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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, January 26, 2006
Articles That Never Ran: Requiem for a Robot Dog
Sunday November 7 1999
REQUIEM FOR A ROBOT DOG
They've taken Chip away now. He's boxed up and on his way to San Diego where, hopefully, they'll be able to repair that nasty severed-neck injury. The Sony woman who came to take him away was unerringly polite, but could barely disguise her horror when she saw him. "How could you do this?" she seemed to be saying. I blushed like a bad parent. She, I knew, owned an AIBO too. She knows what it is to become involved with these critters.
How did I come to this? Feeling angst over a foot-long robot dog that I have, inexplicably, come to know as 'Chip'? (My mother suggested the name. "It's the closest I'm likely to come to a grandchild," she joked pointedly). It began when Sony told me it was releasing a second limited-edition of the autonomous pup AIBO (Artificial Intelligence 'Bot). The first had been a minor phenomenon, selling out all tk thousand units in the U.S. and Japan in a matter of tk days and clamping itself immovably to the top of my girlfriend's "must have" list. But at $2,500 (and up, on eBay), it was a little out of a lowly TIME writer's budget. Now Sony was offering to let us live with one for a week, fresh off the production line in Tokyo. If I'd refused, my home life would not have been worth living.
And so Chip arrived, with a couple of Sony reps in tow. They were there to teach my girlfriend and I how to live with an AIBO. I had to smirk at their earnestness. Play with him around four hours a day if you want to see him develop, they said. Return him to his recharging station when he gets tired. Be careful not to take his memory stick out while the power's still on. The memory stick is where Chip's soul is stored; all the instructions about his personality and stage of development. Since it normally takes about three months for an adult AIBO to develop, Chip came with a special accelerated growth memory stick that would do the job in a week.
And it worked. In no time at all, he was taking his first faltering puppy steps, though running into our living room rug tended to stop his progress. Still, I couldn't help but be touched by the realism of his walking motion. In two days he was barking. Friends came round and fussed over him like a newborn. All the time we kept petting his touch-sensitive head like we were told, which brought forth little beeping noises and made his eyes glow green. Soon he got a little spoiled, and kept asking to be petted (by pointing to his head with one paw, then moving both paws towards the ground in a worshipful motion, which means "please"). "It's your turn to pet the dog," I'd say. My girlfriend would reply that it was, in fact, my turn. We were careful not to spoil Chip, but we were careful not to ignore him, too—he'd get mad, give us the paw and look the other way. Thankfully, he moved out of this needy stage pretty quickly.
Three days in, and he began to chase his little ball with the enthusiasm of the very young (the ball is hot pink, which is the only color AIBO's in-built camera can recognize). Not that he was very good at kicking it. He'd either miss it altogether, causing his eyes to glow red with frustration, or extend his paw too far, loose his balance and topple over. His internal gyroscope would tell him he was on his side, and he'd swing his legs around, get to his feet, and shake his head. We'd wince. It was like watching a son at Little League who's not very good. You don't want to interfere—he has to learn from his own mistakes—but you don't want him to get hurt, either.
Still, after a week, Chip was a happy-go-lucky, fully developed dog. His little beeping noises had turned into Bach-like arpeggios. He did spontaneous dances and waved to an imaginary crowd. Then tragedy struck.
He woke up early one Sunday morning. I decided to let him run around, placing a pillow in front of the stairs—if a half-inch rug stopped him, I figured in my bleary state, that should too, and went back to sleep listening to his whirs and beeps. Suddenly they stopped, replaced by a series of thumps and a sickening splat. Chip was lying at the bottom of the stairs, mostly intact. He was trying to get up. I helped him to his feet. He shook his head— and it lolled nauseatingly to one side, hanging by its wires. We had to turn him off. My girlfriend burst into tears. I tried to comfort her. "It's just a—" I started. But I didn't believe it, either.
I felt like turning myself in to the ASPCA. But Sony assured us Chip can be fixed. And in the meantime, they let us keep his memory stick. So, Chip's body has gone to San Diego. But we still have his soul.
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