Robot Roundup #2

This is mainly someone else’s Robot Roundup – there’s a whole load of them over here, from various places around the globe – most being of the clumpy humanoid variety. The pick things up. They put things down. I can do that.

And it’s heartening to know that the 1970s Doctor Who design ethic is alive and well… although some of them are going for the style over… whatever:

It’s worth going to that link and having a look though (if you’re interested in that sort of thing) to see where the state of the art is at (in the last days of the first decade of the 21st Century) and it’s gratifying to see that we’re almost up to the level of producing the irritating little shit off this:

Twiki. What a cunt he was. And that of course raises the other question… what are these things actually for? I mean Twiki wasn’t actually for anything, other than being a pain in the arse and following you round making irritating noises all the time. Comedic relief which was funny the first 950 million times, but after that wore a little thin.

Why are people making humanoid robots? From the look of the things above, they’re spending millions on them… but like – you can buy a slave in Haiti for about $50. The thing about the current age is, (as the bloke who wrote The Wire as pointed out) that the one thing you can count on is the fact that as the years go by, humans are worth less. In the 1800s a slave used to cost (in today’s money) 10s of thousands of dollars. So now that they’re a) tragically still for sale, and b) tragically worthless, why spend millions building a crap silver one? Are we really that lonely?

In the future there will be a special sort of Turing Test – where something is deemed “intelligent” when it finally gets so lonely that it knowingly starts talking to inanimate objects – that it knows can’t pass a turing test

Anyway… away from that, and back to robots… I can’t tell if this is progressing slowly or fast… because we already know what robots are supposed to be… we’ve had Scifi versions since what? the 1920s? Maybe the roots go back to the Golem thing. We know what a robot is supposed to look like – and although this vision is a fictional device, and serves no other real purpose… that’s where we’re headed. Or at least partly headed. That’s one branch of the tree.

Anyway, this is fast.

This is from a robotic mouse-race maze competition… they hold these every year, and you can see (on youtube) how these improve each year. And I don’t know if the mouse above, is some random dude with some serious talent (or luck) but as far as I can see, they’re improving at a rate that’s fairly daunting.

Something that’s to do with our amazing powers of anthropomorphism I think… we kindof expect robots to move at the same speed animals do. That’s the world we live in – Middle Earth. We don’t expect them to scale infinitely along the speed axis… but if this year’s shown us anything, it’s that they probably will.