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March28th

Theatre, Comedy, Preachers and Mothers

Posted in: Comedy, Inspiration

Last time I was in Boston it was gloriously sunny. This time Boston is alternatively a nipple hardening freeze-fest, or worse-than-London-in-February festival of rain. Still, a weekend in Boston is not to be sniffed at. This weekend I’ll see a performance and then be in one.

I head to the Boston Public Library, a fantastic edifice to erudition and, conveniently, next to the half price theatre tickets booth in Copley Square where I randomly pick my evening’s entertainment – a play called ‘Entertaining Mr. Sloane’ by British playwright Joe Orton. I was hoping to see how an American cast would handle the peculiarly English quirks of Orton’s dark humour (and the accents). It turns out the cast is all British, which is no doubt good for the play, but ruins some of my fun.

The library is one of those beautiful, old school, vaulted ceiling places and I feel all proper and Bostonian as I write. My pre-theatre dinner is jollied by a conversation about technology and faith with the sociable Ellis, a Methodist preacher in a sharp suit, with an easy laugh who laments his church’s inability to keep pace with modern means of communication.

Today I stay at Tracy’s flat to read. Tracy herself is out an about for most of the day, including a trip to church with her mum who is aggressively intrigued by me. “Hello,” I say. “I’m staying with Tracy for a few days.” “I can see that!” she exclaims “But who are you?!” I get the impression she thinks I may be some decidedly unsavoury love interest of her daughter’s and when I tell her I’m in Boston researching a book this is met with suspicion but, ultimately, a request for a free copy. Tracy later tells me that her mother is a selfless servant of others and has “difficulty chilling out”.

That evening Tracy has arranged for a group of her (sociable and likeable) friends to see me do a brief set at Harvard’s Comedy Studio, arguable the most intelligent crowd, well, anywhere. It’s the sort of crowd that tends to heckle with technical points, rather than disdain. I don’t get any heckles, but after my set (which, I have to say, went rather well) one medical researcher did approach me to question my reading of a neuro-anatomy paper that forms the basis of one of my routines. Only in Harvard.

As is the tradition at the Comedy Studio after the show the comics and Rick Jenkins (the owner, and tonight’s generous compere) descend to the Karaoke Bar below to listen to drunk students ruin soft rock hits from the eighties (as if those weren’t bad enough already). Tracy takes a rather brilliant photo that juxtaposes Rick and the Karaoke lyrics to a diVinyls hit.
September15th

Butt Splicing, the solar way.

Posted in: Solar Energy
I spend today with the good people of Konarka, a ‘thin film’ ‘organic’ solar panel manufacturer with a nascent manufacturing facility in Bedford, (a 45 minute drive south of Cambridge). Konarka is one of a gaggle of solar power start-ups that are vying to move us to renewable solar energy and make a tidy profit in the process. I’m hoping to visit a several of these firms for chapter 3, which is nominally entitled “Energy Crisis? What Energy Crisis?”

After all, just 0.3% of the energy hitting the Earth’s surface in the form of sunlight would meet all our needs. We’re awash with it. So, what we have is actually an energy conversion crisis. Or more specifically a cost of energy conversion crisis. That’s why fossil fuels have done so well, because they pack a lot of energy punch in ratio to the amount of money it takes to release that energy in a usable form. This was obvious as far back as 1861 when French inventor Augustin Mouchout developed a steam engine powered entirely by the sun. Of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution he prophetically remarked, “Eventually industry will no longer find in Europe the resources to satisfy its prodigious expansion. Coal will undoubtedly be used up. What will industry do then?” But despite patronage from Emperor Napoleon III Mouchout’s invention never caught on. High costs of manufacture, coupled with the low price of coal made other power conversion technologies more economically viable – a problem that has dogged the solar energy industry ever since. But that’s about to change.

There are two key technology battles that the solar energy industry is fighting that are worth highlighting –
- reducing the cost of manufacture and ownership of solar power hardware (e.g. solar panels)
- making it more efficient (i.e. increasing the amount of sunlight converted into electricity).
More specifically, it’s the relationship between the two – how much energy do you get per buck? If that figure compares favourably to fossil fuels then you’ll begin to see large-scale take-up of solar power not for ‘green’ reasons but for commercial ones. And as fossil fuels get more expensive (as they become more scarce) and solar gets cheaper (as the energy:cost ratio improves) that inflection point draws ever closer. In fact, it’s arguable that it just happened. (I won’t get into a discussion of costs per watt here, because untangling the relationship between such measures and real world deployment of the technology is no small task - hence my use of the word ‘arguable’ above – but it will be covered in the book).

Tracy Wemett, Konarka’s PR woman and, it turns out, a passionate advocate of education (she mentors disadvantaged teenagers when she’s not helping her clients) drives me to the firm’s manufacturing facility. Tracy, it has to be said, drives like she’s immortal (i.e. has no fear of death). Still, death if it comes will probably be swift, we’re in her open top sports car on a beautiful sunny day. I need to look up sometimes and enjoy these moments of the trip. After all, there’s an elevated chance this could be one of my last moments on the planet.

We make it, still alive, to Konarka’s facility which is actually an old printing plant that belonged to Polaroid. Because Konarka print solar cells. It’s a hell of a printer I can tell you – Larry Weldon, Konarka head of manufacturing takes me on a tour – but the result is a flexible solar panel no thicker than a few sheets of paper. There’s no bulky, rigid silicon-based panels here. Konarka’s technology centres around ‘organic nano-particles’ (essentially long chains of polymers) that have energy generating characteristics. I’ll make this chemistry understandable in the book (it’s pretty cool) – and one of the guys who helped Konarka make use of it is Nobel Prize winning Alan Heeger. Heeger won the 2,000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (along with Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa) “for their discovery and development of conductive polymers.” That’s enough geek speak for now. Anyway, you can wrap this stuff around laptop bags, garden furniture or roll it on top of your garage. It’s mobile solar energy generation, something that I’m becoming increasingly interested in, and its implications for our future. But more on that below.

I love the way engineers talk. They’re so matter-of-fact that sometimes you can miss that what they are saying is often quite extraordinary. Larry is no exception. He’s at the centre of a revolution, developing ways to turn the science of solar energy into a cheap manufactured solution. He’s one of the guys addressing that central problem of the cost:energy efficiency ratio (and by extension, helping to end our dependence of fossil fuels). Later I update my twitter status to read: “I like engineers – they talk revolution like it was replacing a fuse”.

Touring the factory is fun. It’s nice to see the future being made rather than just talked about. At the end of the production line is the quality control facility – including a test bed with powerful lamps that are ‘calibrated to 1 Sun’. This is where that all important efficiency rating is determined. Rather annoyingly the solar industry tends to quote a misleading efficiency metric (based on a standard called AM 1.5). For instance, let’s say a manufacturer claims that their cells have an efficiency rating of 10%. This infers that they convert 10% of the light energy hitting them into usable electric current, an inference the PR machine is happy for us to make. However, what ‘10% efficiency’ actually means is, ‘this panel will convert 10% of the light energy hitting it into usable electric current if it’s midday, if the panel is at the equator, and there’s no clouds in the sky’. The measure doesn’t take into account how, for instance, some technologies can generate electricity in low light, or from ambient angles. So a technology that generates lower levels of energy but can work in more ‘difficult’ light conditions (say earlier in the day, or later at dusk, or in cloudier climates etc) might actually generate more energy over a day than one with a higher efficiency rating. Bad solar power industry! Please start using some metrics that reveal the whole story. The test bed looks beautiful, the blue plastic sheeting surrounding it giving off a kind of ethereal sci-fi luminescence.

I have to confess I’m also amused by a machine I see on the tour which proudly displays its function as ‘BUTT SPLICER B’. Larry, Tracy and I joke that when this factory used to manufacture asses this machine was where they put in the crack. It’s actual function is far more prosaic – simply butting two films up to each other for joining together, but I’m adamant that whoever named this knew what they were doing. And to be honest who can blame them? Given the option of ‘dual film joiner’ or ‘butt splicer’ I know where I’d go.

I thank Larry for taking the time to show me around and head out of the factory with some trepidation, because I know the only way I’m getting back to Boston (and my talk with Konarka’s CEO Rick Hess) is with Tracy at the wheel. The photo she takes of me outside the plant could be last of me breathing.

Rick Hess is what I would call ‘very CEO’. He’s confident, relaxed with the air of man who can smell bullshit from 3 miles away. He’s also got the easy manner of a man who probably doesn’t have to worry too much about his pension. What I like about him is he’s honest and generous about his competitors – about where they have advantages or niches that he can’t exploit.

Soon our conversation begins to echo the themes that emerged during my talk with Bill Mitchell the day before – about technological advances that fragment existing models of behaviour or business. “Phones went wireless, Internet went wireless and the only thing that’s left you have to find a wire for is power,” says Rick. It’s an obvious statement but incredibly powerful – and it has interesting implications for the utility model of getting your power. At the beginning of August, Colorado’s biggest utility, Xcel, tried to put a surcharge on homes and businesses using rooftop solar power. Hmmm…

This article from Newsweek has some interesting observations:

In 2008, rooftop solar added more than 10 times the amount of power to the country’s grid than utilities did. Maryland-based Sun Edison, the country’s biggest installer of solar panels in the retail market, added more electricity to the grid last year, 25 megawatts, than did the entire utility industry.

…and…

“The utilities are more interested in protecting their stranglehold on the power grid and preserving their century-old business model than they are producing clean electricity,” says Jim Harvey, who heads up the Joshua Tree, Calif.-based Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, an advocacy group that’s staunchly opposed to utility-generated solar power.

The ‘off grid’ solar revolution has potentially massive benefits for the developing world. “If you look at the developing world in terms of communications,” says Rick, “they skipped wires and went straight to wireless and I think for power they’re going to do the same thing”.

I try to imagine what an alien visitor would say looking at the way we distribute power. “You do what? You wait for millions of years until old biomass has become coal or oil? Then you burn it, to turn a turbine? Then you send the electricity you genereate down a huge system of wires, and if someone wants some of it they have to find the end of one of those wires and plug in? And you charge them for this shambles?” At this point I imagine said visitor pointing upwards with whatever it points with and saying, “Never think about taking it straight out the sky then?” Mankind shuffles awkwardly on its feet. “Well, you know, we are starting to do that. And look! – we have a butt splicer too.”
September14th

Urban Viagra

Posted in: Robotics, Smart Cities

Today I meet Bill Mitchell, head of MITs ‘Smart Cities’ group. Bill’s an avuncular, friendly Australian who has a rather charming habit of saying incredible insightful things that seem remarkably obvious until you realise you haven’t heard anyone say them before. Originally from the Australian bush Bill’s come a long way, to be one of the world’s most respected thinkers on how cities evolve and how they can serve their citizens and the planet (including being part of the solution to global warming). In his native land his lectures sell out instantly. He’s become something of an architectural celebrity.

One of his key themes is the cycles of ‘fragmentation and recombination’ that manifest as new technologies arrive on the scene. For instance, the village well loses its ‘focal point’ status when you get piped water. Now the focal point becomes the tap. It used to be that if you wanted to hear a song you had to go to see it performed, but technology advanced so you could listen to it on the radio, and now you can carry it around (along with a million others) in your pocket. In fact today you can pluck almost any song out the air (don’t you just love ‘Spotify’?). Years ago, if you wanted to make a telephone call you used to have be where the telephone was, now you can talk anywhere there’s cell phone coverage. The architectural shrines we made to facilitate private conversations (telephone boxes) are slowly disappearing. The role of the office is evolving too, as mobile technologies make the need to be next to your paper filing cabinet no longer an imperative. The office won’t completely disappear of course – humans need to get together – but it will become “a much more humane, collegiate space”. “When any place can be a work place there’s no excuse for making it anything other than a human, people-centred wonderful place,” says Bill. “You need to build environments that encourage serendipitous interaction, that encourage people to bump into each other. It’s important to make a great café for instance. I’ve a very strong belief in the potential of people to do amazing things if you just get out the way. We now have technology that is good enough to just work, but get out the way”.

I wonder what technologies are coming down the line that will drive further fragmentation and recombination? One is likely to be power generation, particularly as solar power becomes cheaper and more efficient. When you can generate your power where you are and take your building, your company, your house, yourself potentially ‘off-grid’ another beneficial untying from a fixed, mandated framework occurs, another one of Bill’s ‘fragmentations’. In the back of my mind a thought starts to niggle… ‘When might something like this happen to our political structures?’ Indeed a thesis about how an increasingly networked world interacts with archaic hierarchical bureaucracy and government is beginning to form… maybe it’ll be one of the themes in the book. Networks subvert hierarchies, and our networks in many spaces are growing and becoming more responsive…

Naturally there was a lot more we talked about that I’ll cover in the book, including the coalescence of Bill’s work with that of Cynthia Breazeal – and how our buildings may become sensate social beings that know us and work with us, dynamically adapting to our moods and needs. We also talked about how becoming less tied to infrastructure allows us to connect more readily around values. We also discussed how old cities can be adapted over time to become smarter, Bill talking about various doses of ‘urban viagra’. Indeed.

Returning to my hotel I meet Kris and Arthur at the bar – a lovely couple from San Francisco, along with a gay couple (I didn’t get their names) who taught me the phrase ‘full frontal nerdity’. Arthur works for Google, being one of the brains behind their ‘Android’ mobile operating system. He’s interested in the book and asks if I’d like him to arrange a ‘Google Talk’ when I’m at the Google campus in January. I’m flabbergasted. The Google Talks I’ve seen have been given by the likes of the people I’m interviewing, not novice authors, but he insists my journey and observations would be of interest. Arthur and Kris are generous and lively conversationalists and by coincidence we find out we’ll be in Sydney at the same time in November. They’re also coming to London to live of a while. I think I’ve made some new friends.
September13th

Dating advice from computers…

Posted in: Bonkers (in a good way), Comedy

I spend the morning visiting the MIT museum. I’d expected an ultra-modern edifice to public engagement. Actually it’s several rooms of artefacts (including the remains of Cynthia Breazeal’s ground breaking social robot ‘Kismet’) sitting sadly in display cases with explanatory panels that say, in totality, “MIT thinks about a lot of things, but not the role museums”. I suspect a lack of funding is forcing the museum staff to do the best they can, but I can’t help feeling that MIT is treating its heritage like an ex-lover that it’d rather not see anymore.

In one room I find a computer running START “the world’s first Web-based question answering system” developed by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It’s one of many attempts to make web-searching more amenable to natural language. So, when I type in a question “What is consciousness?” it returns with the Wikipedia entry on the subject, but when I ask it where the nearest T-station (underground metro) is it says, “Sorry, no one has told me where the nearest T-station is”. “Will machines ever become sentient?” I type. “Unfortunately I wasn’t told if machines will ever become sentient” comes the reply, which demonstrates a good ‘understanding’ of grammar at least, but fails to link me to any of the numerous resources on the web about Artificial Intelligence (something its parents at the MIT AI lab would surely be ashamed of). START lets itself down grammatically over my next (admittedly facile) question “Should I start dating again?” I ask. “I don’t know if you should START the dating again”. The capitalisation and the extraneous ‘the’ give the reply a kind of inadvertent psychotherapeutic gravitas. Is the program trying to infer that I’ve never really had a break from dating?

Dead Kismet

Despite its limitations I enjoy the museum, the rather staid panels are good revision for some of the subjects I’ve been covering. The explanation of DNA, whilst tired and broken in places, helps ‘bed down’ some of the knowledge I’ve been acquiring – it’s becoming ‘familiar’. The challenge for the book will be to make sure that I explain this knowledge without that familiarity making my explanations opaque to someone as new as I was to the subject a few short months ago.

The rest of the afternoon is taken up with more research, which I am momentarily distracted from by an e-mail from Amy O’Reilly. I’ve never met Amy but she got in touch after the British Science Festival gig to say how much she enjoyed it and has forwarded me some fantastically funny research (coincidentally by some students at MIT). Ever heard of those conspiracy theorists that like to wear silver foil hats to keep ‘government spies’ out of their brainwaves? Well, a group of dedicated researchers wanted to see if this strategy was effective…

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

See the full paper here

Do you like my helmet?

In the evening I head to the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square. Rick the promoter has a full bill of 12(!) and therefore can’t even find 5 minutes for me, so I have the odd and pleasurable experience of being a club without performing. A number of the comics seem impressed I’m writing a book and, I think, get the impression that back in the UK I’m more famous than I am. The second most (obviously) gay comic in the room asks me if I’m single and flirts with me. I’m flattered but suddenly wish I was on stage.

The club is well run, has a great vibe and clearly attracts not only a better class of comic, but encourages the best out of them. It’s one of the places TV producers scout for new talent on the East Coast and you can see why. Next time I’m in Boston I’ll be here again, but behind the mic.
September12th

Get your questions here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

It’s the weekend, and I’m trying to relax – but finding it hard. Thing is, next week is choc-a-bloc with interviews with a wide spectrum of interesting thinkers and so I’m swatting up and thinking of good questions. Monday is Bill Mitchell, head of MIT’s Smart Cities group, Tuesday I visit ‘thin film’ solar panel manufacturers Konarka, Wednesday is Juan Enriquez (I’m particularly looking forward to this) and Friday the mighty Wally Broecker (of ‘er, folks I’ve discovered climate change’ fame) and Klaus Lackner (hopefully to be of ‘er, I think I’ve solved climate change’ fame) – all people I not only want to ask good questions of, but who themselves are pre-eminent question askers.

Thanks Mum

There’s a great quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Isidor Rabi that I often trot out in my day job (co-running learning consultancy Flow Associates). Asked why he became a scientist he replied, “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions – made me become a scientist!”

There’s a kind of semi-carnival going on outside my hotel, with the fringe benefit that food stalls of all nationalities are serving up steaming portions of culinary goodness. I spend half an hour trying to choose something to eat. With my brain full of genomics, the future of energy and the implications of climate change choosing what to have for lunch suddenly becomes an intractable problem. It’s like my brain has switched into a different gear – and it’s finding it hard to shift to the ‘mundane’ task of choosing what to chow down on. I should be enjoying the atmosphere, the music, the smells, the joy of travelling in a foreign city but I’m distracted. Standing on the corner of Main St. and Vassar St. in Cambridge is, after all, like standing at one of the focal points of our future. If you wander a block in any direction you’ll find laboratories and research institutions that are creating new knowledge (and applications for it) at an incredible rate. Take the Broad Institute for instance, a joint venture between Harvard and MIT, “to pioneer a ‘new model’ of collaborative science [to] transform medicine.” Just down the road is The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT created “with a mandate to use neuroscience to help people with brain disorders, and to ultimately benefit all of mankind by improving human communication and understanding.” The MIT media lab is round the corner on Ames St where “unorthodox research approaches” envision “the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities”. In the Stata centre you’ll find the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The list goes on and on… If the future wanted a zip code, I’m standing in the middle of one of the strongest contenders.

MIT attracts people who ask good questions. Playful minds with a strong desire to find out ‘new stuff’. MIT encourages us to ask ‘What?’, ‘When?’ and ‘How?’ but also seems to have a strong emphasis on ‘Why?’ I’m beginning to feel I want to live here. You can almost smell the spirit of enquiry. It’s in the brick, the sidewalk. I walk past a advertisement that says “For rent: office and laboratory space”. Even the estate agents know that to sell in Cambridge MA, you sell by saying ‘discover stuff here’. Charles Kettering the inventor once said “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. ” If he’d been alive today he might have said, “so I’m moving to Boston…”
September9th

First US gig…

Posted in: Comedy

I return from my first gig in the US – at Mottley’s comedy club. Before the gig I’m worried there may be some language issues and check a few terms with fellow comedians. Turns out that ‘dogging’ isn’t a word out here (if you’re a US reader of this blog, please don’t put this into Google). I use this semantic differential in my act, explaining the meaning and inferring that a chap in the front row simply calls this ‘Tuesday night’.

It’s Mottley’s ‘new comics’ night (which in America I guess I am) so it’s a big bill of short sets. This suits me fine. Not sure I feel like doing a 30 to my first US audience. There’s every possibility my sense of humour might be as welcome as cancer here in Massachusetts.

The club is friendly, small, well run. It’s a quiet night and the audience reaches barely 20. I’ve just missed the Boston Comedy Festival and post labour day it’s hard for the venue to pull in a full house, especially mid-week. I’m happy about this. It’s a safe gig, but with enough punters to generate a good vibe. The compere does a good job of making a virtue of the low numbers and the acts are generally good. I go down well and the assembled mirth makers are quick to say ‘well done’, which is nice, given I’m essentially alone in the city. I’m beginning to see stand-up as simply a way to make my evenings less solitary. I think working in a ‘Red Sox’ (the local baseball team) gag was worth it. I arrange to meet one of the acts on Sunday at Harvard’s Comedy Studio. I’ve already e-mailed the promoter there who thinks he may have a spot for me that night, and my new friend promises to advocate for me too. The Comedy Studio has a reputation for ‘smart’ comedy in Boston, so I’m eager to get some stage time there if I can…
September9th

Robot-human relations… and tramps

Posted in: Articles, Bonkers (in a bad way), Bonkers (in a good way), Robotics

Cynthia Breazeal

Met with Cynthia Breazeal today… and it was great. But, before I headed over to the MIT Personal Robotics Lab I headed to Harvard Square to buy the chocolates that were a condition of my interview. You see, Cynthia doesn’t talk to that many people. As her formidable PA, Polly Guggenheim keeps telling me every time we speak ‘Do you know how many people I turn down?’ reminding me of my special and precarious position… At one point during my negotiations with Polly she says, “I’m maybe of a mind to grant you an interview…” to which I reply, “So, what does it take?”. “Honestly?” she says. “Chocolate. Good dark chocolate”.

Therefore my first trip of the day is to L.A. Burdick, fine chocolatiers with a store in Harvard Square. On my walk there I pass an aggressively drunk tramp shouting vigourously to no-one in particular. As I draw closer to him I realise that, like most of the aggressive drunk tramps I’ve witnessed, he has a broad Scottish accent. Does Scotland export these globally then? I thought it was just a UK thing. Then a theory strikes me. Maybe most of them aren’t Scottish. Perhaps something about the itinerant alcoholic lifestyle alters the vocal chords to makes one sound Scottish, giving that proud nation an unfortunate cadre of fake ambassadors around the planet. I have a short fantasy about asking him where he’s from and receiving the reply ‘Rio de Janeiro, pal!’ Or maybe, after all, the Scots are just better at producing drunken tramps than other nations… I’d like to see a study.

I deliver the chocolates to the Personal Robotics lab and they are received first with detailed inspection, then approval. I’ve done well, getting the interview off to a good start. In fact I’m invited to share the chocolates, being told that the antioxidants within will do me good. I decline. I want all that chocolate goodwill going into the interview.

Cynthia is a generous interviewee, but clearly has no time for waffle. She speaks voluminously in response to my questions but with great efficiency. Our talk ranges from robot architectures, to machine intelligence, to the economic impacts of robotics, to the ethics of sociable machines – taking in learning and developmental psychology along the way. Early on in our conversation she says she’s driven by a vision of robots “as interesting personalities in their own right, robots crossing over into what we would consider living systems that relate to us” – not what robots are now, but what they could be. She’s very clear to draw a distinction between robot personalities and human personalities. A constant refrain in our talk is that she is not trying to, and indeed sees little value in creating artificial humans. She talks of human-robot relations as a new kind of relationship. She talks of robot emotions, not human emotions. “Robots aren’t humans, right?”

Cynthia operates in a world that is both interdisciplanary (bringing together mechanics, computing, artificial intelligence, animation, cognitive and development psychology) and dogged by ‘definitional problems’. How for instance do you know if your robot is ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ when no definition of what ‘life’ of ‘consciousness’ can be agreed on? Indeed, one of the contributions social robotics may make to our knowledge is helping us to define those terms, another driver behind Cynthia’s work. “We’re starting to see sociable robots as a very intriguing way to learn about people”.

The full interview, of course, will be in the book, along with, I hope, a new term to replace ‘robot’ which Cynthia and I discussed as being a loaded term, and no longer representative of the sociable machines she imagines will share our future. She’s tasked me with coming up with that term… and I think I’ve got it, but will sit with it for a while…

Following our interview I ‘meet’ the world’s most famous sociable robot, Leonardo, although he’s sadly, switched off. But I urge you to watch this video of Leo in action – and glimpse something of the future of sociable machines…
September8th

Too much input

Posted in: Comedy, Robotics

Spent most of today preparing for my interview with sociable robots pioneer, Cynthia Breazeal, plugging gaps in my knowledge around machine ethics, artificial intelligence and robot architectures. Yes, I know, I can’t believe how sexy I am either. Am going a bit stir crazy sat in my hotel room attempting lite-boffin status so decided to see if I could find a comedy club to let me perform this week. I’m getting a bit lonely out here by myself and need some social interaction. Straight of the bat Mottley’s Comedy on Chatham St. offer me some stage time tomorrow night… So, looking forward to that. My first US gig!
September7th

Labour Day in Boston…

Posted in: Articles, Comedy, Life Sciences, Robotics, Synthetic Biology

I arrive in Boston tired after a long journey from Guildford, via Woking, Heathrow and a nice chat on the plane with Ryan, a undergraduate physics student at Brown University (which has recently entered the public consciousness in the UK, it being the choice of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson). We have a long chat about genetics (he’s reading Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) the Large Hadron Collider (he’s not a big fan, saying that the money spent on it could have funded thousands of other labs globally) and what to call meals when your flying between timezones. We can’t decide whether it’s ‘Linner’ or ‘Dunch’. Thinking about the LHC, its current ‘out of operation’ status is something of an embarassment all round, not least I suspect for the person who had to make the phonecall to all the funders… ‘What do you mean it’s the parts and the labour?!’

Hungry, I find a seafood bar near my hotel, where I’m rewarded with a cool beer and the hugest starter I’ve witnessed, well, since the last time I was in the US. Even in these first few hours Boston reveals itself to be a town that values intellect. My waitress is training to be a pychotherapist after quitting her job as a producer at ABC and I chat to senior couple (childhood sweethearts) one of whom worked on Byte magazine, which was something of a sacred text for computer geeks everywhere in the late 70s. Before going to bed I e-mail my article about the psychology of humour to The Telegraph and note with amusement that they’ve let me have my gags about Ed Milliband (Labour) and Lembit Opik (Liberal Democrat) but have removed my suggestion that Tory’s get caught naked more often than representatives of other political parties. Hmmm. I’ll refrain from wondering what this says about The Telegraph’s sense of humour.

A jet-lagged inspired early rise the next day sees me set of to explore Boston, which is deserted. I put this down to the early hour but it stays ominously quiet. Outside the MIT media lab (where I’ll interview Cynthia Breazeal on Wednesday) I meet a grumpy PhD who explains it’s a national holiday, ‘Labor Day’ (like William Shatner, a Canadian import). He’s not happy, explaining he’s left completing his doctoral dissertation a little late, hence having to work on a holiday that traditionally marks the end of summer for US citizens.

The day warms into one of pure summery goodness (if this is the last day of summer it’s going out on a high) and I walk and walk and walk. All in all I’m out for 8 hours, and walking for 7 of them. In the Public Gardens I stumble on a large demonstration in support of President Obama’s proposed health reforms. It’s interesting to think that while I’m here I’ll be meeting scientists that may make many of the conditions that these demonstrators believe need legislative reform to provide equitable treatment a thing of the past. Indeed, my research on the genomics revolution shows it has the potential to drastically reduce the healthcare burden in all societies… but as ever politics will need to play its part. Let’s hope it’s an equitable one. Genomics has applications in reducing the cost of health care but also raises the ugly spectre of insurance firms turning you down for cover based on a risk-assessment of your genome.

I chat to a few of the demonstrators and ask why they think some people are anti-reform. A few mention the worry it’s ‘socialism by the back door’. In America it seems anything that might have the word ‘socialist’ attached to it is treated like one of the ugly tumours genetic medicine may banish. It strikes me as sad that the word has become devalued by misinterpretation, like ‘feminism’ seems to have and, to a certain extent, ‘optimism’. One thing that is bothering me is that everyone I speak to asks me where in Australia I’m from.

Boston is a city built on learning. You can’t move for college campuses. I wander to Harvard Medical School, where I’ll interview Professor of Genetics George Church on Friday and feel slightly awed by how important the building on 77 Louis Pasteur Avenue is in relation to the future of medicine and synthetic biology.

Today, by contrast, was a research day, reading up on sociable robots… and comedy clubs in the city. I’ve scored a gig tomorrow night at Mottley’s Comedy Club which should be fun, my first gig in the states…

I’ve just stayed up to do an interview on BBC Radio Wales about the psychology of humour, it’s 1:40am. Time for bed.

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