As you may have noticed, I have a fondness for my little Roomba. The company that makes it is iRobot, so I think that's permission enough to call it a robot. I have been fascinated by robot stories since I was quite young. I may have read an Asimov story, or it may have been from watching the Jetsons...who knows after so long? At any rate when I see a story about a robot, I go and read it.
There's one in the news now that has a lot of folk blogging and commenting, based on a Google Blog search. It's the Child Robot. Here's a snippet of what Salon Tech blogger Farhad Manjoo said in his post from yesterday titled "A child robot that looks like it eats children"
CB2, which is short for "Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body," is 4 feet tall, 70 pounds, and repellent from head-to-toe. Packed with hundreds of sensors sewn into its sick-white rubbery skin, and powered by compressed-air actuators that put halting movement into its elongated arms and legs, the 'bot is purportedly designed to mimic a human toddler but comes off instead like a murderous muppet launching the robot invasion.He was referring to his viewing of this YouTube clip (the YouTube site says "Embedding disabled by request"). It is a creepy little thing.
The Gizmodo subtitle to its article about Child Robot brings to mind some very disturbing thoughts about who might want to buy this kind of a robot. Ick. Since I don't want that word searchable in my blog (it's bad enough that perverts looking for "sex vides" keep coming here from Jamaica and the Middle East) you'll have to go look for yourself.
Now it's back to that spreadsheet. I'm determined to finish it tonight.
dawno
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4 comments:
I for one welcome our evil humaniform-robot overlords.
I was waiting for that one! Thanks, Serge, for coming through. :-)
Creepy indeed.
But I too am fascinated by robots and the idea of something that kinda seems "alive" but isn't really.
It's such a human tendency to project sentient qualities on inanimate objects; all you have to do, for example, to get us to bond with a piece of fabric is make it fuzzy and fashion it in the shape of a bear. (And yes, on a closet shelf, I still have my childhood teddy bear as i could never stand to "kill" it by throwing it away).
So when engineers can actually build things that get even more life-like, it could start getting way weird for human psychology.
Humans are so friggin weird.
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