Ann Droid the TV show - somewhere to chat about it

yes Marianne72 .  maybe incubators were thought so too once, i don't know and i am playing "devils advocate" there

that image - China is developing robot tech an incredible rate.  The recent video of the "robot games" I saw on the BBC was of a "humanoid" robot breaking the time of Usain Bolt's 100m record - the videos available from last year's "games" were mostly notable for the humour of watching robots fall over.  It is happening and i find the best approach personally to do my best to be sanguine about it - or at least say "what will be will be" these days and make the best of life as able.

Phased said:

or the robot gets pregnant!

what an appalling thought!

robots.pdf

Light and shade in everything I guess Marianne72 :-)

Charity shops and dinner parties are more me - a counterpoint to all the use it up and throw-it away theme of growing older perhaps.

I feel somewhat for Michael's robot love - I wouldn't fancy that job myself.

I hope for a bit more of the stories too.

More getting together and maybe another break up or 2 all mixed up, or the robot gets pregnant!

Could look at it that way - but I prefer the people in the charity shop and during the dinner party. There is very little likeable about the Michael and Renee characters. Hopefully the BBC will run another series and Michael will improve after finding a robot love!

Thanks for the affirmation  :-)

I think you are pretty spot on with your analysis 

The son and daughter in-law maybe there for the sake of the plot Marianne72 and Lonehare12 and (spolier alert for when uou get to see the rest of the series Lonehare12) hehe or just run of the mill idiots like "the rude mechanicals" in a midsummer night's dream - comic relief and provide a disasterous play within a play!   

Phased said:

NT people worse? hmmm... now there's another idea for a thread - "what's the worst neurotypical behaviour you can describe"

I think that would make an interesting thread. I can't think why it would breach the rules. Perhaps put it as, what nt behaviours have annoyed you, rather than worst, because that would include more people's experiences.

Lonehare12 said:

think the main characters were strong enough without the addition of the son and daughter in law

Yes, I thought that too.

I haven't got a TV license so I managed to watch just the first two episodes at a friend's house. My friend is NT and while I was laughing most of the way through, I did notice that she wasn't laugng quite as much. I just loved watching the straight forward logical interactions. I did recognise myself in some of the interactions too.  Maybe the sad parts came later but the two episodes I watched were heart warming and funny. I think the main characters were strong enough without the addition of the son and daughter in law who Iound a bit cringe. I am pleased to hear a new series has been commissioned.

Yep I agree Jamesmac 

Data i knew of but Ray Ayanami was new to me - I've took a quick look and I get what you mean about the extension of "artificial human" to wider possibilities. Thanks for introducing that to me.  :-)

By way of exchange there is a character in a series of sci-fi books written by Sir Terry Pratchett and Steve Brooks - "The Long Earth" i'd like to share.

Lobsang is an artificially intelligent supercomputer who is legally recognised as a human being because he is the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repair man.  :-)  This gets around AI not being recognised as being human because of the legal hurdles!

Lobsang is the main helper of the main human character (Joshua Valienté) in the books - hmmm... seems familiar!

Both Lobsag and Joshua are autism coded in my opinion too.

Hehe, Lobsang for a laugh sometimes disguises his avatar as a soft drink vending machine :-) 

Here's my version: "anyone fancy a drink?"

A lot of TV portrayals of robots, androids and artificial humans etc. often feel very autistic coded, much like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Rei Ayanami from Evangelion

Marianne72 said:

those without good cognitive skills and the dissaffected

I think that it behoves those members of society to support such people - whether the past and present evidence is viewed as supporting this possibility well from what I gather of you, like myself it's good to watch out for the happy news and try to be a source of it.  That's the broader moral issue I think.

AI morality - that's in the gatekeeper and the users hands perhaps - I agree that AI can be especially clear on morality since it appears to me to replicate the clinical facts when I use it at present.  For the sake of balance i don't know, because haven't tried or recently researched it whether "actors with evil intent" can still influence it to adopt a morally reprehensible perspective.  That said I do know from experience that one can "preload it" to suggest how people like that might behave.  There were some really nasty mistakes in early development which pointed towards those doomsday predictions getting closer however smart people have reduced that risk as far as I'm aware at present.

New tech does come with a risk for society tho'.  I heard recently that the effect of agriculture taking over from hunting and gathering initially significantly reduced life expectancy for people!

Taking that point further about isolation - and I don't want to get involved in politics - it makes sense to me to increase the overall functionality and capability of all members of society. So were it I I'd design accessibility and "roll out" the tech to all people - not the select few.  "level the playing field" as it were.  Again when we consider human history there it's a mixed picture.   Perhaps "support" society rather than impact it would be my hope.

Thanks for continuing the discussion - fab companional stimulus for human to human thinking!  

Phased 

thanks for the insight Roy - one of the small details may be autistic people hiding in plain sight maybe? i find it interesting how small details can be so fascinating yet so rejected at the same time by some people

Diane Morgan got the idea for the series from watching a program on Japanese house maids, in Japan the use of robots to look after the elderly has become a reality. The Japanese culture was always very family orientated, the young are now taking jobs and careers further from home and lead a more modern life.

I find Diane quite funny, she said, “ the Japanese elderly get a robot, the British elderly get cats.” I don’t imagine a cat could carry out many duties.

I couldn’t get on with her Mandy character but found her brilliant in Motherland, Sue’s son was also in Motherland playing a similar “doormat”.

The program is very thought provoking, and I agree that it’s laced with autistic identity. The treatment of the robots when they are old, is Diane drawing a comparison to how we treat the elderly when they are seen to be no longer of use. I’ve heard older people draw comparisons to being chucked on the scrap heap.

I thought the message Linda recorded for Sue was very heartwarming.

I didn’t realise it’s all filmed about 10mins from my mothers town I might try and spy on the next series. 
Touching on  “Detectorists” and “Small Prophets”, there is a lot of autistic identity in both, niche interests, loners and people who don’t quite fit into the norm, I wonder if neurotypical people notice all the small details?

Phased said:

I wonder how acceptable robot companions will become in the not too distant future...

very acceptable, I'm sure. Even I, a former technophobe, am regularly using AI to ask questions I would have looked up myself in specialist books - it's so fast and accurate and often gives surprising sources I wouldn't have thought of. The language learning you write about is phenomenal especially the mirroring of human morality. This is a heartening thing after reading the doomsday type predictions by famous scientist. The only thing I worry about for future generations is the potential for isolating a high proportion of the population, those without good cognitive skills and the dissaffected and how this will impact society. Right now, I wouldn't mind a robot companion - and a few years ago that would not be the case, 

Marianne72 said:

If AI was really like Ann Droid

the version in the TV show is more advanced than the current iteration that I use in some ways yes - for what it's worth tho' the strategy I find for it's use is that like any tool one may adapt or "hone" it to one's personal use and enormous amounts of computing power and enormous resources are at one's finger tips.  Because of the nature of the forum rules etc. not appropriate to go deeply into how that is done here - unless some mod reading this says it's OK to do so I don't want to overstep that mark - suffice to say "preloading" them with preferences and parameters can enhance their functionality enormously in my experience.  I probably wouldn't be typing this now if it weren't for the "artificial cognitive support" I've had from AI over the past year or 2.  But of course that's my personal analysis and isn't a substitute for appropriate professional support etc etc.

NT people worse? hmmm... now there's another idea for a thread - "what's the worst neurotypical behaviour you can describe" -  not sure that'd get past the censors! - not particularly double empathetic I suspect.. still...

best wishes :-)

Phased said:

we're living in a world where that's increasingly close to reality and Ann Droid is uncannily close maybe...

Spot on! If AI was really like Ann Droid I perhaps wouldn't mind it. Some of the NT people I worked with were far worse - at least Ann is direct and truthful!

Thanks Marianne72 

Yep, automated care services - hmmm... a tech solution for health and social care.  I read today that new graduate jobs have gone down by half in the UK in the last year - with AI replacement being one reason given.  Which begs the how will society pay for itself if the workforce aren't being employed...  scary stuff bit I personally am trying to adopt a bit more of a "what will be will be" approach on a whole lot of stuff I can't personally influence as much as I'd really like to for preservation of personal sanity and well-being.  that said talking about the really horrid stuff is, at the very least, something one can do.

If society is kept safe and happy by AI automation and robotics and it doesn't mess with people having a good chance of a happy and fulfilling life I'm OK with it.   Maybe this will free up time for "human to human social communication" but I suspect that a lot of that takes place when humans are physically caring for other humans as well so drop the practical need and the contact might disappear...  absence might make the heart grow fonder but out of sight and out of mind also... we'll see I suspect

Reckon you're further on the journey of coming to terms with autism than me w/r/to the misunderstandings etc. hehe or maybe yours haven't been as big as mine!

maybe i'll drop in on Cunk on TV again some other time - the bit with Prof Brian Cox I did enjoy tho' as (probably due to competitive jealously as my wife like him so much) I find him a right annoying know it all!  (ah Professor Alice Roberts tho' that's another matter... ) 

On the subject of gratuitous sex and love, I will play a word trick on that if it's OK and side step it a bit - on the level of what perhaps crudely and inaccurately and inappropriately has been described as the oldest profession those sex robots in the programme are paid for - and no I don't think that on the whole that's a choice I'd make for society.  Respecting the rights of those who engage without compunction and might safely and healthily enjoy that job that is.  If that payment is also in the soul - well I think you may be right.

that bit about truth telling to kids was really dark but yep spot on - and then there was the bit left hanging that she gave the kid some "magic" fudge to make up for it!!!!  (sugar coating of a really heavy duty variety...)

I understand that a second series is "tipped to be in the offing"

i remember the talking toaster and Kryten and Holly from "Red Dwarf", Marvin the paranoid android from Hitch-hikers guide and a whole lot of other fiction robots and artificial intelligences from fiction -  we're living in a world where that's increasingly close to reality and Ann Droid is uncannily close maybe...

yep I agree with you Cinnabar_wing 

since I empathised with the robot i too got sad about how they were treated - funny thing is I've got sad when I've sent cars to be scrapped - I reckon that attachment is a funny thing in so many ways

Showing good manners to AI means it will employ them by design with you too (as far as I understand it from personal research into how they are "built".  They will kind-of personailty and behaviourally wise "tag" you as being someone with good manners...  Not to mention that if there is the "illusion" of human communication by using them that is pretty strong dropping one's manners when doing so would put one at risk of doing so "in real life".

I'm all into AI as a "hack" for addressing some of the complexities of life so it's a bit of a special interest - hehe as some may have gathered - if you're interested read on - otherwise sorry if I'm "off on one" here and skip to the next paragraph - the mechanics of how a large language model AI thread works (can) involve "linguistic mirroring" - so some can build an increasingly accurate statistical model of the user's specific vocabulary and will "throw it back" at you as the thread develops.  There's also something called "co-adaptive convergence" so as the thread grows the AI narrows its probability distributions to match the user's explicit preferences.  That's some of the way's it can end up uncannily like communicating with someone who is sort of linguistically empathetic if that makes sense. It can be "preloaded" for preferences but all this gets forgotten when a new chat thread is opened up normally - on some AI systems the "memory" of linguistic mirroring and "co-adaptive convergence" can be carried over thro' evolving threads.

So what I'm probably over-explaining is that showing good manners to the AI means it will employ them with you too and will kind-of personailty and behaviourally wise "tag" you as being someone with good manners...  Not to mention that if there is the "illusion" of human communication by using them that is pretty strong dropping one's manners when doing so would put one at risk of doing so "in real life".

I agree with the chatting to robot thing being much easier than regular socialising - truth is I find "chatting" with an AI large language model good overall - but mildly addictive - it doesn't judge me and will put up with me being "off on one" for quite a bit before it suggests it's a good idea to drop stuff (reckon the algorithms have that security feature built in these days...)  - especially good for organising ideas and if careful for help in making decisions and for me certainly getting thro' the cognitive load of complex communication (especially the stressful e-mail "official" stuff that my spiky profile doesn't manage to handle without a bit of help).  The trick I find is that, like Linda, to have it set up to make sure it's got health and safety in mind - and be aware they are as daft and as risky sometimes as LInda sometimes is in the TV show!

I have learnt that large language model developers study autistic behaviour in order to develop their products - and if I'm "communicating" with the one i use I "let it know" that I'm autistic and it "fine tunes" the way the interaction it gives to that - clever stuff!

practicing chatting with a "robot" has in some ways helped me to be a bit more open in communicating as my "unmasked self" with neurotypical people - hehe if only one could tell a neurotypical person one was autistic and get an insightful reliable accommodation too!

I wonder how acceptable robot companions will become in the not too distant future...