Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Classic Robot Apocalypse: Bring in the Drones

My friend Sean just reminded me of Honeywell's Drones, and it occurred to me I should compile a list of them.

My original posting, from the mailing list...


Robot Apocalypse: Robots Help Police

Or, "How Robots will turn our democracy into a totalitarian police state"


Sean also pointed out this article, which had the following video...



And, of coarse, my favorite Honeywell Drone video...




One of the creepiest (and most fascinating) drones I've seen has an article written up at Gizmodo.




Speaking of nightmares, last night I had a dream… There was the deafening sound of a hundred thousand bees, followed by many painful stings. Or maybe it was just this thing. I can’t be sure.



Orwell would be sad to know that Big Brother is alive and well in London.








Via Gizmodo, Gizmodo, GoRobotics, Youtube

Classic Robot Apocalypse: Sarcos's Exoskeletons

Pulled from the days of the mailing list, I present to you Sarcos's Exoskeleton.



These people have obviously either:

A.) Never seen Terminator, or

B.) Seen Terminator and are blatant Skynet sympathizers.

According to Popsci.com (whose credibility I cannot totally vouch for, but only because I haven't thoroughly checked them out,) these things might be seeing limited field testing next year.

The fact that these things might be able to maneuver autonomously scares the ever loving bejezus out of me. If the Apprenticeship Learning methods that the good folks over at Stanford developed were applied to this...

Well, it makes me shudder.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Damn Robot Hippies

Robots just get scarier and scarier. These robots remind me of the Hippies out at Eeyore's birthday. Instead of industrious robot overlords, we're going to have a bunch of Robo-juicers laying around on your couch and running up your electric bill while playing the Sitar.




Combine this with the 'Robots that Lie', and humankind has just screwed itself by making the perfect Robot Deadbeat Boyfriend. According to ladder theory, we'll all be screwed. Futurama's Robot Apocalypse is looking more and more immanent.

On another note... these people are getting paid to do this?!

Via Wired

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

In the Future, Robots hunt you!

Here's the article.

It should be noted that this technology hasn't been developed yet, but it's something the good folks in the military-industrial complex are working on.

One of my favorite quotes from the article.

"What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed."

Via my IT man Gary P., Via New Scientist

Self-Assembling Nano-Machines!

This article says it all. I have nothing else to add.




Technology Review

Tuesday, November 4, 2008