fbpx

Tag Archive for Sci-Fi

The Illusion of Life

February 12, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Illusion of Life

You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.

 

Resolute

January 4, 2015 Writing Comments Off on Resolute

New Year’s resolutions are always a funny thing.  You look back, you look forward, you take the opportunity to make a change in the way and direction you plan to move.  Sometimes you look back and think “Yeah, that was a pretty good year.” and your resolutions are minor, cosmetic.  New haircuts, a resolve to wear less black or to stop screening your calls.  Sometimes, particularly after a crappy series of events, you want to make a sweeping declaration.  You want to clear the table, flip a fat finger to the universe and stride into the New Year with grace and terrible purpose.

This year’s resolutions are simple ones for me.  Scheduling.  They’re all related to it.  I’m capable of doing a great many things, of pulling projects out of the broken wind from my *ss and adding just one more thing to the never ending checklist.  But at some point I have to specialize.  I have to step back and say, just because I *can* do this thing, doesn’t mean I *should* do this thing.  So this year, the resolution is to become a better diplomat.  Learn to say no with resolute grace.  Let’s see where that takes us.

« Older Entries   Recent Entries »