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Authors: Thomas P. Keenan
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will grow into? The randomness and apparent unpredictability is evidently an appealing feature of the device.
Digging into the chip inside Tama-Goâs programming, Silvanovich found that initial breed and gender are determined randomly, based on the precise clock setting at the moment the device is activated.
From that point on, Tamagotchi child-rearing imitates real life. Ignore your baby and you are going to get one of the nastier toddlers. Also, Silvanovich found, âif you care for your toddler poorly, you need to make up for this in discipline in the teen years or else you will get a âbadâ character.â By pretending to be alive, yet clearly not being truly alive, the Tamagotchi falls into the âUncanny Valleyâ that is both the bane and the delight of robotics researchers.
If you think the era of virtual pets has passed, you donât watch a lot of late-night TV. A fake parrot is now making the rounds with the Sham-Wows and home gym machines. Perfect Polly doesnât need food, or a cage, and never smells up the room
The infomercial for Perfect Polly implies that this motion-activated mechanical bird, which does have an on/off switch, will be the perfect companion for Grandpa since it will react to his every twitch with a tremor of its own. In the commercial, children who appear old enough to know better, accept this plastic pet as a bona fide and welcome addition to the family. And, thanks to an amazing feat of avian mind reading, weâre even assured that a real parakeet canât tell the difference between a potential mate and this plastic imitation.
The Furby and Tamagotchi crazes of the 1990s saw people adopting robotic pets and treating them as real living things, and Perfect Polly is merely the newest iteration of this phenomenon. Our longing for companionship, even of the mechanical variety, appears to be growing ever more pervasive and complex.
Creep Theory
Things were both brutal and creepy in the Paleolithic era as our Âancestors struggled to survive. Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Homo neanderthalensis all had the technologies appropriate to their time: stone tools, clothing, and most especially fire. Recent plant ash and charred bone evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa show that, even a million years ago, early hominids harnessed the power of fire on a routine basis. 336
We can only imagine how bizarre the astounding transformation of matter by fire would have appeared to these people. They would have been as unsettled by this mystery as we are when we walk by a billboard and it displays something we just mentioned in a tweet. They figured it out, and so will we, but not without some burned fingers.
In their article on the Wonderwerk cave discovery, anthropologist Michael Chazan and colleagues call the ability to control fire âa crucial turning point in human evolution.â In a very real way, we have reached a similar juncture. Information, and the technologies that handle it, are transforming our lives in ways as fundamental as the changes brought by fire.
Since weâve had information processing for over 60 years, one might think weâve moved beyond the âUgh. Look. Fire!â stage. Actually, and I can say this with confidence because Iâve been involved with computers since 1965, the first four or five decades of information technology, for all but the most advanced thinkers among us, were spent just rubbing the sticks together:
First we automated things that we understood, like payroll processing, airline reservation systems, and searching for stuff in the library. A few bright lights like Joseph Weizenbaum and Ray Kurzweil pushed us to think about using technology to do things differently, instead of just billions of times faster and more efficiently.
The way we applied technology in the past made eminent good sense because thatâs exactly what the times called for. Just as Henry Fordâs assembly line made
Digging into the chip inside Tama-Goâs programming, Silvanovich found that initial breed and gender are determined randomly, based on the precise clock setting at the moment the device is activated.
From that point on, Tamagotchi child-rearing imitates real life. Ignore your baby and you are going to get one of the nastier toddlers. Also, Silvanovich found, âif you care for your toddler poorly, you need to make up for this in discipline in the teen years or else you will get a âbadâ character.â By pretending to be alive, yet clearly not being truly alive, the Tamagotchi falls into the âUncanny Valleyâ that is both the bane and the delight of robotics researchers.
If you think the era of virtual pets has passed, you donât watch a lot of late-night TV. A fake parrot is now making the rounds with the Sham-Wows and home gym machines. Perfect Polly doesnât need food, or a cage, and never smells up the room
The infomercial for Perfect Polly implies that this motion-activated mechanical bird, which does have an on/off switch, will be the perfect companion for Grandpa since it will react to his every twitch with a tremor of its own. In the commercial, children who appear old enough to know better, accept this plastic pet as a bona fide and welcome addition to the family. And, thanks to an amazing feat of avian mind reading, weâre even assured that a real parakeet canât tell the difference between a potential mate and this plastic imitation.
The Furby and Tamagotchi crazes of the 1990s saw people adopting robotic pets and treating them as real living things, and Perfect Polly is merely the newest iteration of this phenomenon. Our longing for companionship, even of the mechanical variety, appears to be growing ever more pervasive and complex.
Creep Theory
Things were both brutal and creepy in the Paleolithic era as our Âancestors struggled to survive. Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Homo neanderthalensis all had the technologies appropriate to their time: stone tools, clothing, and most especially fire. Recent plant ash and charred bone evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa show that, even a million years ago, early hominids harnessed the power of fire on a routine basis. 336
We can only imagine how bizarre the astounding transformation of matter by fire would have appeared to these people. They would have been as unsettled by this mystery as we are when we walk by a billboard and it displays something we just mentioned in a tweet. They figured it out, and so will we, but not without some burned fingers.
In their article on the Wonderwerk cave discovery, anthropologist Michael Chazan and colleagues call the ability to control fire âa crucial turning point in human evolution.â In a very real way, we have reached a similar juncture. Information, and the technologies that handle it, are transforming our lives in ways as fundamental as the changes brought by fire.
Since weâve had information processing for over 60 years, one might think weâve moved beyond the âUgh. Look. Fire!â stage. Actually, and I can say this with confidence because Iâve been involved with computers since 1965, the first four or five decades of information technology, for all but the most advanced thinkers among us, were spent just rubbing the sticks together:
First we automated things that we understood, like payroll processing, airline reservation systems, and searching for stuff in the library. A few bright lights like Joseph Weizenbaum and Ray Kurzweil pushed us to think about using technology to do things differently, instead of just billions of times faster and more efficiently.
The way we applied technology in the past made eminent good sense because thatâs exactly what the times called for. Just as Henry Fordâs assembly line made
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