Tetherd Cow Ahead

A very average artist’s impression of Titan

This from NASA this morning:

Carolina Martinez 818-354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-025 Feb. 13, 2008

Titan’s Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

I bet George Bush is already cooking up some pretext on which he can invade.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately about people (mainly Japanese people, it has to be said) extolling the virtues of the imminent Robot Revolution. I’m sure you all saw scientists at Tokyo’s Waseda University recently wheeling out their Twendy-one, a kind of home-help robot designed for aged-care, and last year Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University was appearing all over the media with his ‘actroids’, including the odd ventriloquist-doll-like ReplieeQ1 who is variously described as ‘scarily realistic’ and ‘scarily life-like’ but seems to me just plain ‘scarily scary‘.*

I’m not too impressed about the idea of robots getting to be all pally with us, despite the enthusiasm coming out of Nippon. As much as I really loved the concept of our funky metal friends when I was a kid watching The Jetsons and Lost in Space, I’ve seen the future of robotic intrusion into our lives, and I just know that if our destiny is going to involve robots, I’m much more likely to be teaming up with Magnus, Robot Fighter than with little Jimmy Sparks.

I am, of course, extrapolating from the way robots currently ‘help’ us with our affairs. I’m sure you’ve tangled with the ‘proto-bots’ too, but let me elaborate.

Telstra, Australia’s biggest telco, has had in operation for a while now for our convenience, a voice-recognition fembot to handle incoming calls. I often find myself having to call Telstra and I have come to dread the experience. This is how my conversation with this artificial ‘intelligence’ typically proceeds (try to imagine a sing-songy overly-chummy female voice for the fembot):

Fembot: Welcome to Telstra. So that I can direct your call to the right place, in just a few words please tell me the reason for your call.

Me: Incorrect charges on my bill.

Fembot: That would be about a single bill? Does that sound OK?

Me: What? A single bill? What does that mean?

Fembot: I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Let’s try again. In just a few words, tell me the reason for your call.

Me: You’ve charged me for calls I didn’t make. Again.

Fembot: I think there could be faults or problems with your phone, does that sound OK?

Me: No!

Fembot: And is that for a mobile?

Me: What? No. It’s not a mobile.

Fembot: Can you give me the number of the mobile?

Me: It’s not a mobile!

Fembot: And what number would that mobile be?

Me (grrr): I want to talk to an operator.

Fembot: So that I can direct your call, please tell me in a few words the reason for your call.

Me: Aaaaargh! Operator. Operator. Give me a human. Operator. Operator. Operator.

Fembot: OK, please wait and I’ll get a customer service representative.

When the human comes online, we are invariably able to sort the problem out in seconds.

How many things do I resent about talking to the fembot? For a start, I despise the way it assumes a cloak of intelligence and power right from the get-go. By giving the impression that it has some kind of control over what it offers to be able to do for me, it looks all the more moronic for not being able to understand the most basic of syntax; I am phoning to try and sort out a problem and find that I’m immediately talking to an IDIOT. Let me ask you: if you were setting up a business, how likely is it that you go out and hire the stupidest person you could find, and then put them on the switchboard? Well, it’s worse than that.

Next, I loathe the maladroit attempt by the programmers to make the fembot appear chummy. Gone is the stilted computer formant voice of yesterday, replaced now with a studied, efficient-but-friendly, carefully modulated, fluid female phrasing that manages to come across as simultaneously condescending and obsequious. The sing-song inflections are reminiscent of the way someone might speak to a very young child, and the colloquial tone (Does that sound OK?) is merely grating and infuriating when intoned by a gadget whose nearest relative is a talking clock. At least when you got the phoneme-retarded cut-up voices of the past you were comprehensively aware that it was a clunky computer trick that you were dealing with.

But most of all I am maddened by the fact that every time I call I am completely unable to resist being drawn into talking to the damn thing as if it was an actual person, and wasting a good minute or so getting exactly to where I should have been at ‘Hello’.

The technicians who build these machines have got it in their heads that if they make them more people-like, we will accept them more easily, but for me, at least, the closer these things come to having the semblance of humanness, the greater is my desire to punch them. And, in contrast to the way I might deal with a real human idiot, there’s really no moral reason to curb that inclination.

This is what I fear about the coming of the real Robots. At least when the android is separated from me by a phone line, the most I can do is yell at the damn thing (which, I might add, I have done on numerous occasions).† But if Robo was in arm’s reach, then I swear, the word robocide will enter the lexicon faster than you can say klaatu barada nikto. This of course would necessitate the invention of laws. Not as Mr Asimov supposed, Three Laws designed to stop robots from harming humans, but instead, a single Law to stop humans turning robots into boat anchors.

This explains, at least, why they’re practising with robots in aged care: lowered retaliation factor. Better to send the droids up against feeble old folks than aspiring Magnuses.

It’s obvious though, that the boffins, as much as they might know all the ins & outs of their mechanical friends, don’t have even the vaguest concept about aged care. I’m just itching to watch the first practical tests when they send ReplieeQ17 in to deal with some old codger with dementia. I expect it to go something like this:

RQ17: Hello Mr ÄŒapek. I am here to prepare your breakfast. In just a few words, tell me what you would like?

Old Codger: You say what, young fella?

RQ17: I’m sorry I missed that, let’s try it again. Can you tell me, in just a few words, what you would like for breakfast?

Old Codger: Breakfast? Breakfast? What happened to lunch?

RQ17: Would that be oatmeal and fruit? Does that sound OK?

Old Codger (hits robot with cane): Are you trying to steal my money?!

RQ17: Did you say “my money is missing”?

Old Codger: YOU STOLE MY MONEY!

RQ17: I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Would you like to report a robbery? Does that sound right?

Old Codger: There’s something wrong with your face. Are you a Chinaman? Where’s my breakfast anyway?

RQ17: In just a few words, tell me what you would like for breakfast and I will prepare it for you.

Old Codger: A Chinaman stole my money! I knew it!

Well, you get the drift.

Personally, when all’s said and done, if it really is necessary to have a Robot Revolution, I want my robots to look and act like robots. If there’s a problem, I don’t need some kind of creepy pseudo-human standing there and negotiating with me. I just want a big clunky tin can filled with flashing lights, wobbling the claws on the end of its vacuum-cleaner arms, and blurting out in a grating metallic voice:‘Warning! Warning Will Robinson!’

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*Hiroshi Ishiguro has also created Geminoid HI-1, a robot that looks exactly like himself. Well, exactly like himself if he was a spastically jerking animatronic life-size doll.

†I’m not alone in this it would seem. Current research into voice recognition systems for handling telephone enquiry lines is examining ways to extract ’emotional’ tones from callers’ voices in an effort to recognize unhappy campers. Presumably these callers are then somehow dealt with differently to people stupid patient enough to play footsie with the robots.

A special thanks to Pete at Headless Hollow for the Magnus scan. I grew up reading Magnus comics and I really loved the wacky robots-gone-amok future that they suggested.

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In late-breaking Antipodean news, an Australian children’s toy called Bindeez has been withdrawn from the market because it contains a chemical that can be metabolized into the ‘party’ drug Fantasy if swallowed.

I’m particularly enamored of the hippy-trippy unicorn picture that the Melbourne Age has used to illustrate the story. A body is forced to contemplate the notion that the manufacturers of Bindeez might’ve been sucking their own product.

Come with us to Candy Mountain, Charlieeeee…

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… and a special Cow salute to all you visiting boingboing readers!

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Addendum: boingboing reader jimh kicks in a lolcat response to the story here.

Oh for Pete’s sake. Another nutcase has found ‘an image of the Virgin’ on a tortilla sandwich cinnamon bun fencepost pizza pan underpass pebble.

The Holy Pebble was found on a beach in New Zealand by a woman who had ‘an awesome run of luck’ after picking it up. Evidently the awesome run of luck wasn’t permanent since she’s put the Sacred Item up for online auction. Twice. The first time, the winning bid was a hoax. Dang. A hoax! Some people will do anything!

Unbelievably, for Round Two, there are as of this writing, already bids of many thousands of dollars.

A New Zealand Catholic Church spokesperson said the church was ‘cautious’ about responding to claims of holy images of the Virgin Mary, because many turned out to be fakes.

Smack me with a plank from the True Cross! Fakes? No way!

Thing is, you have to be pretty careful when it comes to seeing likenesses in patterns on pebbles. Look at it one way and some might see The Virgin but flip the picture upside down you’ll get an idea of exactly what kind of forces this woman is really messing with.

The Chinese Government has just passed into law a 14 part regulation banning Tibet’s ‘Living Buddhas’ from reincarnating.

Aside from the obvious idiocy of the notion of an atheist government attempting to impose laws on a system of belief that they deny has any basis in reality, the natural question must arise: if someone should disobey the law and reincarnate, what is the government going to decide is a suitable deterrent?

The Death Penalty?

… and since we’re astrologizing, did you all catch the total lunar eclipse and corresponding ‘Blood Moon’ last night? The park near my house was filled with folks looking skyward, which for me was almost as big a thrill as the event itself.

It still amazes me, though, how confused and ill-informed people continue to be about events like this. As I walked up the street to the park, glancing up at the beginning of the eclipse, an old bloke said to me knowingly “Better get a good look – you’ll never see that again in your lifetime…”*

Lunar eclipses occur frequently, sometimes two or three times in a year, total eclipses a little less frequently. ‘Blood’ or ‘Hunter’s’ moons appear whenever there is a total lunar eclipse.† I’ve already seen a few, and I hope to see a few more, all things going well.

Acts 2:20 ~ The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

Of course the religious loonies leap upon this sort of thing with gusto. As an omen, the red moon is surely the lamest of portents to choose – by my calculation, the Earth has seen at least two thousand of these since the apostle Peter penned the above prediction. Even if you assume that St Peter was referring to a combination of solar & lunar eclipses, it’s not such a rare thing for those things to occur in tandem.

If you want to know when your next Blood Moon occurs, you can do no better than fire up the Javascript Lunar Eclipse Explorer at NASA. Plug in your capital city and your century and you’re set to plan your next End Times Picnic!

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*Of course, it is possible that he was clairvoyant, and the real meaning of his pronouncement was that I’ll be turning up my toes before the next lunar eclipse occurs…

†Unless there are extenuating circumstances – a lunar eclipse on December 30, 1982 was almost completely dark. Dust from the recently erupting Mexican volcano El Chichon clouded the atmosphere to such an extent that it occluded the sun’s rays, preventing them from casting their filtered red light on the moon.

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