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The future is apparently here. And it's creepier than we ever imagined—even when we were playing around with tethering Teddy Ruxpin to the Internet. A Japanese company called Vinclu ("a company that makes crazy things and supports crazy people") is now taking pre-orders from Japan and the United States for a new interactive, artificial-intelligence driven home automation system. Called Gatebox, the new Internet-of-Things product takes Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, Spike Jonze's film Her , and the "holographic" anime characters of Vocaloid concerts to their unified natural conclusion.
Wait, what?
Gatebox, priced at ¥321,840 (about $2,700 US), is squarely targeted at young lonely salarymen and all brands of anime-obsessed otaku—promising the experience of "living with your favorite character." The size of a home coffee-maker, with a footprint no larger than a sheet of A4 printer paper, the device's main feature is a clear projection tube that displays a computer-animated avatar for the AI's "character." Vinclu apparently is planning multiple possible personalities for Gatebox—which, as part of the device's backstory, is a gateway to the dimension the character lives in.
A company like this could release the first strong AI product (kawaii slave?).
Beginner's definition of "waifu" for the uninitiated.
Update: Another article indicates that "[There's also] HDMI and PC inputs to allow the owner to make their own modifications and create their own characters."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:10PM
Its interesting to consider that as a goofy gadget thats not going to get much use, $2700 pays for a lot of amazon mechanical turk. I suspect a lot of "Cloud AI" bullshit in the next decade or two will be uncovered to just be mechanical turk equivalents.
As the word transitions to everyone being poor except for a very small number of people having all the money, this seems rather predictable for high end products. Why buy a robot chef, or program a robot chef, when you can sell it for any amount of money to obscenely wealthy, and then turn it into a remote manipulator for hundreds of unemployed physical human chefs to compete for pennies of labor income...
I wonder about smart house bullshit, when a couple decades from now all houses will either be in favellas and have no electricity or have hundreds of human servants employed and there are no houses in between to install "smart house" junk into.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:22PM
That's interesting. Machine learning wipes out a lot of lower-level jobs, and then the unemployed become mechanical turks, providing voice acting and other responses for the tiny holographic waifus. Maybe a button can be added to the base to "vote down" inadequate responses. The waifu will groan ("itai!"), but the mechanical turk will get an electric shock from a shock collar.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:34PM
will get an electric shock from a shock collar
Classic "old" movie quote or future Amazon Turk 2.0 job requirement:
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:42PM
That'd be great, all the rich have remote controlled robots run by the poor. Makes it that much easier to eliminate the world's biggest problem.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:53PM
I enjoy thinking up (bad?) hard sci fi novel plots and I can imagine one where the $2700 IoT inflatable fleshlight has competing teams of poor union organizers and computer hackers and corp/gov blackmail operatives all trying to fight each other over when and who activates the "meatgrinder" (LOL).
"They" couldn't possibly be dumb enough to build something like that in, could they? I suppose over-specing has ruined plenty of engineering projects in the past so designing too much strength on the squeezer could snip it clean off, I suppose.
The problem with my novel is I'm not seeing much sympathy for the victims or reason for the activators to disagree. I suppose the blackmailers want to collect some dough before the union guys "strike them all off" one pre-arranged day meanwhile the hackers want to use their exploit before someone notices and patches it, or some anarchist group says F it and does it for the LOLs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:02PM
> I wonder about smart house bullshit, when a couple decades from now all houses will either be in favellas and have no electricity or have hundreds of human servants employed and there are no houses in between to install "smart house" junk into.
The favellas will have full smart house technology, along with Electricity and three square meals a day. Perhaps some cheap low level entertainment. After all, you need your serfs to be fed and borderline content, otherwise they won't be useful to you (make them too happy and they won't be willing to work much, it is a balancing act).
Plus, the peasants may get uppity, try to organise some sort of revolt, or a strike. You can't have that. So smart house tech will allow for full and constant monitoring of who is in which house, for how long, possibly even a good idea of what they are saying/doing or if they seem to not be a their terminal station taking care of their tasks for the day.
Oh... you thought the smart house tech was for YOUR benefit? Silly idea that.
I suspect the rich won't have smart house tech, you don't want a record of what you get up to in your mansion after all. It is your private property, and you are rich enough to afford privacy, and the discretion needed to enjoy your indulgences to the full. There is no shortage of cheap labour to actually do the stuff you are too lazy to do yourself, plus they will keep their mouths shut, lest they end up back in the favellas with the rest.
This is pretty much how all recent technical advances have turned out. I suspect pretty much same idea with self driving cars (hence the powers that be seem so keen to push them). One day you will find that only the rich can go where they want, the poor will only be able to pick from a select number of "approved" destinations the car will drive them to (assuming you even get to pick, your destination could be at their discretion if they so desire). Don't want the serfs prying too much in areas they are not wanted, they might realise some things that would be more convenient if they didn't.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:58PM
"This automated ride is sponsored by Tesco."
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday December 20 2016, @06:03PM
The proverbial Young Lady's Illustrated Primer stomping on a human face forever. What an age to be alive.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:44AM
> I suspect a lot of "Cloud AI" bullshit in the next decade or two will be uncovered to just be mechanical turk equivalents.
This will work just fine until the wage slave driving some rich person's 'robotic' concubine / chef / gardener uses their access to the rich person's physical home environment to do something dastardly: Grab security information for a real or digital heist, go on a killing spree, take a hostage...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 21 2016, @01:33PM
There's a classic solution to that where life is cheap, you apply a large odd number of slaves to the job, and like the space shuttle computers do, you play games with averaging outputs and silly XOR games.
One dude can drive one semi truck thru a holiday plaza, happens all the time in euro-land and they'll never do anything about it but blame themselves, and of course, die, die a lot and die often, until their opinions are corrected. On the other hand, coordinating a minimum of five out of nine chefs to throw the butcher knife at the estate owner is tricky when the nine don't all speak the same language (intentionally by public policy) and don't work at the same facility, and are not all at the same level of burnout.
Another fun solution when life is cheap involves hostages and when there's a dozen unemployed for every job you don't need to hire loners. You don't even have to be brutal about it, no need for "if you kill the estate owner your kid is killed before your eyes" you can just "if you don't work as hard as possible all the time, you're fired and get to watch your kid starve to death" or no medical care or whatever else.