Joy in the Car Pool Lanes
The politicians came up with their usual dumb solutions - like car pool lanes! They actually thought they could force people to ride together to reduce the number of cars on the road during the rush hour commuting. No such luck. It just added to the road rage problems. Humans want to commute right from their home to their chosen destination at their chosen time as fast as legally possible.It's all about personal mobility!
That's right Michelle. Even after years of forcing car pools on the public and seeing traffic just getting worse the politicians couldn't admit they made an error with that idea and scrap it. It was pretty weird how car pool lanes finally got tossed out. Would never have happened if my rich buddy, Gene Langworthy, hadn't asked me to build that first super realistic animated car pool dummy.
The first one had just six proportional servos and a random computer program for realistic lifelike motion. Gene loved using the car pool lanes whenever he wanted and told his close friends. The orders started pouring in. Within a year the animated dummies were real enough to fool the very best and became a real full-time high-tech electronic business. (The product was obviously only advertised as a "personal protection Mr. Safety". Wouldn't ever think of encouraging breaking the law - now would we?).
Fig. 1. The animated car pool dummy. (Artwork courtesy of Len Stobar, Art Center College of Design)
He was great! Plug him into the cigarette lighter and his head bobbed up and down to the music. It turned randomly left and right. The hand occasionally reached up and adjusted his sunglasses, pulled on his ear, rubbed his nose and even picked his nose at random. Couldn't have been much more human! But it got better - the later versions offered a continual gum chewing option. A couple of years later we had moving eyebrows and a perfect yawn with open mouth option. Volume went up, features went up and prices came down. Any combination of custom clothes, hair and skin coloration options could be viewed then selected right on our Internet site. Our now fully robotic fabrication facility would start construction and decoration processing within minutes. Delivery anywhere in the world within 2 days. We signed up celebrities and for extra costs to cover their licensing fees you could purchase a look-a-like. The scale sized Jesse Ventura, Pamela Lee and Demi models were immensely popular across the age spectrum in spite of their premium price. We became the biggest users of small servo actuators and controls in the country. The huge volume we consumed drove the industry to create clever, really low-cost proportional actuators and standardized control electronics. The economies of scale spin-offs to the rest of the automation industry were phenomenal.
In the year 2005, the law enforcement officials told the politicians it was impossible to detect one of these pseudo passengers from a real one without stopping each and every car. Then, of course, there were the wise guys that had a human friend hiding under wraps on the back seat floor just to taunt the officers once they were "sure" they had a car pool bust. The politicians finally relented and killed car pool lanes forever on January 1, 2006. Rush hour traffic actually flowed better overall, but commuting was still a frustrating daily experience.
We liked to think we were smart and foresaw the end of this business demand concurring with the demise of car pool lanes, so 2 years earlier had sold out to Asimov Research, Inc. That was the new company founded by the young college grads that developed and patented the disgustingly low-cost molded plastic tendon/muscle actuators. You know what that industry has become today. In retrospect we should have done a joint venture arrangement with them.
