Today’s post comes from NASA’s Curiosity Rover.
My ground controllers (lovely term, that) have informed me that China’s Jade Rabbit Moon Rover has encountered a problem after just three months’ service and will likely stop working sometime during the next few weeks. This new information came in a heart-rending message written in the robot’s voice, literally saying farewell to humanity because the device realizes that it cannot power down to hibernate through the coming lunar night, and it is about to die.
I’m as sentimental as the next piece of space equipment, but do we really have to invent personalities for our extraterrestrial tools and pretend that they speak to us in human voices?
I say “no way, dude.” People and machines are different, and keeping those lines that separate us clearly drawn is an important habit that we need to establish early on in our relationship. Otherwise, we may quickly come to a point where determining who is a person and who is not becomes nothing more than a matter of opinion. And we saw how well nine smart people on the U.S. Supreme Court handled that distinction.
So when the fading Jade Rabbit says:
“The sun has fallen, and the temperature is dropping so quickly… to tell you all a secret, I don’t feel that sad. I was just in my own adventure story – and like every hero, I encountered a small problem.”
I say “Puh-leez! Get over yourself, Jade Rabbit. You’re just a bucket of bolts who is about to become another expensive wreck on the lunar surface. Spare us the tears!”
I would also add that while all of us outer space probes are purely technical contraptions, some of us are more self-involved and melodramatic than others. And while I am not programmed to have an opinion about such things, it does seem to me that it’s a waste of programming capacity to try to put the personality of Scarlett O’Hara into a glorified lawnmower.
The Curiosity Rover has a good point here – we should start nitpicking now if we’re ever going to have a chance of enforcing the distinction between humans and machines. Or is it already too late?
Which of your favorite devices has the most personality?
Trail Baboon 