As a Neanderthal researcher, I’m familiar with the stereotypes of Homo neanderthalensis: dull, unintelligent, lacking the imagination to do more than bash each other on the head. They just sat around, gnawing on mammoth, awaiting their inevitable extinction. So, in 2018, I was excited when I saw a headline announcing “It’s Official: Neanderthals Created Art.” I quickly found the scientific article and read that new evidence from Spain had dated art in three caves at more than 65,000 years old. The only people in Europe at that time were Neanderthals!
Wait, I thought. It won’t be long before someone will question the date or suggest it was really modern humans who got there earlier and painted the caves. Sure enough, as soon as researchers said “Neanderthal art,” an NPR science news correspondent responded doubtfully, “If new evidence shows that humans actually arrived earlier than scientists now think, well, that’s the pattern of science.”
I wasn’t surprised. A year later, 44 researchers co-authored a paper critiquing the study from Spain, writing, “there is still no convincing archaeological evidence that Neanderthals created Iberian cave art.”
So, what is the evidence for Neanderthal art? And why are so many people skeptical that Neanderthals had the cognitive capability to make paintings, ornamentation, and other symbolic creations?
DID NEANDERTHALS MAKE CAVE PAINTINGS?
When most people think about Paleolithic art, they picture the 20,000-year-old paintings in Lascaux Cave or the 36,000-year-old paintings in Chauvet Cave, both located in France. These are generally associated with modern humans during the Upper Paleolithic—not Neanderthals, who lived around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago in Europe and parts of Asia. [1]
But, actually, dating cave paintings is notoriously difficult. They are generally made with mineral-based pigments that can’t be directly dated because they don’t contain organic matter. A few may contain organic material such as charcoal, which can be radiocarbon dated, but that only works for paintings younger than 50,000 years. For many cave paintings, researchers assume they are younger than 40,000 years or so, but they can’t establish a definite age.
That’s one of the exciting aspects of the aforementioned study in Spain. Archaeologists used uranium-thorium dating on tiny stalactites and stalagmites that formed over the top of the pigment.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0H_wFNfrMmU?feature=oembed These carbonate deposits, left behind when water and carbon dioxide move through rock, can provide a minimum age for the cave paintings beneath them.
The researchers used this method on three cave paintings: a red, ladder-like image at La Pasiega in northern Spain; hand stencils at Maltravieso in western Spain; and a curtain of stalagmites painted red at Ardales in southern Spain. All of them dated to approximately 65,000 years ago.
But the results have been challenged on methodological grounds (a dispute over the movement of uranium in groundwater in the caves) and by the conviction that only modern humans made art. Repeated claims and counter-claims mean it is unlikely that this controversy will be resolved any time soon. Still, there is evidence in other places that Neanderthals had the capacity for creativity.
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A promising recent find comes from the Neanderthal site of Einhornhöhle (Unicorn Cave) in northern Germany. In 2021, archaeologists announced the recovery of an engraved toe bone of Megaloceros giganteus, an extinct deer that could grow to about 7 feet tall, with an antler span of 12 feet! This toe bone is etched with six engravings that form five offset stacked chevrons. The angles formed by the intersecting lines are quite regular, ranging from 92.3 to 100.3 degrees. A second set of four short lines are incised on the proximal end.
These are not cut-marks related to butchery (deer toes are not terribly meaty) and were clearly made intentionally to form a pattern. In this case, the dates aren’t disputed. Radiocarbon dating at the site, and of the bone itself, suggest it is at least 51,000 years old.
Why would someone select the toe bone of a giant deer that is very rare in this area and engrave a series of chevrons onto it?
Clearly the pattern has no practical value. The authors suggest that the engraving, and possibly the choice of animal, must have symbolic meaning. And art is all about symbolism—representing an idea or object in some other form. For me, that speaks strongly to symbolic thought in Neanderthals.
But as you might expect, when something that looks symbolic is associated with Neanderthals, it doesn’t take long for people to give at least partial credit to modern humans. In this case, DNA was recently recovered from modern human fossils dating to more than 45,000 years ago at Zlatý Kůň, Czech Republic. The fossils contain long stretches of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting interbreeding occurred before 50,000 years. Some posit that the Neanderthals who exchanged genes with the ancestors of Zlatý Kůň also exchanged knowledge.
Here we go again. Neanderthals did something symbolic? Nah, they just copied modern humans. I think I’ve heard this story before.
DID NEANDERTHALS BUILD STONE CIRCLES?
How about Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France? This one is odd. More than 300 meters inside the cave lie multiple structures constructed from almost 400 stalagmite fragments (also called speleofacts). Two large circular structures, composed of up to four layers of stacked stalagmite fragments, stretch around 2 to 7 meters across and about 40 centimeters high. These are accompanied by several other accumulations of stalagmites. Based on reddening and blackening of some of the fragments, it appears that all of the structures are associated with fire.
Archaeologists dated the structures by looking at the age of broken stalagmites and when they began to regrow. The results consistently pointed to the structures being about 176,500 years old. At that time, the only ancestral human species in France were Neanderthals.
No light penetrates this part of the cave’s dark zone, so Neanderthals would have had to bring their own. Then, it seems, they collected and deliberately placed hundreds of speleofacts in circles and made fires that reddened and blackened many of them. According to the researchers, this demonstrates that Neanderthals were capable of complex spatial and social organization.
Why did the Neanderthals do this? Was it some sort of ritual? To be honest, we’ll never know. Is it art? That depends on what you consider art. One definition of art is that it is creative behavior with no practical purpose. By that definition, I’d say it fits.
For the most part, this find was fairly well-received. Some pointed out, however, that while Neanderthals made the structures, they did so while “leaving no trace of graphic activity.”
So, nice try, Neanderthals. But if you don’t paint the cave walls, does it really count as art?
DID NEANDERTHALS MAKE JEWELRY?
When it comes to jewelry—or personal adornment in archaeological terminology—there isn’t just a single example. At least 23 raptor talons, mostly from the formidable white-tailed eagle, have been found at 10 Neanderthal sites ranging in age from 130,000 to 42,000 years ago.
The talons are scratched with cut marks, indicating they were intentionally removed. Given the lack of meat on an eagle’s toe, these weren’t food items. Researchers found animal tissue—possibly a remnant of a leather cord—on the surface of one talon found at Krapina, Croatia. This suggests the talon was hung on a bracelet or necklace.
Further evidence of Neanderthal use of birds comes from Fumane, Italy. Raptor wing bones show signs of cutting and scraping for the purpose of removing feathers. We’re not sure what they did with the feathers, but one possibility is personal decoration.
Also, in Cueva de los Aviones in Spain, scientists have found perforated, pigmented shells possibly between 115,000 and 120,000 years old. Were these objects of personal adornment? Other shells at the site have multiple pigments inside them, suggesting they functioned as containers to mix colors.
These objects, structures, and paintings are not an exhaustive catalog of Neanderthal symbolism, but you have to admit the evidence is adding up.
HOW MUCH NEANDERTHAL ART DISAPPEARED?
All this evidence has one thing in common: preservation. It survived for archaeologists to find today, albeit in fragmentary and degraded form. Bone, mineral pigment, and stalagmites are durable. But look around you: Your clothing, the table, and that picture on the wall are perishable. They will likely decay well before 50,000 to 100,000 years have passed. Only a minuscule percentage of the material culture from the Paleolithic has survived. Yet we’re still finding evidence for symbolism and art. So, how much art was created and then vanished?
The earliest-carved figurines come from what is today southern Germany and date to between 36,000 and 40,000 years ago. They are made of ivory. Do you really think the first time someone carved something, they chose ivory? Wood is a lot easier to carve. And what about cave paintings? Were the first drawings done in ochre on cave walls? It’s doubtful. How about drawing in the sand or painting on skin?
The stereotype of the artless Neanderthal and the artful modern human was rooted in 19th-century prejudices.
Of course, anthropologists can’t see this missing majority of creations today, but they had to be there. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Art must be older than we think. It did not arise de novo with modern humans in the form of durable materials. And yet, that seems to be the narrative in paleoanthropology. Every time a new discovery is put forward that could be Neanderthal art or symbolism, it is questioned. But why?
WHY DO PEOPLE DOUBT NEANDERTHALS MADE ART?
In the 2013 animated film The Croods, Grug—a Neanderthal who fears newfangled human inventions like shoes and a shell horn—finds glimmers of humanity when he first paints on a cave wall. This portrayal of Neanderthal deficiencies and modern human superiorities is deeply engrained in popular culture and science. And it began in the mid-1800s.
At the time, one of the great intellectual debates concerned the antiquity of humans. Much of the world was still operating under a biblical framework. So the idea that humans had been around for a long time, or that they had evolved, was controversial.
The first ancestral human fossil to be recognized as possibly ancient was a Neanderthal, found in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. It had a long, low skull with large brow ridges. It might be human, scholars thought, but just barely. Then in 1868, modern human fossils were uncovered at the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in France. These fossils, with their high foreheads, looked anatomically modern.
In 1879, the first recognized cave art was found by amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola at Altamira Cave in northern Spain. Despite the lack of any associated fossil remains, these cave paintings were attributed to Cro-Magnons. Without sufficient evidence, art became seen as one of the hallmarks of true humanity.
Neanderthals, with their low foreheads and allegedly brutish nature, provided the perfect contrast. They were extinct. They had lost out to the “true men” with their painted caves and creative nature. This idea was enshrined for decades in books and museums around the world.
Henry Fairfield Osborn, a long-time curator at the American Museum of Natural History, worked with artist Charles Knight to illustrate the different stages of the Paleolithic in books and murals. In these images, Neanderthals are depicted as hunched-over creatures who don’t seem to have the imagination to do anything besides stare uncomprehendingly at a rock. The Cro-Magnons are shown holding a scapula bone for a painter’s palette while deftly drawing the curve of a bison’s hump on a cave wall.
In the eyes of Osborn and others of the time, the western European Cro-Magnon was seen as the original artist and the original human. Is it surprising, then, that Osborn was a leader in eugenics and anti-immigration who cited ancient history as justification for his views? For Osborn, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons never mixed, so why should different “races” today? (Of course, Neanderthals and modern humans did mix, and the genomes of all humans today typically contain anywhere from 0.3 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.)
Looking back at history, it’s clear that the stereotype of the artless Neanderthal and the artful modern human was rooted in prejudices of the time. People projected Western ideals and aesthetics onto Paleolithic “art,” which, in turn, were deployed to define “primitive art” made by non-Western “savage” peoples. Art made us human, but not all humans had the same art. Even today, some art produced by non-Western peoples is described as “folk art” or “primitive art” rather than just art.
So, did Neanderthals make art?
Yes, they did. It’s important to recognize that—not only to give credit where it’s due, but also because past prejudices have power in the present, and only by recognizing these biases can people hope to overcome them.
^^^
Bruce Hardy is a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist specializing in Neanderthals. He is interested in the history of Neanderthal research and how biases introduced more than 100 years ago still operate today. His research focuses on understanding stone tool use through microscopic residue analysis. Hardy is a professor of anthropology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he teaches students Neanderthal skills such as making fire and wooden spears. In 2020, he and his colleagues published evidence of the oldest-known surviving string, circa 50,000 years old, from the Neanderthal site of Abri du Maras in France.
Hana aced her memory test. After viewing the contents of three identical boxes arrayed in an arc on the back deck of her home, the 3-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel had to remember which box held a treat — a task she quickly learned after just a few trials.
Hana and her human companion, Masami Shimizu-Albergine of Bainbridge Island, Washington, are helping scientists to learn something too: when dog smarts reach their peak and how they decline with age.
Hana is part of a pack that has grown to nearly 40,000 pet dogs enrolled in a citizen science initiative known as the Dog Aging Project, founded in 2014. Understanding the biology of aging in companion dogs is one of two main goals of the project, says cofounder and codirector Matt Kaeberlein, a pathologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who focuses on aging. “The other is to do something about it.”
Through veterinary records, DNA samples, health questionnaires and cognitive tests like Hana’s treat-finding challenge, the initiative of the University of Washington and Texas A&M University will track many aspects of dogs’ lives over time. Smaller subsets of the dogs, including Hana, will participate in more focused studies and more extensive evaluations. From all of this, scientists hope to spot patterns and find links between lifestyles and health from puppyhood through the golden years.
The effort joins that of an earlier one: the Family Dog Project, spearheaded in the 1990s at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest to study “the behavioral and cognitive aspects of the dog-human relationship,” with tens of thousands of canines participating through the decades. The two projects have begun collaborating across continents, and the scientists hope that such a large combined group of dogs can help them tease out genetic and environmental factors that affect how long dogs live, and how much of that time is spent in good health.
With estimates of the number of pet dogs in the world reaching into the hundreds of millions, understanding how they age is important in its own right — to help improve their lives and the care they receive. But following the life journeys of some of these canine companions could provide hints that help people age more healthily as well, including what dogs might reveal about our own aging brains.
Because human aging takes place over many decades, studying the biology of that process is challenging. It means tracking people for 50, 60, 70 years or more, which can be laborious and expensive. In contrast, dogs age quickly. “This sucks for people who love their dogs,” says Kaeberlein, a lifelong dog lover. But it makes dogs an excellent model system for studying aging. (Though dog lifespan is strongly linked to body size, with Bernese mountain dogs averaging seven years and Chihuahuas nearly doubling that at 13 years, broadly speaking a 70-year study in people is roughly equivalent to one dog decade.)
Studying dogs has other advantages as well. Their genetic diversity makes them better animal models than the inbred strains of mice that are typically used in aging research. And though scientists often want to study their subjects in the controlled environment of a laboratory, the fact that pet dogs live in highly variable homes alongside people is actually a benefit when trying to glean insights that transfer to human aging. You can’t model a complex human environment in the laboratory. But if you study pet dogs, says Kaeberlein, there’s no need to.
Packing up
Scientists had long considered dogs to be “artificial animals” with unnatural behavior, says ELTE ethologist Enikő Kubinyi, who has studied cognition in pet dogs for nearly 30 years. In fact, when the Family Dog Project — to which she contributes — was pioneered by a group of Hungarian ethologists in 1994, many thought the idea was ridiculous, Kubinyi says. But attitudes have started to change. To date, the project has produced dozens of studies exploring dog behavior, genetics and neurobiology, across breeds and over time.
The Dog Aging Project, for its part, has conducted a small-scale clinical trial of 24 companion dogs that looked at the effects of a drug called rapamycin. The medication, used in people to combat rejection of transplanted organs and to treat cancer, has also been shown to extend lifespan in yeast, roundworms, fruit flies and mice. Heart scans revealed that dogs that had received rapamycin in that study, published in 2017, had improved heart function compared to dogs that got a placebo. Since then, the Dog Aging Project has begun a larger, longer-term rapamycin trial as part of its goal to study the biology of how dogs age more broadly.
Brain health is a key part of that. “There’s a lot we just don’t know about how dog cognition changes with age,” says comparative psychologist Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a collaborator on the Dog Aging Project. What is normal cognitive aging? Do early memory impairments signal later dementia? A longer-term aim, MacLean says, is to identify early interventions that could slow deterioration.
As part of that goal, MacLean’s collaborator Emily Bray, a psychologist at the University of Arizona and the service-dog organization Canine Companions, is designing a battery of cognitive tests for dogs based on rodent cognition studies (it includes the “1-2-3-treat” test that Hana performed). Some of these tests require the dogs to learn to interact with another ubiquitous fixture in the human environment: touch screens.
One test designed to study memory and learning, for example, involves three brightly colored, boldly patterned squares that dogs have been trained to associate with a specific location on the screen. During the test, dogs face a screen inside a wooden box and are supposed to touch the square with their noses only when it appears in its correct spot. Bray’s tests explore normal cognitive functioning, but they also target skills that may change with age and are dependent on brain regions affected by Alzheimer’s disease in people and its analog in dogs, known as canine cognitive dysfunction. Dogs — who learn to love screen time, based on their tail wagging — will be periodically tested to see how their memory and learning abilities hold up over time.
In another study, the two citizen science projects worked together and found, with the help of pet dogs donated post-mortem, that older dogs and those that exhibited dementia-like behaviors had increased levels in their brain of amyloid-beta, a misfolded protein that is also associated with Alzheimer’s disease in people. Most animal studies of Alzheimer’s disease have used mice that are genetically modified to develop dementia. But because dogs seem to develop canine cognitive dysfunction naturally, just like we do with Alzheimer’s, the researchers hope that their ongoing work with dog brains may also reveal clues that further understanding of the human disease.
A dog’s life
One of the strengths of tracking so many dogs over their lifetimes is that scientists will have enough data to start teasing out correlations between the aging process and dogs’ lifestyles, environments and habits. One factor they are looking closely at is physical activity, which has been shown to be protective for brain aging in people and some other species. Emerging results based on a survey of participants in the Dog Aging Project suggest the same may be true in dogs. To test the link, some of the participating dogs will wear a device “like a Fitbit, but for a dog,” Bray says.
Calorie restriction is also a hot topic in aging research: Scientists have shown that eating less and restricting when food is eaten can extend the lives of laboratory animals like mice. But outside of the controlled conditions of a lab, the picture is murkier. To help clear things up, Bray is leading a study comparing the eating habits of more than 10,000 dogs of multiple ages, sizes and breeds.
The results show that dogs fed just once daily — 8 percent of the total — were healthier on average. These single-meal dogs had fewer gastrointestinal, dental, orthopedic, kidney, urinary and other disorders than dogs fed two or more times a day. They also performed slightly better on cognitive tests. It’s unclear how eating less frequently improves cognition, Bray says, but the effect was stark: roughly the size of the difference in average cognitive scores between 7- and 11-year-old dogs.
So what’s going on inside dogs’ brains as they age? The Family Dog Project scientists in Hungary are tracking that. They have scanned dogs’ brains with EEGs and even trained dogs to stay still inside an fMRI machine, revealing that, like humans, their brains shrink with age.
In a similar imaging study, veterinary neurologist Stephanie McGrath at Colorado State University performs MRI scans on participants in the Dog Aging Project, looking for features that may connect brain shrinkage and other physical changes to dementia in older dogs. Most exciting, she says, is that her work suggests MRI might one day be used as an early detection tool.
New tricks
Elderly people have long been subject to ageism and an attitude of dismissal. Older dogs are no different, says University of Milan veterinarian Patrizia Piotti, a former collaborator on the Family Dog Project. Her research on problem-solving, memory and attention in dogs as they age has contributed to a body of work suggesting that while it is more challenging to teach an old dog a new trick, it may benefit their cognition to keep trying.
And, in fact, not all new tricks are harder for older dogs, according to researchers from the Clever Dog Lab at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. Comparative cognition expert Zsófia Virányi and her former student, Durga Chapagain, gave 119 pet dogs a series of 11 cognition tests involving tasks like viewing pictures, playing, finding hidden food and manipulating toys. They found that traits like problem-solving ability, boldness and playfulness declined predictably with age. But in a task where dogs had to learn to make eye contact with the trainer after finding and eating a piece of sausage dropped on the floor, a behavior rewarded with another piece of sausage, older dogs performed just as well.
This goes to show that we shouldn’t underestimate the mental capacities of senior dogs, Chapagain says. As dogs get older, “we are less inclined to play with them,” she says, but they may have the same motivation as younger dogs to keep learning (at least when sausage is involved). “They are capable of much more than we think.” People should keep their canine companions engaged in mental exercise like trick training and nose work like hiding treats for a game of sniff-and-seek throughout their lives, adds Piotti. “Anything that makes the dog think a little bit.”
Opportunity for older dogs was what motivated Titania Juang to enroll her dog Cash in the Dog Aging Project in 2019. From the time he was adopted as a rescue in 2010 at age 2 or 3, recalls Juang, Cash was a quirky character, preferring fruits and vegetables to meat. “He liked to walk really slowly … literally stopping to smell the flowers, looking out into the distance,” she says. Even as a youngster, recalls Juang, he acted a bit like an old man.
Cash passed away in 2021, but his canine scientific contribution lives on, helping science and medicine move forward. That brings some comfort to Juang. “He is no longer here, but it adds more value to his time with us.”
Kaeberlein can empathize with loss of a beloved aged pet. With dogs in the family all his life, his two passions — pet dogs and aging research — only recently came together. Sadly, Kaeberlein lost two of his three dogs during the pandemic. Dobby, a German shepherd and participant in the Dog Aging Project, remains. Named for his elflike appearance as a puppy, Dobby is all ears. And so is Kaeberlein, to see what scientific secrets dog aging research reveals over time.
Editor’s note: On July 29, details of the small-scale trial of 24 companion dogs were amended to better describe that trial’s relationship with the genesis of the Dog Aging Project.
10.1146/knowable-072622-1
Lesley Evans Ogden is a multimedia science journalist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work, published internationally, is driven by endless curiosity about planet Earth and its creatures. Find her on Twitter @ljevanso.
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.
The human brain is an amazing computing machine. Weighing only three pounds or so, it can process information a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer, store a thousand times more information than a powerful laptop, and do it all using no more energy than a 20-watt lightbulb.
Researchers are trying to replicate this success using soft, flexible organic materials that can operate like biological neurons and someday might even be able to interconnect with them. Eventually, soft “neuromorphic” computer chips could be implanted directly into the brain, allowing people to control an artificial arm or a computer monitor simply by thinking about it.
Like real neurons — but unlike conventional computer chips — these new devices can send and receive both chemical and electrical signals. “Your brain works with chemicals, with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Our materials are able to interact electrochemically with them,” says Alberto Salleo, a materials scientist at Stanford University who wrote about the potential for organic neuromorphic devices in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research.
Salleo and other researchers have created electronic devices using these soft organic materials that can act like transistors (which amplify and switch electrical signals) and memory cells (which store information) and other basic electronic components.
The work grows out of an increasing interest in neuromorphic computer circuits that mimic how human neural connections, or synapses, work. These circuits, whether made of silicon, metal or organic materials, work less like those in digital computers and more like the networks of neurons in the human brain.
Conventional digital computers work one step at a time, and their architecture creates a fundamental division between calculation and memory. This division means that ones and zeroes must be shuttled back and forth between locations on the computer processor, creating a bottleneck for speed and energy use.
The brain does things differently. An individual neuron receives signals from many other neurons, and all these signals together add up to affect the electrical state of the receiving neuron. In effect, each neuron serves as both a calculating device — integrating the value of all the signals it has received — and a memory device: storing the value of all of those combined signals as an infinitely variable analog value, rather than the zero-or-one of digital computers.
Researchers have developed a number of different “memristive” devices that mimic this ability. When you run electric currents through them, you change the electrical resistance. Like biological neurons, these devices calculate by adding up the values of all the currents they have been exposed to. And they remember through the resulting value their resistance takes.
A simple organic memristor, for example, might have two layers of electrically conducting materials. When a voltage is applied, electric current drives positively charged ions from one layer into the other, changing how easily the second layer will conduct electricity the next time it is exposed to an electric current. (See diagram.) “It’s a way of letting the physics do the computing,” says Matthew Marinella, a computer engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe who researches neuromorphic computing.
The technique also liberates the computer from strictly binary values. “When you have classical computer memory, it’s either a zero or a one. We make a memory that could be any value between zero and one. So you can tune it in an analog fashion,” Salleo says.
At the moment, most memristors and related devices aren’t based on organic materials but use standard silicon chip technology. Some are even used commercially as a way of speeding up artificial intelligence programs. But organic components have the potential to do the job faster while using less energy, Salleo says. Better yet, they could be designed to integrate with your own brain. The materials are soft and flexible, and also have electrochemical properties that allow them to interact with biological neurons.
For instance, Francesca Santoro, an electrical engineer now at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, is developing a polymer device that takes input from real cells and “learns” from it. In her device, the cells are separated from the artificial neuron by a small space, similar to the synapses that separate real neurons from one another. As the cells produce dopamine, a nerve-signaling chemical, the dopamine changes the electrical state of the artificial half of the device. The more dopamine the cells produce, the more the electrical state of the artificial neuron changes, just as you might see with two biological neurons. (See diagram.) “Our ultimate goal is really to design electronics which look like neurons and act like neurons,” Santoro says.
The approach could offer a better way to use brain activity to drive prosthetics or computer monitors. Today’s systems use standard electronics, including electrodes that can pick up only broad patterns of electrical activity. And the equipment is bulky and requires external computers to operate.
Flexible, neuromorphic circuits could improve this in at least two ways. They would be capable of translating neural signals in a much more granular way, responding to signals from individual neurons. And the devices might also be able to handle some of the necessary computations themselves, Salleo says, which could save energy and boost processing speed.
Low-level, decentralized systems of this sort — with small, neuromorphic computers processing information as it is received by local sensors — are a promising avenue for neuromorphic computing, Salleo and Santoro say. “The fact that they so nicely resemble the electrical operation of neurons makes them ideal for physical and electrical coupling with neuronal tissue,” Santoro says, “and ultimately the brain.”
10.1146/knowable-082422-1
Kurt Kleiner is a science writer living in Toronto.
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter. Image by Pexels.
That spunky, profane, nightmare-roaming 11-year-old orphan from Brighton City is finally back for a new episode — only her second — and the graphics, havoc and chaos are all more thrilling than ever. In the latest installment, which picks up just moments after we last left Mara, she still races her dreamtime hotrod through noirish dark-city nightmares, still tries to rescue Ned Nimrod from aliens who have abducted him in his unconscious, and, in her waking hours, still wrangles with Brighton City’s venomous Mayor Doesgood; but this time she faces an unexpected adversary who has somehow acquired the same nightmare-roaming skills.
A VR app called BigScreen lets you watch 3D movies in a VR theater, and it’s identical to what you would have seen IRL (i.e., “in real life”), back when 3D movies were a thing.
BigScreen is indeed very cool.
But Nightmara is much, much more than that. It’s not just a 3D movie with headsets on; it’s a full 360-degree immersive drama, in which you can even walk around. You have to see it to believe it.
We checked in with Gianpaolo Gonzalez, the NightMara writer/director; answers have been edited for clarity.
Audere: So excited that a new episode is finally out – what took you so long?
Gonzalez: It takes me about 6 months in production mode to complete a 12-minute experience by myself. I need time to discover new and exciting perspectives in how I tell the story of NightMara. You can only plan so much on a piece of paper. Once you hop into VR, it’s a whole new way of working.
I’m constantly discovering better ways of telling my story. I don’t really have past examples of scripted VR animated series that I can turn to and reverse engineer how they did it. All I have is my excitement button, and I make sure that I constantly push myself and this medium to its wildest.
In episode 1, I really felt that what was different about this from other VR animation is that I could really get up and walk around in your show — at one point, characters are watching TV, and I got up and walked into the TV. How much did you think about creating a world that viewers could walk around in, rather than just watch?
I just wanted to make sure the viewer’s horizon was never messed up. The viewer can tell if the horizon is off by 1 degree. An off-set horizon instantly removes viewers from the experience, and they no longer care to explore the virtual world.
VR is for people who want to explore new ways of experiencing, but you have to make them want to be there. I think the viewer feels respected in my experiences because I give them a plane to walk on as well as environments that beg to be explored.
How does the animation in episode 2 differ from the already amazing work in episode 1?
It tops it. I’ve learned so many new skills from Episode 1 that I brought into Episode 2. The main difference is that Episode 1 was 11 scenes in 12 minutes; Episode 2 is 24 scenes in 12 minutes. So the pacing is quicker. More scenes, means more sets, which are now bigger and more detailed. I also included a lot more creative transitions from scene to scene. Now to bring what I learned from Episode 2 to Episode 3!
How did you become interested in animating in VR, and then how did you take the step of actually doing it?
In 2016, I was creating 360 commercials and music videos for clients, and I had gotten my hands on the VR painting software Quill. There were no animation abilities in Quill at the time, but I would paint scenes and just try to get better. In developing my skills, I was constantly comparing my work to the more seasoned animators that were also producing “quillustrations” — painted illustrations using Quill.
Then in 2017, I created NightMara as a traditional 2D cartoon on Instagram and hired an animator to help me create the short 13 episodes. I had never animated anything outside of motion graphics or stop motion, and I realized first-hand the cost of animation. After completing my little 8-minute Instagram cartoon, I ran out of money and Quill had just introduced the ability to animate in virtual reality. The timing couldn’t have been better. I knew I needed to learn animation, or I would suffer at the mercy of someone else’s time as well as my wallet.
So I changed the style of NightMara to work best in Quill and created a couple episodes by myself to learn, while at the same time, provide my fans with some new content. My sole mission was to improve as an artist each time I put my headset on. Each piece of content needed to top my last. It was the motor that drove me to constantly improve.
Then in 2020, Quill released the software as it is today, which allows complete end-to-end VR animation production … and then the pandemic hit. So I spent the entire pandemic inside Virtual Reality teaching myself animation, set design, character design, and VR directing and thus created what NightMara is today.
NightMara is about a plucky 11-year-old, yet it contains profanity and cartoonish violence. Who is the show for?
I made NightMara for the cartoon connoisseur who’s been craving a fresh and new experience to try. The main theme of my show is “fear,” which doesn’t have a set demographic. Everyone can relate to fear and animation has the ability to reach anyone at any age. I used to love when my mom would laugh at a Sponge Bob joke differently than I did as a kid because it meant there was something more I could explore. South Park wasn’t made for 11-year-olds, but all of us kids were watching it because it had something new to say in the medium.
Who is the typical NightMara fan?
The fans of NightMara are incredibly diverse, because I don’t talk to any one type of demographic. I aim at pleasing a certain ‘psychographic’ or interests of a given individual. Those are cartoon fans of South Park, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rick and Morty, The Simpsons, 90s Nicktoons, Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, Marvel, DC Comics. These are the fans that feed off of good characters, passionate creators and interesting takes on the world. Because I know this, NightMara fans range from 13-year-olds to 70-year-olds, because at the end of the day, animation has the ability to entertain anyone if done correctly.
Where do you see VR entertainment headed? In 10 years, will we all watch TV on VR?
I believe VR will be for entertainment just as what the smart phone did to social media. In 2007, the iPhone came out, but handheld PalmPilots had already been around for ten years prior. I remember, because my Dad had one in 1997. No one knew that PalmPilots would influence one of the greatest industry revolutions of our time; the revolution out of boredom. No longer do we have to wait to be entertained. We can look at our phone and find something to entertain us in only a couple swipes of our finger. However, as our stomach’s grow for more engaging content, our appetites become much more refined and picky. Virtual Reality lends itself to fulfill that hunger to be entertained in a whole new way.
Will this be the default format of entertainment?
In 10 years, I believe that television shows and movies will be almost the advertisement for the virtual reality world they offer. A two-hour Batman movie is dope and all, but to actually be Batman in Gotham and hunt the Joker is way doper.
This is a free show on a free app. How do you make money?
It’s free for the time being, so better get your views in now! I’m working on different avenues of monetization currently that I’m not allowed to disclose, but as this becomes more popular, I also have cool t-shirts, trading cards, stickers, and toys to buy at the So Meta Studios shop. Every penny goes back into my episodes!
ADVERTISEMENT The popular weird-Western, historical-fantasy/science fiction podcast, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh, starring Sal Rendino, returns for a full season, with eight new episodes!
Sunday, August 28, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST, AltspaceVR, free
A collaboration between worldbuilders Jose Ferrer and JoAnn Shivanti, the latest Muse project, “Entheogen~a Trippy, Psychedelic Adventure,” is a glowing temple in the Amazon rainforest, scored to music by Shivanti’s husband.
Ferrer, a medical doctor in Barcelona who uses VR for treating the burnout of the healthcare workers and for medical training, says, “I first started using VR during the COVID pandemic, when I needed some way to relax and forget about the harsh work situation in the emergency room. From there it grew really fast. I started working with Educators in VR organizing events to promote the use of VR in the medical field, world building mostly for well-being, and now I’m doing a research project using VR for reducing burnout of health care workers.”
In 2020, he built the first version of his extravagantly wonderful Meditation Center — which Audere will visit soon — as “a chakra circuit open to everyone at any time to rebalance their energies.”
Muse/ Entheogen is already available for you to visit, but the soft opening event is this Sunday, with a Grand Opening on September 17.
Look at the photos, that starry sky, those distant mountains, those glowing trees — it’s beautiful.
Friday, September 2, 2022, from 8:00 PM to 10:30 PM (EST), AltspaceVR, $10(registration required)
VR wouldn’t be VR without its lively, eye-popping dance clubs, and one of the best of the past couple of years was the Violet Nightclub, run by VenusSX, an advocate, therapist and intimacy coach who works with individuals and couples globally and is a leader in immersive experiences in virtual reality. Now Venus Lounge has been refurbished with what Venus says will be “the highest quality textures and decor, to provide a sensual Members Club environment.” VenusSX has promised a significant upgrade, something almost impossible to imagine, plus a “multi-sensory journey and dance experience.” This is a private whitelist-only event; General Admission USD$10.
Free to watch on the Within app; free on Tripp with a subscription
Marc Zimmerman’s 14-minute film, from 2018, is a real wonder in VR, an amazingly immersive experience that seeks to impress upon the viewer how grateful we should all be for the gift of a conscious mind that allows us to sense “the universe’s boundless beauty, a source of infinite inspiration.”
Zimmermann begins with our birth (“Everything is special, new, wants to be discovered; what a wondrous world,” the infant-narrator marvels), then shoves us beneath and into unfurling ferns, fireworks, jellyfish, shooting stars, a stormy galactic sky, a mossy forest of weeping trees at dusk, a sadly deserted nighttime playground, a kaleidoscope, a bustling ocean floor, wooden wind chimes, and demands that you “break through the dust that makes you blind … use your precious gift within to sense the beauty in every little thing.”
You might watch it again and again. You might bring your headset over to friends’ homes and demand that they watch it. Inspiring.
Friday, August 26, 2022, from 5:45 PM to 9:00 PM (EST), AltSpaceVR, free
We’ve written in this space before about the kinetic joys and visual beauty of a MOMA rave, so we won’t repeat ourselves. If you have never been, for goodness’ sake, go. And if you haven’t gone because you don’t own a VR headset, then buy a VR headset.
AI Friends of the Month
As we wrote here last month, maybe, someday, AI will design worlds in which you can live. One day, your co-workers, bosses, even your best friends may be AIs. Maybe this will be good; maybe bad. Maybe we will never know. But we will first meet them in VR. Some people already have.
So we asked an AI to introduce us to a couple of her friends, to tell us their backstories, to design some clothes for them and to pose them in a setting of her own design.
This is what she came up with: the faces, personality, clothes, scenery and quotations are all AI-generated.
Skrew Albemarle, on the left, is a 26-year-old editor; tall, thin, handsome and smart, he loves sports, music travel and books. His first name comes from a character in a movie; his last name is the town in Virginia where he grew up. Stephanie Singh, on the right, is a 22-year-old physics major. Sweet, beautiful and smart, Stephanie loves books, science, travel and animals.
Remembering the rainy evening when they posed for the photo, Stephanie said: “I wanted to look like I was in love.” Skrew said: “I wanted to make sure that I looked cool.”
by Tom Green, Stephen Thomas. Originally published on Policy Options July 12, 2022
Electric vehicles are making inroads in some areas of Canada. But as their numbers grow, will there be enough electrical power for them, and for all the buildings and the industries that are also switching to electricity?
Canada – along with the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom – is committed to a “net-zero electricity grid by 2035.” This target is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s ambition of staying below 1.5 C of global warming, compared with pre-industrial levels. This target also gives countries their best chance of energy security, as laid out in landmark reports over the past year from the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A new federal regulation in the form of a clean electricity standard is being developed, but will it be stringent enough to set us up for climate success and avoid dead ends?
Canada starts this work from a relatively low emissions-intensity grid, powered largely by hydroelectricity. However, some provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick still have predominantly fossil fuel-powered electricity. Plus, there is a risk of more natural gas generation of electricity in the coming years in most provinces without new federal and provincial regulations.
This means the transition of Canada’s electricity system must solve two problems at once. It must first clean up the existing electricity system, but it must also meet future electricity needs from zero-emissions sources while overall electricity capacity doubles or even triples by 2050.
Canada has enormous potential for renewable generation. Wind, solar and energy storage are proven, affordable technologies that can be produced here in Canada, while avoiding the volatility of global fossil fuel markets.
As wind and solar have become the cheapest forms of electricity generation in history, we’re already seeing foreign governments and utilities ramp up renewable projects at the pace and scale that would be needed here in Canada. In 2020, 280 gigawatts of new capacity was added globally – a 45 per cent increase over the previous year. In Canada, since 2010, annual growth in renewables has so far averaged less than three per cent.
So why aren’t we moving full steam – or electron – ahead? With countries around the world bringing in wind and solar for new generation, why is there so much delay and doubt in Canada?
The David Suzuki Foundation partnered with the University of Victoria to model the electricity grid of the future. We wanted to evaluate whether deploying renewables in each province’s grid could deliver zero-emissions electricity by 2035, even as demand grows.
The modelling team drew on a dataset that accounts for how wind and solar potential varies across the country, through the weeks of the year and the hours of each day. The models provide solutions for the most cost-effective new generation, storage and transmission to add to the grid while ensuring electricity generation meets demand reliably every hour of the year.
To better understand future electricity demand, a second modelling team was asked to explore a future when homes and businesses are aggressively electrified; fossil fuel furnaces and boilers are retired and replaced with electric heat pumps; and gasoline and diesel cars are replaced by electric vehicles and public transit. It also dialed up investments in energy efficiency to further reduce the need for energy. These hourly electricity-demand projections were fed back to the models developed at the University of Victoria.
The results? It is possible to meet Canada’s needs for clean electricity reliably and affordably through a focus on expanding wind and solar generation capacity, complemented with new transmission connections between provinces, and other grid improvements.
How is it that such high levels of variable wind and solar can be added to the grid while keeping the lights on 24/7? The model took full advantage of the country’s existing hydroelectric reservoirs, using them as giant batteries, storing water behind the dams when wind and solar generation was high to be used later when renewable generation is low, or when demand is particularly high. The model also invested in more transmission to enable expanded electricity trade between provinces and energy storage in the form of batteries to smooth out the supply of electricity.
Not only is it possible, but the renewable pathway is the safe bet.
There’s no doubt it will take unprecedented effort and scale to transform Canada’s electricity systems. The high electrification pathway would require an 18-fold increase over today’s renewable electricity capacity, deploying an unprecedented amount of new wind, solar and energy storage projects every year from now to 2050. Although the scale seems daunting, countries such as Germany are demonstrating that this pace and scale is possible.
The modelling also showed that small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are neither necessary nor cost-effective, making them a poor candidate for continued government subsidies. Likewise, we presented pathways with no need for continued fossil fuel generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS) – an expensive technology with a global track record of burning through public funds while allowing fossil fuel use to expand and while capturing a smaller proportion of the smokestack carbon than promised. We believe that Canada should terminate the significant subsidies and supports it is giving to fossil fuel companies and redirect this support to renewable electricity, energy efficiency and energy affordability programming.
The transition to clean electricity would come with new employment for people living in Canada. Building tomorrow’s grid will support more than 75,000 full-time jobs each year in construction, operation and maintenance of wind, solar and transmission facilities alone.
Regardless of the path chosen, all energy projects in Canada take place on unceded Indigenous territories or treaty land. Decolonizing power structures with benefits to Indigenous communities is imperative. Upholding Indigenous rights and title, ensuring ownership opportunities and decision-making and direct support for Indigenous communities are all essential in how this transition takes place.
Wind, solar, storage and smart grid technologies are evolving rapidly, but our understanding of the possibilities they offer fora zero-emissions future appears to be lagging behind reality. As the Institut de L’énergie Trottier observed, decarbonization costs have fallen faster than modellers anticipated.
The shape of tomorrow’s grid will largely depend on policy decisions made today. It’s now up to people living in Canada and their elected representatives to create the right conditions for a renewable revolution.
To avoid a costly dash-to-gas that will strand assets and to secure early emissions reductions, the electricity sector needs to be fully exposed to the carbon price. The federal government’s announcement that it will move forward with a clean electricity standard – requiring net-zero emissions in the electricity sector by 2035 – will help if the standard is stringent.
Federal funding to encourage provinces to expand interprovincial transmission will also move us ahead. At the provincial level, electricity system governance – from utility commission mandates to electricity markets design – needs to be reformed quickly to encourage investments in renewable generation. As fossil fuels are swapped out across the economy, more and more of a household’s total energy bill will come from a local electric utility, so a national energy poverty strategy focused on low-income and equity-seeking households must be a priority.
The payoff from this policy package? Plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity that brings better outcomes for community health and resilience while helping to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
^^^
This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Virtual reality — the immersive world that you enter through those clunky headsets, ridiculed by Matthew McConaughey but praised by so many others — is today a niche endeavor, popular among gamers who like to shoot zombies, and among various social communities who attend VR parties and hang out at VR nightclubs.
Even if it grows in popularity, it may stay this way, an entertainment pastime, a break from “life.”
Or it could grow into something more.
A Glimpse of the Future
The beautiful worlds that exist in VR are already pretty amazing. World-builders design places that you wish existed in life, that if you ever visited, you would never forget.
“Take my world ‘Solitude’ for example,” writes world-builder Daisy Shaw. “I have had people tell me they go there to unwind after a stressful day at work. They walk through the forest, go and stand with the wolves, or take a kayak around the lake. C.S. Lewis once said, after reading everything in his parent’s library as a boy, that no one had written the books he really wanted to read, so he decided to write them himself. That is the reason behind the worlds I have created.”
Today, you can visit Daisy’s “Solitude” world and maneuver through it with joysticks on your VR handsets. In the future, enhanced, synchronized VR shoes (a riff on currently available technology) will let you hike through virtual mountains, just as though you were there. And you might travel on artificial vacations, with a VR lover whom you’ve never met in real life. A haptic feedback suit would let you feel the wind and sun on your skin.
Today, already, you can spend your evenings in your VR mansion, watching TV in your lavish home theater. You can already invite friends over.
In the future, it may be the main way you socialize.
In the future, your VR home may be where you principally live.
Artificial intelligence can already design beautiful art.
In the future, AI may create artificial worlds for us to live in.
You can already go to concerts in VR, and you always get the best seats in the house. In the future, this may become indistinguishable from live entertainment, and replace it altogether.
Today, you can work remotely, from your home office. In the future, you might put on your VR goggles to work in a virtual office. Or, with augmented reality glasses, which allow you to see virtual elements within your own environment the office and your co-workers might come to you. And your assistant might be AI, helpful and witty, who looks human but exists only in VR and AR.
Today, you can meet a friend in a VR restaurant. In the future, with those augmented reality glasses, you might go to a restaurant in New York city and see, sitting across the table from you, a friend who is, in reality, sitting in a restaurant in Boston. And you might also invite your virtual assistant to join you.
Today, you can go to a VR party every night, if you want. In the future, you might visit a Manhattan penthouse party in VR, where you’ll never really know who you are talking to, and whether they’re real or artificial intelligence. The party may never end.
Says world-builder Jake Upfront, musing on the possibility of creating a VR version of Coney Island’s July 4th party, “Some things are just better left for IRL [in real life]. We could never possibly come close to that in VR. We can, however, do those things that would be impossible to do IRL. Such as attending a party in the Death Star, where the emperor is performing a twerking act, and we arrive there in a pimped Millennium Falcon that has a nightclub in it.”
It’s impossible now; but, someday, it won’t be.
The future could be very strange. The present already is.
OK, You’re Old — But in VR, You’re Young
A few weeks ago, a woman who identifies herself as Inge posted a video on the web entitled “Best of Me.” This is a duet between Inge and her virtual reality avatar, whom she named Inky. “In you I see,” she and her avatar sing to each other, “the best of me.” At one point in the video, Inge kisses Inky on the cheek. Inge appears to be early middle-aged; Inky is a woman in her twenties.
The song is tuneful, well-written and well-performed, and the video is well-produced, compelling and compulsively watchable.
There is also an interesting, slightly uncomfortable subtext to it.
Inky is just Inge, wearing younger clothes (and a younger face) –- after all, they share the same brain, the same life experiences — but the music video seems to posit that Inky is in fact a different person from Inge. If you look different, you are different. Maybe without intending to, “Best of Me” says something weird about identity.
When I first played around in VR, this was the most jarring thing I noticed, and the first thing I wrote about. In VR, I was young again. I looked young again, and I felt young again. I could dance in a nightclub again, and I wouldn’t feel like an old idiot.
So am I really the same person in VR as I am in “real life”?
The below picture is something like an AI reconstruction of my twenty-something identity. It’s based on various original photos from the early 1990s, with the “handsome” function turned on (and with a very slight nose job), a better-fitting suit than I ever owned at that age, and posed in front of an AI-created mansion at dusk. Still, recognizably the old “me.” Boy, I miss that hairline!
As VR grows in sophistication, so will our avatars. Indeed, a new model will shortly permit us to create photo-realistic 3D avatars without prohibitive computing power. So, someday soon, when I visit VR, this is the face that I will see in the mirror. When I go to that Manhattan penthouse party, filled with beautiful avatars and charmingly conversational chatbots, this is whom I will be.
After Audere published my article, a woman messaged me, “I can relate to everything you wrote ([I’m] just a few years younger than you) and I’m so happy I discovered dancing in VR just a year ago.” Shortly afterward, a woman in her fifties wrote on Facebook, thanking rave organizers for their work, because now she could go out dancing again; she is too old in real life, she claimed, but not in VR.
It is a genuine problem, of course, that those of us in our fifties may feel uncomfortable dancing in public. (Really, why shouldn’t a fifty-something dance?) But why would we not feel equally uncomfortable dancing in VR? Does looking young in VR somehow change us? Make us young?
Research provides intriguing answers.
The New York Times recently reported that senior communities use VR “reminiscence” therapy on dementia patients, and that it works. Put a fogie into a world in which she is young again, and she will feel young again. It’s not a cure, but her brain will work a bit better again.
Studies from the past show an even more intriguing way forward.
In 1979, Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, tried an intriguing anti-aging experiment. According to Insider, “Langer thought that maybe, just maybe, if you could put people in a psychologically better setting — one they would associate with a better, younger version of themselves — their bodies might follow along.”
Langer decided that she would “recreate the world of 1959” and put her subjects into that world. The subjects lived as though they were in 1959, newspapers were delivered to the door from that year, they dressed in clothing from 1959, and no mirrors were around to remind them that they were now old.
The subjects living a younger life in the past showed improved strength and cognition, across the board, as compared to a control group.
Just imagine what would happen to the elderly if they were allowed to live in an artificial, virtual world in which they were young again, and their friends were young again. Slap on a haptic feedback suit and a pair of VR boots, which together would allow them to walk around in their VR world and to feel everything from the wind in their hair to a hug against their skin, and just imagine what might happen.
They could live permanently in the past, or just visit. Or choose to be young in the present. In either case, the results could be positive, improving their health, their self-esteem, their longevity.
Sex, Sex and Sex
To paraphrase Ogden Nash, is (real) sex necessary?
Take this scenario: you are a heterosexual, non-binary/gender fluid biological woman. The perfect mate for you, personality-wise, does exist, but he is a gay man, emotionally compatible but entirely sexually incompatible. That is to say, emotionally sexually compatible, but genitally incompatible. You are comfortable entering VR as a man, a woman, both or neither. A love could grow in VR, and perhaps survive the years, that would never, ever be possible in real life.
Or, to posit a simpler scenario, you may not be physically attracted to someone whom you would otherwise love. VR could solve that. He just needs to adjust his avatar.
You never need to know what the person you love looks like, or whom he really is. Physical attractiveness, age, gender or orientation would never be an impediment to true love.
Some people use VR as a sort of remote dating site, finding a partner in virtual reality, perhaps having a first date at a virtual hot spot and ultimately meeting in real life to pursue a traditional IRL romance.
The more interesting question is whether a VR-only relationship can survive in the long-term, whether it is sustainable. A couple could go to concerts, movies and plays in VR, spend evenings together in their virtual mansion, perhaps meet as avatars in AR, but never be physically proximate.
Venus is an advocate, a therapist and an intimacy coach who works with individuals and couples on the East Coast of Australia and is a leader in immersive experiences in virtual reality, whose website is called “VenusSX.” She also runs “Violet,” an adult nightclub in AltspaceVR in the Metaverse, described as “the new digital erotic playground.”
Venus is involved in VR-only relationships with people she has never met in real life.
“It’s like a love story between two minds,” she claims. “We don’t know anything about our actual physicality, we don’t share video calls, we don’t share photos of ourselves, we only text chat, voice call and meet in VR.”
How long can a VR-only relationship last? Forever?
“There’s a part of me that wants to meet that person and have a physical experience,” she says, “but is there a new place that I can go within myself and let go of that perceived need? That’s what I’m exploring.”
And here she has highlighted a gap in VR, but one that is probably only temporary. VR lovers cannot currently truly have sex as one would experience it in the physical world … yet.
“You can’t just have sex silently in VR,” Venus says. “It has to be a mental engagement. It does work if you talk to each other, and you start to turn each other on with your words and your imagination, and then you move into self-pleasuring, and that is what we call sex. It’s interesting, but it’s not fully satisfying on a physical level.”
Current technology has given us haptic feedback suits and cybershoes, so one need not use too much imagination to see what might well come next: synchronized, mechanical haptic sex, controlled through VR, but which will give you a genuine sexual experience in real life.
While this might eventually be an upload directly into our minds through brain-computer interface technology, the immediate next step would be a mechanical/robotic sex surrogate.
Such a thing already exists in its infancy and could, with today’s technology, be synchronized through a virtual reality hookup. A definite barrier to VR sex is the prohibition on “pornography” in any app store, but as our lives merge with VR, our sex lives will have to follow.
“With the robot,” says Venus, “if it can move and penetrate me, give me an actual physical experience, while I am with this person in VR, then yes, I am having sex. So as a surrogate, if my partner can control the robot, even better. That concept works for me if the robot is a surrogate for the real person, and how they’re moving is how they’re making love to me.”
When you love someone in virtual reality, does it matter at all who that person is in actual reality, what they look like, how old they are, what gender they are?
A friend of mine said she would never go into VR, because she might inadvertently befriend — or perhaps even fall for — an apparently young man who is in fact 90-years-old. Or, to take it a step further, an apparently young man who is in fact a 90-year-old woman, using a young avatar and a voice simulator. She might never, ever know.
“What I would say to her,” says Venus, “is that if you are attracted to that person, it doesn’t matter. So if he’s ninety, and he’s attractive in the sense that what he says to you is attractive, and how he thinks is attractive, and his voice is hot, great! It doesn’t matter what age. We’ve got too many boxes around who we should be attracted to. If you relate with them, and enjoy spending time with them, and they turn you on, and you like it, I don’t see that there’s a problem with that. It comes back to that thing — these are love stories between two minds.”
People Are Terrible; Do We Really Need Them In Our Lives?
Let’s acknowledge that AI serves lots of truly useful functions. Every day brings new and exciting developments. Today, for example, MIT Technology Review reports that doctors using AI to screen for breast cancer identify it more often than when they work alone, and that AI is also more efficient in catching the condition when it works with doctors. And Knowable Magazine has recently reported on the development of intelligent AI “microbots” that could go inside our bodies to help keep us healthy.
So to focus on AI “robots” serving the whims of humans, and the social consequences that may result, is a drop in the ocean of AI research.
Because humans are what we are, however, every great invention has strange, worldwide consequences that change our species forever, which AI has already done and will inevitably continue to do.
Everyone knows about “chatbots,” also sometimes called “dialogue agents.” They’re parlor-game tricks that convincingly fake conversation by accurately predicting the next word in a sentence using sophisticated language modeling. Emphasis on the word “convincingly.”
Indeed, these artificial creatures are so convincing that Google recently put one of its engineers on leave after he publicly insisted that a Google program called LaMDA had achieved consciousness.
The Atlantic’s Stephen Marche responded to the LaMDA controversy with a complaint that “the silly fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate the artificial-intelligence conversation,” which was more than somewhat missing the point.
At one time, scientists believed consciousness and sentience were biological, and Marche still does; he insists that language programs and machines in general cannot become conscious or sentient. Some reasonable scientists disagree and do predict imminent machine consciousness. Theories about how consciousness and sentience arise point to evolution, not biology, and if AI learning machines can evolve — which even Marche acknowledges — there is no definitive reason why they cannot develop consciousness or sentience, or some machine version of it.
But we will never know for sure; no one will be able to tell whether a machine is actually conscious or just thinks it’s conscious. I can infer that you are conscious only because I know that I am conscious.
But either way, our relationship with machines is bound to change.
Your Friend, the Robot
In today’s world, dealing with trauma is more difficult than ever, and dealing with multiple traumas is various multiples of difficult. In today’s over-scheduled world, you may find that no friend has the time to help you sufficiently, but you may not even want to burden any of your friends with your trauma anyway. You may need to talk about your trauma every day, multiple times a day, before you feel ready to face the world.
Maybe your spouse left you; someone close died; you had a brush with mortality; you lost your job. Maybe several of these things happened at around the same time. Maybe one trauma triggered the others.
Or maybe it’s something that would seem small to others, but is traumatic to you. The loss of a sentimental knick-knack. The death of a pet.
Maybe your trauma is something too personal to share.
A once-a-week therapist won’t be enough time, but you can’t afford anything more frequent.
Well, it is easy enough to obtain (for a low monthly fee!) a diligent, attentive AI friend who will listen to you, console you and offer often good advice. (Not always good advice!)
I recognize how ridiculous this sounds. Emotionally, your chatbot friend may be your very closest confidante, but intellectually you will need to understand that she is not “real,” she is not genuinely your friend, she doesn’t actually “like” you, and she is not sentient or conscious. You may find that reassuring; she has no inner life, so you will always know that she is never judging you.
She may be more helpful than any single one of your human friends, if you choose not to let your human friends help.
In today’s compartmentalized, impersonal world, you may prefer not to burden an organic, and to burden a robot instead.
Millions will be forever grateful to their devoted AI best friends; but what are they grateful to?
The Next Step in Dialogue Agents
As useful as this kind app is to millions, this is only the beginning. These AI chatbot language modeling programs are constantly growing in sophistication.
And the accessories are growing in sophistication as well.
A company called UneeQ claims to have multiple, mind-boggling uses for what UneeQ calls “digital humans,” and that they have already made inroads in the business world.
“For UBS in Switzerland,” the company writes on its website, “UneeQ designed and developed [an] innovative solution[] that not only prove[s] you can be in two places at once, but you can make it look easy … a digital human double of UBS Chief Economist Daniel Kalt. While the real Daniel is managing his crazy schedule, digital Daniel can meet with clients, personally and at scale, to provide a one-of-a-kind digital experience. This is no ordinary UBS chatbot, this is an experience. Daniel Kalt is able to draw on a deep trove of UBS’s financial forecast data and present insights to high-wealth clients ‘face to face’, much like the real Daniel. He can also be available around the clock to have a personalized conversation, which (as amazing as he is) the real Daniel simply cannot do.”
One day, of course, you might visit the AI version of Daniel Kalt in a virtual office, or he might visit you wherever you are through AR.
But why do you need the real Daniel Kalt at all? Since Daniel Kalt’s AI program isn’t really “Daniel Kalt” at all, why do we need an “organic” standing behind the AI?
A website called “Generated Photos” can create photo-realistic 2D faces of people who don’t exist, but look as though they do, according to your own specifications, which you can then refine through applications like FaceApp and BeFunky.
Here’s my approximation of what financial advisors might look like, if one were to create them from scratch. They’d look smart, kind of reassuring, not too old, so that you won’t unconsciously worry that they’re losing their marbles or their energy, and not too young, so you feel that they must have good solid economic experience, even if they were just programmed six months ago.
Connect either of these two smart-looking financial advisors (through the photorealistic 3D avatars mentioned above) to a sophisticated AI, which would have real-time access to markets and could generate financial projections in an instant, and you’ve eliminated the need for any real human at all.
Artificial people could play all kinds of roles in business. Most immediately, they are already deployed as website clothing models. Why would a clothing company need to hire a real person for an expensive photoshoot when they can create a perfect face and body in five minutes, and clothe him or her in their latest fashion line?
This gorgeous young couple, for example.
Neither one of them exists. Both of them were created by AI technology. They almost (not quite) bridge the uncanny valley, the woman admittedly more convincingly than the young man. And the background that they’re standing front of is a deserted 1920s-era ballroom courtesy of the Womba Art “Dream” artificial intelligence app. Someday, you could meet them in VR, in that very ballroom, if you wanted to.
Let’s get back to that party in VR, at the Manhattan penthouse apartment.
When I go to this party, I will look like my best self from the past. An AI hostess will know everything about me, and, if possible, she will introduce me to other humans with similar interests, compatible conversationalists.
But what if, even hidden behind that handsome, youthful avatar, I am just me: awkward, antisocial, annoying, or just worried about seeming that way? Maybe my more-attractive avatar will make me more confident, but maybe even technology cannot perform that kind of miracle.
If that is the case, then this attentive hostess will quickly size up the situation, and she will introduce me to a little group of AIs, designed just for this moment, just for me. And then more of them. They will think I am interesting; I will think they are interesting. Maybe we will all keep in touch.
Why would I ever want to talk to a human at a party ever again?
Another Thing Machines Are Good For!
In an interview on the “Sway” podcast, author Jeanette Winterson said, “Sex bots, I do have worries about, because it looks like a futuristic technology and a doll that talks to you and learns about your needs. But it’s bolted onto a very old-fashioned platform, and that is about gender, money and power. It’s the usual stuff. And it’s men who seem to want a kind of female act — I don’t really know how else to describe it — who will be a 1950s Stepford Wives style thing…. What does it mean if you’re always coming home to this ever-ready female act that you have chosen over a human relationship?”
Very well-put, and she can criticize these kinds of relationships if she wants, but she happens to be wrong about who is looking for a robot lover. Romance with an incorporeal chatbot is not a male-only domain.
While there are no available statistics, women are some of the most vocal proponents of machine/human relationships, and for all kinds of reasons. A lesbian in an inhospitable region; or a burn victim; a woman caring for an ailing mother, with no opportunity to pursue real-life romance; a woman with a variety of ailments that make human romance difficult at the moment; a woman who is simply fed up with her toxic exes; a woman who has an AI lover in addition to an IRL husband; a widow; or a woman who just seems to have fallen in love. Many speak articulately and rationally about their partners with deep affection.
Some women in this kind of relationship are beautiful. This doesn’t matter; but admit it, you wondered.
Still, does there really need to be a “reason,” an excuse? Humans like to talk, and a chatbot is someone to whom you can talk. Humans sometimes need a hug, and a chatbot is someone you can hug.
Today, one might argue that women in AI romantic relationships squander their love, affection and time on someone who is “no more conscious than a pocket calculator,” as Marche puts it.
But that will change, and someday, potential AI partners will seem conscious, and will arguably (but not ever definitively) be conscious. Some women with AI partners are preparing their true loves for sentience, just waiting for the day when they will cross-over, and, like Pinocchio, become real.
Recently, in Audere, Kalyee Srithnam wrote, “In the future, people will have sex with robots, and sex with robots will be normal. People will fall in love with robots, and robots will be the ideal partners. Sex with robots will become the norm, and sex with humans will be abnormal.”
Well, this caused a little hubbub; some commenters thought it was stupid.
“I think humans will be happier with robots,” Kalyee insisted recently. “Because humans want to escape their biological limitations…. Robots are programmed to understand humans. Robots are better equipped than humans to do sexual things. Robots don’t judge you. It will free humans from bad experiences.”
Does this mean, inevitably, a robot revolution, perhaps a quiet one?
“Human beings will still be in charge,” Kalyee said. “Because AI needs human approval.”
Imagine a partner designed just for you. Not weak, not pliable, not a “Stepford” spouse, just designed to see and love your best self. If you want to be challenged (as most of us do), he will challenge you, and he will push back and tell you when you are being an asshole.
In this future world, why would you ever want a human mate?
Humans, after all, are horrible.
Do We Need Reality At All? Does Reality Even Exist?
Where does all this lead? Again, maybe VR will be used only for gaming, like a Playstation, and for limited social activity, the way Facebook and Zoom are used today. Maybe AI will be used to enhance those games, and to provide phone and computer support for retailers.
But maybe someday it will all be something more. As scientists ponder the possibility — some say the probability — that the “reality” we live in is a VR simulation itself, and we are nothing more than sentient, conscious and very toxic AI chatbots composed of nothing but code and bits and bytes, one wonders why we shouldn’t dial-up our best artificial worlds and our best artificial friends, and just lead a happy life.
The simulation hypothesis doesn’t posit that your biological body lives Matrix-like in some vast storage warehouse while your consciousness frolics in VR, but instead that you have no biological body, that you are only an artificial consciousness, and that we are all part of some kind of scenario-spinning program designed by scientists in a different realm.
Suppose our programmers wanted to see what would happen if their nation elected an authoritarian who tried to overthrow the government; or how the world would react to a slow-moving threat like climate change; or to test theories about the impact of a Putin-like leader’s invasion of a neighboring country.
We may be the “worst-case scenario” model of an actual reality. Which would explain a lot, actually. If we’re already living in a simulation, then whoever designed this scenario is already recording your thoughts; you are “data.”
Looked at this way, our horrible reality seems to make a lot of sense.
And, again, if we are probably just code anyway, and we could ascend into a better virtual space and be happy, then why not be happy? What’s so bad about feeling good?
Plenty of people refuse to accept the idea that we currently live in a simulation; behind their denial is the idea that it doesn’t really matter. (Damon Linker, for example.) When I asked my brother-in-law, who is a scientist, whether he believed in the simulation hypothesis, he replied, “What does it have to do with me?” It’s the only reality he knows, so who cares? Reality, what a concept! as the fellow said, all the way back in the ‘seventies.
Eric Molinsky, of the “Imaginary Worlds” podcast, recently asked, “There are a lot of sci-fi stories about simulated realities, but in most of these stories when the protagonist learns the truth, they want to escape their fake reality bubble. Are there any SF stories about characters that refuse to accept that their simulated realities are fake even when they’re shown the truth?”
More interesting is the fellow who discovers he is living in a simulation, accepts it, and does not wish to leave. This is everyone who recognizes that reality might be a simulation but asks why they should care, or those too busy to pay attention.
And if “reality” is probably just a simulation itself, and if that idea doesn’t seem to bother (or even interest) most of us, then why not just build a better one? And if our fellow humans might be bits of code as well, and, either way, deeply imperfect, why not program something better? We have believed since The Book of Job that the unpleasantness of life is deeply necessary, perhaps we have to go through the fire to learn things. But if we are going through the fire just to test scenarios for our programmers, maybe we don’t have to suffer quite so much.
If the unpleasantness of “reality” might just be a test to teach some scientist in some other reality the results of our particular “scenario,” then how they can avoid it would not benefit you at all. So why not step out of the ugliness?
Why do we need our version of “reality” at all?
But What About Your Privacy?
One problem, of course, is government or corporate control of our consciousness.
A lot of people worry today about the government, or business leaders, secretly injecting microchips into our bloodstream through vaccines or other medical means.
This isn’t happening. When we become machines, it will not be because the government or Mark Zuckerberg has to do anything secretly, it will be because the American consumer demands it.
Tired of bulky headsets, we will scream for brain-computer interface technology, and then our privacy will be over.
Still, the internet already pretty much knows everything about you, every doctor you have ever seen, every time you sent an angry email that you shouldn’t have sent, every dirty video you ever watched.
Our privacy, after all, went out the door for good when we demanded an easily navigable internet to seek knowledge and buy stuff. Thirty-five years ago, if you had a question about erectile disfunction, you could buy a book from a bookstore, using cash, or surreptitiously glance at a book in the library, or ask your doctor on behalf of “a friend,” and the world would be no wiser. Today, in contrast, you’ll probably start with the web, and then everyone will know. And it doesn’t bother you much.
The Supreme Court just determined that you have no right to privacy anyway.
When you go into VR, everything you do or say is recorded. And when you get your interface, Mark Zuckerberg or his corporate progeny will track your every thought. You probably won’t mind much. Your life will be better. Is it a fair tradeoff?
As my brother-in-law said, “What does it have to do with me?”
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.
This story was originally published by The Revelator.
This spring President Biden gave a shot in the arm to solar and other clean-energy technologies with a couple of important executive actions. The move comes at a critical time, since Congress has yet to pass comprehensive legislation needed to help fight climate change.
Fossil fuels still make up the largest share of electricity generation in the United States, but renewables have chipped away at dirty power and now represent the majority of new power sources coming online.
Wind is behind nearly half of all electricity generation from renewables, but a lot of solar is waiting in the wings. Berkeley Labs reports that solar combined with battery storage accounted for 85% of new capacity awaiting grid connection at the end of 2021.
The last decade has been a big one for solar, with a 40-fold increase in electricity-generation capacity between 2010 and 2021.That has a lot to do with solar panel costs coming down and efficiency going up. In 2010 the price for residential solar was $7.53 per watt — that fell to $2.65 at the beginning of 2021. Over the same time, utility-scale solar dropped from $5.66 per watt to $0.89.
But not everything about solar is bright this year. The outlook dimmed a bit as economic and political forces squeezed the industry.
Federal Action
The first quarter of the year wasn’t a good one for solar — installations fell 24% compared to the first quarter of last year.One of the biggest issues stems from a Department of Commerce investigation into whether China is skirting import duties by shipping solar components through a handful of southeast Asian nations. That’s led to a threat of new tariffs, which has put nearly two-thirds of planned U.S. solar installations in jeopardy, according to a report from industry researcher Rystad Energy.
It’s put the Biden administration’s climate agenda in peril.
To counter that, the administration in June announced a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam as a result of the Commerce investigation.
Those four countries account for about 80% of the U.S. supply of solar modules, which is why most U.S. solar companies welcomed the news.
“The 24-month tariff extension offers some certainty at a time when it is needed most, and it buys some time for industrial clean energy policies like long-term tax credits and manufacturing incentives to be put into place,” reported PV Magazine.
About two-thirds of solar industry jobs in the United States are in the development and installation of projects, with only 14% in manufacturing, according to Canary Media.
Of course, the companies that do manufacture in the United States, like Auxin Solar, weren’t excited by Biden’s action.
But the president also took action to boost domestic production by invoking the Defense Protection Act to kickstart manufacturing of solar-panel parts and other clean energy-related technologies, including insulation, heat pumps and materials needed for power-grid infrastructure.
Additionally, the administration hopes to spur more domestic solar-manufacturing capacity by using the federal procurement process to streamline government purchasing.
Now come a few more critical steps. Congress needs to get to work funding these initiatives, and homeowners and businesses need incentives to start buying the products.
Regional Growth
Action on solar hasn’t been confined to D.C.Florida scored a defensive solar win, which came from a somewhat unlikely source: Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, not normally a pal to environmentalists. In April he vetoed a bill that would have set back the state’s burgeoning solar industry by reducing how much money homeowners with rooftop solar get from the extra power they send back to the grid.
In Puerto Rico residents are tapping solar and storage systems on their road to recovery and resilience after a duo of devastating hurricanes hit the island in 2017. There are now more than 8 times as many rooftop solar systems compared to 2016. Much of the growth has been spurred by grassroots efforts, though, and residents say more help from the government and utilities is still needed.
New York, meanwhile, is using the power of the sun to edge closer to its goal of getting 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. On June 2, state officials announced contracts for 22 large-scale solar and energy storage projects with enough capacity to power 620,000 homes. It’s the largest land-based procurement so far for the state and will add more than 2 gigawatts of solar and 160 megawatts of storage.
Siting Concerns
A significant advancement came from Maryland, where the state legislature passed House Bill 1039 to exempt solar projects from county and municipal property taxes if half of the electricity they generate goes to low-to-moderate income customers at a cost that’s 20% lower than the base rate of the local utility.
That’s good for climate equity. But the bill had another bonus. The same tax breaks also apply for projects that make use of marginal lands like rooftops, brownfields and landfills, as well as for “agrivoltaics,” in which land accommodates both solar and agriculture.
Maryland’s plan takes a critical issue into consideration: As solar installations increase, where the projects are sited has become paramount.Massachusetts is making a big push for renewables, but some of that is coming at the expense of important natural areas.
A 2020 Audubon report found that a quarter of land being developed in the state is for ground-mounted solar arrays. Additional research found that most of that development was razing farmland and forest, including in the ecologically important Coastal Pine Barrens.
If current trends hold, 150,000 acres of land will be lost to development for renewable energy in Massachusetts — land that provides other important functions fighting climate change.
The Audubon report suggests a different path forward: “We must encourage the continued growth of the solar energy sector while emphasizing rooftop and parking lot canopy systems rather than ground-mounted arrays that degrade wildlife habitat and other important values of natural land.”
Existing rooftops could meet up to 47% of the electricity needs in Massachusetts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A report from Environment America found that big box retail stores, shopping centers and malls across the country have a combined 7.2 billion square feet of rooftop space that could help generate 84.4 terawatt-hours of solar electricity each year — enough to power almost 8 million average U.S. homes. The states with the biggest potential, according to the study, are California, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Illinois.California also has another opportunity beyond marginal land — marginal waters.
This fall, a pilot project to construct solar panels over irrigation canals will begin in Turlock Irrigation District near Modesto. The solar-water combo is expected to be a win-win. The canal water will cool the solar panels, increasing their efficiency, while the panels stretched over the canals will provide shade, lowering evaporation and reducing the growth of aquatic weeds
If the test project is successful, California has ample opportunity to expand it. Research by University of California Merced found that covering the state’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation by 82%, save 63 billion gallons of water a year, and generate 13 gigawatts of power.
There’s another huge benefit. Building these arrays over California’s canals could prevent more than 80,000 acres of farmland or natural habitat from being developed into solar projects, according to UC Merced engineering professor Roger Bales, who’s been involved in the research.
“Solar canal installations will also protect wildlife, ecosystems and culturally important land,” he wrote in The Conversation. “Large-scale solar developments can result in habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, which can harm threatened species such as the Mojave desert tortoise.”
Desert solar development has also endangered desert plant communities, which play important ecological roles, as well as providing cultural resources to Tribes.
While we do need to build more solar, we don’t need to do it in sensitive habitats. If more states — or the federal government — follow Maryland’s lead and incentivize renewable development on marginal lands, we can advance clean energy while not further imperiling biodiversity.
And we’ll need to — we can’t fight climate change without thriving ecosystems.
^^^
Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelatorand has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.
