This is a remote-controlled K9 toy that sits on the shelf behind my desk. Since I moved into this room to use it as my working office, the model has appeared in the background of all my video calls. There’s also a picture of Tom Baker as Doctor Who on a wall just out of shot.
At first, people commented on K9. Some younger people even asked what it was. Nowadays, they are either used to it or no longer care about the geeky things people have in the background.
When I was a child, I loved the idea of a robot dog—and K9 in particular. One of the things that appealed was that this robot, albeit in dog form, had elements of human speech. Everybody will remember how he referred to the Doctor as “Master”.
I felt the same about Zen, the onboard computer in the television show Blake’s 7. Thinking about it now, Zen feels like a foretelling of the arrival of Amazon’s Alexa. I’m a big fan of those moments when Alexa seems more human than machine.
I still like computers to have human qualities. At work, I was recently writing requirements for some software and wanted the system to log things as though they had been spoken. When somebody read the messages, they could have been written by a person. I rarely get my way in these discussions because better minds focus on how logs should work rather than on making them sound human.
But one day my systems will sound human rather than machine, and I will blame K9 for that.