Last weekend’s runaway train saga totally freaked me out. It just doesn’t bear thinking about; several hundred tonnes of rolling stock thundering through North London’s Underground network, only to be halted – human fashion – by the gradient of Warren Street station. The instance set me thinking of other minds with a machine of their own; Herbie the comic Beetle car and movie star, Steven King’s terrifying Christine, the dancing female robot in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926), and Hal the wayward computer, (2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Of course, our past notions of what a robot actually is was off-kilter, being not necessarily humanoid tin cans with high pitched voices, out-doing us in ‘logic’ at every turn.
The modern-day robot comes in many guises, is usually task-specific and is unlikely to be logical. There are those annoying freezers that ping like mad when you leave their door open for too long. There are the disembodied voices that you engage with on the phone many times – and wish you didn’t have to. And what about those ‘friendly, chatty’ horrors that you check out your supermarket shopping on? With more and more trains are becoming ‘driverless’, it would be enlightening to know who or what controls these beasts and how can we ensure ‘the above’ doesn’t happen again. Answers, please….
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment