0.0 Creepy
article discussing drone operator post-traumatic stress and a rather disturbing suggestion:
create a kill-bot that would anthropomorphize the drone and “let crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens”.
1.0 Mitsubishi
built a robot to replace giant mirrors on the (proposed)
Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii. The difficulties of correctly identifying and
handling mirrors are kinda interesting and feel a bit like a lost plot-point from
The Martian.
3.0 Interesting series of posts on dealing with
language ambiguity and
adaptive dialogue in bot design. Also introduced us to the rather painful sounding discipline of
cognitive ergonomics:
“a design philosophy that recognizes that just as an ergonomic keyboard might bend so that the user’s wrists do not have to, a system’s design should bend so that the user’s natural process for accomplishing a task does not have to.”
4.0 A
recent study has revealed that in emergencies,
people may trust robots too much for their own safety.
“In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.”
5.0 Electric vehicle manufacturers appear to be falling over themselves designing attractive (and hopefully usable and easily learnable)
charging points. (Jump down to “Thing from the past” to see some electric car charge points from the 1900s!)
6.0 The newest edition of
Facebook’s Global Connectivity report. Includes some pretty extensive data broken down by connectivity challenge: Availability, Affordability, Relevance, Readiness
7.0 Why we mourn robot dogs. “
What makes things alive to us? The answer is surely that anything that can die seems alive, and anything that seems alive will sometime die”. And on the subject…here is
a video of an awesome, bouncy, Boston Dynamics robot ‘dog’ (…with no head, but somehow still convincingly dog-like) playing with
a real dog.
8.0 In a prior issue of Twill, we mentioned that some people were packing up Amazon Echo and taking it with them on holiday. It appears Amazon may have been paying attention as they’ve released two
much smaller models. An interesting aspect of the
baby Echos, is that they should enable Amazon (and users) to fine tune their contexts of use. The smallest device (the Tap) is for example battery operated, so will only ‘listen’ once physically tapped. This will no doubt make it
less useful in some contexts, but far more so in others.
9.0 In the “had to happen eventually” department, an L.A. apartment is being built with a rooftop
drone landing pad.
10.0 The New York transit authority has
completely banned hoverboards on subways and busses, as shown in this fairly stern sounding
poster.
