This one isn't actually inevitable in the near term. Lethal robots policing the streets isn't something that can just sneak up on us[0] - it's a pretty clear-cut civic issue affecting everyone, so excepting hardcore autocracies with no vertical accountability[1], the public can push such ideas back indefinitely[2].
It's hard to "agency launder" a killer robot when it's physically patrolling a public square.
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[0] - Except maybe through privatization of law enforcement, which could be more gradual - think police outsourcing more work to private security companies, which in turn decide to "pioneer innovative solutions to ensure personal safety" by giving weapons to mall security patrol robots and putting them out on the streets - but it'll still be pretty obvious what's happening.
[1] - Some cursory search suggests this is the correct term for the idea I'm thinking of, which is how much the people in power have to, in practice, take their subjects' reactions into account.
[2] - Well, at least until armed forces of multiple countries start using autonomous robots as ground infantry, and over the years, normalize this idea in the minds of civilians.
That's really neat. I had no idea there was a Byte Shop in Greensboro. My wife's family is from that area. I live in Raleigh, NC. Now I am wondering if my nerdy father-in-law ever visited it back in the day.
If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome.
“After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”
I'm honored to be included in this article--I wrote Lander (1990) originally for Windows 2.x.
When I applied for a job to work on Lotus Notes (back in 1989), I showed the interviewer (Tim Halvorsen) my Lander game. He said, "That's pretty cool--let's try running it on Windows 3."
At first, I thought, cool! I get to see Windows 3 (which had not yet been released). But then he said, "Windows 3 runs everything in protected mode, so if you have any out-of-bounds pointer access, it will crash instantly. Let's see how you did."
I was on pins and needles the entire time.
But fortunately, Lander didn't crash, and Tim was happy. I ended up getting the job, which forever changed my career.
Except it had terrain and pits. A pit would light up and you needed to land in the pit (your ship landing would depress the button in the center of the pit). If you didn't aim well your ship would hit the edge of the pit, tilt, and you'd fail. If you did hit the button then the light would go off and a different pit would light up.
-- update --
now that I think about it, maybe the controls were more like UFO catcher where you'd align at the top and then press "land".
Anyway, it used to be at Disneyland at the Main Street Arcade.
I played the game in this picture at the pinball museum in vegas. One lever operates the rear fan and the other operates the bottom fan. It was a lot of fun for an analog arcade game.
I returned to the museum a few years ago and it was no longer working. I hope they fix it one day.
Lunar Lander was one of the early games I tried to make a copy of as I was learning programming in high school: (Java applet!) https://github.com/celwell/space-landing
a) thats awesome
b) I am taking a wild leap in deducing you're the same retro-games Benj Edwards journalist that was part of the infamous Retronauts East team. Just wanted to say i always quite enjoyed your presence :)
This is a fun post, I appreciate the mentions. Matt missed my later piece from How-To Geek where I talked to Stan Honey and the Etak engineers again, then interviewed Asteroids designer Ed Logg, and he sent he his original sketch for the cursor. Indeed, his inspiration was Space War.
That was great and really piqued my interest. I remember reading Byte magazine (late 70s and early 80s) and the pages and pages of adverts for machines similar to the Vector; peripherals, compilers, and softwarein the same work satation category.
I’d love to read more about these products and their history. It was all very opaque. Even back then.
Fully-human author here. I wrote it as a joke (a play on a common phrase), since numeric keypads were often used as data entry for accountants and people using spreadsheets.
I dislike this too, although I can understand arguments for it in software that keeps iterating and (hopefully) improving over time.
I wrote an article about this issue for How-To Geek earlier this year that explores the reasons why the subscription model has become so prevalent: Why Is Everything a Subscription Now?
Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.