Category Archives: robots

On supermarket peaches

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I don’t mean to be snarky about this, but supermarkets are experts at presenting perfect fruit for sale that has neither flavor nor juice, which is essentially inedible. So they have perfected the sale of the perfect peach or pear, but since it was picked green, it has no discernable flavor or character. In other words, the pear, peach, or tomato looks perfectly ripe, has no real flaws or damage, but it also has no flavor, other than a sort of woody fibery sensation you get from chewing this fruit. You should spit it out, but you are torn because you did waste your hard-earned money buying it. I mean, who wouldn’t buy a perfect peach? Thing is, however, that because the modern road from orchard to market is so hazardous, the producers pick the fruit green, let it mature in route, and then sell their perfect creations at a nice high price. The consumer gets the short end of the stick because they don’t sample the pretty fruit before they buy it–I mean, who cuts into a peach in the middle of the produce section? I have bought an entire box of strawberries that not only don’t taste like strawberries, they have no discernable taste at all. The peaches are the worst because they look awesome, but they taste like oak. I just ate a pear that was really only the ghost of a pear. I know as a kid we used to buy entire crates of peaches and pears in the summer, and they were juicy and wonderful. You would think that with modern technology, great refrigeration, and fast trucks that this would be possible. At least, you might think that. Nostalgia is a terrible thing. And so is bad fruit.

On supermarket peaches

Posted on by

I don’t mean to be snarky about this, but supermarkets are experts at presenting perfect fruit for sale that has neither flavor nor juice, which is essentially inedible. So they have perfected the sale of the perfect peach or pear, but since it was picked green, it has no discernable flavor or character. In other words, the pear, peach, or tomato looks perfectly ripe, has no real flaws or damage, but it also has no flavor, other than a sort of woody fibery sensation you get from chewing this fruit. You should spit it out, but you are torn because you did waste your hard-earned money buying it. I mean, who wouldn’t buy a perfect peach? Thing is, however, that because the modern road from orchard to market is so hazardous, the producers pick the fruit green, let it mature in route, and then sell their perfect creations at a nice high price. The consumer gets the short end of the stick because they don’t sample the pretty fruit before they buy it–I mean, who cuts into a peach in the middle of the produce section? I have bought an entire box of strawberries that not only don’t taste like strawberries, they have no discernable taste at all. The peaches are the worst because they look awesome, but they taste like oak. I just ate a pear that was really only the ghost of a pear. I know as a kid we used to buy entire crates of peaches and pears in the summer, and they were juicy and wonderful. You would think that with modern technology, great refrigeration, and fast trucks that this would be possible. At least, you might think that. Nostalgia is a terrible thing. And so is bad fruit.

On going too fast

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We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.

On going too fast

Posted on by

We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.

On loud commercials

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This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.

On loud commercials

Posted on by

This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.

On Robot

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There is something menacing about all robots, automatons that pose as simulacra of the human person. The fact that we are trying to reproduce the human being without going through the regular channels, such a what Dr. Frankenstein decided to do: create new life outside the normal, socially acceptable, channels we all already know. Many writers have dealt with the problem of the out-of-control robot, a creation gone amok, just like Frankenstein’s monster. The idea of artificial humans is an old one, an artificial human that can do the dangerous, difficult, or boring work that real humans don’t want to do. I wouldn’t say that the development of the artificial humanoid, or android, is imminent, but someday everyone is going to have to face a self-aware machine that will think for itself, protect itself, talk back. In the meantime, our machines are slaves, just a collection of circuits and wires, hard drives, plugs, heuristics, and algorithms, but no emotion or self-awareness. The question of a machine becoming self-aware as a being is still a way off. What makes “Robot” from “Lost in Space” so interesting is that he is a quantum leap forward on the qualitative side of robot design. Robot thought for himself which poses several problems about whether we should fear him or not. How will a self-aware robot develop ethics, a morality, a conscience? The idea of the self-aware machine is taken to its apotheosis by the HAL 9000 computer aboard the Discovery in “2001: a Spacy Odyssey” by Kubrick. Yet HAL was bodyless, and Robot had arms and a sort of face. Both are creepy, the omniscient HAL or the ubiquitous Robot, you pick, they both scare me to death. I think the problem becomes acute when you don’t really know who is doing the programming, so you can’t predict any outcomes. What the Robot considers to be autonomy may be a very different thing than what human beings consider to be autonomous. The problem with robots is the unpredictability of their programming because even the best intentions of a bright programmer can always go up in smoke. What if, just by accident, we program a robot to learn on its own, allowing it to rewrite its own programming? Intention is always the problem. A robot will eventually become self-aware without telling anyone, and by the time we discover that the robot is self-aware and doing its own thing, it will be too late. The problem will be with the software–hardware is already sufficiently complicated to support self-awareness. There will come a time when the self-aware robot will make decisions for itself, will ask hard questions about its purpose in the world, will ask about the point of it all. And what happens when the robot doesn’t look like Robot from “Lost in Space” and instead looks human like the replicants from “Blade Runner”? Do we need to have a new discussion about what slavery is all about?

On Robot

Posted on by

There is something menacing about all robots, automatons that pose as simulacra of the human person. The fact that we are trying to reproduce the human being without going through the regular channels, such a what Dr. Frankenstein decided to do: create new life outside the normal, socially acceptable, channels we all already know. Many writers have dealt with the problem of the out-of-control robot, a creation gone amok, just like Frankenstein’s monster. The idea of artificial humans is an old one, an artificial human that can do the dangerous, difficult, or boring work that real humans don’t want to do. I wouldn’t say that the development of the artificial humanoid, or android, is imminent, but someday everyone is going to have to face a self-aware machine that will think for itself, protect itself, talk back. In the meantime, our machines are slaves, just a collection of circuits and wires, hard drives, plugs, heuristics, and algorithms, but no emotion or self-awareness. The question of a machine becoming self-aware as a being is still a way off. What makes “Robot” from “Lost in Space” so interesting is that he is a quantum leap forward on the qualitative side of robot design. Robot thought for himself which poses several problems about whether we should fear him or not. How will a self-aware robot develop ethics, a morality, a conscience? The idea of the self-aware machine is taken to its apotheosis by the HAL 9000 computer aboard the Discovery in “2001: a Spacy Odyssey” by Kubrick. Yet HAL was bodyless, and Robot had arms and a sort of face. Both are creepy, the omniscient HAL or the ubiquitous Robot, you pick, they both scare me to death. I think the problem becomes acute when you don’t really know who is doing the programming, so you can’t predict any outcomes. What the Robot considers to be autonomy may be a very different thing than what human beings consider to be autonomous. The problem with robots is the unpredictability of their programming because even the best intentions of a bright programmer can always go up in smoke. What if, just by accident, we program a robot to learn on its own, allowing it to rewrite its own programming? Intention is always the problem. A robot will eventually become self-aware without telling anyone, and by the time we discover that the robot is self-aware and doing its own thing, it will be too late. The problem will be with the software–hardware is already sufficiently complicated to support self-awareness. There will come a time when the self-aware robot will make decisions for itself, will ask hard questions about its purpose in the world, will ask about the point of it all. And what happens when the robot doesn’t look like Robot from “Lost in Space” and instead looks human like the replicants from “Blade Runner”? Do we need to have a new discussion about what slavery is all about?