The Victoria College Dean’s Office announced earlier in the summer that they would be supplementing online learning for the 2020-2021 year with a taste of residence experience by sending new students the iDon. Hundreds of incoming first year students to Victoria College have lost the residence experience due to this year’s COVID-19 pandemic. Living in residence during the first year of university is regarded by many as a formative experience for university students and is simply irreplaceable. Knowing this, the Victoria College Dean’s Office has introduced the iDon, a robotic version of the residence don to help incoming students orient themselves better with university life although they are at home. The Dean’s Office announced that the iDon is state-of-the-art AI trained on two and a half weeks of don training and every movie about college life in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. iDons are equipped with a speaker, have a direct connection to Vic’s Academic Help Center as well as the Registrar’s office, and can move up to thirty miles per hour. The iDon is programmed to run occasional events in the student’s house, eat meals with them (sometimes), and awkwardly smile at them and stop them and ask them how their day has been. The iDons have been released for user testing for a few weeks, and Stranded has obtained leaked reviews of the product. Below are a few excerpts.
Luke B:
My iDon has already malfunctioned. I had to call to disable it after it started obsessing over holding a paint night, short circuited, and began running around my house waving paint brushes around and splattering my entire house with paint.
Sandra J:
My iDon made a calculation error and accidentally brought home four shopping carts worth of Oreos, chips, cookies, and one container of fruit as snacks for our upcoming “floor meeting.” After eating three of the Oreos and leaving the “meeting” I saw the iDon sneaking the rest of the snacks up into its charging unit.
Mathew L:
One positive thing that I do have to say about the iDon is its battery life. I heard it clomping around doing rounds of my house at 2 am after being up at 7 am and walking around the entire day smiling at me and asking me how my day was.
Trish P:
I have to hand it to the developers of this AI; this is really good. The small talk function, while a bit awkward, is spot on. Asking me about my courses, how move-in went, making bad jokes about pop-culture trends in an attempt to be relatable—this is solid design.
Reviews are obviously mixed, but the iDon shows promise for stay-at-home learning. How it fits into home life is a different question, however. The iDon shows very little regard for any parents or siblings in the house, and will only give superficial answers to parents when asked about the student’s life. iDons have also been reported to mistakenly shut down the loud music of siblings and shame the after-work wine-drinking of parents. Similarly, there are some privacy concerns with the iDon. All of the iDon’s experiences are recorded and sent to the universal cloud system for Victoria College iDons, DonNet. All iDons are perpetually connected to DonNet, and an examination into their coding protocols by the top hacker at Stranded indicates that there is a mysterious protocol that is contained in each iDon unit, a command called WriteUp. No one knows what this means. We can only speculate as the iDons are rolled out for real use.
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