Probably the strangest story of the week concerned a “hitchhiking” Canadian robot, which was traversing the US along similar lines to a recent European hitchhiking tour. While the hitchhiking lawn gnome tours are old news (and, surprisingly, none of the robot stories mentioned those), this was different in that the robot included a laptop computer and camera/microphone, which sent back regular message. In that regard it reminded me of the recent photos of Pluto, where we received current updates from a long, long trip.
Then the robot reached Philadelphia, where it was vandalized to the point of electronic death. There has been an international outcry about the vandalism; claims from the Philadelphia tech community that they can indeed reassemble Humpty Dumpty; and the expected ruminations about the hostility/toughness of Philadelphia. There’s just one thing missing:
Mom was right. Mom warned us not to hitchhike, and said bad people were out in the real world that could hurt us. Simply because the robot sailed through Europe and part of the US unscathed didn’t mean that danger didn’t lurk around the corner. It did, and in this case was in Philadelphia (though it could have been anywhere.) This was probably the single most valuable lesson of the robot’s journey, one that has strangely eluded commentary.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20150803_Traveling_Canadian_robot_destroyed_in_Philly.html
Enjoy yourself, but watch your circuit boards!
Best wishes for safe travels,
Jim Shulman
Recent Comments