preserved just as it was on 27th March 1968 - the day he was killed in a plane crash. Even the clock on the wall is stopped at 10.31am, the moment of the accident. 

 It's been a remarkable tour around Star City, which is still a working military base where cosmonauts from all nations train for their work in space. The visit that I chose, organised with Rus Adventures, was the 'museum tour' as Kosmonaut Zero is set in the late 60s.

The guide, Nina, made the comment that for her, coming to Star City is like coming to the old Russia, with everything very neat and very organised, as if provided by an unseen, benefic state. One got the sense that as much as some embrace the change in this country, there is also nostalgia for how things used to be.

Perhaps here at Star City is the Russia that I've been looking for. The long drive out took me away from the new Moscow with its neon signs, designer stores and SUVs. Out past Communist-era apartment blocks, along bumpy roads and through the birch forests. 

Star City is quaint and understated - with just a single guard minding the gate. You would never guess at what goes on inside. Only the roar of jet engines hints at what lies inside. If this place were in the west, you have the feeling it would be branded to within an inch of its life. Instead it is a gateway, both to space and - through the artefacts of the early Soviet space programme - to an empire from another era.

Moscow Diary #3

 Finding the Moscow of 40-odd years ago is a matter of peeling back the layers. Most of the architecture remains the same, except now it has been retro-fitted with advertising hoardings: vast neon signs for mobile phone companies cling like leeches to the granite and stone. 

Imagine the Chrysler Building in New York with an immense Samsung sign running down the side of it and you get the picture.

The metro system is another amazing Soviet construction. It is vast, multi-layered - a city beneath the city. To get a perspective, imagine New York's subway or London's underground, give them some steroids and again, you'll get the picture.

Today, I visited the forrmer KGB / now FSB headquarters in Lubyanka Square. Across the road from this still-feared institution is a poignant memorial to the thousands who were executed in various communist purges throughout the 20th century. Photographs, flowers and notebooks commemorate those who died, just a couple of hundered metres from the headquarters of the organisation that did most of the killing. Times are changing in Russia. In western terms, I'd say this melting pot of a city has reached the 1980s - displaying wealth seems to be everything right now.

The scale of Moscow is what is most striking. It's as if it's designed to make the individual feel as small as possible, but then perhaps that was the idea...

Moscow Diary #2

One of the mock-ups of the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, makes a rather odd addition to the rollercoasters and ghost trains in Gorky Park. It sits by the Moscow River and seems like it's there because no one could think of anywhere else to put it. On a cold Sunday at the end of April, it doesn't get many visitors.

The spacecraft is a relic. The new Russia is fast becoming an outpost in the global village and devours the achievements of the previous empire, only to then recycle them as tourist destinations. Moscow has a space history museum, a KGB museum and a Cold War museum in an underground bunker.

Perhaps the future was never going to be one of lunar colonies and space stations: it's as if Concorde, Buran, the American Shuttle, Apollo - all these visions of science-as-art, they shone for just a few years only to end up as items on tourists' itineraries.

Today I sheltered beneath Buran to hide from hailstones and a biting wind, wondering why it was here on earth and not doing what it was built for up in space.

Moscow Diary #1

Friday 23rd was a long flight, with a quick transfer in Helsinki Vantaa, an airport devoid of activity and food, but also exceedingly clean. Note to self: trying to read Metro signs in Cyrillic after a 12 hour flight will require some concentration...

Right now: in the foyer of the hotel, having a surreal moment as a bride dressed in white lace has just walked past smiling like a bride should.

The centre of Moscow is full of tourists with police everywhere too, not surprising after the recent bombings. Found the shopping mall under Red Square which was a little too much like home.

So why this trip? It is research for Kosmonaut Zero, a novel due out in 2011. Trying to get a flavour of Russia as it was 40+ years ago. The new book is inspired by two sources, one an article I had published 12 years ago called The Cyborg Mystery - about NASA's plans in 1960 to fit astronauts with mechanical pumps and body parts to enable them to go into space without spacesuits. The other source is the urban myth of Soviet Russia's Lost Cosmonauts. More on that here.

And to whet your appetites for what's in the new book, here is some teaser artwork (click image for the full view). 

 

Robot Evolution

 It's been an interesting week for evolution of species. First, some remarkable hominid remains have been found in South Africa, which are just under two million years old and which appear to be those of early human ancestors.

Then, at the opposite end of the evolutionary scale, there are a couple of notable developments in the world of robotics. 

When I was researching the Sorber and Fox novels, I visited MIT and the University of Osaka on three trips between 2003 and 2007. At that stage, researchers at MIT were tackling the problem of how to get robots to recognise basic objects and then understand what to do with them - object recognition and perception - so it's great to see that just a few years later scientists at another institution - the University of Berkeley - have managed to create a robot which can fold towels. A fuller explanation and some quite beautiful video is available here. Though it may seem like a small step, this really is important in the field of perception and in terms of getting robots to perform useful tasks in our homes.

And over in Osaka, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro has been refining his androids, with the latest version being the Geminoid F - check the video here. This new android is even more lifelike in its appearance and behaviours, having greater flexibility and being able to mimic a wider range of facial expressions.

At the moment, all the androids are static in the sense that they are either seated or standing in one position while performing their movements. An important development with the new Geminoid is that the previous large-scale air compressors required to power the robot are now much smaller, with parts of the system actually built into the android's body.

Professor Ishiguro explained to me in 2007 that they could enable their androids to walk without too much difficulty, so perhaps the next stage for the geminoids will be some measure of mobility and independence from bulky power supplies?

So evolution is still unfolding before our eyes, even though with the robots the results may not be fully realised for another 30 or 50 years.

i, Kosmonaut?

A book which I have loved reading as part of the research for Kosmonaut Zero is Two Sides of the Moon, by Alexei Leonov and David Scott. 

One of the reflections common to both men was that their mission profiles gave them no time to themselves, no break in which they could appreciate what it was they were actually doing - being the first man to walk in space and one of the 12 to land on the moon respectively. Leonov took paper and crayons to space so that he could sketch what he saw and recommended that future space missions should include a poet who could record the emotional impact of the experience for all humankind.

Mission Control would constantly ask for status updates and biological data, give them endless tasks to perform so that virtually every minute of each mission was occupied. The act of taking time to experience the wonder of what they were doing was just not part of the schedule.

Here on Earth 40 years on, the space race is forgotten and new technologies take precedence. Web 2.0 platforms proliferate - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube - all based on the premise of 'sharing' - photos and videos, experiences and perspectives.

It's as if we are all now in astronaut mode - document, record, share - giving realtime updates to a faceless global mission control, eviscerating all our activities, no matter how trivial or inane. Privacy is willingly forgotten as we seek to share/express/opine about everything and nothing.

For technology to develop, of course it must be democratic. But which of us are making history like Leonov and Scott - and which of us are merely filling space and time?

Android Lovers. Again.

Sigh. Seems like the world won't leave this one alone. Last week a company called True Companions announced 'the world's first sex robot' and unveiled their Roxxxy doll in the US. There is plenty of footage of it about and you can see for yourself here.

I've written before on this topic. The increasingly human attributes of the androids - the need we seem to have to make them familiar in appearance and behaviour - is telling. The other side of this coin is what we ourselves aspire to in terms of physical perfection and the extensive modification some will undergo to achieve a perfect look. Hence any number of procedures and implants to enhance and adjust. 

Not only are the androids becoming more like us, we're becoming more like them. Maybe ultimately, we will meet somewhere in the middle - cyborgs one and all.