Tetherd Cow Ahead

Mon 11 Feb 2008

We Are the Robots

Posted by anaglyph under Gadgets, In The News, Robots, Scary, Science, Technology
[14] Comments

Magnus dishes out

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).â€ 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!’

___________________________________________________________________________

*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.

â€ 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.

___________________________________________________________________________

Sun 10 Feb 2008

Don’t Point at the Red Cylinder

Posted by anaglyph under Laughs, Signs, Technology
[11] Comments

Don't Point

Picture and gag by Anne Arkham. Thanks babe.

Thu 7 Feb 2008

The Sweet Smell of Excess

Posted by anaglyph under Ephemera, Gadgets, Perfume, Silly, Technology
[29] Comments

The Write Aroma Pen

Boy some people can come up with daft ideas.

Violet Towne has just started back at work for the year and in her work-supplied stationery package she found the above-pictured ‘Write Aroma’ pen*. Of course she thoughtfully passed it on to me (because she knew how much I’d love it), and I in turn pass it on to you (because I know how much you’ll love it too). In case it’s not immediately obvious from the packaging, it’s a car air-freshener that comes breathtakingly bundled with a pen. Or, conversely, a pen that comes bundled with a car air-freshener. Brilliant!

Because you know how often you’ve been in a car and simultaneously wished:

A: That it smelled artificially of apples

and

B: That you had a pen to write a sonnet.

I can’t begin to enumerate the times that’s happened to me. Now, thanks to Pentel, should I be in such a situation ever again, I am completely prepared. Truly a Wonder of the Modern Age. I’m so glad that natural resources are being squandered for the manufacture of this this must-have item. This is how Pentel pitches it on their website:

The convenient Write Aroma Car Kit features the new Pentel Energel dulex retractable rollerball pen. The pen (RRP $3.95) conveniently clip onto the airfreshener(RRP $6.00) so you will not loose $5.00 & never be lost for a pen in the car again.

Crikey. For people who make their business out of selling writing implements you’d think that Pentel might take some trouble to get some actual writers† to work on their advertising. I’m not at all sure why the Write Aroma is ‘convenient’ (it seems to me that for something to be convenient, it has to have some kind of actual utility to begin with – a gewgaw that does nothing useful in the first place can hardly aspire to make a grab for the added status of ‘convenience’…), and I’m completely baffled as to how it stops me loosing $5.00. Or losing it either.

You may be forgiven for making the mistake of thinking, as I did at first, that the pen writes with a perfumed ink as well. Now that would be a truly stupid idea.

So stupid in fact that there are abundant puveyors of such items. At Aroma Writes, for instance, you can buy pens that scribble in little trails of lavender, patchouli, rosemary, Pina Colada and cappuccino.

Why is this desirable, I hear you ask? Obvious: you choose a scent for the type of letter you’re writing! Let me elaborate:

Lavender: Dear Mum & Dad, I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time why I am so fond of musical theatre…

Patchouli: …and then we found these awesome mushrooms and spent the whole evening talking to the pixies…

Rosemary: Of course, for Sunday dinner I cooked up a roast leg of lamb which the whole family enjoyed…

Pina Colada: I also just love getting caught in the rain, the feel of the ocean and the taste of champagne…

Cappuccino: Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middle class!

…and so forth.

But here at Tetherd Cow Ahead, we feel that a real sense of vision from these perfumed pen peddlers is tragically absent. To this end, the clever boffins at TCA Enterprisesâ„¢ are hard at work improving on the Scented Pen concept in an effort to bring you a whole new world of olfactory calligraphic delights. So far we have perfected pens that will scent your correspondence with: bacon; ozone; asparagus-tinctured urine‡; mildew; Roquefort; whiskey; anchovies; pond water, formaldehyde and bratwurst. And we make a car kit too! Just think of the possibilities! Now, when you run into someone’s Merc in the parking lot you can leave them a bacon-scented apology note! Who could fail to be mollified by that?

And that’s not all! TCA Labs have even discovered a way to bring this concept into the digital age! Yes, that’s right, using the very same technology behind the TCA Virtual Glass of Water (VGW)â„¢, TCA Enterprisesâ„¢ in association with Hello From Hell Inc. brings you iSmellâ„¢. With iSmellâ„¢ you can now send aromatized** emails to your friends and families! I bet you didn’t see that coming Steve Jobs!

And should you think that concept has a fishy bouquet about it, just remember the folks at Pentel who managed to convince someone that bundling a pen with a car air-freshener was an idea worth bank-rolling.

___________________________________________________________________________

*You have to consider the concept that these useless tchotchkes are so unappealing and worthless that the only way that Pentel can get rid of them is to throw them in with other actually-useful stuff.

†Instead of out-of-work spammers.

‡Note: this scent undetectable by around 40% of people.

**It’s a real word. Ugly, I know, but somehow… apt.

___________________________________________________________________________

Thu 31 Jan 2008

The Annunciation Outtakes #3

Posted by anaglyph under Annunciation
[8] Comments

Full of Grapes

Wed 30 Jan 2008

On Blogging

Posted by anaglyph under Cow Matters
[18] Comments

A Three Year Old Cow

Ah my faithful Acowlytes! With a minimum of fanfare Tetherd Cow Ahead has turned Three! It seems like only yesterday that a solitary cow let slip its restraints and ambled off into a haze of soporific poppy fumes and an uncertain future. The truth is that it has been a staggering 1095 days and in that time The Cow has wandered far and wide and seen sights and dreamed dreams that cows only dream of. When they’re on drugs. Or something.

As long-time Cowmrades know, my initial reason for setting TCA in motion was as a kind of occupational therapy after the death of my beloved Kate. At that time I really had no idea where I would go with the blog, what it would mean to me, and, indeed, whether there was any real point to it at all.

Over the years, though, Tetherd Cow Ahead has become something much more than I ever expected. I have made many new friends with whom I’ve laughed, philosophized and bantered. I’ve been encouraged, by the continuing labour of keeping The Cow interesting, to pay much greater attention to my world, viewing it, as it were, through the eyes of my readers as well as myself. This strange dissociation has given me an appreciation of my life that I don’t think I would ever have managed otherwise.

There’s been a lot of speculation in recent times about the utility of blogging. Some strident critics like the irksome Andrew Keen obtusely, or perhaps even wilfully, fail to understand even remotely the value of blogs*, advocating that the power of writing should be taken out of the hands of ‘the amateur’ and put back where it belongs (into the hands of those ‘who know what they’re doing’. Like, oh, CNN, and James Redfield, and The Pope and Shirley MacLaine and pretty much anyone of any public profile as long as they achieved their status through means other than the egalitarianism of the web).

People like Keen view the world in a very stilted and old-fashioned way. Andrew Keen would have taken Samuel Pepys’ quill away from him. He would have had Anne Frank go sit in the corner and knit. He’d have told Andy Warhol to get a proper job.

Now I’m not attempting to hold The Cow up to any of those extraordinary chroniclers of human experience, but in my opinion it is inevitable that sooner or later some great works will come out of the blogosphere. If nothing else, everyone who is currently blogging is helping to create an amazingly detailed picture of what it is like to live in the beginning of the 21st century at the explosive dawn of the Age of Information. And this picture is not being painted just by those who are somehow ‘sanctioned’ to do so.

For my own part, a nostalgic trawl back through The Cow lets me see an intriguing picture of my life over the last three years. It’s a quirky, funny, thoughtful and sometimes sad journey, but all in all (from my assessment anyway) it is a pretty good sketch of who I am and what I make of the world. I’ve never been much of a diarist so I’ve never had any real opportunity to look into my past at the changing person I surely am so it’s something of an engaging novelty to go revisit my life through the eyes of The Cow. I’m glad I started it. And I’m glad to have met you all, dear Cowpokes, and I thank you for your fine company.

No quiz this year – you’ve had altogether too many competitions lately I notice. But if you feel in the mood, have a few plugs away on the Mad Cow Ride in the sidebar. You’re sure to find something you’ve never seen before, or something you’ve completely forgotten.

I know I did.

___________________________________________________________________________

*While hypocritically maintaining one of his own. It’s evidently OK for him to have one, because, unlike the rest of us, he’s got something to say…

___________________________________________________________________________

Sat 26 Jan 2008

Missed by That Much…

Posted by anaglyph under Science, Signs
[7] Comments

I guess you all undoubtedly know by now that on January 29th we are not going to be wiped out by Asteroid 2007 TU24. Well, so NASA tells us anyway. As cosmic events go, though, it is a very near thing, with the asteroid skimming the Earth by a mere 1.4 Lunar Distances whisker.

So just how safe should we really feel? The Near Earth Object Program has posted a mugshot of the perp as evidence that they are in full control of the situation:

An asteroid?

Oh yeah. That’s convincing. Hands up who would have picked that out in a line-up as an asteroid? Do you all feel re-assured that it’s all scientific-like and these guys really know what they’re doing? With that kind of ‘proof’ you could claim anything:

Elvis?