Category Archives: Aging

Super Robots

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roombawhiskerI visited some friends for dinner last night and in the corner of their living room I spied a Roomba. I asked them if they still used it and they enthused how it was one of the best presents ever. They have had it for five years and they have used it everyday. It never complains, just gets on with cleaning their hard wood floors and carpets downstairs. This was viewed as a godsend for their family of 3 growing boys. They gave me a demo of their ‘RoboCop’ in action, and it simply went about its business, twirling around, picking up crumbs, fluff and other stuff, while all the time snitching its plastic whiskers to re-orient itself for when it gets stuck in a tight corner.

Having an autonomous gadget that cleans floors simply works. Over 12 million Roombas have been sold worldwide since they were introduced in 2002. China is now getting in on the act and shipping them by the boatload.

superrobotThere is much talk about the next generation of domestic robots. However, these are of an order of magnitude more ambitious than the Roomba in what they are being programmed to do and the hoped for improvements to life. They are now being coined super-robots (Sunday Observer, Nov 6th 2016). One of the latest offerings is Miro – designed to be like a cute cartoon dog with big eyes, big ears and a pert plastic tail. Funnily enough, it has no legs so can’t jump up or crouch or fetch like a real dog. Instead it sits on two base stumps. Its role is to be a companion dog that will nag its owner to do things. The envisioned end user is an old granny, who forgets to take her medicine and people’s names. Making a robot dog be your reminder seems perverse to me. Dogs are meant to be petted, cuddled and taken for walks – not to become your super ego.

The makers mean well – just like all the many other assistive technology developers do. They all seem to have a vision of what ageing is – an old person living on their own who could fall over at any moment and that new tech can sense when this has happened and alert an ambulance to come to the rescue. This breed of robots are quite different from the early dog robots, like Aibo (an expensive toy that was popular a few years back among computer science departments) – that could amuse its owners with tricks. They are being designed to be integrated in smart homes, with cameras, sensors and wearables all thrown into the mix. The dream of tech developers is to put all this gubbins together in someone’s home to show tech’s might. The system of sensors will be able to measure everything about an old person and what they do in their own home, including their heart rate, body temperature, when the taps were turned on and off, when the toilet was flushed, how much toilet paper was used at a sitting and so on. But who is interested in all of this and who is going to look at all of the masses of data that will quickly acumulate?

There will be special data analytic companies set up whose job it will be to monitor the millions of feeds of data, determining if one of the many alerts and notifications that will beep away on their screens actually need attention or is just a quirk of the quotidian of being at home. Most of the data will be extraneous and of no use to helping old people living on their own. It is no substitute for a friendly face popping round for a cup of tea and a chat.

What’s more the domestic robots are still a long way from being able to perform taken for granted chores like making a cup of tea, emptying out the dish washer or making a cheese and pickle sandwich. They might be able to make the perfect pancake but they can’t use a spatula to take it out of the frying pan and place it onto a plate – something we humans do without thinking. Simply put, “It’s an implicit knowledge humans have, but it’s extremely hard to make that explicit for a robot.” (Michael Beetz, head of RoboHow). While companion robots can be programmed to roll their eyes around or purr when stroked, they are a long way from looking their owner in the eye to say ‘come on, pet’, or sharing a good laugh with them cracking jokes about the innuendos being pronounced on TV.

The people who are being targeted at for the next generation of super-robots are the frail, the lonely and those with Alzheimers or other memory loss. The robots are going to cost an arm and a leg together with all the other tech and monitoring support needed. The Roombas, in contrast, were targeted at consumers, from busy working families to business people. They now cost the same as a smartphone or a dishwasher.

Why can’t the next generation of domestic robots, be designed to help everyone enjoy life more than be just nagging at old folk. Our parents and elders are a lot smarter than tech developers might like to think – as this wonderful video from Superflux called ‘Univited Guests’ depicts.

Uninvited Guests from Superflux on Vimeo.

Wising Up

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I have been thinking a lot recently about how we deal with getting older. A few of us just slip into it; many of us do our utmost to keep young, whilst others live in fear of what ageing holds. I remember vividly a poignant moment when my mother, then in her early eighties, looked me in the eye and said sternly ‘don’t grow old’. She didn’t say why but I understood.

Last week I visited Peter Jenks MFA show at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town where he questions the topic of ‘old’ age (defined as those in their 70s, 80s and 90s) by contrasting the realities of growing older with the entrenched attitudes to ageing in society. He chose to deal with this topic by making art that pits these two perspectives against each other. On the one hand, his work deals with the stigma and negative images of ageism, and on the other, the conditions and joys of growing older and wiser.

What stood out for me, as I looked at and heard him talk about the pieces he had assembled for his installation was his desire to learn a whole set of new technological skills (such as 3D laser printers, manufacturing technologies and CAD) at the age of 69. The resultant larger than life pieces that he was able to make through using them, coupled with him learning them late on in his life, emphasized the tensions between ageing and ageism in a dialectical comfortable-uncomfortable way. Very clever.

But there was something else that struck me, even more than his mastering the technological challenges and putting them to creative use. Not only did he craft the striking pieces, all by himself, by using the new skills and technologies, but also he demonstrated and taught the younger students on his course how to use them, showing them what possibilities they afforded to create quite different objects, artefacts and artworks. His joy at being able to share with others much younger than himself a new skill was truly inspirational.

The other night I went to a dinner party where everyone was 10-20 years older than me. They all appeared to be comfortable in their skin, regaling anecdotes, chuckling about political corruption, talking about their dreams, accomplishments and aspirations while all the time knocking back copious amounts of wine. One, a teacher, having returned/retired to Cape Town after working for many years in the UK, talked of her desire to help improve the educational system in South Africa. She, like many other retired folk – ranging from teachers, nurses, doctors, chefs to accountants – still have so much they want to do in life and give to society.

The question is how?

There is a website called The Amazings that offers “classes, courses and wisdom from elders with amazing life experience”. Paul will teach you wood turning, Laura corset making and Dot knitting using a loom. They are all over 50 (that is not old!), “a band of men and women fighting against the idea that older people should go quietly towards the dying of the light.” All great stuff.

But I want to do something a bit different. Part of what I plan to do this year, as part of my dream fellowship, is run workshops with older people who are active in their communities (such as the U3A – University of the Third Age) and have an interest in technology. My idea is to set up a series of whiz-domes, where older people come along for a day or two to learn and experiment with an easy-to-use technology toolkit for a particular theme, such as food, safety, learning or freindship. The hope is that this combination can galvanize them into thinking creatively and constructively, in ways they can share their knowledge, concerns and joys. The idea is to provide them with new opportunities and to see what they might conjure up. My prediction is that older people will engage with these kinds of toolkits in ways that are quite different from how kids or students would, by tapping into their wisdom. Possibly even more creative.

makeymakey

The toolkit I plan to use is MaKey MaKey, which turns everyday objects into touchpads. In a nutshell, it is a “simple Inventive Kit for anyone interested in art, engineering, and everything in between.” An example of what you can make with it is the banana piano – instead of using the computer keyboard buttons to play the piano, you hook up the MaKey MaKey to some bananas, and the bananas become the piano keys.

One of the blurbs on the home page says, “my four-year-old daughter has managed to connect the kit”. Just imagine what another eighty years of wisdom might do.

Mobile Panic

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“I love technology!” exclaimed a sprightly 74 year-old lady who was sitting next to me on a flight to Seattle. She had many a twinkle in her eye; sitting with a drink in one hand and reading from her Kindle in the other. From then on in we chatted merrily about her trip to the US and how ageing is in the body and not in the mind. She was fascinated with technological innovation and has been a Twitter, iPhone, Skype and Facebook user for years. As soon as there is a new app or device out she wants it. It would not have surprised me to see her in one of the long snakes at an Apple store last Friday when the new iPhone 5 was released. It made me think again how we really need to adjust our assumptions and prejudices about the ageing population and what ‘older people’ want.

But not all novel technological developments hit the spot – whatever age you are – especially if they are driven by system efficiency and tree-saving rhetoric rather than creature comfort or cognitive amplification. The latest app that is guilty of this is the mobile boarding pass.

Mobile boarding passes have been around for a couple of years now but I – like many others – have chosen to stick with the tried and tested ways of printing them out at home or at a check-in machine at the airport. The reason being is that I can think of too many things that can go wrong – not least the phone battery running out of juice. I get very anxious flying and so try to avoid unnecessary risks that might increase my fear.

Last week when I was flying back with United from Portland to Seattle I was sent an email with a URL to my mobile boarding pass. Not having access to a printer on the return trip I decided to try it out. The email message was inviting:

“Select a link below to display your mobile boarding document on the screen of your mobile device. Scroll down to the barcode, and then scan the barcode at security checkpoints and at the gate to board your flight(s). Printed versions of mobile boarding documents will not be accepted.

Mobile boarding document links:
Mobile boarding document for flight UA5423 from Portland, OR – Portland, OR (PDX) to Seattle, WA – Seattle/Tacoma (SEA)

For YVONNEDR ROGERS
https://mobile.united.com/CheckIn/MobileCheckInShortCut?txtInput=FKJFC9&eBP=1&origin=GHFYfXVuK3Ml6vF6iLV1abpOD4padh0J”

I clicked on the link in the hotel before we left and it took me straight to the boarding pass. It was really easy and I did not think about it again until we got to security. Then suddenly, I remembered I did not have a print out pass and started fumbling with my iPhone to bring up the mobile pass. The wi-fi took ages coming up and I started fretting. When it did show up I then needed to scroll through the long regulations page to confirm I was happy with the terms and conditions. The page is not designed for mobile phones and requires stretching it to make the tiny accept button big enough for a fat finger to press. More fiddling and fretting. Eventually, I was able to get to my mobile boarding pass and placed my iPhone on the security reader. Trouble was as I moved my iPhone from its portrait view when held in my hand to the scanner the phone’s accelerometer decided I wanted to look at the page in landscape mode and in doing so obscured half the QR code. Not very clever, I thought. The machine barked at me and stayed red. More fiddling to switch it back to portrait view.

When I finally got through (the passengers behind me had started sighing) I was mightily relieved and so went to have some lunch. I put my phone away not thinking. But then at the security check at the gate the same thing happened again. Only this time I could not get the wi-fi to work. I really started to panic. What if they would not let me on the plane as I had no proof. If only I had that paper print out… I waited and waited for the pie-chart icon to appear at the top of my phone, cursing. Finally, it appeared; but then I had to go through the same rigmarole of accepting the terms and conditions of the airport free wi-fi. Then the portrait went to landscape mode and the QR code was not readable. More sighing behind me. More fuming inside me.

Once through, I kept my phone awake by shaking it so that when I finally stepped onto the plane the web page with my boarding pass on it would still be showing. How stupid is that! But one resorts to desperate measures under duress. Once sat in my seat it then came to me in a flash. Why not simply use screen capture? And store it as a photo. At that point I really felt stupid.

At Heathrow T5 on the way out I noticed for the first time a Car Finder kiosk next to the car park payment machine. What a great idea I thought remembering the times I’ve forgotten where exactly I had parked my car. Turns out Siemens made the system and is very proud of its efforts. I asked my driver to put his parking ticket in to see where his car was parked. He obliged. We were both marveling at how the system knows which parking spot you are in when the machine asked for him to type in his car number plate. He balked at giving away this information. I probably would not remember mine especially with jetlag.

The system can work out which floor and roughly which section you are in – but not the actual parking place – based on the cameras it has throughout the car park by scanning your number plates. Not that clever yet if it can’t read the number plate that is printed on your parking ticket when entering the car park. Far smarter is the workaround my Intel colleague uses when he can’t find his car at the very large car park at his place of work – pressing his car alarm button on his car keys.

It got me thinking – what happens when you lose your parking ticket? Technology not designed to help there. Instead, they slap a hefty fine on you.

Top image copied from Alistair Donnell’s blog

Indaba Reality

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Design Indaba is a big exhibition held every year in Cape Town showing the best of South African design. This year, over 300 designers, from architects to coke tin sculptors, gathered for the weekend to show off their homemade wares, exhibiting an amazing diversity of skills. Jewellery, fashion, ceramics, furniture, décor, craft, candles, toys, lamps, knick-knacks and much more; everywhere you looked was an abundance of vintage and modern, sustainable and forward- thinking design. Now in its 9th year, the organizers claim in their brochure “that creativity can create livelihoods, transform communities and contribute to the country’s economy.” Judging by the thronging crowds at the event, it would seem all is well and thriving.

What struck me most was the reworking and repurposing of stuff. There were seats made of champagne corks, lampshades made of crocheted wool, marmite jars made of beads, and flowers made of recycled tin. I love it when an artifact makes you look twice. It seemed that one entrepreneurial lady had turned the art of beading into a must have artform. All the cool pieces on her stall, including household groceries and VW camper vans had red dots on their price tags. Snapped up by shrewd buyers. And as Sabelo, a local bead artist points out: “In our culture, beads tell stories about who people are, how old they are. The amount of beads you wear indicates your age, and the older you are, the more you’re respected because of the wisdom you have”. I like that idea but I like more the way these bead designers had intricately woven their beaded washing powder box and custard tins to be precise facsimilies.

In the middle of the hall, was a very large public electronic display, which projected a live video of the audience standing in front of it, mainly children. They seemed totally engrossed with their mirror image, dancing, waving and gesturing at themselves. At first it seemed just like a live feed from a video camera focused on them from above the screen. However, after a few moments of looking, I suddenly noticed animated cartoon characters appearing from nowhere onto the screen and then, after a few seconds of performing, disappearing. First a dolphin splashed around, then a spaceman floated by, then a leopard prowled by and then some larger than life dinosaurs waltzed on. I was reminded of the early 90s Smirnoff vodka ads, when an innocent cat turns into a panther as the camera panned across the glass bottle. Likewise, there was something seamless and surreal about the way the animated animals mingled with the virtual kids and the real kids played with the virtual animals.

The company that makes this interactive public display – Live Augmented Reality – has paired up with National Geographic. The set up now tours in public settings, such as shopping malls and Expos, and is a wonderful crowd stopper.

The kids happily joined in the make-believe, squealing with delight as the dolphin jumped and splashed around them. One 5 year-old boy, who was quite a dancer, started moving his hand as if to stroke the leopard, as it appeared to brush besides him – even though it was high up on the screen and he a few feet away from it standing on the floor. He was perfectly positioned to make it appear as if he really was touching it. The merging was a magical design.

The finale was a storm – lashings of animated rain, lightening and thunder descended upon the children. They loved holding their arms up to feel the virtual raindrops splashing on them and clapping their ears as the thunder boomed.

I watched the little dancing boy for a while; he was completely engrossed, repeating his slinky repertoire of dancing, stroking and cowering, as the short cycle of augmented cameo characters, returned again and again. The augmented reality illusion, created by the public display technology was a big hit with Cape Towners. Whilst self-conscious fashion models pranced the catwalk and famous chefs constructively talked the creative walk, the kids hyper-played – without an ounce of self-consciousness.

Retiring Roles

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Today, I was invited to Andrew Herbert’s career celebration (sic) at Microsoft Research Cambridge. What I liked about the title of Andrew’s bash was that it was a celebration of his achievements – and not seen as an early retirement do. Andrew had also asked everyone who was scheduled to present to look to the future. There was to be no roast or sentiment; instead we were given a nicely balanced combination of occasional reminiscing with much looking forwards.

A time to reflect on how fast the world of technology and the field of computer science have both moved and to use this as a spring board to envision and consider new challenges – befitting of a person who has achieved so much and been so influential.

It is common for people who retire to travel extensively and then settle down to new leisurely pursuits, such as playing golf, spending more time with the grandchildren and gardening. But not Andrew. By the sounds of it, he will be just as active – if not more – pursuing boyhood passions and mind-boggling hobbies. Amongst many projects up his sleeve, he mentioned just two; one, to restore a replica of the enormous mainframe computer – the 1947 Cambridge Edsac – and two, to restore a Supermarine Seagull V plane. Both sound hugely ambitious undertakings – he’ll project manage both – that will take groups of people several years to complete, requiring painstaking attention to detail, involving a multitude of skills and much collaboration.

So, Andrew has not retired at all – far from it. He is transitioning to work in a different space, far beyond the corporation, that will involve him applying a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and creativity built up over his lifetime. No doubt it will give him tremendous pleasure. However, I am sure it will also reach many other people, giving new understandings and instilling much wonderment. It makes me wonder, too, how many other people there are out there who will be retiring, but still have so much to give. We talk about the need for role models in our work places but maybe we also need new ones to inspire those who are transitioning. Andrew is perfect for that.

Slow Time

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It has only been just over a week since I started my new job but it feels like an eternity. So many new experiences encountered one after the other – people, sounds, sights, tastes, paths, notwithstanding the myriad of obstacles and challenges that come with trying to become part of a new institution. And all that travel on Southern trains.

I am so not used to it – no wonder I am exhausted this weekend. I dipped into Eugene Ionesco’s “Fragments of a Journal” this morning – remembering when I first read it, being struck by how he poignantly captures the stretching and shrinking of time in people’s lives. When he was 8 years old he remembered:
“everything was joy, everything was presentness. The seasons seemed to spread out in space.”

But paradise does not last long:
“since then I have tried, every day, to cling on to something stable, I have tried desperately to recover a present, to establish it, to widen it. I have travelled in search of an intact worked over which time would have no power. Indeed, two day’s travel, the discovery of an unfamiliar city slow down the rush of events. Two days in a new country are worth thirty spent in the place we are used to, days shortened by triteness, debased by familiarity. Familiarity smooths down time, so that you slip on it as on an over-polished floor.” (p. 11)

It got me thinking about part of the problem of aging is the paradox of routine. Having a structure in life gives it meaning but our string of daily habits makes life all too familiar, and so we slip on time. And as we slip out of the routine of work into the routine of retirement our habits become even more familiar and yet we linger on them, trying to stretch them further but in doing so shortening the present. Taking an hour to drink a coffee, and reading the paper from cover to cover. And then it is lunchtime.

Given this inevitability how might we change time, even trick our perceptions of it, as we get older? How might we evoke memories that make the present more present rather than simply triggering faded, fond memories? Is it possible to build on the Proustian experience of involuntary memory – “…than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me…” to doing something more with them – that is if we are lucky enough to encounter them in the first place?

Pill Power

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As I got off the train today and entered Victoria concourse I noticed a tall elderly chap wearing a bright yellow sash holding a collecting tin for the homeless. He stood erect and motionless as the commuters swarmed around him threading their way to the tube – like one of those static mimes you see in cities all over Europe. It was quite bizarre.

As I ambled myself towards the underground I noticed another old chap wearing the same yellow sash but who looked a bit more approachable. I walked up and put some money in his collecting tin. Then I said to him:
“You look very well”.

He replied:
“It’s the pills. It’s the pills.”

He then asked me how old I thought he was. I answered in the way you do when you want to flatter someone – by knocking off a couple of decades.
“Oh, 62-63.”

He glanced at me in amusement and then laughed.
“Now you know that is way off the mark.”
“OK, how about 82?”
“Close. 83, 83.”
“You still look very good for 83. How do you do it?”
“It’s the pills. It’s the pills. I tell you.”

I then asked him if I could take a photo of him and he was a little hesitant until I told him I was researching aging as wisdom. Then he told me his name and how he is stands there every month on a Tuesday morning. Next time he is there he wants me to bring a print of the photo I took of him.

I am struck by the contrast between the small pleasures that can be had in later life – that I have been encountering on the streets – with the big reports and prosaic books I have been reading recently on aging. The latter usually begin with a bombardment of stats about how the number of old people is dramatically increasing followed by a long list of cognitive, social, medical and other problems that beset us as we age.

Reading them makes me feel depressed. But the lovely chap I met today filled me with hope that we can rethink ageing in new ways. So long as there are the pills!

Cicada on Heat

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The doorbell rang and two gentle giants appeared at the front door (both 6 foot 2): Paul and Mozzy. I’d texted them earlier to come and fix a dimmer switch that had broken. But then it occurred to me as they came in that I could ask them to fix another problem which the hob had developed the night before.

The bit that lights the gas had got stuck in the middle ring and was clicking incessantly like a cicada, flickering its tip manically. I tried in vain to bend it, push it, twist it – but no joy. The cicada would not go away. So I ended up switching the hob off at the socket to keep it quiet. It is one thing to be lying by a pool in Tuscany listening to them fazing in and out of the heat; another to have them in a permanent catatonic state in the confines of one’s kitchen.

But how could I get the guys to do two jobs when I had called them to fix only one? We all know how they hate being asked to do more and will raise their hands at the mere mention of another faulty light switch – saying they have too many other jobs to go to after yours. So I thought just maybe if I was very chummy with them they might find it hard to say no.

But they beat me at my own game and were even more chummy with me. They were bowled over by the house the moment they walked in, commenting on the gorgeous floorboards and the high ceilings so I nodded knowingly and gave them a grand tour of the rest of the house. That did the trick. As we cornered into the kitchen I slowed down and stopped opportunistically by the hob and asked: “Would you mind having a quick look at this.” The “Ah, but” started to form in Giant 1’s throat but I looked at him and he melted, and said instead “Arrr, OK.” So I switched the cicada back on and he looked for a second at the controls, then removed the top off the one furthest to the left, took his pliers out, twiddled about with the bit underneath and then turned the gas on. Magic. No more clicking. He’d zapped the cicada.

I was mightily impressed and asked him how he knew which of the five possible knobs to go for and what to do once he’d prized the top off. He said he could just see the one on the left was slightly lower than the others. I couldn’t see it until he pointed it out. That was what had caused the cicada on the central ring to think it was on heat. The control for the front ring had got stuck causing the middle one to go mental.

After that me and the two giants got on swimmingly well. And of course they fixed the dimmer switch.

So the electrician saw the hob console as a pattern of shapes and deviations. The prof just heard noisy clicks. Guru Don would love that.