| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
By Tom Armstrong
Copyright © 2001 Tom Armstrong
WINTER 2001 | IN THE 1973 MOVIE COMEDY "SLEEPER," the Woody Allen character, Miles, is cryogenically frozen for 200 years. When he is revived, and placed in training to be a proper citizen in a totalitarian police state, he is given a robot dog companion.
The dog is first seen entering Miles’s cell. He looks like a cheap toy -- terrier-size, covered in fake fur. His tail wags and his head moves back and forth in a slow rhythm. His mouth moves up and down, out of sync with the words he speaks: “Woof, woof. I’m Rags. Woof, woof.”
Says Miles “Is he housebroken, or will he be leaving little batteries all over the floor?”
Is doesn’t look like the future is on track for Allen’s comic vision of 2173. No, the Pope’s wife didn’t give birth to twins in 1990, as reported in a 183-year-old newspaper in the film. And we may expect that, except for cheap knockoffs, robot dogs in the future will be quite amazing. Indeed, Sony Corporation’s robot dog, AIBO (for Artificial Intelligence roBOt), is quite amazing already as the world’s first, bona fide robotic family member.
In the past two years, 15,000 AIBOs have been sold in the US and Japan. For Christmas 2000, an upgraded model, ERS-210, was released with enhanced features. An ad for the robot, filling the inside cover of The Sharper Image’s Xmas catalog, calls the new machine “Sony’s Second Generation autonomous robot companion,” which has, compared to the initial model, a “much greater emotional range and ability to learn.” The machine has four senses: touch (on its head, chin and back), hearing, balance and sight (through a camera in its nose).
With 20 joints, an ERS-210 moves with some realism and with gusto. It walks, sits, lies down, flaps its ears and wags its tail. It has six emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and dislike. From poses of ERS-210 in the catalog, it seems like a real dog -- except that it is clearly a robot, too, made of dark-gray- and black-plastic parts. The small robot, measuring just 10 inches long, 10 inches high and 6 inches wide, costs $1,590. This includes personality-enhancement software that enables AIBO “to learn from its environment and human interaction, and to mature from infant to adult.”
AIBO IS A SENSATION, AS MUCH FOR what future models will be as for what it is now. And what it will be is likely to branch off in several directions. The main line is sure to be the creation of an anthropoid robot that has the strength and computer-like brain of an amazing machine, with movement and actions that are like humans -- but with a welcome absence of human sloth, egotism and personality disorder.
Evolution toward this anthropoid AIBO is apace. ZDNet reported in September that a division of Sony in France has trained a standard AIBO dog to recognize names of objects by shape, size and color. Software from a desktop computer (which becomes, in the words of a Sony AI expert, “an additional cognitive layer”) is plugged into the dog’s pre-existing in-dog computer giving AIBO the ability to speak the words it has learned.
One can imagine in the not-too-distant future a world shared with robots looking something like Star Wars’s C3PO, that can on any morning, without getting tired or complaining, greet you and hand you an espresso, fix your plumbing, overhaul your car’s engine, spay your cat, and translate your sentences into Urdu. Basically they would be long-wearing, but disposable, slaves with the strength of Hercules, the disposition of St. Francis, the practical knowledge of Martha Stewart, and the wisdom of Albert Einstein. And, if requested, the body and mannerisms of Charlize Theron or Brad Pitt.
Yet what about the future of robotized dogs? They, certainly, will find their marketing niche. But we can only hope that the creation of such animals will force us all to face the question of what this unique and amazing relationship is between organic humans and organic dogs.
PAGE 2: Benefits of an in-dog computer