Kubrickesque spookybot

I quite like this:

(from)

It looks like a cross between Stanly Kubrick Sci-Fi (and a whole lot of THX1138) and the daddy-long-legs that hang out in the ceiling over the shower at my place, trying to telepathically pry into my mind etc. They give me the creeps these things. Robots that look a bit like spiders I mean.

They’re getting to be bloody fast as well… and I’m not fooled for a second by the fact that the one in the video above seems to be holding hands with itself… it could break free and skitter about the place any time it wanted.

There have been a couple of videos of this thing turn up this year – mostly doing things like arranging pancakes (as you do) and whatnot. Does make me wonder though… it’s creating this future where the only jobs will be white-collar. I mean that’s good in a way – crap jobs are crap… but who’s going to buy the pancakes? Not the general public that’s for sure. I’ve met them. They’re idiots.

It’s a simple fact I think that the nerd takeover is pushing inexorably towards some future that we can’t quite see, but we’re pushing, pushing, pushing to get there regardless… and it’s a world in which a hell of a lot of people simply aren’t adapted to exist. Don’t believe me about the pushing? Check this out. A lego Kubrickesque Ceiling-Spider pancake-sorter:

People want this stuff even though they don’t really know why. “Because we can”. “Because it’s a cool thing to do, and it will gain me kudos in the Nerdosphere”.

But who’s going to buy the pancakes hmmm? Who’s going to buy the pancakes?

We really need to radically redesign our life-support systems I think.

(ps: THX 1138 : a grim distopian vision from back when nothing was invented yet)

I used to be a van-driver – occasionally delivered to an Oxfordshire nuclear research facility… it was really cool – they never threw anything away. The corridors were lined with the sort of computer gear that’s in the video above… and come to think of it, that IS about the base tech-level of our current nuclear plants.

That is why nuke is such a bad idea. It takes 10 years to build, then you’re stuck with it for 50. It’s a bleak dystopian scenario where everything is permanently stuck in some wrong-turn vision of what someone though the future might have been like back when everything had dials.

The current crop of British Nuke stations coming offline were built at the same time that this was made:

True. Actually, literally true.

One day people from the future are going to be looking down a similar time-tunnel at us, wondering what the fuck we were thinking by building… well, any piece of technology that couldn’t be rapidly and easily replaced.

So that’s my thought for the day.