Military buzz: race, robots and insects

ABSTRACT

Claiming to “let evolution do the thinking for you,” biologists are teaming up with roboticists and computer engineers in the emerging field of biomimetics to build animal-machines. One of the outcomes of these interdisciplinary collaborations is the development of biomimetic robot-insects: robots inspired by insect life. Biomimetic scientists assert that their technologies will be cleaner, greener, and more holistic, since they imitate Mother Earth’s own capabilities, including for waging war. For example, biomimetic scientists regularly cite the examples of Velcro – a technology inspired by the ways that burrs attach to the fur on a dog’s back – or solar panels – which are inspired by the way that leaves convert sunlight into energy. The specific focus of this article is on biomimetic insect-robot technologies; specifically the development of robots that imitate swarming behavior. Grounding the rise of these swarming technologies in a cultural context preoccupied with an increase in militarization, I show that although biomimetic scientists often claim that these technologies will be more environmentally friendly, in fact they rely upon reified assumptions about “Nature,” on the commodification of Indigenous knowledges, and on racist metaphors of terrorists as “swarms” as part of their technological development. Examining a specific swarm of insect-robots known as nano quadrotors, I demonstrate that the imitation of Mother Earth does not reflect the natural world as it is but instead works to shape that world, and, in doing so, I problematize the utopian possibilities suggested for biomimetic swarming technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Biomimetics
• robotics
• imitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Looking to biology to solve a number of robotics issues, including challenges around establishing synchrony – or the coordination of a common action at a common time – Nagpal’s interest in fireflies learning to work in unison is being applied to her research on sensor network application, since synchrony of disparate parts of a network remains a major challenge for large coordinated systems (Nagpal et al., 2005).

² TED is a nonprofit organization that runs a website that showcases what it terms the “world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers.” It has sponsored a number of independent talk organizations, including Tedx program .

³ Following other scientific practitioners in the field, I use the terms biomimicry and biomimetics interchangeably.

⁴ Of course, evolution was and remains a concept surrounded by controversy. It is additionally important to note the connection of evolution to eugenics projects through Nazi beliefs in the possibility of the evolution of the human race.

⁵ Historically, Vannevar Bush helped to consolidate links between robotics and the military. A presidential scientific advisor to both FDR and Truman, Vannevar Bush was instrumental in consolidating the relationship between US scientific projects and the military (Edwards, 1996 cited in Sabanovic, 2007, p. 68). The best known example is Vannevar Bush’s work in establishing the Manhattan Project.

⁶ There has been some debate within the robotics community about the ethics of accepting military funds, including from Carnegie Mellon roboticist Illah Nourbakhsh who publicly has refused funds from the military. There is also a society for the study of robot ethics which includes conversations about the ethics of funding (http://www.roboethics.org/).

⁷ Honey bees can understand the concepts of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ (Giurfa, Zhang, Jenett, Menzel, & Srinivasan, 2001), can count from one to four (Dacke & Srinivasan, 2008), and are able to accurately group visual stimuli into categories (reviewed by Benard, Stach, & Giurfa, 2006). These qualities are disdained by roboticists who represent insects as complex machines.

⁸ I’d like to thank my brilliant research assistant Tanya Watson for this point.

⁹ One example would be the racist appropriation of Indigenous symbols like the talking stick to other spaces in ways that collapse all Indigenous culture into a small set of cultural practices. This type of Indigenous appropriation is similar to the processes that occur with orientalism, in which the othered culture becomes a phantasmagoric projection of the west.

¹⁰ Lott shows that in a trend of domination, there are also paradoxical moments of liberation through “subversive and enraged lyrics in minstrelsy” (1993, p. 24). Moreover, even racist imitative practices like blackface and yellowface sometimes provided ways for performers to reveal the constructed and performative nature of race. At other times, minstrelsy and yellowface revealed the pain and horror of racism through a demonstration of the ramifications of the oppression of othered bodies. Blackface (as well as other racist imitative practices including yellowface) also sometimes allowed musical and performative aspects of othered cultures and heritages to be handed down between generations as part of US performance culture, as well as to sometimes allow people of color to gain more “control over images generated on the stage” (Moon, 2005, p. 6).

¹¹ I’d like to thank Darin Barney for this astute point.

¹² In a talk for Ted.com, Dr. Vijay Kumar asks “So why build robots like this? Well, robots like this have many applications. You can send them into buildings … as first responders to look for intruders. Maybe to look for biochemical leaks, gaseous leaks. You can use them for applications like construction … .The robots can be used for transporting cargo … . Robots can be sent into collapsed buildings to assess the damage after natural disasters or sent into reactive buildings to map radiation levels (2012).

¹³ I’d like to thank feminist theorist Tanya Watson for this astute observation.

¹⁴ Reviving old rivalries between NASA scientists and corporate bioengineers, some scientists have contempt for the significant resistance to building what some NASA roboticists term “faster, smaller, dumber, and `more effective” robots (Scigliano, 1998, p. 51).

¹⁵ Of course, swarming is not only about militaristic formations. As cultural anthropologist Jake Kosek found in his study of the bee as military technology, there are many swarming behaviors that do not fit militarism (2010). As Kosek states, “Swarming, a form of collective action that has been recently appropriated by Pentagon strategists, is the way honeybee colonies move into a new nest. In my experience, swarms are often gentle, sometimes confused. I have even seen a swarm return to a hive that it previously left – a collective behavior that is not supposed to happen” (2010, p. 652). However, the elements of swarming that are of most interest to the US state are those that are imagined to be easily militarized.

¹⁶ Unlike Karen-Sue Taussig (2009), I disagree that biology is less militarized as a science than physics. For further reading on the militarization of everyday life, see The Complex (Turse, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the SSHRC [#230934-191699-2001].