(no subject)
There's now a $5000 robot baby harp seal called Paro, short for personal robot, that's being used like pet therapy to calm patients and treat depression in hospitals and especially nursing homes, espcially for patients with dementia. Future versions could plausibly cost $500 or even $50.
Reptiles and such aren't cute enough, while dogs and cats are too familiar and the machine couldn't imitate them accurately, so they made it a baby harp seal. It can't imitate a baby harp seal accurately either, but hardly any of the patients have ever even seen a baby harp seal in person, much less cuddled with it, so they can't tell, and so the engineers who created it don't care. Ironically, baby harp seals are best known for being clubbed for their skins, widely criticized as a failure of human empathy, just as bonding with a machine as if it's alive is sort of a failure of human empathy in the opposite direction.
Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, sailors on ships and inmates in prisons were given cheap, planned diets that provided fat, carbohydrates, and protein, but not various vitamins or minerals, because it wasn't yet known that the body needed those. They kept coming down with various diseases, but it was assumed that they were contagious, like the bedbugs or colds that were also common in those places. Only very slowly and after a great deal of time and suffering was it discovered that many of the diseases were due to vitamin deficiencies.
Now, here we are again, spoon-feeding a largely powerless and even uncomprehending group a carefully planned, cost-focused, steady diet of what we arrogantly assume will be sufficient for them, even though it's not what we'd give ourselves.
What new mental and social deficiencies will be unearthed if we give people all their companionship from machines instead of humans and animals because it's cheaper that way? Are we going to experiment on our nation's senior citizens until they're real-life versions of J.F. Sebastian from Blade Runner? I generally like technology and automation, but this idea worries me very much.
Reptiles and such aren't cute enough, while dogs and cats are too familiar and the machine couldn't imitate them accurately, so they made it a baby harp seal. It can't imitate a baby harp seal accurately either, but hardly any of the patients have ever even seen a baby harp seal in person, much less cuddled with it, so they can't tell, and so the engineers who created it don't care. Ironically, baby harp seals are best known for being clubbed for their skins, widely criticized as a failure of human empathy, just as bonding with a machine as if it's alive is sort of a failure of human empathy in the opposite direction.
Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, sailors on ships and inmates in prisons were given cheap, planned diets that provided fat, carbohydrates, and protein, but not various vitamins or minerals, because it wasn't yet known that the body needed those. They kept coming down with various diseases, but it was assumed that they were contagious, like the bedbugs or colds that were also common in those places. Only very slowly and after a great deal of time and suffering was it discovered that many of the diseases were due to vitamin deficiencies.
Now, here we are again, spoon-feeding a largely powerless and even uncomprehending group a carefully planned, cost-focused, steady diet of what we arrogantly assume will be sufficient for them, even though it's not what we'd give ourselves.
What new mental and social deficiencies will be unearthed if we give people all their companionship from machines instead of humans and animals because it's cheaper that way? Are we going to experiment on our nation's senior citizens until they're real-life versions of J.F. Sebastian from Blade Runner? I generally like technology and automation, but this idea worries me very much.