This article explains recent work to "remote control" sharks and other creatures. This imagines and extends control and containment of animals in another technological direction. Previously we used technologies that looked like fences, gates, locks and now the huge farming enclosures that are indistinguishable from other factories to contain and control animals, radically changing where the animals would go, the nutrient cycling they fostered and the territorial resources they effected. Now these fences that enforce forms of servitude and domination extend further into the body of the animal...
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18925416.300.html.
Secondly, a New York Times article
WEEK IN REVIEW | March 5, 2006
Ideas & Trends: The Art of Building a Robot to Love
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
If robots can act in lots of ways, how do people want them to act, happy or sad, bubbly or cranky?
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“Some designers give their machines a human touch. Dr. Bartneck's robot, for example, called eMuu, is a teardrop-shaped cyclops that can arch its eyebrow and mouth to express anger, happiness or sadness.
But not even a rudimentary face is necessary. Dogs, Dr. Nass noted, show happiness by wagging their tail. ''They do a brilliant job expressing emotion,'' he said. ''A robot doesn't have to announce, 'This is my happy look,' just as my dog doesn't.''
This article introduces Maja Mataric's and the work of others in research to do with emotionally expressive robotics covering presentations given at the Human Robot Interaction conference in Salt Lake City (see: http://hri2006.org/). This represents work to "instrumentalize" emotions. One argument is that designers can exploit the sophisticated emotionally lingua franca of emotions to facilitate effective communication, that we are good at emotional readings because it gives us predictive information about what will happen next. Another argument is that people are good at learning, and can adapt and learn invariant systems. Why try to make them emotional—who prefers the animated paperclip to the pull down menus of Microsoft Word? Don’t we want to reduce complexity, rather than increase it. Other emotional views (so to speak) can be found at: http://emotion-research.net/workshops. Are your dogs “emotionally” expressive? What makes you able to project (or not) emotional response?
Some designers give their machines a human touch. Dr. Bartneck's robot, for example, called eMuu, is a teardrop-shaped cyclops that can arch its eyebrow and mouth to express anger, happiness or sadness.
But not even a rudimentary face is necessary. Dogs, Dr. Nass noted, show happiness by wagging their tail. ''They do a brilliant job expressing emotion,'' he said. ''A robot doesn't have to announce, 'This is my happy look,' just as my dog doesn't.''
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