Flubber, Artificial Intelligence and GIFs.
I want a Weebo.
I just watched Flubber with my wife and son today. In Flubber Robin Williams’ assistant is a floating robot named Weebo.
It was animated fairly well for the time the movie was made. It made me realize that we are still wayyyyy behind on virtual assistants.
I mean Flubber was released in 1997. We still haven’t caught up to the level of AI that was in a robot in a movie from 1997.
Our virtual assistants are good. They can do a lot of stuff. But they still feel like small apps and fancy CLI’s. They don’t feel as organic as a Weebo, Samantha, or Jarvis. They feel more binary. Do this. Do that. Sure, some may have a few funny quips and responses, but they aren’t converstaional. That’s the big difference with what we have now and what is in the movies. Conversation.
To me, Samantha is exactly what I want. Something that stays in the background and can perform tasks and project the results on our phone. But based on this insanely long article in WIRED, virtual companions are far off. The technology is super detailed and will take a while. Vlad Sehnoja, the CTO of Nuance, wrote the article and says this, which is probably more reasonable:
Ultimately, the real promise of AI — at least as we see it — is not the creation of artificial companions, but an Amplification of Intelligence (ours) through the creation of amazing and transformative tools.
We may want to have a virtual assistant, and I do, but the most direct advancements that we will see will be apps adding advanced machine learning to help us out and remove a steps that used to be there. If we could have a virtual assistant that can navigate with these apps and help us out, that would be a step closer. That’s why I hope Siri can get even more integrations with third party apps. I’m totally fine with Apple waiting on this, but I hope it happens soon.
Weebo & GIFs
Also, did Weebo start the whole trend of using GIFs in every day life? When Robin Williams’ character would fall over or crash something, Weebo would play a clip of people clapping or laughing.
I thought that was hilarious and way ahead of it’s time to use reaction GIFs in a movie from 1997. The funny thing was that most of the GIFs were from Disney movies since Disney made Flubber.
I also didn’t know that John Hughes helped write Flubber. It’s not a great movie, but fun to watch with the kids.
