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KURTIS: From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME, the NPR News quiz. I'm Bill Kurtis. We're playing this week with Alonzo Bodden, Faith Salie and Helen Hong. And here again is your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
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PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Bill. Right now it's time for the WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME Bluff The Listener game. Call 1-888-WAITWAIT to play our game on the air. Hi, you are on WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME.
LAURA CHRISTIAN: Hi. My name is Laura from Seymour, Tenn.
SAGAL: Oh, Seymour, Tenn. What do you do there?
CHRISTIAN: Oh, I'm a veterinarian.
SAGAL: Oh, that's nice. I mean, do you have the usual dogs and cats? Or, because you're in Tennessee, do you get any farm animals?
CHRISTIAN: There are some farm animals, but I mostly see dogs and cats.
SAGAL: I see. Well, it's nice to have you with us, Laura. You're going to play our game in which you have to tell truth from fiction. Bill, what is Laura's topic?
KURTIS: The city of tomorrow today.
SAGAL: The city of the future - flying cars, moving sidewalks, hobo's who pee lasers. This week...
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SAGAL: ...We read about a city that has already taken a step towards tomorrow. Our panelists are going to tell you about it. Pick the one who's telling the truth. You will win our prize, the voice of anyone from our show and your voicemail. You ready to play?
CHRISTIAN: Oh, definitely.
SAGAL: OK. Let's hear first from Helen Hong.
HELEN HONG: The city of Madrid thought it had found a high-tech solution to its very low-tech problem of dog poop. The Spanish city streets have been plagued with poop problems for years, with thousands of dog owners more keen to pick up a cafe con leche than their doggy's doodies. Exasperated city officials invested 3 million euros on a pilot program of 10 poop bots which use sensors to detect feces in public areas, scoop them up with robotic trowels and collect them for later proper disposal. Things were going great for the first few weeks until sanitation officials started noticing a problem. The poop bots stopped picking up poo. We don't know what is the problem, sighed sanitation director Francisco Fernandez (ph).
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HONG: One day the robots are picking up the caca no problem.
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HONG: The next day, less caca and less and so on. Witnesses report some of the robots seem to avoid the offending areas on purpose, making hard turns or wide circles to keep away, instead choosing to pick up piles of leaves or food wrappers. The entire program has been put on hold while the robots are examined and rebooted. It seems even robots don't want to deal with doo-doo.
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SAGAL: The poop-cleaning robots of Madrid work well until they decide they don't want to pick up your dog's poop, either. Your next story of urban advancement comes from Faith Salie.
FAITH SALIE: The hills of Austria may be alive with the sound of music, but the streets of Salzburg are filled with the sounds of pedestrians on smartphones smacking into lamp posts.
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SALIE: That's why the Austrian Road Safety Board has covered the city's sidewalk light poles with airbags.
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SALIE: It's unclear if the airbags are meant to protect the lanterns or the distracted passersby looking down at their phones. The locals call these smartphone zombies smombies. After a study of 7,000 smombies, Austrian safety expert Martin Fanner (ph) declares that they're involved in more street accidents than cyclists, car drivers or even annoying Mozart impersonators.
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SALIE: The lamp post airbags are white and puffy and have big letters that say, is the next car well-padded? Look at you and not at your cell phone. Granted, a confusing and lengthy message for someone who's not even reading the warning...
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SALIE: ...On which she's about to plant her face. This safety program is going countrywide. Viennese city officials may consider requiring all phone-addicted pedestrians to wear inflatable Michelin Man jumpsuits, so they can Instagram while they carom off city property and into moving vehicles.
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SAGAL: The city of Salzburg, Austria, tired of distracted pedestrians walking into lamp post, puts airbags on the lamp posts. Your last story of a modern city comes from Alonzo Bodden.
ALONZO BODDEN: Stockholm has a tourism problem. Research shows that foreigners think of Swedes as cold and aloof. Worse, actual walking around and trying to talk to people proves they're right.
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BODDEN: So if you can't provide nice people, fake them. Hologram Hospitality is a program now being tested that projects holograms of nice people in popular tourist spots.
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BODDEN: The holograms might say hello or have a nice day or, using an internet connection, even comment on the weather. Harold Samms, (ph) the official commissioned to run the program, says, quote, "we tried to offer people on the street free lessons in polite conversation, but no one would talk to us. So it turned out to be easier just to invent nice people." But early tests revealed a problem. The holograms were too nice. Say, what a sunny day, and tourists just grunt and walk by. According to Samms, we had to make them a little ruder just to seem human. Now a hologram might react to it tourists walking by by saying, hey, I'm standing here. You blind?
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BODDEN: People instantly turn to argue back and then engage with the hologram. If you try to reach your hand through a hologram, it might say, hey pal, buy me dinner first.
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BODDEN: No matter what the hologram says, it usually leaves them happy or freaked out, in which case they go to a bar and spend money, which is the whole idea.
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SAGAL: All right. You've got three choices of something that some city in the world has done to modernize for our modern world. Is it from Helen Hong, the city of Madrid deploying robots to clean up dog poop until the robots themselves get tired of the task, from Faith Salie, the city of Salzburg, Austria putting airbags on their lamp posts for distracted pedestrians or from Alonzo Bodden, Hologram Hospitality, fake nice people talking to tourists in the city of Stockholm? Which of these is the real story of modern urbanization?
CHRISTIAN: I am going to go with Helen's story about Madrid.
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SAGAL: You're going to go with Helen's story about Madrid, the robot poop picker-uppers that decided for some mysterious reason that they don't like to do that, either. That's your story?
CHRISTIAN: Yes.
SAGAL: All right. Well, we spoke to a reporter who had covered this story.
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SARAH PEPPER: There this city in Austria that is putting airbags on lamp posts to stop smartphone zombies from running into them.
SAGAL: I know. I didn't believe it, either. That was a woman named Sarah Pepper. She's from The Morning Mix on KHMX in Houston, Texas. And she was reporting on the story telling us about, in fact, the air-bagged lamp posts in Salzburg, Austria.
CHRISTIAN: Crazy.
SAGAL: I know. It is crazy. Well, unfortunately, you didn't win our game. But you did, in fact, earn a point for Helen...
HONG: Yay.
CHRISTIAN: Yay.
SAGAL: ...Because I think she spoke to that deep need in all of us to find somebody else to pick up the dog poop.
HONG: Yes.
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SAGAL: Thank you so much for playing.
CHRISTIAN: Thank you. Bye.
SAGAL: Bye-bye.
HONG: Bye Laura.
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JOHN PRINE: (Singing) Yeah, I'm living in the future. I'll tell you how I know. I read it in the paper 15 years ago. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.