Meet Simon Penny's Petit Mal bot

I would like to introduce you to Petit Mal, crafted by Simon Penny as an "an autonomous robotic artwork" in the early 1990s. The “anti-robot” is reflexive and responsive, but it is not a tool. Its two wheels suggest a wheelchair, calling to mind a disabled entity, and its single camera suggests an eye. It approaches and retreats. It is intentionally under-engineered in its physical structure but making use of several high-tech sensors and a micro-processor. Petit Mal is able to counteract its motion and stay upright, moving in a way that Penny describes as “just a little out of control” and “an engineers nightmare.”(1)

Petit Mal is an effort to craft an embodied computer that can teach humans about the limitations of computers. As Penny writes in his book on Making Sense, the computerization of minds has created a strong but false equation of symbol and being. If you missed it, much of the middle of the twentieth century was spent developing complex weapons using various types of feedback systems, also known as cybernetics. These systems were powerful means of reducing complexity and creating control over movement of projectiles of various kinds used for violence. These systems were felt to be existentially necessary, and the promise of this technology was so appealing and terrifying that its influence was felt everywhere. Indeed cybernetics seemed like it might be able to influence culture and heal global divisions through a universalizing approach to human societies. Mostly, however these systems operated by reducing the good stuff to math and discarding what can’t be reduced. KPI or die. Is this the right time to note that Penny’s book is an argument for the opposite? He argues in favor of arts and for embodied cognition aka holistic sensing, emotion, thought wrapped together.

In a section called The Rise and Fall of Symbolic Abstraction, Penny explains the implications of cybernetics and the problem of reducing all thought to the “manipulation of symbolic tokens by logical rules.” With the rise of cybernetics and the increasing computerization of the 20th century:

“Thus arose a Janus-headed thing, a circular and self-reinforcing argument in which brains were held to be intelligent because they behaved like computers and computers were intelligent because they manipulated symbols in a way analogous to brains.” (2) In this worldview, the goal of thought is symbol manipulation. Math and grammar. Semiology and combinations of probable patterns. Yes, this sounds a lot like LLMs though Penny suggests that current AI is not quite this way.

Why am I writing about this today? Well I have been writing about the history of adaptive / augmentative / enabling computers in the 1980s. And I am thinking a lot about the difference between a computer that allows a nonverbal person to join the symbol world and a computer that reduces someone’s humanity to a cliche from ChatGPT. Clearly, the fact that an interface like a Unicorn Board allows people to participate in symbol world and hence have their humanity recognized, then that is great. And it really seems to have been encouraging to Shoshanna Brand’s parents as relayed by Elizabeth Petrick. And tools like the Optacon show how many great tools of inclusion are possible but also embodied and as much about touch as they are about symbol. But when these tools are used to further reduce humans to abstraction then we have lost the thread of the human project. It must always be cyborg: computer and body. Machine and spirit.

And I kinda feel like we know this benefit and danger. This objection to abstraction is rather the point of the history of ergonomics that I am writing. All these words to remind us of something we knew? Okay.

But the novelty would be latent in Petit Mal. As we revise the cybernetic world for the 21st century, what can we learn from the anti-robot? What can ergnomics be if we do not equate thinking and math? Where do we end up if we let art lead the way?

(1) https://simonpenny.net/works/petitmal.html

(2) Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. (MIT Press, 2017), xxvii.

(3) Elizabeth R. Petrick, Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology. History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 47.