Page 49 - Changes and Challenges

Dementia
Changes and Challenges
contrary opinion and would be able to engage easily and meaningfully with
Asimo. This I think is partly cultural, but ultimately individual.

7
If they were designed for their function i.e. ‘form follows function’ , and not to
mimic humans, they would be more useful, and I suggest much cheaper.

Figure 11: Asimo Learns Cricket

Were robots will be acceptable, is in doing specific functions such as lifting or
food preparation.

Now take the current generation of ‘digital personal assistants’ such as Siri,
Cortana, Google and Alexa. All are relying on voice recognition to provide
assistance. In all cases they require an internet connection to do two things,
firstly to transmit our voice to one or more ‘clouds’ so that it can be converted
into text and digital instructions, then secondly to retrieve what every
information was requested. Many people find the lag as information is
shuffled around the clouds to be a problem, but most people overlook such
things as privacy. Our voice and instructions are there to be spread around

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Form follows function is a principle associated with 20th-century modernist
architecture and industrial design which says that the shape of a building or object
should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.
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