I overcame my suspicions of not understanding their music or their technology and went to Sónar. I wanted to interview Kate Darling, the world’s leading expert on robotics ethics (since she read Asimov as a child). Her features, of symmetrical golden and Caucasian perfection, drew the first question from me:
-How do I know that I am not before a robot?
Darling smiled at me as only a woman or a robot whose perfection has not yet been achieved can smile.
I did not see the “uncanny valley” in Kate Darling’s well-carved face: this robotics term defines that “gap” that our senses perceive in the face of something “almost” perfectly human, that robotic gap so subtle that it is highly disturbing. That is why I believe that Kate Darling is human (I will soon publish her answers in “la Contra”): she tells me that many people baptize their “rumba”, the cleaning robot, and that in the event of a breakdown they would reject any offer to change it for a new one:
-Never! How am I going to replace my Mercedes?
We tend to humanize nature: a couple of traits that flatter our image and likeness are enough for us. And we can even fall in love with a little bird. It happened to Mozart with a starling, a bird that flies in flocks that draw enigmatic undulating shapes in the evening sky. But being a starling in the United States is not a trifle: it is considered an invasive (European) species there. Lyanda Lynn Haupt has had the detail to study the love relationship between Mozart and a starling. I do not forget what Care Santos told me about Eugene Schieffelin, the millionaire who brought to New York the birds that Shakespeare mentions in his plays: the 300 million starlings that fly in the New World today descend from a pair that Schieffelin brought from the Shakespearean England to Central Park, in 1890.
To compensate for the robotics, I attended the dance and music show Woman by Vivancos (Poliorama theatre): with scenic force, it walks through vital moments of women, so crude that they take away the desire to be a woman… Fortunately, seven powerful dancers perform them redemptively .
But I return to robotics through the mechanics of mobility: isn’t the automobile today a robot on wheels? In “the contra” tomorrow, Monday, José Manuel Barrios (responsible for the next World Congress of Automotive and Mobility Technicians, to be held in Barcelona) tells me what the vehicles of the immediate future will be like: electric, connected, without a driver no human accidents or need for a parking space or a title deed by its user. A closed defense of the urban car that contrasts with what the biologist and environmentalist Cristina Linares told me one day, as well as Joel Schwartz, although in the vein of Lex Hoefsloot.
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The busy week An investigation by Dr. Vicente Arráez suggests that our attention (with intention) alters reality: the mind shapes matter, in short. That’s how strong we started a week that continued with the anti-racist didactic of the soccer player Lilian Thuram, the musical with a feminist conscience by the dancer Aarón Vivancos, the praise of the starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt and its eventual influence on the work of Mozart and the farewell to another great composer: Johann Sebastian Mastropiero, celebrated parody of Les Luthiers that the great Carlos López Puccio tells me.
