Soft Robots

On softness as a skill, a material property, and a source of confusion

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.

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A note on citations: this essay should come with an extensive bibliography of peer-reviewed soft robot studies but the Substack software makes that difficult so please refer to my reporting at New Scientist for more rigorous coverage of many experiments I shout-out below.

SOFT ROBOTS 

A friend recently told me that before they had put their hands on my stomach, they had never touched someone with abs. I kept thinking about it for days after, not because I thought they were mistaken, but because in my mind I am not “someone with abs”. 

When I look at myself in the mirror, I can sort of see it: the hint of hardness in my core, skin that is more taut than loose, something like muscle peeking through if I haven’t had breakfast yet. I used to want to make this joke about how I don’t have a six pack, I have whatever it’s called when people at the store break a six pack to grab a couple of individual bottles so there’s only a few left behind, wrapped in punctured, flimsy plastic, but there was never a good time to tell it.

When I told my friend that I had been thinking about their comment, they said they were used to touching soft bellies. I couldn’t really remember the last time I was soft. 

My father used to say this often, usually when he wanted my mom to teach me how to shave my legs or take better care of my unruly curly hair,  that girls have to be soft and smooth. I grew up to be angular and wiry. As an adult, I have the kind of muscles that I don’t quite know how to flex, but you can tell that they store a whole lot of anxiety-turned-tension when I am focused on something.

In my yoga class, the instructor will frequently ask the class to work on softening. Sometimes just our jaws, sometimes our whole bodies. When you are in an uncomfortable pose, it is natural to become tense and stiff, to fight the discomfort by hardening. Bodies that are limp have usually already lost some fight. However, hardening is helpful only when it is targeted, when you know that pushing your thighs together will make you more stable, as opposed to scrunching up your shoulders towards your ears just because this is what you do when your body encounters pain. 

On a rational level, I understand that I get more out of my practice if I am not straining my neck and jaw, when I’m not siphoning energy away from the parts of my body that should be doing all the work. But my instinct is never to soften. Softness is something I have to be coached towards. In its most common state, my body is as stiff as if I had been made by someone braiding muscles and tendons, maybe some plastic, together into the shape of a person.

***

As a journalist, I can’t seem to avoid stories about soft robots. They jump, they run, they pick up objects, they squeeze themselves through narrow vessels, even some computers are soft and can be programmed by being squished and squashed. One researcher told me that any robot that could be safely used around people will have to be soft. Another told me that we might have a small revolution when it comes to encoding robots’ ability to execute logic into their soft bodies. They spoke at length about embodied cognition for soft robots and soft computers, design principles meant to mimic the bodies of animals like octopi. Another told me that, on some level, we are all soft robots. It made me think of that Mary Oliver poem, though they were talking about a U-shaped piece of rubber.

The word “robot” originates with the Czech writer Karel Capek who presumably got it from his brother, drawing on the word “robota” which means something like hard work. There is a similar word in Croatian - “rabota” - which also means labor, and labor done for a master in particular. It also has a second meaning as a suspicious activity, often something edging on a conspiracy or a type of crime that requires multiple people coming together and conversing in hushed tones.

I think about both meanings as I keep writing about soft robots. As all other robots, they are made to work, often to execute tasks that are slightly undignified and even slightly gross. Their softness makes them prime candidates for use in medicine, for instance for fetching things out of our stomachs without hurting us or clearing blockages and diseased tissues without needing harmful chemicals. Talking to researchers, I always get the sense that biomedical soft robots of the future will be grotesque. I imagine ads for soft robots that upcoming generations may see as tiny, compressed versions of the 1988’s The Blob but with better production value and a note on side effects or possible hazards at the end.

You may one day have to swallow a biomedical soft robot that is made of tiny magnets suspended in oil, a sort of dark slime, then have to wedge your body between some magnets that will force the robot to move inside of you. This is preferable to your flesh being cut when the robot is removing a blockage. It is also preferable to swallowing giant pills of possibly toxic drugs and hoping for the best if they get dispersed to the wrong place inside of you when the robot is delivering medicine in a targeted way. This work of the soft robot is interior, hidden, covert, almost kind of conspiratorial. It is too much like the nightmares I had as a child after seeing an episode of Dexter’s Lab where gooey aliens overtake the small genius’s family.

At the same time, the conspiracy of the soft robots, their “rabota”, goes deeper. Namely, if they could be a little less blobby, they could conspire to imitate us better than any metal-and-wires android from science fiction movies. We do not always think about it in these terms, but as our bodies are full of nerves, we are in some sense wired for small computations everywhere. When we touch something warm or sharp, nerves in our hands process the stimulus quickly and we pull our hand or fingers away. A soft robot may similarly shrink its body when faced with a stimulus. The sensation may be quickly processed in a simple logic circuit resulting in something akin to the scrunching up of shoulders towards the chin in response to pain.

Over the years, robots in science fiction have been a reliable stand-in for marginalized groups. They have had storylines about breaking free or developing personhood and individuality. They have looked like women or been explicitly designated to serve and please. In many stories, their danger lies in the fact that they are artificial, a simulacrum of the true person, of the irreplicable reference of what is more often than not a straight, cisgendered, white man. 

Marginalized people share this with robots - they are often both pressured into imitating and emulating the identity at the center of mainstream culture and feared and punished for doing so. My father loved to say that women will never earn equality by trying to act just like men (which, for him, meant yelling loudly and being hard and arrogant in the face of opposition).

Someone recently told me that they identify as a cyborg because they are enamored with gadgets. I wondered whether the era of using cyborgs as our go-to metaphor is nearing its end, whether what will make us seem both subservient and dangerous like robots will be an accommodating yet threatening kind of softness, an ability to be immersed into a body, a social body maybe, that needs us to do something without having an obvious way of hurting it.  

***

The most artificial thing about me is my eyelids, because I paint them blue or purple or green. The sharpest thing about me is the little line I draw at their edge, the one I have been practicing to make just the right kind of pointy for more than a decade. My cheekbones shine in direct light with a metallic kind of sheen; I am not reflective, but I smear on a generous amount of a suspension of particles that work together to distract from the soft normalcy of my skin. I bought a setting spray that a TikTok influencer promised would make my skin look “like glass”, something that seems to be favorable among many of the app’s users. 

The TikTok algorithm is generally very good at guessing what I’d like to see, but it sometimes stumbles when it comes to make-up tutorials. Here and there it will add a “clean girl look” how-to amid a steady stream of monstrously maximalist looks, Y2K revivals and the kind of metallic eyes that require layering at least five products before your real, soft, not-glassy, skin is fully hidden. The juxtaposition is jarring, yet both looking maximal and fully artificial and looking clean and fully natural seem to take enough work and skill to warrant a video tutorial. I think about it at night when I reluctantly rub greasy products onto my shins and shoulders and a special oil onto my face. For me, softness does not come naturally - in fact, it comes with mandatory upkeep. 

Of course, as many have noted, looking clean, much like eating clean, is about purity and class more than anything else. Many have also noted that the labor of beauty is still labor regardless of whether we choose to take it on to build skill or feel forced into it to stay socially acceptable and desirable. For some women, transwomen and gender nonconforming people, nailing the soft robot look is a matter of survival. The soft robot is not without merit as a tool, and its importance is possibly most underscored by the dangers of rejecting it.

I don’t love all the maximalist trends that the algorithm shows me. Cashing patterns coupled with every accessory made in the late 90 or full-on Hot Topic revivals are not quite how I imagine my daily uniform. But I like to tell myself that it makes sense that a very queer, very earnest, very disilusioned generation of young people that happen to be digital natives are turning towards a loud kind of artificiality instead of trying to be sleek, soft, and as elegant as if they had been manufactured on a line. Being garish is not exactly the opposite of being soft, but always being hard and angular, something I learned through trying to be not-like-the-other-girls when I was the same age as many influencers are now, is a lot more exhausting and a lot less fun.

***

In physics, so-called soft matter is its own area of study and you can train to become a soft matter physicist. This particular subgenre of physics is broad and involves anything that is not a crystal. Its model systems range from grains of sand or rice spinning in large drums to mixing oils or toothpaste in industrial settings to trying to understand how liquids that sometimes act as solids if you push on them work on the level of each of their constituent particles colliding with its neighbor. 

When I was looking to get involved in research in college, a well meaning professor told me that if I had ever made a good Hollandaise sauce in the past, I could be a candidate for a soft matter physics summer exchange program. This sauce is an emulsion where liquids that don’t seem to want to mix get intertwined with and suspended within each other in a fairly stable state you can then pour on your eggs Benedict. As the dish does not really exist in Croatia, I had never even heard of it, but when I looked it up I understood his point - soft matter physics is about squishy, slimy, deformable things and to study them in the lab you do need at least some finesse.

Yet, I have rarely encountered a one line definition of what makes a physical system a soft matter system. Instead, what is often given is a list of examples and some language about deformation, structural alteration or large response functions. In other words, if you push on a soft matter system even a little or expose it to changing temperature, it may change a lot in response. Growing up, I was opposed to softness because I thought the only possible response was a submission or a collapse. Certainly, I was wrong to think this, not just because there are other possibilities for physical materials, but also because being hard, anti–soft so to speak, can still make you brittle. Even rocks crack under pressure.

In the past few years, I have often wished for the kind of softness that enables flexibility and ease of being. The kind that helps you absorb impact, stretch your imagination, and shrink when you want to, when being a little squished can be an act of love and care. I am, at times, a bit too much like C3PO from Star Wars when he is doing what he has been designed for - I thrive on routines and protocols. When those are disturbed I struggle to bend and deform instead of breaking. 

Being socialized as a girl should have made me a soft robot. Yetm, because I was brought up to think that most girly things were frivolous and meaningless through a mix of outright misogyny and capitalism-flavored language of practicality, intellectualism and independence, I never quite internalized the soft part. There is a sense of loss to this. I imagine people raised as men experience it as well. And the sense of exhaustion at keeping yourself tightly wound up at all times because an unexpected collapse risk could always be around the corner.

***

My last project in graduate school was about metamaterials. They are a bit like Legos for physics PhDs and they are currently having a small renaissance. 

Metamaterials are artificial materials that researchers build piece by piece, block by block, connecting them all in intricate and clever ways so that once the whole system is complete they can change its properties at will by forcing a few blocks to bend or rotate away from their neighbors. One sheet or cube of some metamaterial, maybe a grid of small pieces of gold, maybe an array of interconnected fidget spinners, can serve multiple purposes because how they carry sound or reflect light or respond to pressure can be adjusted over and over again. 

Practically, metamaterials are useful because including them in devices means using fewer other materials that have one purpose and one set of properties only. In this way, they aid miniaturization efforts and add versatility. Theoretically, they offer so many building and mix-and-match opportunities that some researchers are using AI to comb through all possible ways to make them given some set of constraints. 

Not all metamaterials are soft, in fact many are not, but they can be made very adjustables and very responsive to their environments. The line between a computer that can be programmed by exerting pressure on its “soft body” and a metamaterial surface that reconfigures itself in response to an object being dropped on it is somewhat blurry. In fact, the latter may be just the right choice for building the former.

During my yoga classes, when my physical stiffness, not a metaphor but the visceral reality of my hips and hamstrings, becomes a problem I think about my body as something that just has to be reconfigured a bit. Instructors tend to give really precise advice about flexing a foot or pushing down with a fingertip, almost as if they are trying to say that you are infinitely adjustable if you move yourself piece-by-piece, deliberately. And the thing is, if I cannot be soft, if softness confuses me as much as it eludes me, I might at least try to make myself more reconfigurable.

Best,

Karmela

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

My biggest and most exciting story since my last letter came from a visit to an IBM lab in the Hudson Valley where the company has built the largest refrigerator for quantum computers yet. The whole thing is massive, basically twice the size of a tall person like me and it gets a 100, 000 times colder than interstellar space, or 25 millikelvin. Designed and carefully built piece by piece by some very excited IBM engineers, this is cooling tech that will be crucial for enabling ever bigger and more powerful quantum computers to be operated in the future. And it was very cool to get to touch it. 

Otherwise, I have been writing for the news section of the New Scientist website at a pretty incessant pace (I had at least one week where an article of mine was published every single day) so it’s difficult to pick out favorites. Not doing it all justice, I think this satellite-based test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that took decades to complete and still did not prove him wrong was very inspiring and interesting to report on and so was this experimental realization of an ultracold quantum magnet that physicists have also been after for a very long time.

LEARNING

How to constantly keep asking better interview questions and pick more productive fights with editors. How to not let small setbacks, like one detail I forgot to ask about, ruin my whole day. How to be flexible when technology and schedules act up at the same time. How to be more and more comfortable with having an identity outside of work and not being clued into every single budding social relationship at the office. How to be polite to loud people who make it hard to work and compassionate to people who disagree on how that work should be done. How to not pick fights on Twitter when strangers misunderstand what “100,000 times colder” means.

How to put my phone away during date night and how to say yes to hanging out with friends even if it is two days in a row. How to skip a run one night and still eat three real meals the next day. How to just tell people what I want from them and not feel overly needy. How to meet a baby. How to train with a new boxing instructor. How to not hide in the kitchen when the party is small and thrown by a friend. 

Rules of American football, for the millionth time.

READING

This essay by raechel anne jolie about solidarity, returning to work and reexamining work as a socially sanctioned way of building community. In response to a comment made by Malcolm Gladwell, Jolie writes

The problem here is the focus on work and not on, what Gladwell rightly points out, the need for belonging. We do, I think, crave ‘being a part of something’; what he gets wrong is not that we do better getting out of bed and sharing space with people—I think this is actually good advice (if possible/and with consideration for different abilities)— but that he lands on getting that through capitalist relations. The bigger issue is that for many, many people, work is the only place they’ve ever felt any semblance of ‘community.’ Alienation is a problem for us as workers, but sometimes more painfully, for us as neighbors, as simply living beings. 

I also really appreciated her writing about labor and the beauty industry from both a personal and a compassionate view.

Storyteller and a friend I have long looked up to, Christian Sager, launched a newsletter called Wicked Problems that I have been enjoying. It’s structured according to the Maslow hierarchy of needs and Christian is both a compelling writer and a varied and discerning consumer of academic text and pop culture alike.

This poem by David Whyte which starts with the remarkable line “Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.” and becomes progressively more harsh and more inviting as it goes on.

One of my colleagues at New Scientist interviewed the pope’s AI advisor, the monk Paolo Benanti, and I have been fascinated to learn that this is even a role that exists. Certainly, Benanti’s views reflect his faith, but I was struck by his use of language around AI when he says:

“These are the unwritten ethical standards we hold ourselves to….I like to think of these unwritten ethics as the quality of gentleness, and I think machines have to have this quality. That’s why, with the Rome Call, we are trying to encourage companies to shape algorithms to be gentle in the human-machine relationship.”

LISTENING

PAINLESS by Nilufer Yanya which sits on the line between 90s-adjacent indie rock and alternative pop for dark moods. Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris which feels like it should be a radio drama, but still makes sense as an album where almost every song has a slightly different stylistic flair. Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood, again, because her new single It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody reminded me how soothing that ephemeral evergreen quality of her voice is without being anemic.

Adrienne maree brown’s interview on the On Being podcast where she touches on pleasure activism, emergence as an organizing principle, expunging carceral logics from our relationships with as much ferocity as when we want to expunge them on the level of state, and learning from nature. Brown is a gentle yet profound speaker and a broad thinker whose ideas are always prompts for further discussion as much as they are statements.

Two nerdy, lefty, radical podcasts: Death Panel which deals, very broadly, with healthcare in the context of capitalism, and Bad Gays which presents case studies of queer “villains” from history through a lens of historical scholarship and a fairly self-conscious brand of queer theory. Neither is for the faint of heart and you probably cannot be put off by the idea of reading Marx of Foucault and enjoy these, but despite their forays into jargon and no pretense of not being ideologically biased, they have taught me a lot in just a few episodes.

WATCHING

My partner and I had a brief 90s sci-fi phase and, with absolutely zero regrets, watched Terminator II and Hackers in a row. We also watched the 1998 Robert De Niro spy thriller Ronin and all three held up more than I expected. There is something to be said about an action packed film, even if that action is cheesy or over-the-top, that does not follow the mold and tone set by being part of a sprawling franchise.

We finished watching the animated show Star Wars: Clone Wars. The show was hit-or-miss for most of its long and certainly shifted in tone lots since its beginning, but the last season or so, and especially the last arc which overlaps with Revenge of the Sith really blew me away. A few days later we re-watched Rogue One as a warm up for Andor and seeing Darth Vader at the movie’s end felt so different now that so many details of Anakin Skywalker’s descent to the dark side had been filled in for me by Clone Wars. This animated series single-handedly turned me into the kind of Star Wars fan that actually cares about lore and detailed backstories, and I have really been enjoying that.

EATING

A vegan version of this “Brooklyn blackout” cake that I made for a friend’s birthday, covered in an extra layer of ganache just in case the chocolate factor wasn’t high enough. This may have been my favorite cake I have baked this year so far though my take on this upside-down peach cake came out wonderfully as well.

A poppy seed roll inspired by my grandma’s “makovnjača” that I made for a picnic with a few other queer vegans whom I adore. Other standouts included Thai basil peanut pesto noodles, a herby potato salad and chocolate chip rosemary cookies, and a true cornucopia of Russian zakuski.

Veggie paella at a Spanish restaurant in our neighborhood that also serves wonderfully Spanish gin and tonics and giant hand-held sushi rolls in McCarren Park.