skinner whole house
After experimenting with house automation, I arrived at the inevitable point when I needed something to do with all this cool stuff that nearly worked. Having devoted entirely too much time to the process of raising and training a miniature human, my first instinct was to look for ways to automate the work of parenting
Enter JAYNE from a previous post: my fledgling house AI. Her attempts at cajoling my daughter coming a good citizen of the house were decidedly mixed.
Given the incomplete state of the younglings cerebral cortex, I looked to more primitive training her methodolgies. The work of BF Skinner sprang to mind. I needed a system of rewards and disincentives to guide her responses. Apparently it is considered controversial to raise your daughter in a Skinner box.
After ruling out electrified floors I needed a more elegant form of reinforcement either positive or negative. The first obvious choice was an to play an increasingly obnoxious sound starting at the desired moment of departure and culminated in dreadful cacophony. When resistance and immunity began to take root, I accompanied the alarming sounds with progressively slashing red lights.
At the other end of the spectrum where I played soothing lights and softer music to suggest that the end of the evening was approaching. The results were hard to measure in concrete terms, but may have been more subtly effective as both a reminder and an actual somnolent.
More tactile followed experiments in the same vein (I re-purposed several Google buttons to allow the house to know when task completed and provide positive stimuli in the form of jokes and humorous anecdotes) my efforts failed completely when the children ran off with all the buttons and proceeded to positively reinforce themselves at will.
My next and admittedly dubious efforts will be towards Arduino sensors that inform the AI when tasks are completed. for example I envision sensors under the cat food that will note when the cat has been said likewise sensors in the cabinet will alert Jane as to the status of the dishwasher.
I fully expect all such efforts to go completely unrewarded as the horde of monkeys quickly figures out how to subvert and game the system. At least my expectations will have been made clear.