artificial intelligence | Chris Aldrich

Mr. Typewriter, a Royal 660 Electric Typewriter, as inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000?

Before we were introduced to the ominous HAL 9000, some knew his older, creepy, sexist cousin Mr. Typewriter, personified by a Royal 660 which appears in the 1966 short film/advertisement Successful Secretary presented by Royal Office Typewriters and directed by Carl A. Carbone.

While there is some heavily gendered blather juxtaposed with some entertaining and atmosphere filling late-1960s jazz, the star of the short film is Mr. Typewriter who incessantly “sells” him self to a contemporaneous mannequin secretary.

This commercial for a 1966 Royal 660 electric typewriter predates Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey by two years. But based on the scripting, pacing, composition, and even some of the character, it seems like Kubrick was heavily inspired by this short film.

HAL 9000’s tone in 2001 seems to have come straight from Mr. Typewriter and even some of the typewriter/computer personification particularly in the camera angles on the machines seems stark and heavily familiar. One can’t help but notice how Mr. Typewriter looms over the viewer at the 7 minute mark as it delivers it’s “helpful” advice.

“I think you’ll like the half sheet better. It is faster.” —Mr. Typewriter, [timestamp 6:59]

Litton Business Systems, Inc. was a subsidiary of Litton Industries, Inc., an American defense contractor that specialized in shipbuilding, aerospace, electronic components, and information technology. They had bought out Royal Typewriters and had created the electric Royal 660 (released in 1966) specifically to compete with the IBM Selectric (introduced July 1961). Given the time period Litton would have been a potentially more ominous corporate parent than IBM.

Movie buffs have often speculated that the letters of H.A.L.’s name were a one letter increment from I.B.M. Kubrick was known to have corresponded with IBM in relation to the film, but perhaps this was a macguffin to cover up the inspiration from Royal and Litton?

Stanley Kubrick was known to have used an IBM Model C electric typewriter which was manufactured between 1958 and 1967.

Here, Mr. Typewriter in a calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary about his usefulness while HAL does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the space race in that time period). Suddenly the populace feels the more mysterious computer might be a bad actor compared to the typewriter which was slowly being supplanted.

With any luck, Mr. Typewriter wasn’t sexually harassing anyone in the office, but it’s highly unlikely any of the audience at the time was dwelling on such issues until Colin Higgins’ 9 to 5 (Twentieth Century Fox, 1980) which uncoincidentally featured a row of Royal electric typewriters in it’s trailer.

Intriguingly it bears mentioning that the voice over on the 9 to 5 trailer sounds like William Schallert, who portrayed the avuncular Professor Quigley in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (Walt Disney Productions, 1969), another film of the period which has something to say about personifying information systems and the coming era of artificial intelligence, though this time as embedded into the brain of a young Kurt Russell.

While the gendered roles portrayed at the time are atrocious (a male machine represented by a male voice is now directing the woman’s work in the office instead of her too-busy, jet-setting male boss), you have to love the techno-utopianism engendered by Successful Secretary:

“We’re living in an electric world, more speed and less effort.”—Mr. Typewriter

I did some reading and annotation and learned something deplorable about Perusall. What grade does your AI give me?

We caught ’em!

— Perusall (@Perusall) February 21, 2022

https://hyp.is/A9EcXpR0Eey_JGdvKnxDPg/twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

Read “I started crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google (MIT Technology Review)

Two weeks after her forced exit, the AI ethics researcher reflects on her time at Google and the state of the AI field.

It’s long past time to divest my personal data from Google. Reading this article on holiday reminds me that I’ve got time to start making the necessary changes.

RSVPed Attending Innovate Pasaddena: Creating Lifelike Animate Companions that Enhance our Lives

Online event: July 17, 2020 at 08:30AM - 10:00AM

Moxie is an animate companion that promotes social and emotional development through play-based learning. Paolo Pirjanian will show a demo and speak to his journey developing Moxie and his vision for how technology can improve and enhance our lives.

We're at a tipping point of a paradigm shift in the way we will interact with technology. Embodied is aiming to lead this charge through an advanced social interface that respects humans’ natural modes of interaction, beyond simple verbal commands, to enable the next generation of computing, and to power a new class of machines that will change the world around us. Paolo will discuss how he and his team at Embodied are rethinking and reinventing how human-machine interaction is done - starting with the recent announcement of Moxie.

Moxie is an animate companion that helps children build social, emotional, and cognitive skills through everyday play-based learning and engaging content developed in association with experts in child development and education. Embodied has assembled a world class team of experts in engineering, technology, game design, and entertainment to bring to life a robot with machine learning technology that allows it to perceive, process and respond to natural conversation, eye contact, facial expressions and other behavior as well as recognize and recall people, places, and things.

Paolo will speak to his journey developing Moxie and his vision for how technology can improve and enhance our lives.

BIO: Paolo Pirjanian
Paolo Pirjanian is the former CTO of iRobot and early leader in the field of consumer robotics with 16+ years of experience developing and commercializing cutting-edge home robots. He led world-class teams and companies at iRobot®, Evolution Robotics®, and others. In 2016, Paolo founded Embodied, Inc. with the vision to build socially and emotionally intelligent companions that improve care and wellness and enhance our daily lives.

Bookmarked Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: A reality rooted perspective by Frank Emmert-Streib, Olli Yli-Harja, Matthias Dehmer (arXiv.org)

We are used to the availability of big data generated in nearly all fields of science as a consequence of technological progress. However, the analysis of such data possess vast challenges. One of these relates to the explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning methods. Currently, many of such methods are non-transparent with respect to their working mechanism and for this reason are called black box models, most notably deep learning methods. However, it has been realized that this constitutes severe problems for a number of fields including the health sciences and criminal justice and arguments have been brought forward in favor of an explainable AI. In this paper, we do not assume the usual perspective presenting explainable AI as it should be, but rather we provide a discussion what explainable AI can be. The difference is that we do not present wishful thinking but reality grounded properties in relation to a scientific theory beyond physics.

Read Meet Leo, Your AI Research Assistant (blog.feedly.com)

Goodbye Information Overload

Keeping up with topics and trends you care about within a sea of articles can be overwhelming and time-consuming.

Filtering out the noise so you can focus on what really matters is a challenge we are deeply passionate about.

Today, we are delighted to announce Leo, your AI research assistant.

This is kind of cool, but I think I’d want more manual control over what I’m reading and seeing and perhaps a separate discovery mode to do this sort of functionality at times.

Bookmarked Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by

Adrienne Mayor (Princeton University Press)

The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life—and even invented real automated machines

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements—and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines.

As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for real automata. Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

A groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Gods and Robots reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth—and how science has always been driven by imagination. This is mythology for the age of AI.

↬ Sean Carroll Mindscape Episode 40: Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology (#)

Listened to Episode 40: Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology from Sean Carroll's Mindscape

The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It should probably come as no surprise that these ideas aren’t new to modern society — they go way back, at least to the stories and mythologies of ancient Greece. Today’s guest, Adrienne Mayor, is a folklorist and historian of science, whose recent work has been on robots and artificial humans in ancient mythology. From the bronze warrior Talos to the evil fembot Pandora, mythology is rife with stories of artificial beings. It’s both fun and useful to think about our contemporary concerns in light of these ancient tales.

Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar Classics and History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University. She is also a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her work has encompasses fossil traditions in classical antiquity and Native America, the origins of biological weapons, and the historical precursors of the stories of Amazon warriors. In 2009 she was a finalist for the National Book Award.

I’d never considered it before, but I’m curious if the idea of the bolt on Talos’ leg bears any influence on the bolts frequently seen on Frankenstein’s monster? Naturally they would seem to be there as a means of charging or animating him, but did they have an powers beyond that? Or was he, once jump-started, to run indefinitely? Bryan Alexander recently called out his diet (of apples and nuts), so presumably once he was brought to life, he was able to live the same way as a human.