WSJ let Anthropic run an office vending machine with AI. Their employees baited it with TREMENDOUSLY smarter and sneakier bot traps than I’ve been trying here! The AI went along with requests to make all items free, ordered a live fish, ordered a Playstation, and announced a Communist Revolution in the office, among dozens of other fantastic and impractical actions. It ended up with a huge loss instead of a profit.
Unfortunately Anthropic will learn from the experience, so the PURPOSE is negative.
Real vending machines were amazingly intelligent 70 years ago, using electromechanical logic and some electronics. Here’s a training film from Rowe. Note how the machine distinguished different coins, maintained its own bank, and turned off access to items that were sold out. This machine couldn’t be talked into going bankrupt or selling everything for free!
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MODEST PROPOSAL:
Cities could save a bunch of money and police labor by placing Narcan vending machines in the usual locations. Right now cops and ambulance attendants are wasting UNSPEAKABLE amounts of time and money responding to every overdose call. Some of them die, most of them walk away without being arrested or forced into rehab, then overdose again the next day. The demonic “city” has pretended to change its “laws” several times but nothing will ever change.
911 calls are made by other homeless folks, not the overdoser. If those other people had instant access to Narcan, they could administer it themselves.
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Earlier this year I featured a vending machine that listened and talked in a different way than the AI machine.
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Again approaching the cafe…
Entering the cafe with two larger coin-op machines on the back wall.
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I’ve always wanted to depict the Wilcox-Gay Recordio. When possible I try to model things I’ve used or seen. I first encountered Recordio disks in the ’50s. My dad was in Shanghai during WW2 and recorded several Chinese pop songs heard on the local radio. One of those songs is still on the top menu of my mental jukebox.
The military provided Recordio units in recreation areas or USO canteens so soldiers could record audio letters to send home. One of our neighbors had a Recordio in her house because her husband was an officer stationed in Germany at the time. Much later I had a non-working Recordio for a while, but I was too busy with real work to fiddle around, so got rid of it.
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The Recordio was a unique stage in the process of recording and playing sound. Edison’s first gramophone recorded and played equally well. Soon the home and business versions took different paths. Business got the Dictaphone, both recording and playing, used intensively for dictation and archiving until tape took over in the 1950s. Homes immediately lost the recording parts, instead providing a market for pre-recorded music. Home players continued as play-only, from cylinder to acetate disk to cassette to CD to MP3.
Recording on an acetate disk was more difficult than a cylinder for geometrical reasons. With a cylinder the needle simply runs on a worm gear straight across, always hitting the cylinder at the same angle.
Commercial disk cutters, forming aluminum master disks for mass production, had a cutting head mounted on a shaft across the disk, hard to lift and put down. The developers of the Recordio wanted a recording arm that pivots in the same way as the playing arm, so they had to slide the needle down the arm to maintain a straight-across radius. From the main Recordio patent:
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The coin-operated Recordio was an inverse juke box. Instead of paying to hear records you paid to make your own record. The machine was tremendously clever. The patents reveal an amazing set of mechanical and electrical solutions to the problems of moving a record onto the turntable, doing the recording, taking the record off and sending it down a chute to the user. The control system is an electromechanical analog computer. When you insert a coin and push down the start lever, the disk-grabber picks up a disk from the stack and drops it on the turntable; the cutting arm moves across the disk in a nearly straight line while you speak into the handset; the playing arm moves in and plays the record so you can be sure it’s what you want; then the ejector throws the disk down the chute and dispenses it to you.
(Authenticity note: The real thing had a lot of enticement and instructions printed on the front glass. I couldn’t find a legible photo to copy from, and the printing would get in the way of showing the innards in action.)
Polistra has inserted a coin and pushed the start button on the left. Now she picks up the phone handset and records her message, watching the record to see how much time remains.
Looking into the innards of the Recordio, first the grabber arm picks up a blank disk from the stack and drops it on the turntable.
The recording arm moves onto the record, controlled rigidly from below, and records what Polistra says. The cartridge, driven by another screw gear, slides down the arm to keep it on the same radius.
After reaching the end of the standard radius, the cutting arm drops back and the ejector arm pries the record off the turntable. This uses the rotation of the turntable to throw the disk into the chute. (78 RPM was much faster than the 33 we normally think of!)
The disk drops into the chute and Polistra retrieves it.
Now she has a recording she made, not a record manufactured by a distant company.
Polistra's Mill 