The Veldt：
After reading this story, I’m a little bit frightened but still fascinated by the “intelligent house” idea. I hope there can also be a chore assistant helping me with cleaning and folding clothes, sweeping and mopping the floor, cooking and cleaning tablewares, etc. But I don’t want it to schedule my daily life or help educate children, as letting an artificial intelligence affect human life is dangerous and unreasonable. All the things in my life should be of its duty, but not my life itself.
In real life, my idea may be closer to an automatic vacuum cleaner (which is called a sweeping robot). But obviously many technical companies are working really hard on upgrading such products and my idea will finally come true some day in the future. Also, it suddenly occurred to me that in Love, Death & Robot Season 2 Episode 1, there’s a more intelligent household robot, which corresponds with my imagination (of course without attacking people).
And the possible future it may take is also demonstrated in Love, Death & Robot. Humanity’s growing disability is almost an inevitable future coming along with the growing ability of machines. Hopefully we and our future generations will still be able to go back to our original way of living, keeping the functions of machines as assistance instead of dominance.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:
In this story, the child in the basement is so very pitiable and made me feel powerless to help. Such a scene reminds me of the poor kids and the elderly in the world who have neither money nor notice. If we can convey happiness(and necessary supplies), I hope less people will suffer from unknown pain.
I want to design a station which looks like a telephone booth. Such stations will be set randomly on the street around the world, where people can record the happy things happening in their life and receive others’ videos or audio recordings. Also, it can work as a exchanging station, where people can put books, food, medicines, clothes, etc. and pick up things they need there. With this, sad people can gain happiness, while helpless people can find something to support their living.
The exchange station appeared in almost every neighborhood in Shanghai during the three-month-lockdown. It helped a lot of people, not necessarily for the needs of living, but for the needs of emotional connection: someone is still there and goes together with you. I hope my design can do more than that if it’s realized.
The problems it may bring happen in every common space. Messing up in a few weeks, being short of time supply, people worrying about privacy problems, etc. But I really hope it can be maintained in a good order by everyone passing by if people do admire this idea.
The Plague：
I was inspired by the white/red sign in front of each house. If there’s also an electric(or even no power needed) board next to our doors, it may help both ourselves and visitors. In my opinion, this board can change into different colors to show different statements—white: nobody in; red: host at home; blue: will back in a minute; etc. Hosts can leave some words on it for different situations(such as say hello to passers-by or show the delivery man where to put packages down), and visitors can also leave a message or make a facetime call through the board so that no message will be missed.
We can buy an “intelligent doorbell” now, which can partly achieve the functions I demand, such as having a camera to see who is outside the door. But such techniques are still installed indoors, and the aims are completely different. An outside board mainly used to communicate with visitors rather than serve the host directly.
I hope the statement will not attract thieves to come into vacant houses… We need a better security system to cooperate with the board.