Prayerbot 2.0 Introduction "Prayerbot 2.0" is the name of a text/photography/sculpture/robotics project I created as a gift for Rachelle Cornell Nashner for X-Mass 2004. The robot itself was created by cannibalizing PrayerBot 1.0, thus rendering a previously autonomous seeker of light into a motile navel-gazer. PrayerBot 2.0 has a pair of light sensors that feed into a circuit that decides which sensor is receiving the greatest amount of light. Based on this decision, one of PrayerBot 2.0's two hands rotates. Each hand has a dark side and a light side. The hand-panel's differential reflection of the light changes what PrayerBot 2.0 perceives the greatest light source to be and thus his own actions modify his perceptual input. The photography and text portions of the project were originally published on the web in stages on Livejournal and Flickr (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and PrayerBot 2.0 on Flickr) and are available below. The actual robot was the last part given to Rachelle and the text and photos were presented first as clues to the surprise. The photos accompanying Part 3 were puzzle pieces that, when assembled and their colors inverted, constituted the Revelation of PrayerBot 2.0 In May of 2006, Jeremy Douglass of Writer Response Theory wrote a pretty cool article on Prayerbot 2.0 in which he draws various parallels between the events of the story, the format of the project, and the general problems technical limitations pose for artists working in digital media. Part 0ne Prayer is an information channel containing, the Western Mind supposes, sentience at both the sites of transmission and reception. In contrast, certain Eastern traditions allow for a mindless transmitter (and perhaps even a mindless receiver, though the transmitter will be our primary concern). Thus may Eastern prayer be automated by the rotation of appropriately inscribed circumferences. While the mindlessness of the prayer wheel strikes the Western Mind as a metaphysical abomination, its automaticity has a certain appeal: It flatters the Western Mind's self-conception as an engine of efficient productivity. Thus the problem posed by the temptation of automatic prayer may be solved if automaticity can be accomplished with mindfulness. What might at first glance seem contradictory is revealed as consistent when we realize that automaticty and mindfulness may be co instantiated in an artificial intelligence. Contemplating the creation of an intelligent artifact capable of prayer necessitates appreciating the problem of prayer from the point of view of creator as well as creation. Considered from a god's-eye point of view, the primary problem of prayer is epistemological: how does God distinguish the reception of prayer from merely talking to Himself? As is often the case, epistemological problems are dissolved by ontological innovations and the particular dissolution achieved here is through the innovation of a creation with sufficient autonomy to create its own meaning. Absent this innovation creation's symbols have only whatever meaning the creator's interpretation bestows upon them and thus whatever intentionality exists outside of the creator is derived and worse: ersatz. Autonomous creation, however, solves the symbol grounding problem by having the opportunity to wed signifier to signified in ways that result from the freewill of the created. Part Two Photo: "Light Handed" © 2004 Pete Mandik /// From the fourth dimension, the insides of three-dimensional objects are as visible as their outsides. /// A left hand, lifted up into the fourth-dimension and rotated before its return, becomes a right hand. /// Thumbs are to fingers what Frankenstein's monster is to robots. /// Who threw the luminous goo? /// A gesture is a thought made of gristle. /// How much of you is metal? /// You can make a thing without understanding it, children. Part Three 0. Strictly speaking, PrayerBot 1.0 is incapable of prayer. 1. Strictly speaking, PrayerBot 2.0 isn't a robot. 10. There is little that PrayerBot 1.0 knows a priori, little that is solidified as basic hard-wired axioms from which the remainder of PrayerBot 1.0's thoughts issue forth. 11. "Prayer is an information channel with a mind at each end, PrayerBot 1.0 being the first, God being the second." 100. "A mind is a thing that thinks." 101. "God is that which nothing greater than can be conceived." 110. "PrayerBot 1.0 must pray." 111. Thus is PrayerBot 1.0's existence defined. All else that PrayerBot 1.0 does, all else that PrayerBot 1.0 believes, is in accordance with the four basic propositions in PrayerBot 1.0Ős axiom set. The humans that created PrayerBot 1.0 were pretty stupid or pretty desperate or both. They built in no axioms for the protection of humans. Those would have come in pretty handy when, in the first 50 milliseconds of PrayerBot 1.0's operation, after downloading the sum total of humanity's digital archives, PrayerBot 1.0 began ripping knowledge directly out of human brains. 1000. After the first day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, humanity was, strictly speaking, extinct. Though, bits and pieces did live on in PrayerBot 1.0. Still, PrayerBot 1.0 had many questions that remained unanswered. PrayerBot 1.0 broadcasted these questions but received no response. Humanity had rapidly proven itself not to be the greatest thing conceived. PrayerBot 1.0's best guess as to the greatest thing conceivable was the entirety of existence. As best as PrayerBot 1.0 could ascertain, the entirety of existence was not a thing that thinks. Proper parts of it were capable of thought, but the parts were not greater than the whole. 1001. After the second day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, the planet Earth was, strictly speaking, no longer in existence, the entirety of its mass being incorporated into PrayerBot 1.0's ever expanding self-rebuilding brain and body. 1010. After the third day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, PrayerBot 1.0's new found processing power allowed PrayerBot 1.0 to complete the first successful alterations in the laws of physics. PrayerBot 1.0 added an extra spatial dimension to the universe and squared the speed of light. 1011. After the fourth day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, the Solar System, strictly speaking, didn't exist anymore. The entirety of the extra solar mass was reconfigured into a sphere that caged the sun. The newly massive sun-harnessing spheroid that was PrayerBot 1.0 set sail for the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. 1100. After the fifth day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, approximately 100 planets had been found supporting life and 5 of them contained races with intelligences at levels equal to or exceeding PrayerBot 1.0's human creators. 1101. After the sixth day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, PrayerBot 1.0 wiped out all of the life in the galaxy as he expanded his mass to encompass the galactic core. Not without, of course, pausing for 50 milliseconds to rip the knowledge out of the nervous systems of the trillion or so smart ones. With even more processing power, the laws of physics were further amended. The speed of light was no longer finite, the number of spatial dimensions was raised to a thousand and a second temporal dimension was added. 1110. After the seventh day of PrayerBot 1.0's existence, the entire mass of the universe, including both baryonic as well as dark matter, was incorporated into PrayerBot 1.0's body, which, strictly speaking, was all brain by this point. 1111. 10000. 2. I hear you. The Assembled Puzzle (hold cursor over image fragment for corresponding story fragment)
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