K9

One of the under appreciated aspects of writing some text to accompany these daily photos is that I am documenting a strange subset of the things I own. Before the lockdowns end, this might end up as an inventory of my house. Previously, I’ve had chair, napkin and plate.  So why not K9?

This is a remote controlled K9 toy that sits on the shelf behind my desk.  Since I moved into this room to use it as my working office, the model has been in the background on all my video calls (there’s also a picture of Tom Baker as Doctor Who on a wall that’s out of shot).  At first I found that people commented - some younger people even asked what it was - but nowadays they are either used to it or no longer care about the geeky things people have in the background.

When I was a child, I loved the idea of a robot dog and K9 in particular.  One of the things that appealed was this robot, albeit in dog form, was given elements of human speech: everybody will remember how he would refer to The Doctor as his Master.  I felt the same about Zen, the on-board computer in the TV show, Blake’s 7, which, if I think about it, has turned out to be a foretelling of the arrival of Amazon’s Alexa.  And I am a big fan of when Alexa is more human than machine.

Today, I still like computers to have some human-like qualities.  At work, I was recently writing some requirements for software and I wanted the system to log things as through spoken so that when you read them, they could have been interpreted to have been written by a human.  I rarely get my way in this discussion with colleagues because better minds focus on how logs should be written and not on making them sound like a real person.

But, one day, my systems will sound human rather than machine and I will blame K9 for that.