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When I was younger, my mother used to tell me the following sentence: "your grandma was lousy, I was careless and your sister had dyslexia". Through this summary she wanted to explain how external perception of dyslexia
had evolved over time. But when I got older, the story was not quite about dyslexia. It was about ADHD as well. And when I turned 22, I turned out to be lousy and careless. I got diagnosed with ADHD.
According to the DSM-5, the worldwide used handbook for diagnosing in psychiatry, about 2,5% of the world’s population has this neurodevelopmental disorder. And while several researchers and developers within the robotic and computing domain are in competition for making the most advanced, ‘human’-like robots, we are forgetting that we as humans are not perfect at all. To the contrary. We are flawed, and our flaws are mapped on a diverse spectrum of everything that can be wrong with you or specifically your brain. So, why aren’t we making more realistic and thus flawed versions of ourselves? Why are we not making a robot with ADHD?
No attention to details
Difficulty sustaining attention
Not listening when spoken to
Not following through on instructions and fails finishing
Difficulty organizing
Avoids, dislikes and is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort
Loses things
Easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
Forgetfulness
Back to artificial creatures. In the following sections I will be describe some related artworks and concepts within informatics that can be relevant in further exploring of ADHD within artificial systems.
AI's with dementia?
Humans take a lifetime to learn and remember things. In comparison with artificial intelligence, we have an almost infinite space on our memory 'card'. Intelligent systems are limited to certain space, which can lead to the phenomena of catastrophic forgetting: overwriting previous data when learned new data. (Taylor Hayes et al., 2022) To illustrate, consider an AI perfected in distinguishing cats on images. Suppose we want to teach it to distinguish dogs as well. When not done properly, the new data with information about dog characteristics may overwrite the old data about cats, resulting in the AI losing its ability to identify cats.
Credit: Kachi Chan on designboom.com
Sisyphus - Kachi Chan
Named after the famous Greek mythology character, Sisyphus is an installation consisting of one large robotic arm with several smaller robotic arms surrounding it. The smaller robots are trying to build small arches from bricks laying around, while the bigger arm rotates and sweeps the structures. The original concept displayed in this artwork is of resistance and oppression and our current socio-political climate. Although the 'oppressor' is much larger and stronger, the 'resisting' arms keep on building, thus embodying a never ending battle.
While this installation has no connections to ADHD or other cognitive disorder, we can take inspiration from the idea of robots never completing their task. Both parties are stuck in an ongoing struggle in destroying the other, which ultimately results in lots of work and effort, without any effects. This artwork is from a massive scale perspective concerning large political structures. But if we smaller the scale and integrate the installation in our brain, we can translate the ongoing struggle in an ADHD like inability to complete a task; even though a lot of work has been done, results are nowhere to be seen.
My Robot Companion - Anna Dumitriu & Alex May
HARR1 (Humanoid Art Research Robot 1) is a humanoid exhibiting other forms of social interaction and body language besides just talking. It was created in by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, together with Dr Michael L. Waters and Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn in the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. While there is no interaction with HARR1, it just looks around and fidgets its hands. It appears to be 'bored'. When there would be movement, HARR1 would follow it with its eyes and when the movement stops, it would go back to being 'bored'.
Implementing such 'social' body language into robotics is very interesting as a robot appears to not need fidgeting or being bored. But in discovering more about ourselves, and to be specific regarding this blog, discovering more about ADHD, it can be of great value to add those traits to entities that are inherently programmed to be optimised. By doing this, we can isolate ADHD characteristics, which could add to a critical outer perspective with less noise.
Credit: Francesca Moore
The story of the procrastinating Mars Rover
In 1996, Nasa launched a mission in which they send the Sojourner Rover to Mars. The goal of the mission was to explore Mars' foreign surface and gather more information about the planet and its climate. For its time, Sojourner was a pretty advanced AI machinery and it was a pioneer in its field of space exploration. But once landed, the rover came upon some problems Nasa's people did not prepare for.
This problem was within the scheduling algorithms of the rover. It was assigned several tasks, but quickly it was not able to prioritise which processes, resulting in Sojourner getting stuck in a scheduling loop instead of doing its tasks.
Too much going on!
In operating systems there's a constant interaction between the main memory or RAM and the secondary storage or hard drive, same as working memory and long term memory in humans. When an operating system needs too much data from its secondary storage to execute processes with no room in its RAM thrashing can occur, which happened to Sojourner.
When thrashing occurs, the system spends more time moving data between the main memory and the secondary storage than actually executing tasks. This can significantly degrade system performance and responsiveness.
Credit: David Hall on tate.org.uk
TV interruptions - David Hall (1971/2006)
In his interruptions, David Hall placed seven monitors in a circle, within close proximity of each other. Each monitor displayed a black and white film on loop, accompanied by sound. However sound and film conflict with each other, creating a sense of chaos and confusion.
Although this artwork stems from a time where TV's were relatively new and not yet usual in expressing art, the chaos Hall aimes for is very relatable for any ADHD'er. Trying to focus on doing something when your brain is producing an unrelated noise loop at the same time. In this artwork there is not a robot experiencing ADHD traits, but using technology for creating chaos could be used as an inspiration in making a neurodivergent robot.
Coke is it - Matt Kenyon
With Coke is it Matt Kenyon explores the idea of the repercussions of overconsumption. The robotic installation consists of robot C3, obsessed with Coca Cola. C3 is an umbrella like creature waddling towards pools of coke. Finding coke, it slurps the substance via a straw and sprays the coke on its own top surface. Eventually, the acidity of the coke corrodes its own 'skin' and in the end kills C3.
In his work, Kenyon wants to address overconsuming, but we could also interpreted this phenomena as a form of addiction; giving in to cravings, knowing that they are destroying you. Substance abuse or addictions are very common comorbidities of ADHD, thus making Kenyon's approach useful in further exploring of ADHD within robotics.
Credit: Matt Kenyon
designboom. (2022, 5 augustus). Sisyphus: a robotic art installation in endless interaction with power and resistance. Designboom. Geraadpleegd op 15 februari 2023, van https://www.designboom.com/art/sisyphus-robotic-art-installation-endless-interaction-power-resistance-08-05-2022/
Dumitriu, A. (2011). HARR1: My Robot Companion. Anna Dumitriu. Geraadpleegd op 15 februari 2023, van https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/harr1-my-robot-companion/
Hayes, T. L., Kafle, K., Shrestha, R., Acharya, M., & Kanan, C. (2020, August). Remind your neural network to prevent catastrophic forgetting. In European Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 466-483). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
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