Felix Katz Originals

Most people thought the drones were androids: human-shaped robots. They only knew them from TV: unit after unit standing motionless in a row, black rubber skin gleaming, with a drone commander unit with its orange shoulder patch at the front, dark lenses staring blankly ahead. But it had turned out that building a device this complex was easier when you took advantage of some … prior art. Human nervous systems still out-performed all but the most advanced computers, and growing a clone in a vat was cheaper than assembling a robot from parts. Separating the higher-level cognitive functions from consciousness had proven to be trickier than expected. But by inserting a mediator between the cortex and the brainstem, the drone creators were able to take advantage of the autonomous functions of the vegetative nervous system, as well as tap into the cognitive processing power of the cortex, all the while staying in control of the drone’s actions. But even the creators didn’t know what w...

J made me drop my cutlery at lunch today, in front of everyone. It clattered on my plate, and everyone was staring at me while I gazed at him stupidly, expecting a treat. And all because of the clicker. We’d been looking for some way to condition me for a while – for making me display a certain behaviour involuntarily, without engaging my conscious mind. That was when J came across the idea of “clicker training”. The idea behind it is simple: If you want a certain behaviour from a dog, you just wait until it displays that behaviour naturally, even accidentally, and then you make a certain sound. Most people use a device that produces a sharp click – a clicker. You reward the dog, and over time it associates the sound of the clicker with the behaviour, and the behaviour with the reward. He’d been using the clicker for a while when playing with me as a dog. Every time I did something he liked, he would press the clicker, and give me a reward – sometimes in the form of a pet, or a t...