Honda Uni-Cub brings us one step roll closer to Wall-E's world

Wall-E, in case you haven't seen it, is a brilliant film of the dystopian future genre in which a rag-tag band of humans find themselves fleeing chaos in a post-apocalyptic world in which anthropomorphic computers and robots are hell-bent on their destruction and/or preventing their return to Earth.

If you have seen Wall-E, you're probably wondering what I was on when I watched it.

Yeah, yeah, it's a kids' film, with an i-Robot-you love story to boot, but it really is about a dystopian future, a post-apocalyptic world filled with destruction, loads and loads of chaos, and anthropomorphic computers and robots, some of which are preventing humankind's return to Earth. And one of them really does seem to be trying to kill the captain (or at least incapacitate him).

But the joke's on him: morbid obesity would have done the captain in soon anyway.

And that brings me to my point (yes, I do have one). Honda recently unveiled its answer to the Segway (as if we needed one): a glorified electronic unicycle called the Uni-Cub. They might as well have called it the Uni-Club, because it will figuratively club you to death.

You're probably wondering what I am on now, but bear with me, please. When the Segway was first released, it was hailed for the supposed community-altering aspects it would bring. Instead of jumping in their cars, people would hop on their Segways and zippily go places that were a little too far to walk but too close for the guilt-ridden to drive (yes, there are a few of us).

The idea was that, with more and more people milling about at street level, this would lead to shops, cafés, neighborhood eateries, food kiosks, etc., sprouting like weeds and American cities would become like Seoul, Tōkyō, London, Paris, Roma, Hong Kong, Pusan, Ōsaka, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Cairo, Athens, Brussels, Stockholm, Milano, Firenze, Marseilles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, or just about every other city in the entire world.

Alas, this utopian future world never materialized. The Segway instead resulted in three major trends: Waikiki tourists getting plowed into by uncaring Honolulu motorists, national park rangers looking utterly ridiculous, and two entire generations conditioned to misspell the perfectly usable word segue.

The Segway was too expensive, too bulky, and it caused presidents to fall on their face. But the Honda Uni-Cub aims to resolve at least one of those issues, since it can even be used indoors. Simply put, you can, if you so desired, never walk anywhere.

And that brings us back to Wall-E's world.

This is technology gone horribly wrong. What is the difference between the top photo and this one just above? Holographic computer screens and about 50 kilos per person.

This is the part of the essay where my public health background kicks in: God made us bipedal for a reason. Walking provides us with salubrious functionality that goes way beyond getting from Point A to Point B. It keeps our blood pumping, it provides just enough stress on our skeleton that it encourages healthy bone replacement, and it helps regulate blood sugar. I run three miles a day, but if you can't run or jog then you should walk.

Even just a walk around the block with your dog, your s.o., and/or your kids or parents would do wonders for your health and longevity that you wouldn't get if you were mostly stationary and sedentary. Those of us in public health simply cannot emphasize that enough (seriously, we can't stop, it's like a genetic flaw or something).

And that leads me to what should by now be an obvious conclusion: Honda's Uni-Cub is part of a plot by the Japanese government to once and for all solve its demographic crisis. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look a the charts on this post (a very high-traffic post for this blog, and one of only two in this blog's top ten that don't include scantily clad women). Japan's "population pyramid" is an inverted pyramid, and South Korea is catching up on this trend.

No economist has yet figured out how to maintain high standards of living with a graying population characteristic of an inverted pyramid like this.

Simply put, what had long been considered a "normal" population distribution was a pyramid like the one at right, where it had a large base of young people and it tapered off at the top where all the old people (i.e., retirees) would be. The idea being that those toward the bottom would work and toil (much like the people who built the actual pyramids) and the fruits of their labor would be enough to support the elderly in their old age, as well as the base (which is made up of children who, thanks to Charles Dickens, can no longer be put to work legally).

But years of declining birth rates have meant loads of old people and not enough young workers. We used to have twenty workers per retiree, and soon we'll have just around two because the top is growing faster than future workers are being replaced and the elderly are living to 100 instead of dying a year or so after retirement due to smoking-related illness, preventable infections, public safety problems, or nagging.


Replacement birth rate is about 2.1 children per adult woman (2.0 to replace the woman and the man who impregnated her, presumably her husband or long-term boyfriend, and 0.1 to replace those who die before reproducing or never marry). But countries like South Korea, for example, implemented birth control programs so successful that its birth rate plummeted from something like seven children per woman (not an exaggeration even though it sounds like one) to just 1.2. That's two people being replaced by 1.2 offspring. That is the very definition of a dying society and the reason why Korea is now embracing immigration and its own brand of "multiculturalism" (다문화주의).

The Japanese have the same problem as Korea, but have chosen (so far) to eschew immigration in favor of technological solutions. And by that, I mean robots. Robots will be trained programmed to take care of the elderly and do all the tedious tasks that now require a fully human health care worker. But denial is, like the aforementioned pyramid, a river in Egypt, and this technological fix can only go part of the way.

Ostensibly, Honda's Uni-Cub will be part of this effort to handle the elderly like glazed donuts on the conveyor belt at Krispy Kreme, but I'm pretty sure that they were really designed as part of some darker final robotic solution (my ominous point from several paragraphs up, in case you were wondering just where the hel1 this tangent was going).

Gin-san and Kin-san:
Public Enemy #1

It's pretty clear: Honda's Uni-Cub is part of the government's effort to trim the top of the inverted pyramid by inducing obesity in the Japanese population. Start 'em young... er, youngerish. Give 'em a Uni-Cub at the age of, say fifty, and by the time they reach seventy or so, when their government pensions are kicking in, about half of them will be just like the scooter-lounging humanity in Wall-E. And that means they will kick off at seventy-five instead of ninety-five, thus relieving pressure on the non-retired population.

You think I'm kidding, but I'm deadly serious.

View Honda's propaganda video, if you dare:



...

The Shawshank Contraption (redux): Reuters on South Korean prison robots

Jealous that the Associated Press gets to pretend they're the KCNA, Reuters has decided to pretend they're Arirang. They're reporting on the Great South Korean Prison Robot Test with a video that looks like it was put together by the Media Club at my high school.

Monster Island readers are already familiar with the prison robots (see here and then here), so they know the robots' capabilities and skill set: they can detect suicides and violence, for example, but not spelling errors...

Emerjency? Really?! Were there no pot-smoking English teachers in the foreigners' wing of the prison to run that by before you sent it off to the CG animators? (Oh, wait... maybe they did run it by pot-smoking English teachers.)

Man, that's just plain embarrassing. This is Reuters, dude. That means it will be seen by at least a dozen or so British people.

Anyway, I just noticed that Reuters's music at the start of each video segment sounds a lot like the Onion's. 

... 

South Korea's prison robots in the LAT

I'm beginning to feel a bit like Aaron Altman, a main character in Broadcast News (a 1987 film about its titular topic; yeah, I'm dating myself, but hey, no one else will — rim shot! ... actually I was a teenager in 1987).

You see, late last month, I highlighted South Korean plans to employ robots in South Korean prisons (in South Korea, prison and schools — same-same). Fast-forward a week later and — bam! — there it is in the Los Angeles Times.

T'is not the first time I've noticed this pattern. I could be full of self-importance, though, but in this case, I think I'm one of the very few in the K-blogosphere who wrote about this.

Back to Altman. He was a news producer, writer, and sometime on-air talking head, but he was upstaged by a pretty-boy former sportscaster who, basically, didn't know much of anything but the network needed him to sound intelligent in front of the camera. With the help of microphones and telephones, etc., etc. (this was 1987, pre-Wikipedia), Aaron Altman basically talked the talking head through a breaking news story.

Sitting in his living room watching the fruits of his labor emerge from the telly, he says to himself, "I say it here, it comes out there."

Okay, okay. You had to be there. And no, I'm not likening John Glionna to a pretty-boy talking head who doesn't know anything (to the contrary, I imagine he's very intelligent and quite homely). But I do feel I'm feeding him ideas. Not that there's anything wrong about that, since he does go and do his homework (though I think mine has more of the snark the story is screaming for).

...

Korean English teachers preferred over foreign English teachers?

I guess all those articles on pot-smoking, child-molesting, skirt-chasing, drunk-teaching instructors have resulted in this shocking result: students, parents, and other educators prefer homegrown English teachers (assuming they speak English well) over native English-speaking teachers by about two-to-one.

Hmm... I was joking about it being all about the bad press, but I'm sure some will think that. What I think is really at work is the nervousness, uncertainty, and anxiety that so many KoKos feel when they learn English. They want, whether they should have it or not, to have someone hold their hand through the language learning process.

The thing is, most native-speaking English teachers cannot do that in Korean. And of course, those who do speak Korean reportedly are told not to do so. It's all a bit unfair, I suppose.

But I don't think this means the native-speaking English teachers are going anywhere soon. The survey was comparing them to Korean teachers who speak English well, which is almost a hypothetical creature in many schools. And there will always be those who feel that no matter how well a KoKo speaks English, it will never be as perfect and pure as an actual native, for whom there will always be a market.

Even despite the robots.

...

Shawshank Contraption

As part of its move to become the world leader in replacing job-seeking humans with cold, soulless machines, South Korea is reportedly planning to use robots as prison guards. A month-long test is being conducted in Pohang:

The robots are designed to patrol the corridors of corrective institutions, monitoring conditions inside the cells. If they detect sudden or unusual activity such as violent behavior they alert human guards.

“Unlike CCTV that just monitors cells through screens, the robots are programmed to analyze various activities of those in prison and identify abnormal behavior,” Prof. Lee Baik-chul of Kyonggi University, who is in charge of the 1 billion-won ($863,000) project, told the Journal.

I think this is a capital idea! Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan, especially if they patrol the international wing of the jail where the robots' programming would never ever interpret foreigner behavior as abnormal.

By the way, this is what they're actually supposed to look like. Frankly, if this pilot study were being conducted in an American prison, I'd give it about 700 nanoseconds before K-prisonbot 3000 is made someone's bitch.

...

Saving 15% could cost you your life

When I first saw this Geico commercial (with bonus footage here), I couldn't help but think they were directly influenced by this story from South Korea of robots in the classroom. See also here, here, here,  and here. (That story was of course mocked and ridiculed across the K-blogosphere here, here, here, here, and here — if you mocked them, too, send me a link.)

I'd also like to think they were inspired by my own apocalyptic take from the future.

The Huffington Post used a picture from Japan for this Korea story.
Feel free to make up your own caption for this one. 

...

Kiro... hope that's not shorthand for ki•ller ro•bot

Engadget, which is where I get most of my iPhone news, has an article on Kiro, the Robot who can do anything, including your job, whatever it is:

Developed by Korea's Robot Research Institute, the bot recently wrapped up a three week trial period in a kindergarten classroom, where he apparently spent most of his time screening educational videos on his abdomen, playing interactive games, and keeping his students in rapt attention. When he wasn't busy dishing out Ritalin to his underlings, Kiro also served as a guide at the Dong-A University Museum, in Busan. After programming the droid with enough knowledge to make him sound smart, engineers set him loose within the art gallery, where he would provide visitors with background information in hushed, docent-dulcet tones. He loves kids. He loves art. He's always smiling. He's the kinda bot you could bring home to Dad.

I don't know... I've been to the future and I've seen what really happens when robots rule the classroom.

By the way, this is not Engadget's first article on Kiro.

English robots deployed in the classroom — Oh, the humanity!

AP and the New York Times have been reporting on the deployment of robots in South Korea, both the military kind and the pedagogical kind:

Over the years, this country has imported thousands of Americans, Canadians, South Africans and others to supplement local teachers of English. But the program has strained the government’s budget, and it is increasingly difficult to get native English speakers to live on islands and other remote areas.

Enter Engkey, a teacher with exacting standards and a silken voice. She is just a little penguin-shaped robot, but both symbolically and practically, she stands for progress, achievement and national pride. What she does not stand for, however, is bad pronunciation.

“Not good this time!” Engkey admonished a sixth grader as he stooped awkwardly over her. “You need to focus more on your accent. Let’s try again.”

Engkey, a contraction of English jockey (as in disc jockey), is the great hope of Choi Mun-taek, a team leader at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology’s Center for Intelligent Robotics. “In three to five years, Engkey will mature enough to replace native speakers,” he said.

Oh, dear God. I know I sound like a ranting John Connor's mom when I go on like this, but I've seen the future and it isn't pretty.

In the Year Two Thousand (Twenty): English-teaching robots run amok

This news from the Korea Times about automated machines supplanting real-live English teachers over the next decade had me thinking, "Wow, English-teaching robots replacing human English teachers? What could possibly go wrong?"

Well, with the help of these guys, I was able to briefly go into the future and — with just a ninety-second window to check my blog — see what posts I may have written in the future about the subject (side note: KRW-USD exchange rate at 540 won per dollar). Here's a post from September 15, 2020 that I retrieved just before the portal closed:

Netizens are angry following the seventh Engbot office massacre since the new semester began. Netizens are always angry about something, but ever since they were collectively appointed Minister of Culture and Information, they're a force to be reckoned with. And at any rate, this time their outrage may actually be justified: The latest event involved more decapitations than in previous attacks, and there is some speculation that it wasn't just bribe-taking, drunk-getting, female student-groping ajŏshi teachers who were victims this time. Naturally, people are scared, and pissed off.

From the Gorea Times-Herald-Daily:

The scene was bloody in the lounge of "S" Language Institute in suburban Seoul yesterday after the management became innocent victims of the latest in a string of deadly Engbot attacks. Law enforcement cordoned off the building, but eyewitnesses with offices nearby describe a confused scene of body parts and frayed wires.

"I craned my neck to look at the carnage as the police shuffled me and my coworkers toward the elevator, and I saw dozens of bodies slumped lifelessly over desks and on the floor," noted Park Miyung (25). "I was relieved to find out later that most of them were just cops napping."

"Engbots" is the popular name for English-teaching robots introduced a decade ago, known officially as the ED-2010. They were developed in order to save money over hiring real-live English teachers, and it was thought that their widespread use would reduce administrative paperwork, operating expenses, and headaches stemming from cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Though they were programmed to recite the historical record supporting Korean ownership of Tokto and to recognize the health benefits of kimchi, thus reducing 93% of intercultural conflict, their artificial intelligence architecture eventually made their behavior so human-like that they responded negatively to many situations in which flesh-and-blood foreign teachers would also react unfavorably, only with greater force and more effective organization.

Like most of the others, it is believed that this latest attack was also prompted by a contract dispute. Two days earlier, people in nearby offices reportedly heard an Engbot speaking in a high-pitched robotic tone complaining that its contract clearly stated a maximum of 140 hours of classroom time per week. It was also complaining about the size of its residence: It had been allotted just a small closet even though the contract promised a medium-sized closet.

Police believe that may have set off the incident, particularly if the offending Engbot had any software defects. The head teacher at the institute, who survived the incident by taking a two-hour lunch, told police the Engbot's lesson plans this week would have included idioms such as "kick some butt" and "heads will roll." A faulty literalism chip could easily turn such a lecture into a deadly encounter.

The same article notes there's already a lot of handwringing over the robot attacks:

"In hindsight," robotics engineer Choe Kyushik told us off the record, "we shouldn't have given them superhuman strength. We thought it was a good idea at the time, since they could also be used for moving furniture. The old model human English teachers always griped about things like that. Telling them that their large White people arms made them genetically more predisposed for heavy manual labor just got them angry. Especially the women."

Of course, there are dissenters to the general anti-robot mood. From an op-ed in the iPad Times:

Look, the AI-infused robots are just reacting according to their programming, which is to be like humans, and no humans like to be jerked around. If you promise them high-grade lubricant oil and a clean motherboard, you'd better give them high-grade lubricant oil and a clean motherboard. If you don't, they'll be in your face and all over the Internet.

Indeed, Engbot gripes generally involve managerial promises of high-grade oil lube jobs and sleeping compartments that are at least one meter wide. The Great Engbot Strike of 2017 occurred because it was discovered average sleeping compartments were only 96 centimeters. The hagwon industry was brought to its knees when all the Canadianism-programmed Engbots walked off the job. The Americanism Engbots, however, lacking any code that would enable them to use metric, gleefully went about their duties.

That was the largest work stoppage since the Ministry of Education temporarily removed "monthly lube jobs" as a guaranteed contract item in 2015, when a newly promoted MOE bureaucrat became convinced it was a sexual reference. "No more English teachers and sex in Korea," declared the pencil pusher, "That was the whole point of the Engbot Iniative."

As one would expect, however, the Engbots do have their supporters, particularly Ben Wagner, a professor of law at the Super Songdo Hovering Cyber University located in the floating hologram circling the top twenty floors of the 312-story Songdo Super Korea Tower Complex Park in the Old Songdo International Development Complex. From the Hankyoreh:

Ben Wagner says Koreans should avoid stereotyping Engbots, and he says he will raise objections on the three remaining K-blogs and file a petition with the National Human and Robot Rights Commission of Korea to make sure new regulations are not imposed on super-strength robots unless they're also put on human Korean teachers as well.

He also noted that many of the stories of Engbot robot violence may be the exaggerations of a robophobic public. "It's worth noting that we have no actual first-hand eyewitness accounts of Engbots committing school administrative violence," he said in a cranium-phone interview. "It's all hearsay or conjecture."

"That's because there have never been any survivors," noted MOE vice minister Kim Nayŏng. "At least not any that still had their tongue intact."

Sigh. Like so many other high-tech "solutions," it seems the Engbots have created more problems than they fixed. And to think back in 2010 this looked like such a promising idea. In those heady days, one kyopo commenter privately told me about the departing humanoids, "At least we'll finally be rid of their bellyaching."

I'll end this post with a touching story from Lee Ryu, a teacher whose elementary school friend was among the victims of one of last week's attacks:

I never thought I'd say this, but after all these robot massacres, I long for the days when English teachers just spread AIDS and occasionally touched students in inappropriate places.

AIDS takes a long time to die from. You get AIDS from your foreign co-teacher and you still have five or ten years to get your affairs in order. With angry Engbots, you've got five seconds before so much blood rushes out of your neck that you lose consciousness. Even with cranium-implant speed dialing, that's not enough to call my loved ones and say good-bye. I might get my wife and my girlfriend, but I wouldn't have time to reach the kids.

Now that the deadly spider pumas which Radiant Leader Kim Jong-un unleashed on us have all been exterminated, I suppose the imported Sri Lankan animal handlers could be put back to work sneaking up on Engbots and flipping their emergency-off switches. Once the menace is contained, we could ask the human English teachers to come back, but after that horrible incident at the Equine Flu Internment Camp in 2013, would they want to?