Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ullman Ellen

Author:Ullman, Ellen [Ullman, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Is Sadie the Cat a Trick?

2003

Photograph by Elliot Ross

When I returned from Boston, after talking with Rodney Brooks, I bought a robotic cat. It wasn’t very advanced, just a cheap, vaguely cat-looking thing from Toys “R” Us. It was made of metallic plastic, nothing furry and fuzzy about it, nothing like a robotic toy Brooks would have made. I intended to have it around as joke fodder.

The “robot” was laughably unlike a cat to anyone who knows the real thing. It comes racing toward you when you call it, for instance, preposterous in a living cat. But one of its behaviors “worked.” I left it on while I read, and after a time it began to make a pitiful noise. It seemed to “suffer” if I ignored it for some preprogrammed interval. Soon I found myself getting up to “pet” it—stroking an area on the plastic head that converts the whimpers into a soothing sound, not a purr but producing a similar effect. A cute trick, I thought, to get me to want to give it attention and “affection.”

Sadie, my real cat, found the robot curious at first. She noticed its motion and sounds. Being nearsighted, like all cats, she went up close and sniffed it. Not finding any animal scent, she walked away and ignored it.

Then, about an hour later, Sadie came up to me, doing the things she always does when she wants attention: a slight scratching of my hand at half-claw, an intent look, a waving around of her tail, and, most of all, a rigidity in her entire body that always tells me without a doubt that she wants—no, needs—the attention we call petting. I gave her what she asked for. She started purring.

No one knows exactly what a cat means by purring. We may want to think it indicates something akin to happiness. But the source of purring, the physical instrument behind it, seems to be growling. I have read conjectures that purring/growling evolved in companion cats as a means to get humans to sit still and give them bodily warmth—a means to condition us, train us. In any case, whatever Sadie’s “intent,” it worked. She purred. I relaxed. I let her stay in my lap.

But then, as I sat enjoying the moment, my thoughts were invaded by Rodney Brooks. I remembered his saying that everything inside us is merely a set of “evolutionarily determined responses.” And that the goal of those responses is to make us believe there is something essential in another being: we are built to fool one another. “I think you’re a bunch of tricks,” he’d said, “and I’m just a bunch of tricks.”

I looked down at Sadie. Suddenly I could not help wondering if all this asking for and getting attention, this purring, wasn’t just like the hardwired program in the plastic robot. Sadie at that time was nineteen years old, a wily and mature creature who would look me dead in the eye, and with whom I had a complicated relationship.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.