The news this morning (diaried earlier on Daily Kos), that Carnegie Mellon University won the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) robotic vehicle challenge, reminded me that an organization with ties to CMU has developed robotic initiatives that oppose the military-defense complex in a way that combines social protest, high technology, and humor -- in other words, a use of robotics and related technologies not unlike the use of the web to produce Daily Kos. Some of the readers of this diary may have used or seen this technology used over the years; a summary of the Institute for Applied Autonomy and its projects begins after the jump.
The Institute for Applied Autonomy was founded almost a decade ago by robotics researchers who were uncomfortable with the political and economic structures funding robotics research in the United States. The IAA sought to put robotics to work for grassroots political subversion. Its mission statement:
The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.
Over the past nine years, the IAA has developed several projects that advance these goals. IAA research began during the Clinton administration, when the rising number of prisons in the United States and state policies such as California's "Three Strikes" sentencing guidelines increased the number of prisoners held in the United States. In addition, restrictions on protests in public places (including both parties' political conventions) inspired IAA work on technology opposed to Big Brother...take for example, Little Brother.
Little Brother.
Pamphleteer, aka "Little Brother," is a propaganda robot which distributes subersive literature. Pamphleteer is designed to bypass the social conditioning that inhibits activists' ability to distribute propaganda by capitalizing on the aesthetics of cuteness. The robot's form references a tradition of robot aesthetics developed in science fiction and popular media.
Read the paper "Pamphleteer: A Propaganda Robot for Cultural Resistance."
See the 2001 film Little Brother Gets Busted.
GraffitiWriter.
GraffitiWriteris a tele-operated field programable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour. The printing process is similar to that of a dot matrix printer. GraffitiWriter can be deployed in any highly controlled space or public event from a remote location.
The lesson of GraffitiWriter is simple. People -- including law enforcement -- will not only let a cute robot do things that a human cannot without threat of arrest, they will allow the robot to do these things as officially sanctioned activities. This lesson has been proved time and time again in the United States and around the world.
Scroll to the bottom of the page for several video demonstrations of GraffitiWriter in action. See Streetwriterfor advances made on the GraffitiWriter project.
Two related trends in the 21st century -- the War on Terror's encroachment of civil liberties, and the expansion of surveillance throughout the industrialized world -- have inspired recent IAA projects. Some readers may already be familiar with i-See, TXTmob, and Terminal Air.
i-See.
i-See is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. With iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras ("paths of least surveillance") allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors.
Surveillance cameras have proliferated in Germany and several American cities (including Chicago) are looking into expanding the use of these cameras over the next few years. See the Manhattan application of iSee.
TXTmob.
TXTmob is a free service that lets you quickly and easily broadcast txt messages to friends, comrades, and total strangers. The format is similar to an email b-board system. You can sign up to send and receive up-to-the-minute messages from groups of people organized around a range of different topics.
TXTmob might be the most familiar of these projects to readers at Daily Kos, as it was used in 2004 to coordinate protests at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. See a video about TXTmob at the bottom of this page.
Terminal Air.
Terminal Air is a visualization system developed for mapping the movements of planes over time. The flights represented here are ones known or suspected to have been involved in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. The extraordinary rendition program involves the kidnapping and transport of suspect terrorists to undocumented prisons where they can be held, interrogated and tortured outside the research of international scrutiny.
The progression from Little Brother to Terminal Air shows how response to the growing authoritarianism in the United States has evolved. Read the 2007 pdf paper "Engaging Ambivalence: Interventions in Engineering Culture" and see a video demonstration of Terminal Air.
Through humor, subversion of surveillance systems, and novel ways to disseminate propaganda, the IAA produces technological innovation not to serve the military industrial complex, but to make the world a little less Orwellian. Empowering dissent through modern technology -- perhaps not what DARPA envisioned, but a message that may resonate with readers of this blog.