Slashdot Mirror
Emotional Bonding with Space Probes
bfwebster writes "Space.com has a story on the scientists and technicians working on the Mars rovers, Spirit and Oppotunity--and how they will react when the rovers finally break down, go silent, or otherwise die. Of course, humans becoming emotionally involved with hardware is high on the list of overused science fiction cliches (see I.14), and humans were naming (and anthropomorphizing) their cars long before they started doing it to their computers. Some argue that anthropomorphic design can ease end-user acceptance [PDF], with some interesting results among toys for children. On the other hand, when software manufacturers try to give our computers some 'personality', we tend to vehemently react against it--witness Microsoft's attempts with the much-loathed Bob and Clippy. And when our personal computers are aged or ailing or simply misbehaving, we usually are more than happy to put them out of our misery. So in the case of Spirit and Opportunity, the issue may be the large investment of time, money, and professional credibility in having two semi-autonomous rovers 100 million miles away function correctly. Best quote from the Space.com story: when Spirit, early into its mission, shut down for reasons then unknown, the Spirit mission manager happened to get a phone call from her husband. He asked her how her day had been, and she said, 'Well...I think I'm personally responsible for the loss of a $400 million national asset.' Doncha hate it when that happens?"
Give it up Markedroids, we don't need you!
Scientists bond to space probes because they created them. As a programmer, I have an attachments to the software I created; if someone unfairly criticizes it sometimes I can take it personally.
Things like Bob and Clippy are loathed because they were what the creator/Microsoft wanted, not necessarily what the users wanted. In these 2 specific cases they act like the end-user is a complete idiot (which may or may not be true). People take offense at hand holding if they can walk fine on their own.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
If by that you mean the ridiculous knocking on the monitor to get your attention while you were trying to concentrate on something else, yes. The problem was not the anthropomorphism, but that some annoying little twit kept interrupting serious thought to announce something trivial you could deal with later.
Meatspace has the saying: "children should be seen and not heard." Microsoft ignored that.
This is something I've noticed with Hubble, except that we who deal with the technical side of it don't wax nearly as emotional about it as the astronomers who work with the data.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
...that the scientists in JPL are already in an unhealthy state due to the difference between Earth's and Mars' day (as mentioned here).
This particular disequilibrium of sleep will accentuate the reactions to the loss.
Isn't it similar with ./ers?
and why is it Microsoft's fault that you chose not to do a full install?
No mention of anthropomorphizing machinery is complete without a reference to Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley: n. Feelings of unease, fear, or revulsion created by a robot or robotic device that appears to be, but is not quite, human-like.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I remember that folks started anthropomorphizing macs as soon as they came out, perhaps in response to the happy mac icon at every startup (or the sad mac if you had problems that day).
The add on Talking Moose was what did it for me though...hard to describe this particular piece of software, but it put an animated moose in the corner of your screen... he would come on and say things (using Macintalk) in response to user actions with menu items and also randomly during idle times. It definitely gave me a connection to System 6, because he never really worked right with system 7. Unlike Clippy or Bob, the moose never really tried to be helpful, other than occasionally reminding you to save your document. But with his Canadian accent and hundreds of phrases, I still miss him to this day.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
I should have clarified. I don't consider evil innovative or inventive regardless of how resourceful it is. I realize that English in general doesn't make the same distinctions I do, but there you have it.
I even have a book on programming "Agents". (I'll buy almost anything for $4.) The first trivial idea I had was to program "Bit" from Tron. Give him five states. Do nothing, Yes, No, Yes yes yes, No no no. Use the TTS and maybe STT to render its state and decide what the user was doing in a very course manner to decide on a state. Something like the world's most annoying magic eight ball. The other dubiously more useful idea would be to us it to launch a roubust spider, that might itself have gekko included in it to help in avoiding certain windows vulnerabilities. It would acctually make a lot of sense to use an agent as the front end in that case.
When the news came down that SOHO was probably gone for good, otherwise very controlled, steady, Dave Bowman types were seen leaning against the wall weeping, or bawling in front of the console. It was as if we were all in mourning for a suddenly lost friend -- except that, another time, a member of the spacecraft team did pass away (for reasons of his own) and the collective gestalt emotion was not as strong about him as about the spacecraft itself. That's not a statement about the callousness of the individuals involved -- but rather about the strength of the emotional upset that came from the loss of the mission.
Perhaps that's because the mission becomes such a strong focus of the team's lives that it really does encroach on an emotional place normally reserved for our closest friends and family. We're conditioned, and society is structured, to deal with human tragedy; but losing our ``friend'' leaves us with an equally large void and no societal preparation for it.
People didn't react badly to the anthropomorphizing, they reacted badly to the patronizing tone.
No, Slashdot geeks reacted badly to the patronizing tone--just as they do to anything a company does to make things easier and friendly for non-techies, because geeks need to feel superior about everything.
Everyone else was fine with Clippy. You make it sound like there was a mass revolt, but there wasn't. It only existed on Slashdot.
I do tech support for my company, and the realtors just love the "cute little dog" that "digs at the ground" when I do a search for some document that they can't find. They don't find it intrusive or patronizing in any way at all, because they don't approach it with that mindset. It's just some fun little thing the computer does while they search. Slashdot nerds have this tone of, "How dare they assume I'm an idiot!" when all you have to do is tell the goddamned thing to go away, and it will never return. It's like the girth of your penis is tied to how knowledgable you can prove that you are to the computer.
Basically, it's the ego of the Comic Book Guy, but applied to computers. "How dare you..."
Concur.
They gave it their best shot, but they got it wrong.
But then again, so did many others. Clippy notwithstanding, a day will come when personalized interaction with computers will not only exceed what now obtains between humans and pets, but also what now obtains what now obtains between humans and other humans. When this finally happens, there's gonna be some seriously weird shit going down along the lines of the ancient curse about living in interesting times.
Is it fascism yet?