Most of the questions in the debates about artificial intelligence, robots and the future in recent years have revolved around what machines can do, what they cannot, never can, and why one should still be afraid. Which is why it is a pleasant change on a rainy summer morning to go through his exhibition “KI.Robotik.Design” in the Munich Pinakothek der Moderne with the professor of robotics and artificial intelligence Sami Haddadin. Because he is not only a researcher, but also an enthusiast.
In general, this exhibition is a godsend. So far, Munich has been rather hesitant about its role as one of the world’s leading centers for science and technology in the cityscape. It is still the romantic dollhouse of the city center and the transfiguration of the foothills of the Alps that determine the city’s self-image. There are highlights like Haddadin’s exhibition that make you, as a Munich resident, understand that you are living here in the maelstrom of exponentially accelerating future forces.
The fact that robots can now feel is a decisive step for the next phase in the history of technology
By the way, Sami Haddadin is a star. It was only in May that he received something like the accolade when the German Patent and Trademark Office put his work on the list of milestones for German inventions. Otherwise there are things like the automobile, the X-ray tube, Konrad Zuse’s very first computer and most recently in 1989 the digital music format MP3. Haddadin was included as the 41st inventor for his invention of the tactile robot. In layman’s terms, he taught the machines to feel. In the exhibition there is such a robot arm from the Franka Emika company, which he co-founded. The patent is already six years old, but the fact that robots can now feel is a decisive step for the next phase in the history of technology.
Sami Haddadin, engineer and robot researcher, head of the chair for robotics and system intelligence at the Technical University of Munich.
(Photo: Catherina Hess)
This week comes with the exhibition Sami Haddadin’s big moment in the light of the public or at least the art gallery public. It’s not a particularly aesthetic exhibition. But if you take half an hour, you get a solid basic knowledge of the history and the future of man and machine. Haddadin tells the story from the start. He and his team have recreated one of Leonardo da Vinci’s robots, a figure made of wooden slats, winches and cords. “We helped a little,” he says. The original plans never worked. But as early as the Renaissance they showed how complicated the simultaneous mechanical processes in the human musculoskeletal system are.
The next station projects three manuscripts by the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz onto the wall. There you see a binary code, something like the primordial soup of digital culture. There is an excerpt from his monadology from 1714, in which he already proved at that time that a machine cannot have a mind because it is only an abstraction of man. And then there is an integral sign, something like the A in the endless alphabet of higher mathematics. Sami Haddadin tells the rest of the story using machines. A Leibniz calculating machine is there, the Turing machine and IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer are explained, the early models of those machines that today automate learning, analysis and logistics processes under the term artificial intelligence.
Mind and hands absolutely belong together
What the exhibition also conveys, however, is Sami Haddadin’s view of the world, which on the one hand is pleasantly deeply rooted in the European Enlightenment. On the other hand, he sees the research fields AI and robotics as a unit. He holds the chair for robotics and system intelligence at the Technical University of Munich, so a combination of engineering and computer science is not that often found. He can therefore explain very well why the next step in digitization is not only technically linked to robotics. This is already becoming apparent because the “Internet of Things” with its self-driving cars, its intelligent assistants, care robots and its new industrial revolution will ensure that artificial intelligence makes the leap from the abstract spheres of cyberspace into the physical world . It can also explain very impressively how inseparably intelligence and fine motor skills have determined human evolution. That mind and hands belong together. That you could only develop tools through motor skills.
The penultimate exhibit is a showcase with a paternoster made of dioramas, which shows a brief outline of how this symbiosis of robotics and artificial intelligence is currently taking place. This begins with the development of a design for a musculoskeletal system, inspired by the idea of humans as homunculus, who use a large part of their brain capacity for the motor skills of the hands. Once this is regulated, the body perception follows, which a machine also needs in order to be able to act in space. Then there is the movement. Since everything leads to the ability to manipulate the environment, which also requires hand-eye coordination. At the very end there is the symbiosis of man and machine via the interfaces. It may be technology, but it is also an evolutionary process that took mankind millions of years but technology only decades.
The basic tenor is an optimism that is rooted in a philosophy
It is above all the idea of symbiosis that ultimately shapes the exhibition. There is certainly also a short side path into dystopia with the deep fakes of artificial intelligence, those sinister methods of deception that security experts are currently so afraid of. But the basic tenor is an optimism that is well-founded in a philosophy that assumes that modern society usually manages to subordinate itself to machines and, above all, to make them useful.
At the very end of the exhibition, a two-story installation is waiting to convey what it could look like via art. There are a couple of robot arms on a scaffolding that has been made a little more personable with plants and wood. The arms are fed by an artificial intelligence with the input from the most important news sites on the web. Visitors to the exhibition can also download an app with which they can join this flow of information. The robotic arms process this data on a huge roll of paper into drawings, which are then fed back to the Internet via social media.
The metaphor is as simple as it is friendly. The cycle that arises here between humans, data and machines, which are based on the capabilities of the respective other authority, creates something more, which in this case has no use, but a purely ideal value. It is a physically monumental, but content-wise rather sensitive final chord of an exhibition that wants a lot more than to fulfill an educational mandate.
AI.Robotics.Design. Until September 18, 2022 in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Tue-Sun 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Thu until 8:00 p.m. Info: pinakothek-der-moderne.de