the klog

Oh my God, this is awesome.... Author Margaret Atwood is the first author to sign books remotely, via a telepresence robot. She uses a webcam to chat with fans and ask them what they want her to write, and then she signs her name on a tablet, and a robotic arm repeats the movements on the fan's actual book. Dude!

Here's someone's blog post about it.

This reminds me of a paper I wrote in college about telepresence. So will these people get to consider these books truly signed? Are these really her autographs? I mean, the computer could easily record her movements and have the robot mass-produce signatures. That would obviously not be legit, right? But does that possibility invalidate the legitimacy of the live remote signings that the fans are witness to? The witnesses know it's real, but there would no way to empirically tell the difference between a real signing and a replicated one. Forensic techniques used to check signature validaty would be useless here.

So maybe you say it's not really her signature if she's not holding the pen, but how is this fundamentally different from if she were wearing a glove while signing? I mean, it's the glove that's really holding the pen, and she's just moving the glove, right? So is using a computer-mediated robot really different?

I love this stuff. :)