Friday, January 9, 2009

Suck it, Japan!!

IEEE Spectrum Online has a chart up that shows the countries most likely to be overthrown by our robot overlords (first).






















In other news, we're all going to die!! (You first, Asia!)

Masterminds and Nightmare Plots

Happy New Year, boys and girls! We're now one year closer to the inevitable domination of mankind via robot hands!

Three items of news-worthiness came to my attention over the holidays, and I felt compelled to spread the Christmas cheer. Two of them are not developments in robotics per say. They are techniques, however, that could be put to rather nefarious use in the hands of our robot overlords.

The first was pointed out to me by Sean. In an interesting development, researches have been able to stimulate the sexual drive of a person by administering electrical shocks to certain parts of the brain. This is good a good thing, right? Our robots overlords will know just where to poke us to make us happy (or sad)! What could possibly go wrong?

Another little interesting article via The Pink Tentacle. The long and short of it? Scientists have created a computer that can read your mind. Well, kinda. Actually, it can recognize what word you're thinking of when you read a card by monitoring brainwaves. The researches think it's only a matter of time before they perfect the art. Actually, what I really think is fascinating about this is the neural-network that the computer uses to decide which waveforms mean what. I could go on and geek out about neural networks, but it'll no doubt bore everyone else to tears.

And finally, you should read this. Because swarms of robots are never a bad thing, right?


Via The Telegraph, The Pink Tentacle and Symbrion.