Tag: science fiction
Fighting Robots With Robots

Fighting Robots With Robots

So machines are now able to assess a human’s mood. “Emotion detection software” has put robots one step closer to replacing the humans who work — or used to work — in what we in the olden days called “customer relations.”

Assuming that you, dear reader, are a human and not a column-consuming robot, you may be asking the question: What happens to the jobs of humans who were laboring under the impression that they could still do things machines couldn’t?

That’s a good question, says Zeynep Tufekci, an information expert at the University of North Carolina. Robots can now interview people at the border and identify phony documents, she writes. One imagines they can hire other machines.

Robots are getting better at holding conversations, and their voices can now sound as if they are reacting in a heartfelt way to the human’s remarks. More like Candice Bergen, one supposes, and less like ED-209, the robot in RoboCop. (“Please put down your wea-pon. You now have 15 se-conds to com-ply.”)

Marketers may soon use robots to deliver “mood-targeted” advertising. Sales robots are being programmed to assess your level of interest and personality type. They’ve got the algorithms, mined from your digital activities, and may very well know how much buying power is left on your credit card.

Suppose you’re looking at running shoes. What chance do you have against a sales machine programmed to respond to your every gaze and sigh — who knows your shoe size and past purchases of athletic apparel?

What you need is a machine to fight the machine. You need a shopping robot who knows your style, colors, price range, needs, and wants — but whose poker-faced panel reacts to the sales machine’s pitch with supreme indifference. You need a shopping robot who doesn’t gasp with desire and shout “me want” into the sales machine’s audio analyzer. That way, your shopping robot can extract the maximum discount from the sales robot.

It sounds so efficient. Robots make the running shoes, sell the running shoes and buy the running shoes by the most cost-effective means possible.

But there’s a problem. Who’s going to pay for the running shoes? I mean, if a robot can do your job taking drink orders, reading ultrasounds or selling washing machines, how are you going to earn the wherewithal to buy stuff?

“Machines are getting smarter,” Tufekci notes, “and they’re coming for more and more jobs.” Furthermore, the jobs they are coming for are no longer limited to those requiring little in the way of skills.

Human resistance may be futile. Robots don’t sleep, get sick or take vacations. Unless programmed by a criminal, they don’t walk out with the employer’s paper clips or coffee mugs. (And they have sensors in the back of their heads to catch any human trying to do that kind of thing.)

So all you humans working insane hours, taking stimulants to better focus on the job, answering corporate email on the weekends — your efforts may be in vain. A robot can always outpace you.

Humans will be left with a very simple role in future economic transactions: Their function will be to fork over dollars some working person earned back in the 20th century.

Of course, those 20th-century dollars will eventually run out. But technology may eventually be deployed to find something economically useful for humans to do. Have faith in the future. Humans are still the only beings on the planet able to binge shop and make impulse purchases.

But also be on guard. The day you see a robot wearing running shoes, you’ll know you are truly in trouble.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Bill Dickinson via Flickr

Top Reads: ‘The Making Of Star Wars’

Top Reads: ‘The Making Of Star Wars’

The Force is back! This week the internet went absolutely ballistic over the release of the second teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first proper sequel to the original trilogy in over three decades. (Don’t get us started on those prequel abominations.) To tide you over until the new film’s Christmas release, check out The Making of Star Wars, which tells the story of how a young filmmaker named George Lucas and a ragtag ensemble went off into the Tunisian desert with a bag of B-movie tropes, and pop culture was never the same again.

You can purchase the book here.

And, just in case you live under many layers of sedimentary rock and missed the new teaser, here it is:

Fear Without A Name: ‘The X-Files’ Is Reborn In A Changed World

Fear Without A Name: ‘The X-Files’ Is Reborn In A Changed World

The X-Files, like so many beloved, bygone television properties of late, is catching a second wind.

Fox announced on Tuesday that the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning paranormal procedural will be revived for a limited six-episode run. The new season will go into production this summer and will include the participation of series creator Chris Carter and the show’s two leads, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

The bulk of the show, which ran for nine seasons and spawned two films, chronicled the investigations of two FBI agents — believer Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and skeptic Dana Scully (Anderson) — into crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated by supernatural forces. The show became a touchstone of ’90s culture: a series of allegories for our pre-millennial, post-Cold War angst. Surely something was lying in wait — in our stars, under the bed — waiting to close this parenthesis of relative peace. And for this fear-without-a-name, the show proposed any number of incarnations: viral pandemics, religious cults, a parade of horrifying trans-human mutations. But none was more ominous and more baroque than the shadowy cartel that had conspired with little green men to bring about the end of humanity’s reign on Earth.

In many respects the show was ahead of its time: The lush, moody cinematography, the grotesque special effects, and of course the portentous, hydra-headed narrative set the template for subsequent shows both successful (Lost) and not (Carnivàle). And like those shows, after all the twists and omens, X-Files could never bring itself to a proper conclusion, positioning the in-story culmination of the aliens’ plot several years after the show ended and leaving a heap of loose ends on the floor.

But the show ran out of steam long before it finally sputtered to an end in 2002. And it wasn’t just Duchovny’s departure, or the show’s relocation from gloomy Vancouver to sunny L.A. In place of the Pacific Northwest’s perennial fogs, an invisible but undeniable cloud of disillusion settled over the show’s latter seasons.

In Fox Mulder’s quixotic pursuit of the Truth, there was always the tacit conviction that once the Truth had been uncovered, the crimes that went into concealing it could somehow be answered: Americans would be informed of their government’s malfeasance, the planet would remain ours, the monsters, now revealed, would scatter away. In exposing the Truth, the country’s course could somehow be corrected, and the world could somehow be saved.

Is this notion the least bit tenable anymore, even in the most outlandish science fiction? No. The show didn’t think so, either.

The X-Files was a cartography of shadows. Like the best supernatural fiction, it achieved its impact through insinuation and suggestion. Turn on the lights and you lose the effect. As the show inched closer to pulling the curtain off its own last act, it became subsumed by the enormity of the horror it had always hinted at, as well as the fatalism creeping in from the world around it. The transformations the show alluded to but could never name could be said to have occurred offscreen; its portents of downfall finally realized. The last season debuted two months after 9/11. Since then, the surveillance state has been exposed, without repercussions. We’re on the verge of any number of cataclysms. And we don’t need aliens to put our species out of business.

It will be interesting to see whether the show can adapt to the times that it warned us were coming, and whether it can still convince us that two adorable nerds can do anything to fix it.

I guess I’d like to believe again.

Fred Ordway, Rocket Scientist Who Was Key Adviser On ‘2001’ Film, Dies At 87

Fred Ordway, Rocket Scientist Who Was Key Adviser On ‘2001’ Film, Dies At 87

By Jill Leovy, Los Angeles Times

The pulp science-fiction magazine was left by a maid in his family’s posh upper eastside apartment.

Fred Ordway picked it up, and knew from that moment what he would grow up to be.

Ordway, 87, who died July 1 in Huntsville, Ala., devoured science-fiction magazines after that — chronicles of flying saucers, green aliens, and Buck Rogers.

His fascination would propel him to the inner circle of leading American aeronautical scientists, working alongside Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Born when ice was still delivered by horse cart, Ordway joined teams that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.

And then, having seen his childhood fantasies made real, Ordway tended to the next generation’s fantasies: He served as technical adviser on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

That film’s mesmerizing power owes much to Ordway.

Ordway was a friend of Arthur Clarke — whose fiction inspired the film — and ensured that what the movie “claimed about this idealized world had some validity to it,” said Benjamin H. Bratton, a visual arts professor at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego.

Details that might have been glossed over in other movies were painstakingly reproduced frame by frame in Kubrick’s masterpiece — a floating pen, for example, and Velcro slippers worn by space flight attendants to keep them from drifting upward.

Without these “little touches,” the movie risked being dismissed as just a “spacey, hippie-dippie, psychedelic fantasy,” said Sheldon Brown, director of the Clarke Center.

Instead, the film’s transcendence is achieved in part by its juxtaposition of heady themes with minute detail, many of them provided by Ordway. Lovingly choreographed scenes of an astronaut moving from weightlessness to micro-gravity help ground the film even as its larger themes ascend to heights of abstraction, Brown said.

Frederick Ira Ordway III was born in New York on April 4, 1927, the only son of a wealthy banking family. The pulp fiction of the 1930s he consumed featured flying saucers, machine wonders, and depictions of the earth that looked like road maps printed on a balls.

They offered a mostly optimistic view of the future that would change in the atomic age, said Alison Scott, former bibliographer at Harvard University, to which Ordway donated his pulp-fiction archive. Ordway received an engineering degree at Harvard and served briefly in the Air Force Reserve after World War II before joining the burgeoning rocket industry.

Ordway was always well-dressed and humble in manner, and his strength was in making complex topics clear.

He served as a liaison among scientists and also worked as an educator, speaking and writing books, including “2001: The Heritage and Legacy of the Space Odyssey” (with Robert Godwin), for anyone interested in space travel.

He interviewed engineers across disciplines for material for “2001.”

“He could talk to anyone about anything,” said his son Frederick Ordway IV of Huntsville, Ala., who confirmed his father’s death but did not disclose the cause.

His son recalled the whole family moving to England while his father worked on the film. Every detail of the movie set had to be perfect, his son said, because “they didn’t know where Kubrick was going to point the camera.”

The result: Even images that flash by are elaborately constructed meditations on how future technology might work.

Ordway’s wife of 62 years, Maruja Arenas, died in 2012. Besides his son Frederick, he is survived by son Albert Ordway of Huntsville, Ala., and daughter Aliette Marisol Lambert of Powhatan, Va.

Photo via WikiCommons

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