This Could Be Important: My Life and Times With the Artificial Intelligentsia by Pamela McCorduck

Author:Pamela McCorduck [McCorduck, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780359901388
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2019-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

5.

One reason, though hardly the main one, the Japanese were keen to ramp up AI in the early 1980s was a stark demographic fact: the Japanese population was growing older rapidly, and this large cohort of elders must be cared for. Perhaps because of this, certainly because I thought our book was getting tech-heavy and needed some levity, I introduced the Geriatric Robot.

The great thing about the Geriatric Robot, I wrote, is that it doesn’t just clean you up, feed you, or wheel you out into the fresh air. The great thing is that it listens. Tell me again, it says, about how wonderful/awful your kids are. Tell me again, it says, about that great coup of ’73. It listens patiently and sincerely—again and again. It isn’t hanging around to inherit your money or because it can’t get any other job. You are its job. It doesn’t get distracted or bored. It doesn’t judge you. It’s an attentive caregiver who will be there long after your biological family has lost its serenity or your hired help is fed up. “We humans can’t help it,” I added. “It’s part of our charm” (Feigenbaum & McCorduck, 1983).

In the past few years, I’d often been invited to give talks to college students and needed to illustrate AI with something that would be vivid to people that age, and better, make them laugh. My dear friend, the novelist Hortense Calisher, who was in her seventies, thought the Geriatric Robot was hilarious and ought to find a wider audience. If Hortense, at her age, didn’t find it offensive, then I imagined other people wouldn’t either. In the book, I flagged it with all sorts of rhetorical signals that I was just kidding.

Ed took a look at it and said, maybe not. I insisted. The editor excised it. But that editor had tried to throttle every sign of life the manuscript showed, so I put it back. Fun or not, it seemed appropriate, given the Japanese plans to meet responsibilities of eldercare with AI.

The Geriatric Robot was a small part of the book—nothing compared to other, more significant challenges raised by the Japanese, which soon brought an invitation to Feigenbaum to testify before a Congressional hearing—but for the First Culture, it was proof positive that AI people, me included, occupied in the Great Chain of Being the level of insensible brutes.

That’s just above the plants.

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