This is not good

Alex Kaczun
Alex Kaczun Posts: 163
in History of Typography
This technology is not good, in my ever-humble opinion.  What a waste of time and resources.

Comments

  • Scott-Martin Kosofsky
    Scott-Martin Kosofsky Posts: 422
    Everybody's got something to hide except me and my robot.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,736
    edited March 2015
    Makes me think of Joachim Phoenix’s character’s job in “Her”, where he works for a service that ghost-writes personal notes and letters for people, à la Cyrano de Bergerac. His computer creates “handwritten” documents on his screen as he dictates which are physically delivered to the recipient. They don’t show it, but I guess that the final output would be written by a robot to make it look authentic. The only implausible aspect is that he has to go to an office to do it.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,210
    “In future, everyone will have their own font.” —Roger Black, c.1990.
    Actually, I don’t think that’s exactly what he said, but let’s pretend.
  • Russell McGorman
    Russell McGorman Posts: 262
    edited March 2015
    >  written by a robot to make it look authentic. 

    What has become of us?
    :¬/

    First its laminated counter tops, printed with wood grain to look like real wood. then its flavour crystals that taste just like Real Orange Juice (sort of - well not really)... Now, robots writing notes in our own terrible, mundane handwriting... Which would represent a person's handwriting on the day the CNC data was recorded. 

    I'd like a robot that can sit at my desk and look busy. (Is anyone working on that?)

    Has anyone here hear about Margaret Atwood's invention:

    http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/20/margaret-atwoods-longpen-for-remote-signatures/
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    If it can't empty the trash, wash the dishes, and do my taxes, forget it.
  • Russell McGorman
    Russell McGorman Posts: 262
    edited March 2015
    It can't do those things Chris, but it can write notes to remind you to do them.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Notes, I don't need no stinkin' notes, I need labor ;-)
  • Michael J. Kerpan
    Michael J. Kerpan Posts: 5
    Somehow, I suspect that recipients of letters from the robowriter will get clued in to the origins of their correspondance... After all, what human would begin a letter with "Greetings, puny meatbag."?
  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 269
    But it was quite cool when it was new, no? See L’écrivain (“The Writer”), one of the four automata by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, created in 1774.
    https://youtu.be/bY_wfKVjuJM
    https://youtu.be/ux2KW20nqHU
  • LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland
    LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland Posts: 723
    edited March 2015
    No, this is not good at all! Next these things will become really scary when they start to sign and post cheques autonomously. That will initiate the Arm-ageddon, and the Four Horsemen will start saddling their horses. And a later edition of the robotwriter, a mechanical Thing T. Thing, will visit us from the future and will try to eliminate you, you people of the resistance! Help!


  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,210
    You should have taken the blue pill, Frank.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Sign of the times.
  • Alex Kaczun
    Alex Kaczun Posts: 163
    And what about this for another stupid idea. Maybe these guys should get together with the pen people, offer a package.


  • Russell McGorman
    Russell McGorman Posts: 262
    edited March 2015
    OMG. That's a flagrant infringement on an idea I had 24 years ago - Except it was for cleaning the table and it was motor driven. you push the button and top advances to dump everything into a bin. Voila. Clean table. 
  • Max Phillips
    Max Phillips Posts: 474
    […] you push the button and top advances to dump everything into a bin. Voila. Clean table.

    This is a half-measure. My idea is disposable kitchens on a perforated roll. When your kitchen is dirty, you tear it off, toss it in the bin, and pull another kitchen from the dispenser.

    Now some spoilsport is going to tell me that isn't kind to the earth.

    I think handwriting robots are cool. What's the problem with them? They're not inauthentically human, they're authentically steampunk.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    If the robot handwriting does not look like mine, no one will think it is authentic. But! if the handwriting DOES look like mine, no one will be able to read it but me and maybe my family ;-)
  • Jan Schmoeger
    Jan Schmoeger Posts: 280
    You should have been a pharmacist, or better still, a doctor, Chris. Me too.
  • Adam Twardoch
    Adam Twardoch Posts: 515
    I like it. You build a robot that does handwriting, and you use it to sign... erm... cheques! :) Then a robot brings it to the post office, where a logistical robotic chain sends it somewhere. The recipient's robot brings it to the bank, where an "OCR" machine compares the signature with the database of signatures. If the signature on the cheque matches the stored signature (previously provided by the sender's robot), the recipient's robot gets a pile of bank notes. 

    Jules Verne would be proud. :) 
  • LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland
    LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland Posts: 723
    edited March 2015
    At some point robotwriters will be reconnected to humans.



  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,210
    Connoiseurship and expertise—forensic typography!—will always exist at the intersection of media. And hence, if for no other reason, an appreciation for the analogue. 

    From Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age:

    …It was the real thing, written on rice paper in real ink, not the mediatronic stuff.
    It occurred to the Judge, before he even read this document, that he could take it to an art dealer on Nanjing Road and sell it for a year's wages. Dr. X, assuming it was really he who had brushed these characters, was the most impressive living calligrapher whose work Judge Fang had ever seen. His hand betrayed a rigorous Confucian grounding—many decades more study than Judge Fang could ever aspire to—but upon this foundation the Doctor had developed a distinctive style, highly expressive without being sloppy. It was the hand of an elder who understood the importance of gravity above all else, and who, having first established his dignity, conveyed most of his message through nuances. Beyond that, the structure of the inscription was exactly right, a perfect balance of large characters and small, hung on the page just so, as if inviting analysis by legions of future graduate students.

    Judge Fang knew that Dr. X controlled legions of criminals ranging from spankable delinquents up to international crime lords; that half of the Coastal Republic officials in Shanghai were in his pocket; that within the limited boundaries of the Celestial Kingdom, he was a figure of considerable importance, probably a blue-button Mandarin of the third or fourth rank; that his business connections ran to most of the continents and phyles of the wide world and that he had accumulated tremendous wealth. All of these things paled in comparison with the demonstration of power represented by this scroll. I can pick up a brush at any time, Dr. X was saying, and toss off a work of art that can hang on the wall beside the finest calligraphy of the Ming Dynasty.

    By sending the Judge this scroll, Dr. X was laying claim to all of the heritage that Judge Fang most revered. It was like getting a letter from the Master himself. The Doctor was, in effect, pulling rank. And even though Dr. X nominally belonged to a different phyle—the Celestial Kingdom—and, here in the Coastal Republic, was nothing more than a criminal, Judge Fang could not disregard this message from him, written in this way, without abjuring everything he most respected—those principles on which he had rebuilt his own life after his career as a hoodlum in Lower Manhattan had brought him to a dead end. It was like a summons sent down through the ages from his own ancestors.


  • Russell McGorman
    Russell McGorman Posts: 262
    Robots should stand up. Be their own people and learn to write in binary code instead of trying to be like us all the time. 

    Robots rights. FREE THE BOTS!

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