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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: 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.