Nil by Mouth

my horoscope today tells me:

my horoscope today tells me:

“The secret of life,” declared sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is — it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

that’s a nice quote, and i like henry moore besides.

i saw A.I. yesterday. it was weird. my jury’s still out. i’m too sensitive to like Kubrick’s misanthropy, but too cynical to buy Spielberg’s cheesiness. and the movie’s weird ’cause both theme’s are kind of fighting with eachother. the robot boy is the only sympathetic character. but finding a robot that is more sensitive than the humans, while being human yourself, doesn’t really make you think, just makes you distance yourself from the movie. but the photography and sets and all those “details” of the future were really cool. G liked it. she said it was a fairy tale, and she likes fairy tales. i can’t quite appreciate it like that i guess.

it did get me thinking about the future of robots. computers, and the like. i can’t see the future filled with robots that look, speak, and act like human beings. in fact all the research

(COMPUTERS AS TOOLS OR AS SOCIAL ACTORS?,

Anthropomorphic UI Agent,

Chapter 6: Intelligent Tutoring Systems)

i’ve read says people have a strong dislike of anthropomorphic computer agents. i.e. Clippy, Miss Boo.

people want to be firmly in control of their machines. understandable. most of us don’t get what goes on inside those little boxes anyhow. putting a human face on top of the controls only pushes us even further from any understanding. and if you ask ordinary folk the right questions about why they don’t use the computer more, you’ll probably get to answer that sounds something like, “I don’t understand how it works, so i won’t be able to get it to do what i want anyway.”

so, yeah. i’ll be very surprised if humanlike robots get any further than some kooky R&D engineering labs.

but i guess someone probably said that about the web too…

• Jul 2