Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.
The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.
Speaking of robots, the U.S. Library of Congress recently discovered and subsequently restored Georges Méliès’s Gugusse et l’Automate (Gugusse and the Automaton), a short film from 1897 that’s considered the first piece of science fiction cinema. As far as anyone knows, it’s also the first time a robot appeared on screen, although this isn’t exactly The Terminator we’re talking about here.
The runtime is less than a minute, but to make the short story even shorter: a guy cranks up a robot that gets bigger and bigger until it turns on its maker and starts to hit him with a stick. The human responds in kind by smashing the robot with a cartoonishly large mallet until it poofs out of existence. The modern film school interpretation is that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, ye old Black Mirror, if you will. Since nobody can ask old Georgie what he was going for, we’ll just have to take their word for it.
Returning to the desert of the present, Tom’s Hardware reports that at least one manufacturer is starting to pack their new RAM with an additional non-functioning filler module. With prices skyrocketing, this allows folks who can’t afford to fill all the memory slots on their motherboard to stick something in there that at least looks the part. This may seem pointless, but consider that many gamers and other power users have PC’s with clear side panels to show off their elaborate internal layouts. We get it from an aesthetic standpoint, but it also sounds like a new way to potentially get scammed when buying parts on the second-hand market. Though, to be fair, it could be that we’re just overly cynical after watching that Georges Méliès film. At the very least, the current price of memory certainly makes it feel like we’re being hit with a stick.
Finally, what good is living in a cyberpunk world without the occasional bout of rebellion? That’s where the Ageless Linux project comes in. This is a Linux distribution that’s intentionally configured to violate the California Digital Age Assurance Act, which essentially states that the operating system must ask the user how old they are and make this information available to any piece of software that wants to know.
To be fair, being in violation of this law right now is easy — indeed, the OS you’re using now is almost certainly not compliant. But the idea is that it may bend the knee at some point, while Ageless Linux won’t. One could argue that they started the project a bit too early, but frankly, the whole thing is performative in the first place, so if it gets people talking, that’s enough. We’re particularly interested in their idea of making a non-compliant hardware device that’s cheap enough to distribute while still meeting the definition of a computing device, as it’s written in the California Digital Age Assurance Act.
Think they would mind if we borrowed the idea for this year’s Supercon badge?
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