The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (review)

The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet. Edited by Ken Goldberg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. 330. $35.

The governing premise of this selection of essays is that Web-based interactive technology raises important issues within the field of telepistemology, the study of knowledge acquired at a distance. The interactive structure of the World Wide Web allows widespread access to remote agency through robotic devices (called telerobots) controlled via the Internet. At http://telegarden.aec.at, for example, Internet users can direct a robot to plant and water seeds in a garden located in Austria. However, the distributed nature of the Internet that ensures communicative reliability also allows it to bypass all centralized editorial or vetting authorities. Since it is no great technological challenge to create a "live" site with prerecorded images (and many such sites have been revealed as forgeries), the potential for deception is particularly high. What if the telegarden is a fake?

The heightened potential for deception on the Internet reasserts the importance of many traditional concerns arising from modern epistemology, such as perception, representation, and the possibility of authentic knowing. The specter of scores of Web-based "evil geniuses" seeking to deceive us demands something akin to Cartesian doubt. The first of The Robot in the Garden's three main sections is informed by this skeptical spirit. Philosophers drawing on diverse traditions explore not only the fundamental questions of how and what we can know through the Internet but also moral and phenomenological questions pertaining to human action and interaction within telerobotically mediated environments.

In the second section, critics analyze the ways in which several contemporary artists explore the epistemological tensions described in the first section. By incorporating telerobotics into their work, these "teleartists" investigate philosophical questions of reference, agency, and identity by juxtaposing what is seen and what is staged, the mediate and the proximal, by technical means. Some of these interactive "teleartworks" are quite ingenious. For instance, in allowing web users to manipulate his body by sending low-level bursts of voltage to muscle-stimulation circuitry attached to his limbs, the performance artist Stelarc offers insight into how such technical mediation creates a disturbing distance between agents and their actions on another, albeit remote, human being.

The third section offers perspectives from engineers and computer scientists. Here the focus is on the technical challenges of designing stable interfaces that will allow intuitive interaction between users and remote environments. Many philosophical themes are prominent here as well, as system designers draw on philosophical investigations of human cognition, expressivity, and intersubjectivity in order to meet these technical challenges. This reviewer sees a deep irony in technologists using philosophical insights to create transparent computer interfaces, which can only add to the potential for deception that is this book's governing premise.

Given that the Internet is a relatively new technology, it is not surprising that The Robot in the Garden is only exploratory. It offers no unified conclusion to the dilemmas generated by Internet telerobotics, though it does succeed in identifying several critical points of reference by bringing diverse perspectives to bear on the cluster of epistemological issues surrounding this technology. These points of reference should be regarded as possible starting points for further inquiry into this new technology, the history of which is just commencing. At the same time, the book points out that the philosophical questions with which it grapples are actually quite old, having been initially generated by telepistemological technologies such as eyeglasses, telescopes, the telephone, television, and lunar rovers. In other words, Internet telerobotics is only the most recent elaboration on a well-established trend in technology. It is for these reasons that historians of technology will find The Robot in the Garden worthy of attention.

In summary, this book coheres well and never strays from its declared...