Technocreep (25 page)

On April 1, 2012, Google Announced “Google Voice for Pets” which would allow you to receive text messages and even voicemails from your dog and cat. The key innovation was “Voice Communication Collars” These Google-invented devices “fit around your pet's neck and use a series of sensors to record audio directly from your dog or cat's vocal cords, using technology originally developed for NASA spacesuits.”
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They didn't stop there, going on to say “voicemails from your pet would be pretty silly if you haven't been trained how to understand cat or dog. Thankfully, we've solved that problem too. We took our voicemail transcription engine and combined it with millions of adorable pet videos from the Internet, training it to understand our furry friends. Now our transcription engine can now translate cat meows or dog growls into English!”

If you clicked on the link “to be one of the first pet owners to try our special communication collars,” you were taken to a Google search on “April Fool's Day.” This was one of Google's little pranks.

But, not so fast. Perhaps talking to the animals is not so far-fetched. Northern Arizona University Professor Emeritus Constantine Slobodchikoff's work on communicating with prairie dogs has been featured in
The Atlantic, National Geographic
, and
Smithsonian Magazine
.

In an interview with
The Atlantic
, Slobodchikoff moved from analyzing the “jump-yip” gesture of the prairie dog to speculating about an electronic device that might open up the hidden world inside the brain of a pet:

I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says “bark!” and the device analyzes it and says, “I want to eat chicken tonight.” Or the cat can say “meow,” and it can say, “You haven't cleaned my litterbox recently.” He predicts this will be a reality “probably five to ten years out.”
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We might be skeptical of Slobodchikoff's vision of human-animal chatter in the coming decade. But he does have an ace up his sleeve. Body language. He figures we have been wasting our time “barking up the wrong tree” in studying animal language by just trying to decode their sounds. Animals communicate with their whole bodies, including their urinary apparatus. They may use signal systems we cannot even detect. Slobodchikoff confirms what every slouching, iPod-wearing teenager is probably told before that first job interview—“when spoken language and body language conflict, the listeners pay attention to the body language.”
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Of course, it you really want a pet to converse with, you could try a virtual pet like a Furby. The unique feature of the Furby, aside from being cuddly in an alien sort of way, was its language ability. Out of the box, all Furbies spoke their “native language,” Furbish. Given a command, a Furby might say “doo-dah” (meaning “OK, I'll do that) or “Boo” meaning “no way, José.” Then, according to the hype that had frantic parents tearing them off the shelves around Christmas 1998, your Furby would gradually “learn English,” and shed its Furby baby talk for vaguely proper English. This worried the National Security Agency.

In 1999 the NSA issued a memo notifying its employees that “personally owned photographic, video, and audio recording equipment are prohibited items. This includes toys, such as ‘Furbys,' with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound to mimic the original signal.”
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The fear was that a rogue Furby could record confidential information and then blab it back if its owner stopped off in a bar on the way home with the thing in tow.

Apparently lacking the will, technical ability, or spare Furbies to cut them apart, the U.S. National Security Agency simply banned them from the premises. At a time when Edward Snowden was still trying to get his first driver's license, and Wikileaks was only a dream of its “chief visionary” Julian Assange, the NSA was fretting about stuffed toys.
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After all, they were made in China.

We now know that first generation Furbys were faking it. They only had a two hundred word vocabulary—one hundred in Furbish, and one hundred more in English—that they were pre-programmed to reveal. In a blog post, Dwayne Hoover analyzed the inner workings of the original Furby:

it's not going to learn or say anything different than the 100 English words it was already programmed to ‘learn.' You can read it Portuguese porn articles every single day for six months straight, and it's still going to end up saying, ‘I big worried.' But, it's easy to see how the NSA wouldn't know that. It's not like they are big on, you know, gathering information about things.
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We all fell for it, and indeed there were Christmas-time “Furby Fights” at toy stores around the world. Web pages even revealed secret “Furby cheats” like “cover his eyes three times then pat him on the back, and he will crow like a rooster”
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If one Furby was good, two were even better, since they did have some rudimentary ability to interact. They reportedly played Hide and Seek with each other by saying the phrase “Hey Kitty Kitty Kitty Hide” back and forth.
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Real pets were reportedly driven insane by their incessant chatter.

This kind of annoying behavior, coupled with the lack of an on/off switch, spawned creative ways to “kill a Furby,” including putting him in a microwave so “the electronic parts of your Furby would be burnt out and destroyed in a very short time.”
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Your microwave would also be destroyed, giving Furby the evil last laugh.

Hasbro brought Furby back in 2012 to bedevil a new generation. Now with LED eyes, the new Furby comes in a box emblazoned with the ominous tagline “Furby—A Mind of Its Own.” This new Furby interacts with computers and smartphones and can lay eggs which hatch into Furblings.

If Furbies could be demanding and petulant, bleating out “Ah-May Koh Koh—Pet Me More!” at the most inopportune times, the other virtual pet craze, Tamagotchis, was known to interrupt business meetings in Japan and cause people to miss their turn on a golf course.

With their built-in digital meters, these pocket-sized creatures demanded regular care, feeding, and even bathroom breaks. The programming inside the Tama-Go has been reverse-engineered by Natalie Silvanovich, who posted some of her findings online.
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She shares Tamagotchi secrets like “from code inspection we learn that it is equally likely a girl will be Belltchi and Hositchi, and equally likely a boy will be Mattaritchi or Ahirkutchi.”

These glorified digital watches, and our reaction to them, actually provides some great insights into human nature. From the hatching of the egg, the Tamagotchi's life is a series of suspenseful, if somewhat pre-programmed moments. Will it be a boy or a girl? Which kind of baby personality will it have? What factors determine the variety of Toddler or Teen it will grow into? The randomness and apparent unpredictability is evidently an appealing feature of the device.

Digging into the chip inside Tama-Go's programming, Silvanovich found that initial breed and gender are determined randomly, based on the precise clock setting at the moment the device is activated.

From that point on, Tamagotchi child-rearing imitates real life. Ignore your baby and you are going to get one of the nastier toddlers. Also, Silvanovich found, “if you care for your toddler poorly, you need to make up for this in discipline in the teen years or else you will get a ‘bad' character.” By pretending to be alive, yet clearly not being truly alive, the Tamagotchi falls into the “Uncanny Valley” that is both the bane and the delight of robotics researchers.

If you think the era of virtual pets has passed, you don't watch a lot of late-night TV. A fake parrot is now making the rounds with the Sham-Wows and home gym machines. Perfect Polly doesn't need food, or a cage, and never smells up the room

The infomercial for Perfect Polly implies that this motion-activated mechanical bird, which
does
have an on/off switch, will be the perfect companion for Grandpa since it will react to his every twitch with a tremor of its own. In the commercial, children who appear old enough to know better, accept this plastic pet as a
bona fide
and welcome addition to the family. And, thanks to an amazing feat of avian mind reading, we're even assured that a real parakeet can't tell the difference between a potential mate and this plastic imitation.

The Furby and Tamagotchi crazes of the 1990s saw people adopting robotic pets and treating them as real living things, and Perfect Polly is merely the newest iteration of this phenomenon. Our longing for companionship, even of the mechanical variety, appears to be growing ever more pervasive and complex.

If the word “robot” conjurs up Issac Asimov–style humanoids made of sheet metal, or the toy you got for your fifth birthday, it is time for some updating. The vast majority of robots today are either computer-controlled arms that weld car parts together or goofy-looking contraptions that defuse bombs or roam around Mars. Even that image is about to change.

In the near future, some robots will look like insects. Swarms of insects. Researchers at North Carolina State University are thinking of using sensor-equipped cockroaches to explore dangerous sites like collapsed buildings. The plan is to have them “signal researchers via radio waves whenever biobots got close to each other.” In a press release from the University, Dr. Edgar Lobaton says, “One characteristic of biobots is that their movement can be somewhat random. We're exploiting that random movement to work in our favor.”
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They've been working with Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

Like many technologies that move from the lab to the consumer world, you can now buy the technology to make your own iPhone-controlled living being. After a successful Kickstarter campaign ($150 with “a dozen well behaved roaches”; $100 if you already have all the roaches you need), Backyard Brains of Ann Arbor, MI, offers a kit that allows you to hack the nervous system of a cockroach.
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An ethical furor around animal cruelty has arisen, though the comment “let he who has never squashed a bug throw the first stone” seems to have calmed that somewhat.

The military has long been interested in using bugs for surveillance and as weapons. In a 2009 book called
Six-Legged Soldiers: Insects as Weapons of War
, Jeffery A. Lockwood examines the ­insect-created 1343 pandemic in Kaffa which helped Janiberg, the last Mogul khan. Napoleon's 1799 and 1812 defeats were caused by plague-bearing fleas. The book also describes the use of insects as instruments of torture, even on young children.
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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has experimented with weaponized flying insects.
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The Japanese-originated concept of the Uncanny Valley provides clues to our reaction to robots that are just a bit too human. A great example can be found in a YouTube video called “Invertuality: Jules says Goodbye.”
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Jules is “a conversational character robot” built by scientist-artist David Hanson. Like BINA48, Jules has a human-like face made of a foam-rubber composite called Frubber. It's designed for statistically perfect androgyny. He looks from person looks from person to person, and remembers where people are so he can look at them.

In other videos, Jules expresses fear about traveling to England and curiosity about his own sexuality. In addition to having realistic facial expressions, Hanson's robots, which also include a pretty good Albert Einstein, carry on rather convincing conversations.

Artists are not the only ones making robots. At a robotics demonstration at Fort Benning in Georgia, Scott Hartley of 5D Robotics reportedly said that “ten years from now, there will probably be one soldier for every ten robots. Each soldier could have one or five robots flanking him, looking for enemies, scanning for land mines.”
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Critics of this trend argue that the psychological threshold for going to war may be reduced if we are using disposable robots. Drones already allow us to fly missions without risking human life; robots might make soldiers virtually invincible, especially against adversaries who are not similarly equipped.

We might even get to the stage anticipated by science fiction writers where countries in conflict simply duke it out in cyberspace to see who would win, based on mathematical models, and then the proper number of citizens on each side are executed in the settling up. It would be an efficient if chilling way to handle disputes with our neighbors.

Will robots also minister to a soldier's need for companionship? Throughout the ages, where there have been (human) soldiers there have been prostitutes. Now there is serious talk about Android brothels in the future. The world's oldest profession may be ripe for some very creative automation.

New Zealand researchers have “predicted that robot sex workers will replace human prostitutes by 2050.”
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Calling it the next logical step in the billion dollar sex toy industry, a YouTube video promises lifelike sex robots with sanitary features that will eliminate sexually transmitted diseases.

In a real academic paper, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the Victoria Management School in Wellington give us a provocative, if creepy, peek into a fictitious future establishment, the Yub-Yum, located near a canal in Amsterdam:

The Yub-Yum offers a range of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features. The club is often rated highly by punters on www.punternet.com and for the fifth year in a row, in 2049 was voted the world's best massage parlour by the UN World Tourism Organisation.
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