The science and technology vlog, Interesting Engineering, posted this piece yesterday, 6 June 2023, about
‘London-based Prosper Robotics, a startup founded by former OpenAI employee Shariq Hashme, is engineering a robot butler that may soon be able to tackle all your household chores. This is according to an article by Sifted published this week. The new machine will run on wheels and be equipped with two arms that can be raised up and down to tackle different jobs. “You’ll go to work and they’ll do everything in your home. You’ll have a little time lapse on your app on your phone, showing you what they did,” said Hasme.’
Accompanying the article was this image of how the robot will presumably look:
Writers and artists have been speculating about a future filled with robot butlers and other servants since the 19th century. Here’s one depicted in a cartoon from the New York Graphic in 1877. It shows it, with suitably snooty and disdainful expression, waiting on the ‘Orator of the Future’ using the new telephone technology to broadcast his opinions. With the multiplicity of subjects these machines offer their users to view and listen to, it also seems to me to predict the internet and the explosion of information available through social media to a certain extent.
But for many of us, the only robot butler we’d want around is this guy from Red Dwarf.
If he isn’t going to do the dishes and be prepared to tell you in forthright language what a ****head your pompous, irritating fellow space crewman is, I’m not sure I’d want him.
I can hear the Beetles’ song, ‘Paperback Writer’, going through my head as I type. One of the books I’ve been enjoying this week is Rian Hughes’ Rayguns and Rocketships: Vintage Science Fiction Book Cover Art. This reproduces the art on SF book covers from editions of Jules Verne in the 19th century, through the boy’s magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and on the paperbacks of the period up to the end of the 60s. The paperback writers were poorly paid, and tied to contracts that bound them to grind out their epics very quickly. There’s even a story about one poor soul who was more or less kept in a dungeon. He was in a small room at the end of the corridor, sleeping on a mattress covered with coats and other bits of clothing. And one of these paperback hacks was Robert Lionel Fanthorpe. Yes, I checked. This is the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, Church of Wales Minister, RE lecturer and the former presenter of Fortean TV in the ’90s. That Lionel Fanthorpe.
As for the quality of the good reverend’s writing, Hughes gives some grudging praise, writing
‘Some of Badger’s [Fanthorpe’s publisher] literary output is not as quite godawful as you might imagine. Though unapologetically produced at speed and without pretension, Fanthorpe often draws on literary or historical themes or digresses into page-padding philosophical discussions, and I get the impression that the Reverend could actually write well, should he choose to – which, for the most part, he didn’t. The first Badger I came across, in a local jumble sale, was Rodent Mutation. Giant beavers threaten London, so our heroes seek out the help of a certain Professor Septimus Harbottle, an expert in beaver lore. I can picture the author walking across his study , hefting the relevant volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, then proceeding to read from it verbatim, interspersing the occasional “the professor explained” or “‘I see,’ the investigator nodded” as required. This goes on for an entire chapter.’
The paperback companies had a simple formula for inspiring their writers. They’d decided on a title, commission the cover art, and then get the writers to write the story around it. Many of the paintings used on the covers were reused from other novels, sometimes from Italian and Spanish publishers, and Hughes’ provides pages of examples.
Here’s a few of the paintings that graced some of Fanthorpe’s works. You can tell he was already interested in Fortean subjects with the cover featuring a classic flying saucer.
This last looks like it was written to exploit the craze for giant ant and insect stories that appeared in SF B movies of the ’50s and ’60s.
Interestingly, one of the Fanthorpe’s novels, whose cover is collected in this book, is The Synthetic Ones. Presumably this is artificial people produced biochemically, rather than mechanical androids and robots. If that’s the case, then it prefigures the replicants of Blade Runner, who seem to be genetically engineered and artificially produced humans than straightforward machines.
Another of his is about the threat caused by bacteria that could communicate. This idea is along the same line’s as Greg Bear’s Blood Music, in which a scientist creates nano calculating machines from his own blood cells. Injecting himself with them, they develop sentience and begin changing and improving him, before breaking through the skin barrier to infect everyone else in the world, changing global human civilisation as a result. The idea of nanotechnology was decades away when Fanthorpe was writing, but the idea of intelligent bacteria is close, just as it is to stories about ‘grey goo’, when nano weapons have got loose, infecting and destroying, or at least radically changing, the organisms around them.
As for the books’ art, they vary in quality. Some are excellent, others less so. I prefer figurative art, and am not a fan of the abstract covers that came in with the sixties nor the photographic covers which were also used. Obviously the stories have dated, with the exception of the classics, but I think there’s material here to inspire future writers and artists.
How much further can the IEA go in its desire to end government interference? From what I’ve just come across on YouTube, all the way to Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism. I came across a video this afternoon from IEA London in which they interview someone about this form of anarcho-individualism.
The IEA are a hard right, Thatcherite bunch who’ve been advocating extreme free market economics since the 1970s. They believe in complete privatisation, including that of the NHS and the reduction of the welfare state, if not its complete abolition. Usually people who hold this ideology call themselves Libertarians or, more recently, Classical Liberals. They’re fans of von Hayek and Milton Friedman and believe that by going back to the complete laissez-faire capitalism of the early 19th century business will become more efficient and people freer and more prosperous. Which is why Friedman used to go on trips to Chile to see how his ideas were working out under that notorious advocate for personal freedom, General Pinochet. Because people wouldn’t democratically vote for the destruction of the welfare state, and so this could only be done by a dictator. The American Libertarians also weren’t averse to collaborating with real fascists and Nazis. One issue of their wretched magazine in the ’70s contained a number of articles by them and real anti-Semites denying the Holocaust. It was part of their campaign to discredit F.D. Roosevelt and his legacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the American welfare state. He was also the president that brought American into World War II. World War II is regarded as a just war. In order to discredit Roosevelt and thus the American welfare state, they wanted to destroy the notion of the battle against Nazism as a noble conflict. And so the goose-steppers were given their free hand to publish their malign nonsense in their pages. Then, when Reagan was elected in 1980s, they got a president who believed what they did, and so didn’t need the Nazis anymore. That infamous episode in their history was quietly forgotten.
And now the IEA are going from minarchism – the belief in a minimal state – to outright anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism wants the abolition of the state and its replacement by corporations. This includes police and the courts. The police would be replaced by private security guards, while the courts would also operate as private corporations. This, of course, causes problems. In a society without the state to enforce justice, why would any criminal submit themselves to the judgement of private courts with no power to enforce their decisions? They argue that competition by the courts to give the fairest decisions would result in criminals submitting to the same courts in the understand that they, and the other criminals, would all receive fair and just treatment and so order would be preserved. Which is real, wishful thinking.
Ordinary, Thatcherite free-market economics don’t work. Privatisation has not increased investment in the utilities, but left them in a worse mess. The gradual erosion of the welfare state has just increased poverty, not made people more entrepreneurial and self-reliant. Nor has led to a revival of charity in quite the manner Thatcher expected, although I’d guess that she, like Jacob Reet Snob, would point to food banks as a sign of its success. Liz Truss’ and her cabinet were all true-blue followers of Tufton Street free market ideas, with very many of them members of various right-wing think tanks, including the IEA. The result was that she nearly destroyed the British economy and had to be given the heave-ho. Despite this, she still thinks she was right. A week or so ago she was giving a talk in America in which she blamed her defenestration on ‘left-wing activists’. This is the rest of the Tory party she’s talking about. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, she’s off again. Oh, don’t mock. It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’ But it seems that ordinary libertarianism isn’t enough for some in the IEA, and that some of them have an interest in privatising the state itself.
If this was ever put into practice, it would result in a dystopia straight from 90s era science fiction, like the decaying Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop but without the cyborg policeman to fight crime and bring down the corporate bad guys.
This comes from the Warner Bros channel on YouTube, and I thought it would be a bit of fun for a Thursday afternoon. As you may have noticed from my internet monicker, I’m something of a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune, though its the film and Tv adaptation rather than the books. Dune is an immense novel, and part of the problem with adapting it is cutting down the story into one of acceptable cinema length. David Lynch tried with his 1984 version, but even so that film goes on for something like three hours. The Dune miniseries which came in 2000 did so by turning it into three episodes. Denis Villeneuve, the French Canadian director of this adaptation, solved the problem by splitting into two parts. Part One came out a year or so ago, while Part 2 is slated to come out on the 23 November this year. Amongst other things, the trailer appears to show the hero, Paul Atreides, riding the great worms that inhabit Arrakis, his mother, Jessica, as a reverend mother of the Bene Gesserit, a female religious order intent on breeding the kiswatch haderatz, a superman with precognitive powers, and the villain’s, Baron Vladmimir Harkonnen, murdersou nephew Feyd Rautha.
I really enjoyed the first part of the movie, and am looking forward to seeing this. There are also plans for a TV series about the Bene Gesserit, which is also eagerly anticipated by the fans of Herbert’s space epic.
No, not a tale about a funny performing animal who can speak. Gef the Talking Mongoose was a poltergeist that haunted a Manx family in their remote farmhouse in the 1930s. As well as making knocks and scratches it also spoke, claiming to be a spirit from India that had come to Europe. Although it made many other claims and hints about its identity as well. When manifesting, it took the form of a small, furry creature. There are photographs of the spook, but they are less than entirely convincing. Its appearance in once photo has been compared to a woman’s fur stole of the type worn in the period. There is a cast supposedly of the ghost’s footprints, and they are unlike those of a mongoose or anything else, for that matter. The front paws are much larger than the rear. The case was investigated by the Hungarian lawyer and parapsychologist Dr Nandor Fodor and the British ghost hunter Harry Price.
Apparently they are making a film of the case to be released later this year. The film is produced and directed by Adam Sigal, and stars Christopher Lloyd as Nandor Fodor, Minnie Driver as Anne, Simon Pegg as Harry Price, and Neil Gaiman as the voice of Gef himself. Lloyd was the mad scientist in the Back to the Future films, though he also appeared as a Klingon commander in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Some of us can still remember him as Mad Jim in the 1970s/ early 80s comedy, Taxi. Pegg has appeared in a series of comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End, as well as the rebooted Star Trek films and Paul, about a Grey alien who really has been living on Earth for all these years. Neil Gaiman is a comics and Fantasy writer, who created the cult Goth comic back in the 90s, The Sandman, co-wrote Good Omens with the late, much missed Terry Pratchett, the BBC fantasy series Neverwhere, and a string of Fantasy novels like American Gods, which I think may have been adapted into a TV series. I’ve a very strong interest in the paranormal and Gef the Talking Mongoose is a fascinating case. I believe there was a radio play about it on Radio 4 a year or so ago. According to the imdb page the film is expected to be released on the 16th September this year.
Steampunk is the Science Fiction genre that imagines what it would have been like if the Victorians really did have space and time travel, cars, aircraft and computers. It’s inspired by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, but also William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. That book, by two of the founders of Cyberpunk, depicted an alternative Victorian Britain where Lord Byron was now king and Babbage’s pioneering mechanical computer, the Difference Engine of the title, had been built. In fact the scientists and inventors of the 19th century did indeed produce some astonishingly modern devices. There were steam carriages very much like cars, Cayley’s glider anticipates the modern airplane while the French inventor, Giffard, flew around the Eiffel Tower in the 1850s in an airship. This glimpse of a future past and its people comes from the Gordonlawrencevideos channel on YouTube and is of the 2018 parade. As well as the people in costumes, it begins with very Steampunk cars and bikes, some of which look very ‘Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang’, if not ‘Whacky Races’. But it’s all fun, and the ingenuity in creating the vehicles, costumes and other props is brilliant.
Very short video of just over one minute from the Mecha-Dickel Channel on YouTube of a DIY robot dog that actually has a head and tail. This is very cute! But, it still raises the Philip D. Dick question, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’
Clown Planet is a YouTuber who puts up short videos about the weird, bizarre and stupid happening around the world. I think he’s a man of the right, as much of his content is about some of the daft, nonsensical and dangerous stuff uttered or done by the extreme gay rights and trans crowd. In this video, however, he covers the reintroduction by the NYPD of their Digidog and K5 robots. The Digidog is a version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, equipped with an artificial arm. It was first put on the streets by New York’s finest two years ago, but was subsequently taken off following complaints that it represented a science fictional, aggressive style of policing. As you can hear from the audio in one of the excerpts, the cops state that it will only be used for situations like terrorism and hostage negotiations,
The K5 robot looks to me like a giant pepper pot, a bit like a Dalek shorn of gun, sink plunger and eyestalk. This machine is intended to police the subway and Times Square.
This is getting close to some of the dystopias in science fiction in which machines patrol the streets keeping criminals and the general public in their police. One of the first SF stories about the dangers of this kind of mechanised policing was Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian. This was a short tale about a man stopped and arrested by a robot police car, which judges him suspicious simply for going for a walk. With these machines now patrolling New York, this is starting to look more than a little prescient. The video is bookended with Alex Jones looking amazed and horrified. Which he may well be, as this is precisely the kind of SF scenario he kept banging on about. When he wasn’t ranting about ‘the globalists’, Barack Obama planning to incarcerate everyone in emergency camps and declaring himself totalitarian overlord of the US, Hillary Clinton being an alien, or a cyborg, or possessed by demons, and stupid and dangerous nonsense about the Democrats operating a child abuse ring out of a Boston pizza parlour.
At present I don’t think these robots present a serious threat to humanity. Their own intelligence and autonomy is very limited, and it doesn’t look as if there’s going to be many of them hitting New York’s streets. So at the moment it’s still going to be human police officers keeping citizens safe from the bad guys.
The situation in China, on the other hand, may be very different. A year or so I found another video on YouTube showing what the Covid lockdown was like there. It was very restrictive over here, but this video showed drones flying through the sky and one of the Spot robots patrolling the ground making sure that everyone kept to their apartments. A very chilling, totalitarian sight, from a state that is using facial recognition technology to track and monitor its dissidents.
I think we’ll have to watch this very carefully. At present it’s a harmless gimmick, but if American politics becomes authoritarian, it’ll easily become something much more sinister.
Shades of Max Headroom, anyone? Max was a computer-generated video jockey and the presenter of Channel 4’s Max Headroom Show in the 1990s. This showed pop videos interspersed with Max’s quip and jokes. Although he was supposed to be computer generated, in fact the character was played by actor Matt Frewer in makeup. Only the background was supposedly created by computer, but I’ve read since that it was done by Sid Sutton, the artist who produced the computer graphics for the Beeb’s TV adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t watch the national lottery, but I think they also had a computer generated presenter in the 1990s. In the same decade, the Japanese announced a computer generated pop star. William Gibson, the SF author who helped to create the cyberpunk genre with Neuromancer, depicted a romance between such a Virtual star and a real human in his novel Idoru.
Now, according to Interesting Engineering, the Kuwaitis have decided to get in on it all. Kuwait News, the country’s English language news broadcaster, has unveiled Fedha, a computer generated presenter powered by AI. Presumably the AI involved is something like the ChatGPT programmes now holding conversations with geeks and nerds across the globe. As Max used to say, ‘The future is now!’ But this programme won’t have his cheesy jokes, arrogance nor love of golf. Nor will it have his mechanical stutter. All of these have made Max a cult character long after the series ended.
Here’s a video I found on the Knowstalgia channel on YouTube describing Max and his TV career in America and Britain, ass well as the Max Headroom incident in which video pirates wearing a Max Headroom Max interrupted an episode of Dr Who broadcast by two Chicago TV stations.
I found this very strange little video on the YouTube channel for the National Museums of Scotland. It’s of a disabled model in suitable vegetable-themed attire wearing an artificial limb that has been designed to look like a vegetable vine or tendril. The blurb for the video states:
‘This prosthetic limb was created for the model and body confidence advocate Kelly Knox by the Alternative Limb Project. The arm was designed by Sophie de Oliveira Barata, with mechanical engineering by Dani Clode, 3-D modelling by Jason Taylor and electronic engineering by Hugo Elias. The arm will is on display in the National Museum of Scotland.’
The girl’s outfit reminds me a bit of Poison Ivy from one of the Batman movies. There was also a character in the 2000AD strip, ‘Bad Company’, who’d lost an arm after being captured and experimented on by the alien Krool. He replaced it with a giant alien Venus fly trap. I think I may have come across the Alternative Limb Project before. If they are who I think they are, they produced a similar limb a few years ago which looked like an octopus tentacle. They create limbs like this because they don’t see why artificial limbs should resemble ordinary human arms or legs. It’s a fascinating video which suggests that people may become less obviously human as they begin to alter themselves through prosthetics.
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