What at first seems like an expensive webcam on wheels (eight wheels, four of them designed to climb stairs up and down really fast) is a mobile, wireless server you can log on to through an internet connection. This means you can find yourself inside the robot, go around the place where it is and see everything through its eyes. You can also speak though it and hear what the people talk back to you. I wonder how many iRobots will end up being called Malkovich.
Features: each iRobot has its own IP number. It refuses to stumble over an obstacle. It creates a map of your place and knows the way back to its charging station. It will ship next year for US$ 4995.
I for one know what role distance - and tools that somehow minimize it - can have in one's life. Some of the people (and places) I love the most are somewhere far, far away. Telephone and e-mail do help a lot, but actually being able to show up there, in whatever form, and move around and express myself in space, that's something else. And the other way around: imagine being all alone at home and having a far away friend embody him- or herself into your little robot, follow you into the kitchen as you prepare something. Just think of the possibilities.
Embed yourself
From 'Stars in my pocket like grains of sand', the book by Samuel Delany I am currently reading (recommended by Paul):
'That - ' Alsrod Thant put her small brown hands behind her, gazing up at the crystal column - 'is your grandmother, your seven-times great-grandmother, the source of your stream, Gylda Dyeth?'Other embedded relatives
I chuckled. 'It's what they used to call a simulated synapse casting. All the soft lights and multicoloured flashes inside supposedly reproduce her personality, in crystalline form.'
The glimmering pillar rose from its ornate metal pedestal to soar beside the wall decorations next to the blades of the door, till it disappeared into the equally ornate capital, one with the court's roof, where silver tracery pictured what one evelm artist had thought she had seen in our stars.
'Shall I tell you the story connected with it?'
Alsrod's hands came before her to clasp in mimed ecstasy beneath her brown chin.
I put my hand on her shoulder.'Mother Dyeth lived well into the fourth generation of her children. The casting was taken right at the old lady's demise. A decent length of time after her bodily passing, when it was turned on, so we've all been told, the capital speaker up there annouced: "Now, I'm a mechanical reproduction. Not the real thing at all. I know it. You know it. You were fools to get this thing made in the first place. Frankly, I'd turn it off if I were you and let me stay dead," which was so uncannily like Mother Dyeth in life, everyone was quite astounded at the synapse caster's skill.'
My mother the car, a TV series from the sixties.
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