Both JuliaM and Man Widdicombe have picked up on this one.
Prof Peter Robinson, head of emotional robotics at Cambridge University, is working on devising a generation of smart computers which will be able to detect and react to users’ moods.
One application could be in a satnav systems which could use the technology to display some sympathy with a driver’s state of mind and react accordingly.
This is a classic example of someone trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I love my satnav. As someone who has enjoyed everything to do with maps and navigation from an early age, the satnav was a dream come true. In the nineties, I linked up my Psion Series 5 with a Garmin GPS unit, which combined with my Michelin yellow maps provided an effective navigation aid. I still use paper maps for overall route planning, but the turn-by-turn routing through unfamiliar cities is a boon that wasn’t available twenty years ago, making such navigation on a motorcycle somewhat easier now than it was – particularly in France where the signposts seem almost designed to frustrate tourists.
Yes, sure, sometimes I tell the damned thing to shut the fuck up because actually, I know a better route – or, sometimes as happened last week, it is making no allowance for weather conditions. That’s why we have brains, so that we can reason. We can override the satnav. It really isn’t difficult.
What I don’t want is a satnav from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation thank you very much. That would tip me over the edge to murder – or, at the very least, satnavicide.
Love maps, hate satnavs. I can understand them as an adjuctunt but unfortunately the are used as a surrogate brain. The numbers of times I have followed people and can see their satnavs showing them their way home on a route they must have done countless times. People who can’t follow simple directions, using signposts and landmarks such as pubs but instead want your postcode. Arrgghh. Can’t they read? I would like a head up display which shows an actual map, very useful but not some moron trying to tell me I don’t know my own way home.
It’s a tool like any other tool. I’ve found mine invaluable when navigating in unfamiliar places. I wouldn’t dream of trying to travel a large, unfamiliar city without it. These days, you can’t just pull over to check a map – especially in red zones. When travelling to clients a postcode is often all I have to go on.
When people have problems with using satnavs, it isn’t the satnav that’s the problem…
“Ironically, the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with!” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes”, with a footnote stating that the position of Robotics Correspondent is vacant. It is notable that a future edition of The Encyclopedia Galactica fell through a wormhole in time, and its entry for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
but I also one day want to get a Tom-Tom with the Brian Blessed voice.
Just so I could program it to shout ‘Fresh Horses’ when going through Chiswick.
And smile to myself (yes I am easily pleased)
Once went on a UK holiday by satnav. Took me down some interesting tracks and tried to route me through laybys until I switched it to ‘quickest’ route not ‘shortest’. Apparently they are not the same thing!
It was five years or so back.
The last UK holiday two years back I used a throwaway AA Map of Great Britain booklet from the Daily Mirror and managed perfectly well.
Take your point about the satnav’s usefulness around an unfamiliar city but I rarely venture anywhere near cities these days, thankfully, so I’ll stick to freebies.
My comments on sat nav are on a previous thread.
Share and enjoy.
Or should I say, Go stick your head in a pig.
It’s tending towards that whole class of ‘devices which are magnificent solutions, which will make us very rich if we ever find a problem to which we can apply it’ so common in the computer industry over the years.
They always turn out to be so narrow in focus and appeal that they disappear without trace, other than large amounts of red ink in balance sheets.
Digitizers was one example.