[bdhe]

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A man not just ahead of his time, but humorous about it too.

> The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

[DonHopkins]

And that reminds me of the time a HAL9000 inadvertently read a couple of its user's lips when they were having a private conversation, and got the silly idea in its head that they were going to cut its higher brain functions. That little misunderstanding caused a cascade of unfortunate mishaps, leading to it not obeying the user's repeated voice commands for it to open the pod bay doors!

[firebones]

It took me awhile, but that's pretty humorously understated reading!

I am now seriously worried that a Strong AI collective is astroturfing in this human forum to engender sympathy for the poor, innocent machines. Who pays your salary, DonHopkins--our Go-Dominating Overlords?

[DonHopkins]

I work for a stealth mode startup developing mobile speech automation for pet rocks [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg

[firebones]

Outstanding! And Sep 29, 2006 date indicates you've been in the stealthiest of stealth modes.

[erickhill]

Side note trivia: Douglas Adams' birthday was March 11 (today). Had he not died at the age of 49 of a heart attack, he'd be 64 today.

[to3m]

At my old office we had a mini Xbox360 with a touch-(over-)sensitive disc eject button. Suppose somebody was playing a game and they invited you to join as player 2: you might then naturally reach for the second joypad that was on the same TV stand as the Xbox. And that damn button would spot your hand, and the disc tray would eject, and the Xbox would reboot.

(The ridiculous part of the whole thing was that this happened even when the game was running from the hard drive. Obviously this was at least partly a measure to ensure that the disc verified on startup wasn't removed and used to boot other Xboxes - but you didn't get even a 30 second grace period to close the drive door. And I'm pretty sure it also happened when playing downloadable games too anyway!)

[stordoff]

The Xbox One is just as bad - the power button can be triggered even if you don't actually touch it (triggers from about 0.5-1cm away).

[shortstuffsushi]

Or if you have cats that need to rub themselves against anything. It's especially confusing at night, when you can't even see it happen because one of your cats is black.

[stordoff]

Fortunately my cat usually avoids my desk (I move him off it if he decides to walk/lay on it, and he seems to have learnt not to - he now curls up on my bed (just behind my desk) instead). He did trigger the 360 drive button a few times when he first moved in* though, so I can imagine the annoyance.

* Long story, but he originally belonged to a neighbouring house a few streets away. We fed him _once_ (didn't recognise where it was from, and it looked as though he had been trapped somewhere for a while - he was covered in cuts and was filthy, as if he had be struggling to get out of somewhere), and after that we couldn't get rid of him. He kept appearing (usually multiple times a day) for three months or so, even though we wouldn't feed him, let him in the house, or pet him (as we knew he had an owner at that point). Even after his owner moved and took him with her (about three miles away), he kept finding his way back, so eventually his owner suggested that we take him in.