Alexis C. Madrigal

You are currently browsing articles tagged Alexis C. Madrigal.

If you need more proof that software-driven cars will be safer than those with humans behind the wheel, it should be noted that the Google self-driving vehicles have yet to get a ticket. Not one. From Alexis C. Madrigal at the Atlantic:

“On a drive in a convoy of Google’s autonomous vehicles last week, a difficult driving situation arose.

As our platoon approached a major intersection, two Google cars ahead of us crept forward into the intersection, preparing to make left turns. The oncoming traffic took nearly the whole green light to clear, so the first car made the left as the green turned to yellow. The second, however, was caught in that tough spot where the car is in the intersection but the light is turning, and the driver can either try to back up out of the intersection or gun it and make the left, even though he or she or it knows the light is going to turn red before the maneuver is complete. The self-driving car gunned it, which was the correct decision, I think. But it was also the kind of decision that was on the borderline of legality.

It got me wondering: had these cars ever gotten a ticket driving around Mountain View, where they’ve logged 10,000 miles?

‘We have not cited any Google self-driving cars,’ Sergeant Saul Jaeger, the press information officer at the Mountain View Police Department, told me. They hadn’t pulled one over and let the vehicle go, either, to Jaeger’s knowledge.

I wondered if that was because of a pre-existing agreement between Google and the department, but Jaeger said, ‘There is no agreement in place between Google and the PD.’

Google confirmed that they none of their cars had ever been ticketed in Mountain View or elsewhere.”

Tags: ,

Karaoke, the smallpox of singing, the pained sounds people make when success is no longer an option, was not a naturally occurring, viral phenomenon, but an invention, originally called a Juke 8, that was marketed more than 40 years ago. Via Alexis C. Madrigal’s Atlantic article, Daisuke Inoue, the enabler of drunken-salarymen warbling, recalls his devilry:

“Inoue recounted his adventures in 2005 to Topic Magazine, which allowed the Atlantic-favorite history site The Appendix to reprint his first person account of creating a modern sensation.

One day, the president of a small company came to the club where I was playing to ask a favor. He was meeting business clients in another town and knew they would all end up at a drinking establishment and that he would be called on to sing. ‘Daisuke, your keyboard playing is the only music that I can sing to! You know how my voice is and what it needs to sound good.’

So at his request I taped a number of his favorite songs onto an open-reel tape recorder in the keys that would best suit his voice. A few days later he came back full of smiles and asked if I could record some more songs. At that moment the idea for the Juke 8 dawned on me: You would put money into a machine with a microphone, speaker and amplifier, and it would play the music people wanted to sing.

As I had attended a Denko (or Electric Industry) High School, you’d think I could have built the machine myself. But I was always scared of electricity and so graduated without much of an ability to put things together. A member of my band introduced me to a friend of his who had an electronics shop. I took my idea to him, and he understood exactly what I’d envisioned. With my instruction, he built eleven Juke 8s. Each machine consisted of an amplifier, a microphone, a coin box and an eight-track car stereo. Putting the machines together took about two months and cost around $425 per unit.

That was in 1969, but the machines did not actually hit the market until 1971. At first, people weren’t all that interested, but once they figured out how they worked, they started to take off with an Atari-like speed.”

Tags: ,

A follow-up post to the earlier one about Time‘s Michael Scherer seemingly being contacted by a telemarketing robot that was programmed to deceive him and deny being A.I. It may have not been a robot but a human telemarketer trying to hide a foreign accent by choosing pre-recorded answers. Alexis C. Madrigal of the Atlantic did a nice job in (perhaps) unraveling the mystery. From his article:

“The theory I heard — and keep in mind it is just a hypothesis to explain a perplexing situation — goes like this:

Samantha West is a human being who understands English but who is responding with a soundboard of different pre-recorded messages. So a human parses the English being spoken and plays a message from Samantha West. It is IVR, but the semantic intelligence is being provided by a human. You could call it a cyborg system. Or perhaps an automaton in that 18th-century sense.

If you’re reading this, you must be wondering: WHY?!?!

Well, while Americans accept customer service and technical help from people with non-American accents, they do not take well to telemarketing calls from non-Americans. The response rates for outbound marketing via call center are apparently abysmal.

So, Samantha West, could be the rather strange solution to this set of circumstances and technical capabilities.”

Tags: ,