the future is delayed
Suzan Calvin does not exist. However, she was at the Toulouse Robotics Conference in the fall of 2024.
She never existed, but the robot psychologist has left her mark on AI as deeply as Freud did on psychoanalysis. The character Suzan Calvin popularized the “Three Laws of Robotics” and it is quite logical that she is present on the 2024 poster of the Toulouse Robotics Conference.
Prof. Calvin has a very valid excuse: the future of the 2020s is no longer what it was in 1970.
Father of the Three Laws of Robotics, Isaac Asimov tells how Susan Calvin tests and repairs “positronic brains”. More useful than frightening, quite similar to human brains, these A.I. equip the robust and complex worker robots that the international law of the 2000s authorizes exclusively on the Moon and colonized planets.
The 2000s are moving away from us, and I notice that the list of what has not happened is growing:
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The Moon and Mars are still uninhabited. The climate up there seems to have become less attractive than in the 20th century. Except for some.
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Cars are just starting to drive themselves.
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ChatGPT and other chatterboxes have some command of language and say as much nonsense as humans - but not the same.
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Good old oil is burned on the road and in the air by citizens who do not travel at the speed of sound.
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An international law on anything remains unthinkable.
Rereading myself: the delay of the future has its good sides:
- The third world war has not yet begun (“The Road” by Cormak MC. Carty).
- For the moment, no fatal virus has destroyed humanity (“Tomorrow the Dogs” by Clifford D. Simak)
- Current climate change is for the moment quite slow (“The Day After Tomorrow” film by Roland Emerich)
About the future of yesterday The RetroFutur exhibition at the EVOLUON museum in Eindhoven (NL)