A Failure of Imagination
ex machina
FUTURISM / FANTASY / REALITY
The Inspiration
I have been interested in robots for as long as I can remember. The robots of my youth were in black and white on TV. They were slow, had flashing lights, and often had arms and legs of some sort. In my childhood, amidst the space race, shows were put on air to capture children in the updraft of the race to the moon. In Buffalo, NY the show was “Rocketship 7”. It happened to be carried on our local affiliate channel 7. I found an old video of it (where else on YouTube). Google’s mission statement at the founding was “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I marvel that for the intrepid, all of this information (and cheezy videos) are indexed and available for the asking. I had forgotten how basic in delivery the show really was. It was on the air from 1962 to 1978. In hindsight, I imagine most of them were just costumes with people inside. As I decorated our home for the holidays, I knew that I would work with a different sort of robot I never anticipated in my youth. This will be a long story but as I promised in a recent post, my 5-7 minute read admonition is now an important focus. My intrigue with robots is the long-term inspiration of this and future posts.
An Admission
Tonight’s post, full disclosure will only, at best, get us halfway there. I may have a few teasers about robots but the rest will come in at least one more post. When they publish, I will put the back-reference to this post for continuity.
The Setup
In some previous posts, I have referenced a refinement of a compelling sentence from “The 9/11 Report”. The sentence appears in Chapter 11 titled “FORESIGHT — AND HINDSIGHT”. The nation was still in a state of shock regarding the extent of the attacks on that September morning. The sentence actually read as “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.”1 What does THAT have to do with robots? I have written previously that one of the greatest challenges of our minds and their structure is how a belief becomes rigid and in so many cases, our reason is set aside. In its place, we stuff tribalism, go-it-alone, independence. We often see this is as “the promised land” and different, more tribal belonging instincts overtake our ability to reassess. In business, this can be referred to as “the first-mover advantage” at least while it lasts.
When I think of the robots of my youth whether on TV shows or in movies, there was a distinct lack of imagination as to what a robot could be. The one, “way ahead of its time” exception is the Stanley Kubrick classic movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” made in 1968. One of the stars of the movie is the all-knowing computer assistant called HAL. HAL and the astronaut Dave interact throughout the movie and eventually, HAL seems to become self-aware. If you have not seen this classic movie, put it on your list. Here is the trailer for a movie that holds up well after 52 years. I realize I am not a movie critic but I consider this one of the ten best movies ever made. The special effects for a movie created in the 1960s were completely accomplished on film. If you want to abandon this post now, here is a longish documentary on the impact of the film on generations of filmmakers. While I loved the movie when I first saw it and each time since the idea of the computer/robot as an assistant was only science fiction.
A number of years ago, I took my children to a presentation at the University of Minnesota about robots. I think that over time, one of the more popular public-facing robot efforts was sponsored by Honda. They cleverly named their robot Asimo in tribute to the Sci-Fi author Isaac Asimov. Here is a link to a more recent visit. Even as we reached the mid-2010s, there was a distinct “failure of imagination” about how robot assistants might enter our lives. Honda, after twenty-plus years of research and basic science efforts, has now abandoned this public-facing robot program and focuses more on applications. What no one envisioning a slow-moving butler realized was that Siri and Google Assistant would begin to define an assistant in a different way on our SmartPhones. Later, Amazon Alexa and Google Home would bring this capability into our homes.
There would be competing visions but the Amazon Alexa and Google Home solutions have largely captured the burgeoning home automation market. While it will be a future post, this brings me to an interesting observation about “a walled garden”. Despite the early trailblazing efforts with Siri, the Apple ecosystem of devices is closed. Amazon and Google have COOPERATIVELY worked with every conceivable provider to make their CONTRIBUTIONS to a smart home compatibly work TOGETHER. In the same way that perhaps the technically superior Betamax from Sony was an early success, a large group of competing firms cooperated, agreed to standards, and overwhelmed the BetaMax with a tsunami-like effect when they worked to make the VHS format. This market still has a lot of innovation in store.
As industries mature, the need for standards emerges. Taking your jacks and going home and going it alone can bring short-term benefits but history has shown, especially in the technology world, standards move us all along together to reach much greater heights. The striking example I think of often is America Online and “You’ve Got Mail”. The internet was in its early stages, and AOL provided a private on-ramp to the internet with a stylized set of functions like news, sports, etcetera. I have no doubt that the idea was successful for a time. One day, however, the Internet grew up because of standards and there was a better way to get news, sports, entertainment, shopping (and email). AOL, one of the original “walled-gardens” is now a footnote in Internet history.
All walled gardens are not the same. When they are portrayed as “good” or “bad” it is likely done by people who really like things to be black and white. Only in the narrowest of circumstances, is black and white a useful metaphor for ANYTHING. There are benefits and downsides to all approaches.
Back to the Story & What’s Next
A recognized term in the technology industry is “the network effect”. It applies broadly to almost anything. Here is a broader definition:
I think that is far enough for a single post. Discipline and fewer tangents and fewer run-on sentences might help me reach the 5-7 minute goal. I think we are halfway there. Here’s tonight’s tune.
18+ [6:51]
The 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 11, pg 339