Robots Without a Cause

WG55 writes "Have you noticed that more and more technology is more ingenious than useful? Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian writes in his article Robots without a cause that much technology produced today will change our lives little, if at all. He writes, 'Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.'"

Comments

"The Emperor's Nightingale..."

[dpbsmith]

...by Hans Christian Andersen, and all the ingenious "automata" of the nineteenth century, show, at least, that there is nothing new about the love of gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry.

It's probably a form of idolatry... that's a sin we're not very conscious of these days...

Agreed

[GuyMannDude]

I've always wondered what George Boole's fellow mathematicians must have thought about him speding so much time developing an algebra based on only two numbers. And I believe that when Joseph Fourier presented his work to the academy of sciences showing that any function could be represented as an infinite sum of sine and cosine functions, the result was a big yawn from everyone.

While I look at a lot of modern technology as useless yuppie crap, there's something to be said about the relentless pursuit of scientific and technological advancement.

GMD

Re:Agreed

[tesmako]

True quote from a pretty damn clever mathematics prof. that held a course I took once:

"Practice in mathematics is using mathematics to invent new mathematics, it is not in any fucking way related to bridges."

Translated from swedish, hopefully decently true to the original swedish quote :)

Re:Agreed

[mav[LAG]]

And I believe that when Joseph Fourier presented his work to the academy of sciences showing that any function could be represented as an infinite sum of sine and cosine functions, the result was a big yawn from everyone.

Funnily enough it actually generated quite a bit of controversy. Joesph Louis Lagrange happened to be on the review council and refused to believe that adding sinusoids could produce signals with corners. It was only after Lagrange died some 15 years later that Fourier could get his paper published.

Re:Agreed

[zwalters]

And I believe that when Joseph Fourier presented his work to the academy of sciences showing that any function could be represented as an infinite sum of sine and cosine functions, the result was a big yawn from everyone.

Actually, Fourier's proof was extremely controversial at the time, and has arguably had a larger impact on the subsequent development of mathematics than anything else in the 19th century not invented by Gauss.

Consider a square wave. It's a discontinuous function that by Fourier's theorem can be represented as an infinite series of continuous functions -- and yet it's trivial to show that any sum of continuous functions must itself be continuous. So which is it -- continuous or discontinuous?

The problem in this specific instance results from a failure to distinguish between pointwise convergence (looks at local behavior -- whether two functions give the same answer at the same point) and functional convergence (loosely, that the functions behave the same over the entire range being considered). But the real problem was that there was enough slop in 19th century definitions and standards of proof that it was possible to "prove" a theorem true or false using equally valid arguments.

There were other problems cropping up at the same time, of course, but the problems of Fourier analysis were a major if not the major cause of the movement for rigor that redefined math in the 20th century.

Connecting all this to things the average Slashdotter will have heard of, the famous Hilbert program was a prominent part of the movement towards rigor -- a series of important questions that had to be answered if rigor were to be possible. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and the Turing machine were both answers to Hilbert problems.

Re:Those who can, do. Those who can't . . .

[TopShelf]

The author seems not to have much perspective as to how different people might view particular gadgets. A robotic vaccuum cleaner sounds great to me, since I've got 3 kids under the age of 16 months and hence a titanic workload just to keep the house under control.

The question for all of these gadgets is whether or not enough people find them useful and affordable to make the R&D investment worthwhile. This is inherently a risky proposition, so there will tremendous hits (DVD) and flops (Iridium)...

Best Purchase Ever ...

[SuperDuG]

Want to keep me entertained? Then let me use the new technology of a roto-tiller and let me purchase plants and plant food.

I recently made a $60 investment in a tiller garden utensils and plants (onions, peppers, tomatoes, mellos, and corn) and planted them a new garden in my back yard.

Granted gardening is far from new technology, but a tiller that weighs no more than 20 pounds and can still cut through 8 inches of earth? That's a pretty good feat of technology. I really enjoy the fact that what used to take an entire weekend now only takes me 25 minutes.

While the technology may not have a huge impact on our lives it does bring about more time for leisure. Some of us spend 9 hours a day at work, come home and clean the house (because we couldn't before work), make dinner, and then notice we have maybe 2 hours tops of free time before we have to get to bed and do it all again the next day.

Technology has made it easier for us to be able to actually relax and release stress from us. To not have to worry about the lawn because you placed a chemical that causes it to grow stronger and less fast or to be able to not have to worry about the house because a new weatherproof paint won't fade peel or chip. It's these "simple" things that we may not notice, but we also don't notice the impact they have on us. It can take an entire weekend to plant a garden, take care of a lawn, or paint a house.

It's technology that makes it possible for us to have more time to enjoy life.

Re:Those who can, do. Those who can't . . .

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

His argument isn't abut the usefulness of research, or the problem of its funding. His article isnt about the free market mythos.

It's about a cultural obsession with temporary diversion and amusement in novelty.

Shockingly, he supposes that lasting value in life might come from knowing oneself better, and that real sources of happiness are pusued with fewer contemplative distractions.

Very one-sided

[d3faultus3r]

He completely ignores the fact that incredible things have been accomplished in this age of gadgets he deems pointless. Does he really think the most inovative thing in this modern era is a wind up radio? What about genetic engineering, hybrid cars, nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, etc...? The scary part is, there must be a lot of people like him for this drivel to be published.

Re:This may be true for some, but it's not for me

[crazyphilman]

That's a pretty good point. When you think about it, it doesn't really matter whether a gadget is stupid in and of itself. The technology that is within the gadget is all patented, which means it becomes part of the public record, and available (after 17 years, or earlier through license) to the rest of us.

Take that little vacuum for instance. Would I buy one? Well, ok, maybe I would, but I'd crack it open and hack it into something else, maybe a little patrol camera for my apartment. So, if I can think of that, others can as well. If you've got a little trilobite-like thing that knows how to navigate around your apartment, getting over cables and such, and using sonar to "see", you can go pretty easily from there to a fleet of security bots who can detect motion and automatically capture video of whomever is breaking into your apartment, store, or corporate location.

Ok, next step. Make the trilobite out of aluminum. Mount a webcam on the back, and make it stream images. Program the device to patrol your apartment, store, or corporate location. When it locates someone, it emails you and you can see what it's seeing on the webcam. You can call the police and bust the thieves without ever leaving your cubicle, or vacation spot, or whatever.

Moving along, make one out of waterproof, floatation plastic, with a floating/swimming feature. Emergency services send out thousands of them to find flood survivors using infrared. Whenever they run into someone, they beam back a GPS coord set and some video. Or, better: some kid's lost in a forest. Thousands of trilobites scurry through the woods looking for heat signatures. Or, police use them to find fugitives.

Take this a little further. Make the little trilobite out of steel, and beef up the power and suspension. Mount a stronger antenna, and make it radio-controllable, so that it'll navigate through, say, a terrorist's cave until it "sees" somebody on infrared, and then hand over control to an operator. The operator drives it into the middle of the terrorists, and activates the modified claymore mine built into its armor. Boom.

Sure, it's a silly little vacuum cleaner NOW, but what can you do with the basic idea of the machine? Now that they've built it, what else can you do with it?

Most of the weird gadgets that are around today could be put to better uses. Research is research. It only takes imagination to bend it to a purpose...

Re:Broader view

[ronfar]

Hmm.... Did you ever watch the BBC TV series Connections? If not you are in for a treat and they probably have it at your local library. Well, when I was a kid, my greatest joy was to stay up late and watch Connections on my local PBS station.

Why am I bringing up Connections? Well, because Connections would trace the connections between various inventions that it would seem had no relation to each other. Many of the inventions the show would showcase as part of the chain would seem frivolous or irrelevent, but finally they would all link up to showcase the major invention of the show (which would be something like the automobile or the satellite dish).

Heh, lately most of the justifications for a space program are based on the idea that innovations that came from the space program led to improvements in medicine, construction or other fields. (Note: if you can't sell people on exploring a new frontier and helping humanity break its earthly bounds, explaining how we wouldn't have Tang is not going to sell them)