Plant Machete | Hacker News Reader

Plant Machete

dwbowen.com

24 pointsyamrzou12 comments

I love these sorts works the blend nature and tech in slightly uncomfortable ways. So without getting all caught up in overstating the role of the plant, the extended distributed intelligence of the entire system is kind of interesting, and the first impression of the piece is pretty awesome.

I've used plants with this sort of electrical pickup in the production of music, and the output of the plants does seem to react to input sound being amplified back at the plant, creating a control feedback loop. In this particular setup, I'm not sure the plant it able to react to the movement of the machete. It may be able to react to the vibrations and moving EM fields around the robot motors. But that's not the point, I think that first impression is more the point. To be near it would be extremely discomforting as you are facing a dangerous unknown otherness.

Now I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be interesting if a similar system allowed the plant to control things on its favor, like water and light? I wonder if the plant could learn such a system via positive reinforcement?

This nonsense was posted on Reddit already. I'm surprised anyone here would fall for it. And yes it is nonsense:

> Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

Dial back the "plant brain is controlling a knife" description and then maybe it would fall back into the realm of sense.

How is it nonsense? Either the machete is moving according to signals picked up from the plant, or it's not.

Are you asserting that the voltages sensed are just random noise, and do not represent internal potentials? Or just that the plant is not deliberately waving around a knife?

Plants do exhibit electrical potential changes in response to environmental and internal stimuli. It would be surprising if those vary as dramatically as the exhibit suggests, but not physiologically implausible.

Plants do not have separate nerve tissue crammed together into a skull to minimize signal transit time as needed to respond in millisecond increments, as animals must, but they certainly do have cells distributed throughout that could respond as nerve cells do, given connectivity and stimuli, on a slower timebase. We don't know if there are such connections or responses. Each plant taxon might vary substantially from others, in this detail, so not finding it in pea plants does not tell you anything about philodendrons.

Proving its absence in peas could be arbitrarily difficult.

The "essentially the plant is the brain" part is super-sensationalized nonsense. To the extent of the information provided, the robotic arm is just a visualizer of the electrical activity of the plant. And the machete is there only for the extra clicks.

It is an art installation. Every last detail of every art installation is "for clicks" (where not just for kicks).

I for one welcome our new plant overlords

wouldnt you get similar results from any source of noise?

Why do you assume it is noise?

It might be noise, in which case the exhibit is "just" art. Or, it might indicate a more dynamic electrical activity than we are used to thinking is there.

> plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron

I didn’t assume it says it first thing in the article

They use the term informally. You seem to be assuming much more than you or they can know: that the signals picked up are, in fact random. Not understanding their meaning, if any, is fundamentally different from knowing they are random.

Imagine a plant machete duel

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