Hot digital dog: A man’s best friend is still his... K-9 No robot in TV history has enjoyed such renown as K-9, the loyal robotic mutt who was the Fourth Doctor’s companion for a chunk of the late 1970s and early 1980s. K-9 provided nit-picky comments and generally useless bits of information while serving as a foil for a rather ebullient doctor on their travels. It was so popular …
In [The Sarah Jane Adventures], K-9 - once retrieved from the black hole of being separately licensed for his own cartoon show - has some interesting mutually disrespectful conversations with "Mr. Smith", the super-computer brain, scanner, and analyser installed in the attic, and voiced by Alexander Armstrong.
"Mr. Smith" is normally concealed, but opens out with a musical fanfare and, probably, a couple of brawny stage hands behind the scenes pulling big levers. Viewers are left uncertain whether the fanfare is audible to characters in the show or is just background music. In fact, it is audible to characters in the show.
Oh, and "Mr. Smith" turned out to be evil at the end of season one, but was reprogrammed.
Share and Enjoy
Share and Enjoy
Journey through life
With a plastic boy
Or Girl by your side
Let your pal be your guide
And when it breaks down
Or starts to annoy
Or grinds when it moves
And gives you no joy
Cos it's eaten your hat
Or had sex with your cat
Bled oil on your floor
Or ripped off your door
You get to the point
You can't stand any more
Bring it to us, we won't give a fig
We'll tell you, 'Go stick your head in a pig'.
Was partly due to the limitation of the control gear. It interfered with studio cameras - or was that the other way round? Anyway bit of a sod to use in practice. Also heavy, needing two K9s - the fully kitted one to wag his tail, and pootle around the console, and an empty shell when an actor had to carry him. The team could at least have put a blank panel in the base and a bit of ballast to give some heft. Iin Warriors' Gate K9 is ejected from the slaver ship by Kenneth Cope; apart from getting a good look up K9's skirts (so to speak) Cope is so unchallenged by the weight of the dummy that it looks for a moment as if a strong breeze would blow K9 back at him.
Though whether the choice of stories helped or not around that time - Power of Kroll set in reedbeds! - he was still distinctive enough to become an icon. Not as big an icon as the Daleks but if you want to build one of your own you won't have to give over as much of your lounge.
A.I. with robots will happen, sooner rather than later. Having a sentiant and inteligent machine is the ultimate User Interface. As a kid i never understood why C3PO would have been proggramed to have a personality, but now i realise its to make telling it what to do easier. Instead of having to click an icon, and programmme a set of actions, you could simply tell it what you want.
I dont think however that we have anthing to worry about machines rising up, its simply a great plot device. As the robotic A.I.s creators we can ensure they enjoy what ever job they have,and would never consider anything else.
A.I. with robots will happen, sooner rather than later.
Oh really? Care to cite any of the relevant research showing we're appreciably nearer this goal than we were in, say, 1980? The last I looked (a few months back), we were still only scraping the surface of many quite basic problems in, comprehending language, such as reliably determining conversational entailment - and that's only one of many areas we need to handle for "AI with robots", and it's despite the vast amount of extremely clever work that's been done.1
"Strong" AI, even in very specialized domains, has made little or no headway in decades. "Weak" AI is doing a little better, but largely due to the general increase in computing power which has made additional approaches tractable (eg with IBM's Watson). And AI for robots is orders of magnitude worse than special-domain strong AI, because the robot 1) has to deal with hugely complex real-world inputs, and 2) has physical effectivity, which makes it dangerous.
Having a sentiant [sic] and inteligent [sic] machine is the ultimate User Interface
Good god. Why is this so difficult a concept? There is no "ultimate user interface". Users are not homogeneous, and neither are applications. No type of user interface is perfect for all users or for all applications.
Sentience wouldn't do a damn thing to make my computer use easier, for at least 90% of what I do with computers - and with the remaining 10% it'd be an annoyance.
As the robotic A.I.s creators we can ensure they enjoy what ever job they have,and would never consider anything else.
And machines working as instructed has never led to problems?
1It's only relatively recently that we've seen a number of major general algorithmic approaches, such as SVMs and MEMMs, applied in this area, not to mention algorithms more specific to NLP such as LSA. But we're still very much at the low end of the curve for a comprehensive mechanical understanding of language. That's partly because we don't understand a great many things about language in the first place - from low-level stuff like aspects of prosody (e.g. what "stress" really is) to high-level ones like how rhetorical devices really play in informal logic. Or about the neuropsychology of language. Hell, we don't even have a particularly good philosophical model of it - even within a philosophical school or movement (the New Pragmatists, say) there can be huge disagreements.
And there's also the B9 model robot (no name, other than Robot) on 'Lost In Space'. (Most famous line, repeated on many, many, MANY episodes: "Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" 'cause Will was a useless berk who was always doing something likely to get his clueless ass killed.) The Robot could sing, cry, sneeze, produce umpty-ump volt electric discharges. The Robot and Dr Smith were the reasons I watched the show. (At the time I was too young to appreciate Judy...)
Twiki on 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' also deserves a mention. Though to me the primary attractions of that show were Erin Gray and Pamela Hensley. And, on some episodes, Jamie Lee Curtis.
Kitt was just a car with a funny light. K9 didn't even have the light.
K9 isn't even the best (depending on your definitions...) robot dog on TV. The original Battlestar Galactica had a thoroughly annoying robot daggit named Muffin, which was, thankfully, eradicated with extreme prejudice from the reboot.
I believed K9 could fire a laser and communicate with other computers, I never believed KITT could jump over lines of cars.
Twiki, I wanted to punch in the face (plate).
Mind you I also thought AirWolf would benefit from meeting the pointy end of a surface-to-air missile battery - so perhaps it was just some elements in US shows grated on my young-teen pysche.
Twiki season 1 would give K-9 a run for the money on the good buddy front. For season 2 I have no idea what they were thinking in redoing the voice. So I'd have to give it to K-9 on the reliability front as he lasted more seasons. OK, for the most part I'd like to do away with Buck Rogers season 2 in its entirety.
Robbie was just annoying. Even with his berkness, I much preferred Will.
While there "may" have been more people watching Knight Rider when it was being broadcast, I'd challenge anyone to suggest it has had the legacy that K9 has. If you say K9 people know who/what you mean - try asking anyone about Kitt - I think therein lies the question of renown.
Although I am fond of KITT from the original show and not the gawd awful reboot, he in no way can be classified as a robot
Why not? KITT could operate itself - drive around and such - and it was a mechanical partner, which is vaguely close to Capek's original usage.
No one in this thread has mentioned Box from Logan's Run, and he was overwhelming. Though, in the end, overwhelmed.
Two comments:
a) K-9 was several times more annoying than Tegan, and should have met with a 16 ton weight shortly after wheeling on stage.
2) Wot, no Japanese "moon man" robot? I was pretty impressed with that one, and hoping the designers would add a punch response to the "try and push it over" test.
All of these pathetic attempts.
Not a single one of them could stand up halfway in quality with my dear, departed Dutch Shepherd.
Strong, best nose I ever saw in a dog and so smart he did my taxes.
When I was audited, he stood beside me and convinced the auditor that my deductions were quite fine, thank you. ;)
OK, maybe not the taxes, but he was the smartest dog I've ever met. Learned new tasks in under five minutes.
Try doing *that* with a robot!
Mobile bugs, that people invite into their own homes? With cameras?
A simple custom firmware update is all it'd take, and if you can talk the manufacturer into signing it that's trivial to pull off. Even better than hacking a PC to get to the webcam - this one can be guided around to learn the layout or follow someone, pick up and open books, and make sure any weapons are hidden before the soldiers are sent in.
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