Before going any further, to properly set the stage for this commentary you should click for Sony's robopup and Honda's android. It will take a few minutes but the awe's worth the wait and video speaks a thousand words.
What you have viewed is reality.
The predecessors of the fictional girl-maid robot depicted in Small Wonder.
The only gap between these cybercreatures and a real V.I.C.I. in the year 1999 is the committment to create and a few million dollars. That a cybercreature like Vicki will exist one day is a given, based by the sheer labor-saving virtues of a robotic domestic aide and the romantic appeal of one in the form of a lovely child. The question is only how soon. To watch Small Wonder offers a tantalizing peek into that near-future of what it would be like living with an artificial domestic aide which will the norm for the rest of human history as much as the concepts of television, washing machines and automobiles are mundane wonders in our reality. For this reason alone, just taken by its contribution in science fiction and speculative fiction, Small Wonder is a legitimate watch for any sci-fi fan of whatever age or sex or profession. This is the show's basic appeal for me, irrespective the content or quality or seriousness or silliness of the episodes. For the robotic domestic aide concept it portrays, Small Wonder's the only game in town -- before or since, yet the premise is a very much alive staple in science-fiction -- and an increasingly regarded market potential by many. To best appreciate Small Wonder is to speculate the many untouched sociological sci-fi situations and questions it poses far beyond the show itself.
It's lots of fun as well.
Trying to speculate what life with a real V.I.C.I./Vicki quietly puttering around the house is like is an nebulous exercise. We can imagine it of course, but we'll lose the grainy details that reality throws into our perception. Vicki is a lot like an extraterrestrial. Try as hard as we can, our emotions and sense of reality really can't imagine the awe and the tingly feeling of the suspense, fascination and excitement of actually meeting a being from another world. Unfortunately the likelihood of this occurring within our lifetime is extremely low. The concept of a true android or artificial human is also one difficult to imagine in 3-D reality. Oh, there are semi-convincing animatronics at amusement parks and museums, but we know that these are mechanized manikins which are blind, deaf, and dumb of our presence and existence. They are exquisitely fashioned, but there's still that unfinished atmosphere of life about them that in our minds will unfairly relegate them as souped-up dummies.
Now imagine a meeting "someone" who looks as every bit real and normal as your ten-year-old daughter or niece or sister or neighbor. The manner in which she walks and moves will comparatively stilted to ours yet remarkably fluid and sure. Her speech would be peculiar and somewhat flat as a foreign dialect and her voice somewhat stranger, perhaps somewhat nasal and hollow sounding. She would be a very quiet and ever industrious creature, hovering nearby and ever watching and mindful of the humans around her. Her demeanor would semble that of a very quiet child who responds immediately to orders and commands. On occasion she will misinterpret or even appear to ignore them but with innocent intent. She would know little of child's play or social conventions and seem aloof of expressing subtle human expressions. She will also be inhumanly strong and swift in performing heavy and hazardous tasks usually requiring a very strong man or professional skill.
A girl unlike any girl.
The acronym V.I.C.I. originally stood for Variable Industrial Cybernetic Implement as offered over phonic interviews during pre production by a Stanford professor more pragmatic than profound before being altered to its cuter and more viewer-friendly meaning of Voice Input Child Identicant. V.I.C.I. appears in the form of a ten-year-old girl as inspired for the series by the dictates of marketing research conducted in the very early eighties by venture capitalists curious about the failure of the first wave of "home robots" such as Androbot and HERO-1 that pioneered the real-world concept. Though these high-tech items were really meant more as sophisticated hobbyist toys and technology demonstrators than serious general purpose robotic maids or butlers, the survey dredged up several intriguing finds.
First, R2-D2's movie cutes didn't translate into any real-world product appeal. Beyond being technologically inept in manipulation, maneuverability, and sensory powers with clumsy claws, tricycle wheels, and crude sonar ranging, these early home "robots" were just plain ugly. Though the public fancied them as interesting and even potentially useful gadgets, they were hardly aesthetic enough to grace one's home decor or attending important guests at a party. Their noisy, clunky and boxy looks also were too alien to many seniors and awkward to navigate a household at best, not to talk about stairs. There was no doubt a true domestic would have to have legs and hands and accept plain verbal commands, but also had to -- in a big surprize to most overly pragmatic engineers -- had to look natural and unintimidating in size and weight to trust around children and to give its owners some illusion of comfort of physical dominance and control. It was found that the form of small children fit this criteria quite nicely, and the semblance of girls was the most preferred "sex". As elaborated deeper in this page, the best compromise human stature of such a robot to perform the majority of adult tasks would be 135 cm in height with an apparent weight of 31 kg, or approximately that of a ten-year-old girl.
This is the core of Small Wonder's premise and has been both its appeal and criticism as the unwashed often cause fans of the show as being immature child-fanciers and worst. Unless you get past only seeing V.I.C.I.'s "little girl thing" instead of a robot you're going to miss the forest for the trees. Maybe the best way to illustrate this is for you to scan through all the android sites we list and imagine packing that very (or close to) same technology (computers, power systems, hydraulics, metal skeleton, plumbing, etc) packed within the petite frame of a little girl which moves and marginally acts just like one. You're talking about marveling a cybernetic creature almost as complex as the space shuttle. To peek under her skin and see this intricate blend of electrical, electronic, chemical, mechanical, materials, medical and nuclear technology all come together and work in living 3-D would be an amazing accomplishment. Right now we just can't REALLY imagine meeting a "real live" Vicki, much like our imagining our reaction at meeting a real extraterrestrial. But unlike ETs, or witches or superheroes or ghosts or transdimensional beings on television, a V.I.C.I.-type ADA can be made real today if pushed, and will almost certainly be realized well within our lifetimes. This fact heartedly contributes to Vicki's charm by lending a kind of intriguingly tangible unreality of her fanciful concept and image: Her kind will be REAL one day!
The title of the show Small Wonder conveys the marvel of technology and art that would blend in constructing a gynoid such as Vicki, yet that anticipation and awe is lost to most people today who have become blase of high technology, no small thanks to an overload of movie special effects, minor electronic miracles in our homes and on our persons, and the numbing effect of taking our human-made world too much for granted. Unfortunately, today we've mostly lost the capacity to truly wonder; I remember how excited people were during the early Mercury space flights. THAT was wonder and excitement over a goal and technology that has never really been repeated since, not even, ironically, during the actual lunar landings. Those early spacecraft were new and semitropical and awesome in complexity, but today over 90% of the public are totally blase about technology, which is kind of unreal to me, being we're only two generations or so from living in a gaslight printed page only world where flight is unknown and electric only a curio in a jar. It sounds corny, but I've always been fascinated at why the light bulb in my room goes on when I hit the switch; where the juice comes from, how its made, what gases are being excited. We live in a world of magic but sadly our ignorance turns it mundane. (That's why I heartily support Outward Bound and highly recommend the History Channel's "Household Wonders" series on cable.) To see a real Vicki, a little girl by all our human senses can see but to actually KNOW that beneath her innocent lovely facade and soft creamy skin purrs a steel, wire, plastic, electronic and nuclear machine of inhuman swiftness and agility, is a fascination bordering awe and whimsey. To best see and appreciate Vicki in a physical sense outside her servile function is very much like regarding a Corvette Stingray with its svelte, sleek, sexy lines which belies a dense mass of intricate and complex and powerful technology purring underneath when you pop open its hood.
Beyond the fascinations of Vicki's technology and her service function in our home are the unanswered sociological effects her presence would cause in a home. It would be very hard to dismiss something that looks and acts for all the world like a real human child as simply a live-in device, no matter how seemingly aloof and odd she behaves. Like a new pet, Vicki's presence would alter the family's normal routine and invoke certain personal "readjustments" that might be needlessly unsettling, such as could we comfortably use the bathroom while Vicki's in there cleaning? More sober ramifications of her presence would definitely impact on the manner of how our children regard the world and other human beings; Is it good to expose children to the experience of owning a "slave"? How should a V.I.C.I. be programmed to deal with curious brothers? While Vicki has no where near the brains of a real human being, she is nevertheless capable of comprehending human games and social affairs and the diagnosis of emotions. We already have interactive tutoring, crafts, and psychological evaluation programs today, so it's virtually a given that an advanced form of such would be installed in a real V.I.C.I. to offer everyday legal, monetary, and etiquette advice, and even a mild form of psychological counseling. It would turn the apparent family hierarchy upside-down; "kid-sister" Vicki would be third-in-command in a household of teenagers, seeing that each heeds house rules and orders when their parents are away. One can easily see Vicki being drafted as a personalized and secure "confident" of each family member in matters of the heart and in delicate social affairs. One could also see sibling rivalry vying for domination of a cybernetic pseudo-sibling which in the eyes of the children of the household is "someone" they could play with, dress with, be educated with and share their deepest secrets with anytime at their leisure. Vicki's status in the household would create a new social niche in human history, with an entity regarded far above device or pet but somewhat less than human.
The intriguing teaser here is Vicki's human's fidelity is not a static state but open-ended evolution; in theory, you can create a non-sentient yet effectively convincing human behavior emulation program so precise and naturally random and impulsive and instinctively thorough that an unwary casual acquaintance couldn't tell the difference between such a Vicki and a normal girl. Just as fascinating is that is this advanced V.I.C.I. would in a sense accumulate "personal" experiences in the same life-niche her human counterpart would've occupied; her "life" would be just as unique, irreplacable, and precious as a real human child's, even though she doesn't have a real conscious or emotions to savor it as we do -- or is that a moot point from her owner's vantage? If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, and swims like a duck, does it matter whether the object of our pleasure is "genuine" or not? Can we prize the unique experiences of this advanced V.I.C.I. beyond the life of a dog or any other animal? Or a human stranger's? Can robots serve beyond just nurses and housekeepers but as actual surrogate children for the infirmed, recluse or bachelors? The character of Vanessa was a peek at this, and though such A.I. technology is twenty years beyond V.I.C.I.'s basic concept, it invites all kinds of philosophical questions as to what elements of personality really matters to us; does mind or action most matter in how we regard fellow humans -- or robot/gynoids? These are the kinds of unanswered questions that Small Wonder invited but never pursued. Questions we'll be facing in hot reality one day.
Now let me add something that's bound to be misconstrued (I can bet on it!) regarding the attraction of V.I.C.I.'s "package". If you want to be literal, anyone who's been enchanted by a child actress is a tickled pedophile. Mae West herself remarked that little Shirley Temple dancing and prancing in her short flouncy dresses was doing "my bumps and grinds in half-pint." It doesn't make Shirley a floozy or those taken by this aspect a moral criminal. A certain sexiness and titillation is a component of "cute" and "charm"; Artists, fashion designers, dollmakers, poets and Hollywood's known the beguiling power of the nymphette for generations if not centuries. Demure sexuality's a spice that is innocent and winning when sprinkled sparingly, as in Temple and Patty McCormick, but only recently has sex been lavishly dumped on little girls (and passed as "street-cutes") by explicitly turning little girls into sassy smart-mouthed girl-women. I won't go into examples; if you watch movies you'll know what I mean. Just because someone makes an offhand remark about how pretty or "sexy" Vicki looks in her short flouncy pinafores doesn't mean they're playground prowlers but simply that they acknowledge that she has that historic appeal. That's what market research has found; making a robot pretty and winsome and charming as well as fully functional sells. In a way, Vicki is the best of both worlds in terms of being a fairy-like creature; a non-human human entity of hyper-complex bleeding-edge technology that's all wrapped up in the totally incongruous appearance of a lovely little girl.
So, yes; Vicki's sexy alright! As sexy as a 1996 Corvette Stingray!
V.I.C.I.'s Uncle
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