Robots and stylebooks

Last updated on: March 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm by Fred Clark

Robots and stylebooks 2011-03-10T18:00:47-05:00 Fred Clark

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That video, created and posted to YouTube by lonzo625, perfectly captures not just the retrofuturistic theme of the song — “(It’s the ’80s, Where’s Our) Rocket Packs,” by the band Daniel Amos — but the way its own “futuristic” sound itself now seems like a time-capsule relic from the early 1980s.

I’ve thought of that song a few times recently due to a series of recent stories in which robots seem to feature prominently.

First there was all that business with Watson, the computer that schooled several human Jeopardy! champions (before getting beat, oddly, by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.). Then it was Brad DeLong asking “Did the Singularity Already Happen?” (He says “Yes.”) And then XKCD definitively answering the “Where’s my flying car?” question. And then — I’m probably skipping or missing a few more examples — the Japanese robot marathon: “Humanoids run world’s first robot marathon race.” (The winning time was 54:57:50, so Robovie-PC didn’t quite qualify for Boston, but still.)

And then, finally, there was this story that we ran in the paper I work for: “Robot therapist helping children with autism connect.” This is a pretty cool, and kind of heartwarming, story about a robot toy whose simple actions and gestures help children with autism learn to respond to social cues:

Eden Sawczenko used to recoil when other little girls held her hand and turned stiff when they hugged her. This year, the 4-year-old autistic girl began playing with a robot that teaches about emotions and physical contact — and now she hugs everyone.

The therapy seems promising, and they think they can get the cost of these little therapy-toy robots down enough to make this something widely used, but there’s a bit more studying to be done to figure out if this is a long-term, effective approach.

If you follow the link you’ll see a picture of Eden and the robot, named Kaspar, which is pretty creepy (Kaspar, not Eden — she’s adorable). Kaspar definitely falls in the “uncanny valley.” He was meant to:

“Children with autism don’t react well to people because they don’t understand facial expressions,” said Ben Robins, a senior research fellow in computer science at the University of Hertfordshire who specializes in working with autistic children. “Robots are much safer for them because there’s less for them to interpret and they are very predictable.”

So Kaspar’s expressionless, creepy face is thought to make him more effective in helping children with autism. (There’s probably a joke here about Tom Cruise in Rain Man, but I’m not quite sure what it is.)

Kaspar is meant to look like a little boy, which is why I used the masculine pronoun above. The Associated Press used that pronoun, too, seeming to follow the same style they use for dogs or other animals, which is that an unnamed dog is “it” but a dog with a name is “he” or “she.” Whether that’s appropriate for robots is an interesting question.

I suppose in the long run, the best way to decide pronoun style for robots will be to ask them what they prefer. And in the very long run, it may be to follow whatever they order us to do.

Anyway, here’s my question regarding Kaspar, which is something that’s been bugging me ever since all those stories about the submarine “robots” BP used to fail to fix its oil spill. Kaspar is actually operated by a therapist with a remote control — does that really count as a “robot”?

I can see why it might, but that’s not how we thought of the word when we were kids. A remote-controlled car wasn’t something we thought of as a “robot car.” It was just a plain, old remote-controlled car. A robot car was something like Kitt on Night Rider.

Is the distinction I’m reaching for there valid? Or should I just concede the robothood of remotely controlled devices such as Kaspar and BP’s Keystone Kops submarine corps?

* * * * * * * * *

On the subject of newspaper style, but having nothing to do with robots, you may have noticed that some papers treat headlines as titles, Capitalizing Each of the Main Words, while others, including the one I work for, capitalize the first word and only proper nouns after that. I can see the merits of both approaches, but the latter does sometimes help to clear up ambiguity.

The Yorkville Patch headline “Author Encourages Cross Evangelical Lutheran Students to Write,” for example, would have appeared in our paper as “Author encourages Cross Evangelical Lutheran students to write,” thus clarifying that “Cross” is part of the name of the school — a proper noun and not an adjective.

Which is good, because I think cross evangelicals should be encouraged to settle down a bit before trying to write.

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