Technology

In a sweet and clever 2012 sci-fi movie, Robot & Frank, Frank, an older retired jewel thief, is given a domestic robot by his son, Hunter. Hunter’s an adult with a family of his own and a full-time job. He gives Frank as much care and attention as he can, but sometimes it wears him thin, and he’s reluctant to have his father move to assisted living. Enter: Robot. Frank is initially put off by having this odd machine around, but soon Frank & Robot are as inseparable as Batman and Robin, pulling hilarious heists that include stealing a copy of Don Quixote from the local library—a witty move by the screenwriters. Couldn’t Frank’s home robot be the Sancho Panza to Frank’s Quixote, dealing patiently with the knight’s romantic suspirations, his sermons on the glories of antiquated knighthood (or in Frank’s case, cat burglary)? Someday, will we all have a witty robotic squire to stand by our side and assist us with our daily lives?

As a kid, I was always captivated by Rube Goldberg machines, especially in the movies. They have a tendency to flow beautifully to music, such as Dick Van Dyke’s tiny Ferris wheel in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that delivers fresh eggs to the pan for frying. There’s an appeal to a machine so absurdly dysfunctional, where the mechanics so greatly outweigh the service they provide. Clearly it would be easier to just pick up an egg and crack it than to build a miniature Ferris wheel, but the machine itself becomes an object of wonder. Early computers, the size of a room, were akin to the Ferris wheel of eggs, in their ratio of mechanics to the value of their service. Today, big data and cloud technologies actually make it possible to streamline the mechanics of technology, so we can integrate it seamlessly into our lives. The cloud replaces “egg machines” with eggs that float magically across the room and crack themselves neatly for frying, without a sprawling mechanical interface that takes up half the kitchen.