Machine learning / Ball wars
Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times; and Joe MacLeod, Editor at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.
Issue No. 580
ANDRO ID (Part 1)
Author One
Ball Wars
Joe MacLeod
ANDRO ID (Part 1)
by Sam Thielman
A humanoid robot eight stories tall is, first and foremost, impractical. The human form’s bipedal gait and high center of gravity make stability the designer’s foremost concern, rendering any other purpose for which the robot might be intended—combat, entertainment, housing—subsidiary, if not altogether unsuitable. And even a perfectly stable giant robot must encounter the same problems that might trouble a human being of identical stature, strength, and resilience. To stroll down the street weighing seventy tons on feet the size of sport-utility vehicles, to shrug shoulders like wrecking balls, to impatiently snap fingers that could serve as traffic bollards—each of these everyday activities might distribute mortal or at least expensive injuries among innocent bystanders and unlucky propertyholders, when performed by a machine with a steel exoskeleton bristling with guns, missiles, and antennae. That our elected officials have proposed to equip the next generation of these devices with wings and “gravity thrusters” so soon after the Soft Fires hardly inspires confidence in their grasp of public safety.
Nevertheless, as I look out my window I can see no fewer than three of these monstrosities, each festooned with corporate logos and cracked video screens displaying advertisements for entertainment products and snack foods. One of them, I am pleased to report, can no longer move, having tipped over during what I am told was a rare failure of the patented gyroscope system purchased, for an unthinkable sum and with our taxpayer dollars, from the Microsoft corporation. An elder at my church told me that the gyroscope is a little metal sphere about the size of a cantaloupe. It is stored in the left knee, he said, behind a small metal panel like a fusebox, only twenty or so feet off the ground when the creature is standing. This evidently makes it easy for illegal immigrants, or thrill-seeking teenagers from other neighborhoods, to steal and resell to the Glass Tree, a paramilitary group that uses the gyroscopes in their floating music festival. This, he explained, is what is wrong with the neighborhood today: Too many people, and so on, who aren’t from here, stealing things.
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