Dr. Dobb's Journal September 1998
When I first suggested we go see Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, my better half replied that she didn't know a movie had been made about me. Okay, so on occasion I have said "big night," "video rental," and "pizza" all in the same sentence. Jeez. Nevertheless, she was game, so gussied up in our best bib and tucker and stepped out -- off to Saturday night at the movies.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which received the 1997 Golden Globe award for best documentary, interweaves the stories of Dave Hoover, a wild-animal trainer with, well, unique theories on how animals think; topiary gardener George Mendonca, who creates animal sculptures out of garden plants; Ray Mendez, a zoologist who studies tiny, hairless, buck-toothed mole-rats; and (more to the point here) Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and designer of autonomous robots.
As it turns out, the movie's title is borrowed from a paper entitled "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System" (available at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/brooks/paperlist.html), which Brooks and A.M. Flynn published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (October, 1989). In both the paper and movie, Brooks promotes the idea of invading space with legions of tiny, single-purpose, inexpensive, throwaway robots. "Instead of sending one 1000 kilogram robot to explore Mars," he says, "our idea [in the paper] was to send a whole bunch of one kilogram robots -- maybe as many a hundred of them -- that you are willing to try higher risk things with. If you fail and lose a robot, it's not the end of the mission."
These disposable mobile robots (sometimes called "microbots" or "mobots") can be quickly built using cheap off-the-shelf parts. And since they are designed to perform individual tasks (locating a water source, then raising a "flag" indicating they've done so, for example), they don't need constant control or supervision -- they're turned loose to do their jobs. These notions apparently clicked with NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab, leading (in part) to the development of the microrover "Sojourner," deployed on the surface of Mars as part of the Mars Pathfinder project. Likewise, the U.S. Defense Department is experimenting with similar, yet airborne, devices as an efficient means of gathering information.
As for life on Earth, Brooks sees the day when "the ideas we are developing are going to let us have robots everywhere in our world. Everything around us will become intelligent at some level. A door will have agents and when you walk up with two bags of groceries and say 'open,' it will open. They will learn about our habits. These much more intelligent systems agents, which will be embedded in all the physical objects around us, will eventually be able to start talking to each other. They are going to infiltrate our lives and they'll be operating in the background." To deal with such mundane matters as, say, dust on TV screens, Brooks envisions bottles of microbots that you buy for a dollar. You sprinkle the robots onto the TV display, and they absorb electrons to charge-up. When the TV is turned off, they spread over the screen, each cleaning a small section. When the TV comes on, they go back to the corner, charge-up again, and wait for more dust to accumulate.
Central to Brooks' way of thinking is that it isn't possible to have disembodied intelligence without a physical connection to reality. To illustrate this, the movie moves back and forth between, for instance, hopping kangaroos with MIT robots moving about in a similar fashion. As for humans, Brooks believes we are made up of thousands and thousands of little agents, all acting independently" -- a model he's clearly extended to his laboratory world. But this also leads to a major barrier. A common cockroach has 30,000 hairs, each an individual sensor. The most complex robot Brooks and his team have built had only 150 sensors and that "about killed us." Clearly, getting beyond the sensor hurdle will be a big challenge.
Is Brooks a crackpot operating outside the mainstream? Only if you also consider stuff like embedded systems or distributed computing to be wacko. If you think about it, Brooks' ideas mirror the personal-computer revolution itself -- inexpensive computers connected to each other outside the control of a centralized IS bureaucracy. In all likelihood, any skepticism leveled at Brooks was probably echoed by mainframers scoffing at early PCs.
So what does all this have to do wild-animal training, topiary gardening, and hairless mole-rats? At the beginning of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, each man talks about his life's work. But as the film unfolds, multiple connections emerge, helped along by the cinematic technique of juxtaposing video of circus animals or mole-rats with audio of Brooks talking about robots -- one man's comment underscoring another's point. By the end of the movie, there's little question that we're connected to each other and to the world around us.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Check it out at your neighborhood video store or download QuickTime clips of it from http://www.spe.sony.com/classics/fastcheap/index.html. Four stars. Two thumbs up. Hey, even my wife ended up liking it.
-- Jonathan Erickson