You Are Fined 1 Credit For A Violation Of The Verbal Morality Statute

demolition-man-verbal-morality-monitor

Some citizens can control their language and others cannot. What is a civilized society to do? In a dystopian future you can count on electronic monitoring. But wait, the future is now… or it will be in a few weeks. [Tdicola] is building the verbal morality monitor from Demolition Man as his entry in Hackaday’s ongoing Sci-Fi Contest.

Currently the project is in the early planning phase, but holy cow this is a fantastic idea! For those that didn’t see the glorious 1993 feature film, the young [Stallone] pictured above is accepting a ticket (as in: he must pay for his violation) from the tattle-tale wall-mounted computer. Everything about this device is completely feasible using today’s tech. It needs voice recognition and a list of naughty words, a way to play a pre-recorded message, and a printer to spit out the tickets. The build log for the project outlines all of this, as well as possible cost and sources for each.

We’ve been wondering who it was that injected an Artificial Intelligence into our project hosting system. We see both [tdicola] and [colabot] are on the team for this build. The names are too conveniently similar to be a coincidence, don’t you think?

55 thoughts on “You Are Fined 1 Credit For A Violation Of The Verbal Morality Statute

  1. Speaking (er… writing) of the Projects site.
    When I hit the Back Arrow on my browser (in this case, Firefox), I get taken back to the first Projects page, not the Projects page I had left (i.e. the 2nd or 3rd page) meaning I have to page through Projects again to get back to where I was if I intend to visit the next Project on the list. Yes, this is really irritating enough for me to mention (write) it.

    1. I see what you’re referring to. It’s a Javascript issue on the projects page. When you hit “More Projects” it loads them dynamically (JSON or XML) via Javascript/jQuery; follow one of these dynamically loaded projects, then go “back”, and the Projects page doesn’t load the dynamic pages you were previously at.

      HaD: This could be solved using an #anchor tag system in which the jQuery/JS recognizes when $(document).ready() triggers. If there are #page_1 or #page_2 anchors, load N pages.

      Sorry for the off-topic comment – on topic, this post made me realize I’m out of toilet paper!

  2. Demolition Man! This film had so many cool (pun intended) sci fi technologies. Foam filling the car instead of air bags. Cryo Stuff, telepresence. The three shells, what was that about, speculate away! Loved it!

          1. Hmm I’m fairly sure that when I used the word ‘cool’ due to the key plot driver of cryogenic freezing and subsiquent thawing in the film Demolition Man I was indeed making a Pun.

      1. Thanks. Now I’m imagining a tampon in that future with a sensor that activates a small amount of that crash foam when needed…..high impact for the woman on the go I guess…

    1. Having watched it again recently, the movie really is pretty good. When it first came out I was a little too young to catch all the satire and fun being poked at the future world. Definitely worth a watch again if you want to see some classic mid-90’s sci fi.

  3. The swearword list should also include corporate buzz words such as ‘proactive’, ‘leverage’, ‘synergize’ and so on…

    Hmm, perhaps not, some managers I know would overheat this thing in minutes.

  4. Oaths and epitaphs come from a different part of the brain than other forms of communication. You all should have heard my grandfather after he had his stroke. Swearing was all he could do then. The stroke blew out his speech center entirely, but that didn’t stop him from still being able to swear! It was quite bizarre.

  5. So it is pricks like tdicola who impose their will upon others by placing limitations on constitutionally protected speech in a free society?! No wonder why we have restricitve violations like the Patriot Act and the TSA grabbing our genitals.

    1. Yes, because HaD only reaches Americans who love to hear others swearing all the time.

      Anyway, I think of this as a virtual “swear jar.” It’s actually a pretty neat concept, IMO, especially for those of us who are tired of the kids coming home from school dropping F-bombs left and right making themselves sound like their vocabulary is so limited that they can only speak with vulgarity.

    2. If you ever saw the movie you’ed see that much of it was a satire on the loss of freedoms, and the swearing ticket machine was a good part of that, so calm the fuck down! What, one credit? Fuck that? Two!? Shit!? 3!!?? Son of a … and so on.

  6. Thanks for just handing the authoritarians free tech asshole. Lighthearted joke or not, you just made it that much easier for this shit to be a reality. Go ahead and fine me twice. Don’t think they won’t and that such a scenario is a tinfoil hat scenario? Most never thought a “democratic” society would monitor all its citizens without warrants and look how that turned out.

    1. Something tells me you listen to waaaay to much Alex Jones. This movie has been around for over 20 years, so the idea for the tech is far from new and it’s completely unnecessary to blame [Tdicola].

      Besides, Microsoft ACTUALLY APPLIED IT. From what I understand, various games and features of the XBox One prohibit bad language (thanks to that nifty Kinect with a microphone.) NBA2K14 gives “technical fouls” due to bad language in the room, and you can actually get BANNED from Live for swearing at your friends.

    2. “John Spartan you are fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statutes!”

      Kidding aside, this project won’t really be breaking any new ground in speech recognition. I’m just hoping to use free tools / libraries that are out there in an interesting way to make this project. I’m sure the commercial world (and probably NSA, etc.) have far better speech recognition tech.

    3. Calm your tits. Speech recognition has existed for a long time, putting a buzzer on it isn’t assisting anyone. Siri already responds to certain swearing. Writing “if swearList.contains(input)” is not handing authoritarians tech

  7. I’ve been meaning to make a “kurva-counter” to hang in my backyard. I have polish neighbors, and 90% of their outdoors conversation is made up of that one single word. Ring a bell, and increment a large 7-segment display every time it is uttered. Would be interesting to see the reaction.

  8. Thanks for the shout out–I think it’s a cool project too if I do say so myself. :) Hoping to make some progress on the speech recognition soon. This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a few years but haven’t really known enough about speech recognition to make a reality. I’ve tried simple stuff like PocketSphinx’s continuous speech recognition but found you have to have an entire grammar of all possible sentences for it to be good at recognition. This works pretty well if you have a small set of commands and know exactly when someone is trying to utter those commands, like if you press a button and want to tell your computer to turn on a light, etc. The problem is when you want to continually listen to pick out when certain key words are uttered and reject everything else as garbage. What I found recently is that this problem is a whole other field of speech recognition called keyword spotting. There’s not much out there in free tools/libraries to support it that I’ve found, other than some in development work with PocketSphinx. Hoping to explore what PocketSphinx has further and use it for this project.

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