Paro, an interactive robot that calms people with dementia--Beck- Agence France Press
I have seen the future, and it is robots.
Because I am old and did not grow up gazing at electronic
screens or playing with high-tech toys like I-pods and I-pads, I may be among
the last to come to this realization-- that the human race is seriously
threatened by the creation of ever more sophisticated robots. But I want to warn my fellow senior citizens,
those who still don’t know how to text or to hook an attachment onto an e-mail.
Last May I wrote a blog post called “Do You Want to End your Days Talking to a Robot?” This was inspired by an article in The New York Times
detailing new kinds of robots being
created to care for weak and confused old folks. The robots included “Cody” who was “gentle
enough to bathe elderly patients”, HERB who can fetch household objects,
Hector, who reminds patients to take their medicines, Paro, who looks like a
baby seal and calms patients with dementia, and PR2 who can blink, giggle and
interact. The article quoted a professor
at MIT who said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman telling her
life story to the baby seal robot. I was
troubled too.
My post elicited a number of e-mails from around the world
describing devices which truly do improve elder care—the “Betty” tablet that
caregivers use to inform each other and family members of a patient’s daily
activities and condition, video games that increase cognitive ability, and
devices—a wristwatch and something called Trax, which both use GPS, Wi-Fi and
smart phones to track pets, children and demented elders who wander out of a
pre-set digital area.
I began to think I was being paranoid about robots. But I wasn’t.
As 2013 continued, Amazon announced that they were working
on a delivery system that would fill the air with drones able to drop a package
on your doorstep a half hour after you ordered something on line. This inspired
a newspaper cartoon showing a discouraged Santa trying to sell his sled and
reindeer while the sky overhead buzzed with package-carrying Amazon drones.
And we’ve all heard that in the near future we will have
automobiles that drive themselves and are too smart to collide with each
other. That left me wondering—what if
the self-driving car encounters an old-fashioned car, driven by an imperfect
human, who is texting or adjusting the radio?
Delivery drones and self-driving cars don’t sound so bad,
but then on Dec. 26, The New York Times told me that you can now have sex with
your computer.
The article, “’Interactive’ Gets a New Meaning” by Alex Hawgood,
began by describing the sex scene from the
movie “Her” which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, an insecure, rather nerdy
man who falls in love with Samantha—who is a voice in his computer—an app, I
guess you’d call it. She clearly
resembles Siri, the female voice in my husband’s I-phone who can answer
questions like “What is the population of Seattle” but gets evasive when you
ask her things like “What is the meaning of life?”
But Samantha—the voice in “Her” is smarter than Siri because
she is interactive--she can change and evolve to please Theodore. According to the NYTimes, there is a sex
scene in which “after returning home
from a failed blind date …it shows Theodore gently edging Samantha into arousal
by telling her what he wishes to do to her body. As things become increasingly explicit, the
screen turns black, leaving the audience lingering in darkness as the
characters reach their aural climax.”
That strikes me as very sad—falling in love with a computer
app that has no body.
The Times article goes on to list many computer sex toys
already available—one, called “Real Touch” allows two people to have sex over
the internet, no matter how physically far apart they are.
Designed by a former NASA engineer, “It comes in two parts, one modeled
after a woman’s lower anatomy and one modeled after a man’s.”
There is a list of interactive computer sex toys already on
the market, some meant for two people to use, some to use on your own. A report by a trend-forecasting firm in New
York, according to The Times, “makes the case that forward leaps in augmented
intelligence and video-game interactivity will let people ‘get attached to and
develop real relationships with their hardware and software.’”
But can they take them to the office Christmas party?
LovePlus, a dating simulation game for the portable Nintendo
DS console, “allows a player to caress another’s hair using a touch pad…these
virtual sweethearts modify their personas in real time based on the player’s
likes and dislikes.”
So you don’t have to spend time and money searching for Mr.
or Ms. Right—you can create and train one all by yourself.
And on December 29, on
the front page of The New York Times, there was the scariest article yet,
titled “Brainlike Computers, Learning from Experience” by John Markoff. Here’s the first sentence: “Computers have entered the age when they are
able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the
digital world on its head.”
In 2014, according to the article, a new kind of computer chip
is scheduled to be released that can learn from its errors to evolve and
increase its skill at a task. This
computer is based on the biological nervous system. This will create a new generation of
artificial intelligences that can “see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and
control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech
recognition, navigation and planning.”
The article went on to elaborate on how this works, using
words like “algorithm” , “neural network” and “biological synapses” which cause
my aging eyes to glaze over, but while the explanation is over my head, I’ve
seen enough science fiction movies to know what happens after computers and
robots can imitate and even improve on
the functions of the human brain and body. Which
is why I’ve concluded that in 2014, in addition to worrying about global
warming, our environmental footstep and terrorism, we should also watch out for
the new generation of robots that is
being born.
